Acis

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For other meanings, see ACIS (disambiguation)

In Ovid's Metamorphoses (xiii.750-68) Acis was the spirit of the Acis River, which flowed past Akion (Acium) near Mount Etna in Sicily. According to Ovid's poem, Acis was the son of Faunus and the river-nymph Symaethis, daughter of the River Symaethus. Acis loved the sea-nymph Galatea, but a jealous suitor, the Cyclops Polyphemus, killed him with a boulder. Galatea then turned his blood into the river Acis.

The tale occurs nowhere but in Ovid; it may be a fiction invented by Ovid "suggested by the manner in which the little river springs forth from under a rock" (Smith). A first-century fresco removed from an Imperial villa at Boscotrecase, preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius, and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art<ref>Polyphemus and Galatea in a landscape</ref> shows the figures as incidents in a landscape.

It was a familiar tale from the Renaissance onwards: there are paintings of the subject, sometimes as mythological incidents in a large landscape, by Adam Elsheimer<ref>(National Gallery of Scotland. Elsheimer changed his mind in midstream and painted out the figures, rendering the painting a pure landscape. [1]</ref> Nicolas Poussin (National Gallery of Ireland), Claude Lorrain (Dresden),<ref>Other images of Acis, Galatea and Polyphemus are displayed at the ICONOS site.</ref> and musically in Lully's Acis et Galatée and Handel's Acis and Galatea.