A Nereid born to Nereus and Doris, named in Hesiod and Homer among the sea-sisters and in Ovid as the beloved of the river-spirit Acis, whose death beneath the Cyclops Polyphemus' rock she mourned until the gods changed her lover into the Sicilian stream that keeps his name.1
Hesiod and Apollodorus number Galatea among the daughters of Nereus and Doris — comely Galatea in the Theogony's catalogue, Galatea again in the Bibliotheca's long roll of Nereids. Homer shows her in the bright cave when Thetis grieves: among the throng of sea-sisters who surround the silver-footed goddess are Doris, Galatea, Nemertes and many more.2
Ovid gives her voice in Sicily. Galatea, whose sire is Nereus and whose mother the azure Doris bore, loved the youthful Acis; the monstrous Polyphemus, who had courted her in vain, crushed the boy with a thrown crag. Galatea turned Acis' blood into the river that flows beneath Etna still — a metamorphosis the nymph narrates herself to her sister nymphs, warning that no gentle race of suitors waits for every maiden of the sea.3
She must not be merged with Galatea the ivory bride of Pygmalion — that later name for a statue is a Roman accretion outside the seven lenses of this atlas. This Galatea is the sea-nymph of Acis, attested from Homer through Ovid.4
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
