The sculptor Pygmalion, sickened by the immorality of some of the women he has seen, resolves to carve his own out of ivory. He soon falls in love with her. This story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses is sung by Orpheus (see Story 63). There are obvious parallels with the ancient myth of Pandora (see Story 9). The Pygmalion myth has also had a busy afterlife, inspiring a significant handful of operas, and informing works as diverse as Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) and George Bernard Shaw’s eponymous play (1912), which was later re-adapted as the musical My Fair Lady (1956). Ted Hughes’s translation is splendidly visual and very much in Ovid’s spirit.

If you could ask the region of Amathis

Where the mines are so rich

Whether it had wanted those women

The Propoetides,

You would be laughed at, as if you had asked

Whether it had wanted those men

Whose horned heads earned them the name Cerastae.

An altar to Zeus,

God of hospitality, stood at the doors

Of the Cerastae, soaked –

A stranger would assume – with the blood

Of the humbly sacrificed

Suckling calves and new lambs of Amathis.

Wrong. They butchered their guests.

Venus was so revolted to see offered

Such desecrated fare

She vowed to desert Ophiusa

And her favoured cities.

But she paused: ‘The cities,’ she reasoned,

‘And the places I love –

What crime have these innocents committed?

‘Why should I punish all

For a few? Let me pick out the guilty

And banish or kill them –

Or sentence them to some fate not quite either

But a dire part of both.

The fate for such, I think, is to become

Some vile thing not themselves.’

The horns of the Cerastae suggested

One quick solution for all –

Those men became bullocks. As for the others,

The Propoetides –

Fools who denied Venus divinity –

She stripped off their good names

And their undergarments, and made them whores.

As those women hardened,

Dulled by shame, delighting to make oaths

Before the gods in heaven

Of their every lie, their features hardened

Like their hearts. Soon they shrank

To the split-off, heartless, treacherous hardness

Of sharp shards of flint.

The spectacle of these cursed women sent

Pygmalion the sculptor slightly mad.

He adored woman, but he saw

The wickedness of these particular women

Transform, as by some occult connection,

Every woman’s uterus to a spider.

Her face, voice, gestures, hair became its web.

Her perfume was a floating horror. Her glance

Left a spider-bite. He couldn’t control it.

So he lived

In the solitary confinement

Of a phobia,

Shunning living women, wifeless.

Yet he still dreamed of woman.

He dreamed

Unbrokenly awake as asleep

The perfect body of a perfect woman –

Though this dream

Was not so much the dream of a perfect woman

As a spectre, sick of unbeing,

That had taken possession of his body

To find herself a life.

She moved into his hands,

She took possession of his fingers