Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

Lampros took his wife at her word without bothering with any anatomical inspections and thus, raised male, Leucippos grew up to be a fine, intelligent, universally liked and accepted boy. Teenage years approached, however, and Galatea became more and more afraid that her beloved child’s lush natural curves and striking lack of any downy growth on the chin must eventually give the game away to Lampros, who was not the kind of man to overlook such a deception.

For safety’s sake Galatea took Leucippos and sought refuge in a temple of Leto (the Titaness mother of Apollo and Artemis), where she prayed that her daughter might change her sex. Leto answered the prayer and on the instant Leucippos was transformed into a masculine youth. Hairs pushed through where they should on a male, the correct bulges appeared, the incorrect bulges disappeared. Lampros was none the wiser and they all lived happily ever after.

For generations after this, the city of Phaestos celebrated a festival they called the Ekdusia.fn1 In this ritual all young Phaestian boys lived amongst women and girls, wore female clothes and had to swear an oath of citizenship before they could graduate from their agela, or youth corps, and acquire full male dress and status.fn2

Leucippos II, Daphne and Apollo

Interestingly, another myth tells of a different sex-changing LEUCIPPOS – this one a son of OENOMAUS – who fell in love with the naiad DAPHNE, whom Apollo also loved but had not so far wooed or seduced.

In order to be near Daphne, this Leucippos disguised himself as a girl and joined her company of nymphs. The jealous Apollo saw this and caused the reeds to whisper to Daphne that she and her attendants should bathe in the river. Accordingly they slipped out of their clothes and splashed about naked. When Leucippos, for obvious reasons, refused to remove his maidenly garb the girls teasingly stripped him bare, discovered his embarrassing and unmistakable secret, and angrily speared him to death.

By this time Apollo’s own lustful blood was up. He materialized and began a pursuit of Daphne. The terrified girl leapt out of the river and ran away as fast as she could, but he quickly gained on her. He had almost reached her when she sent up a prayer to her mother, Gaia and her father, the river god LADON. Just as Apollo closed in and touched her he felt her flesh change under his fingers. A thin bark formed over her breasts, her hair began to slither out into shining yellow and green leaves, her limbs wreathed themselves into branches and her feet slowly drove down roots into her mother Gaia’s receiving earth. A stupefied Apollo found that he was clutching not a naiad but a laurel tree.

For once in his life the god was chastened. The laurel became sacred to him and its wreath thenceforward crowned the brow, as I have said, of the winners of his Pythian Games at Delphi. To this day the winner of a great prize is still called a laureate.fn3

Galatea III and Pygmalion Too

The island of Cyprus, being the landing ground of spume-born Aphrodite, had long worshipped the goddess of love and beauty with a special fervour, earning Cypriots a reputation for libertine licentiousness and libidinous loose-living. Cyprus was thought of by the mainland as a degenerate place, an Island of Free Love.

In the southern port town of Amathus, a group of women known as the PROPOETIDES, or ‘daughters of Propoetus’, were so indignant at the amount of sexual licence that pervaded there, they even had the temerity to suggest that Aphrodite should no longer stand as the island’s patroness. To punish such blasphemous impertinence the wrathful Aphrodite visited upon these sanctimonious sisters feelings of insatiable carnal lust, at the same time ridding them of any sense of modesty or shame. So cursed, the women lost the ability to blush and began eagerly and indiscriminately to prostitute their bodies about the island.

A sensitive and wildly attractive young sculptor called PYGMALION saw the flagrant and shameless behaviour of the Propoetides and grew so disgusted that he decided to foreswear all love and sex in perpetuity.

‘Women!’ he muttered to himself as he set to work one morning on a commission to render in marble the face and figure of a general from Amanthus. ‘You won’t find me wasting my time on women. Oh no. Art is enough. Art is all. Love is nothing. Art is everything. Art is … well now, that’s strange …’

Pygmalion stepped back to look at his work and wrinkled his brow in surprise. His general was taking shape in the oddest way. He could have sworn the man had a beard. Furthermore, the old warrior may have been a little on the tubby side, but Pygmalion was sure he didn’t sport a pair of swelling breasts. Nor were his neck and throat so slender, smooth and irresistibly …