Acis (Ἄκις / Akis)

Region/Culture: Sicily, Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A mortal shepherd of surpassing beauty whose murdered body is transformed by his nymph lover into a Sicilian river, after which he is honoured as the horned god of its waters.
Role in Mythos: The doomed third corner of the Polyphemus and Galatea love triangle in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whose death by a Cyclops’s thrown boulder gives rise to a real river at the foot of Mount Etna.
Relation to Humans: Acis begins as a Sicilian herdsman, an ordinary mortal youth tending flocks on the slopes of Etna. After his apotheosis into a river god, the people of eastern Sicily inherited him as the local genius of the small, swift stream that ran from a fractured rock down to the sea, calling the waters in their own tongue the blood of Aci.

The little river still runs there, fast and cold off the black flank of Etna, and the locals once called it the blood of Aci. It rises from beneath a slab of lava and reaches the sea so quickly that a man can walk its length before noon. The water tastes of stone. Anyone standing on the bank long enough hears the story underneath the sound of it, because the story is older than the village above and gives the village its name.

The shepherd at the centre of it was sixteen. Ovid is careful about this. The boy’s cheeks carried only the first soft down of a beard, and he tended his flocks on the lower slopes of the mountain, on grass that smelled of thyme and warm dust. He was the son of the woodland god Faunus and a local water nymph named Symaethis, whose father was the great Sicilian river Symaethus. So the river was already in him, in a quiet way, before any of it began.

Galatea loved him. She was a Nereid, one of the fifty daughters of the old sea-god Nereus and his wife Doris, milk-white and sea-bright, and she chose the boy over every suitor on the coast. The two of them met where the shore met the wooded slope, where shade fell across cool stone, and she would lay her head against his shoulder and listen to him talk. That was all. The myth makes nothing more of it than that. A boy and a nymph, very young, in the shade of the rocks above the sea.

Polyphemus saw them.

The Cyclops was the giant son of Poseidon, a one-eyed shepherd of his own monstrous flocks, and he had been hopelessly fixed on Galatea for a long while. Ovid spends a delicious stretch of the poem on his vanity. The Cyclops combs his shaggy hair with a rake. He shaves his rough face with a scythe. He sits on a cliff above the water with a pipe of a hundred reeds and serenades the indifferent sea, listing for Galatea the orchards he owns, the apples he has gathered, the goats and the cheese, every wretched and tender thing he can think of to recommend himself. The seer Telemus had once warned him that Odysseus would one day put out his eye, and the giant had laughed it off, certain that the eye he cared about belonged only to Galatea.

Then, mid-serenade, he glanced down and saw the two lovers in the shade below him.

His bellow split the air. Galatea, hearing it, fled into the sea. The boy turned to run and was not quick enough. Polyphemus tore a corner off Mount Etna itself, a piece of the mountain large enough to be a hill in its own right, and threw it. Only a fragment of the stone touched Acis, and that was the entire fragment that needed to. The boulder buried him where he stood.

Blood ran out from beneath the rock, then ran clear, then ran cold. The Nereid called on her sister powers and on whatever ancestral right Acis carried through his river-blooded mother, and the answer came. The stone split. A tall green reed pushed up from the crack. Water leapt out of the hollow, and from the fissure rose the boy himself, transformed, standing waist-deep in his own new spring with woven rushes around his temples and fresh horns curling out among them. He was a river god now. He was the stream, and the stream was him, and from that day the water carried his name down the mountain to the sea.

That, in summary, is the myth, and the strange thing about it is how thinly attested it is. Nothing earlier than Ovid survives. The scholar Athenaeus reports that a poet named Philoxenus of Cythera had spun out a version centuries earlier, weaponising the love triangle as a political dig at the tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse, but Philoxenus’s text is gone. What remains is Ovid’s, and many readers since have suspected he composed the whole apotheosis himself, suggested to him by the very real little river that does, in fact, leap out of cracked lava at the foot of Etna and run down to Acireale. The myth may have grown up to explain the river, or the poet may have grown a myth around it. Either way the river is there. The water still runs. The locals still know whose blood it is.

His powers were the ordinary, beautiful powers of any minor potamos. He governed his own stream. He shaped its course, kept its waters cold and steady, gave them their characteristic rush off the lava. His weaknesses are the weaknesses of every river god in the tradition. He cannot leave his channel. His being is tied to the water that bears his name. If the spring ever fails or is buried again, so does he.

The lesson, if a lesson is wanted, is that some lovers really are no match for some rivals, and that the consolation prize for being crushed by a mountain can occasionally be a small, durable kind of immortality. The river is still cold. The mountain is still smoking above it. The boy is sixteen forever.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Acis in Greek mythology?

Acis is a beautiful Sicilian shepherd, the son of the woodland god Faunus and the water nymph Symaethis, and the mortal lover of the sea-nymph Galatea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. After he is killed by the jealous Cyclops Polyphemus, Galatea transforms his spilled blood into a river that flows from the foot of Mount Etna and bears his name.

How did Acis die?

Acis was killed by Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops son of Poseidon, who tore a piece off Mount Etna and hurled it at him in a jealous rage after discovering Acis and Galatea together. Only a fragment of the boulder needed to strike him; he was crushed where he stood.

What did Acis become after he died?

Acis was transformed by Galatea into the river god of a Sicilian stream that springs from beneath a slab of lava at the foot of Mount Etna and runs down to the sea near modern Acireale. He rose from the cracked rock waist-deep in the new spring, with woven river-rushes around his head and freshly sprung horns, in the standard iconography of a Greek potamos.

Who are the parents of Acis?

According to Ovid, Acis is the son of Faunus, the rustic god identified with the Greek Pan, and the Sicilian river-nymph Symaethis. Symaethis was a Naiad of the river Symaethus, so Acis carried river-divinity through his mother’s line, which the myth implicitly draws on when Galatea calls for his transformation.

Is the story of Acis based on a real river?

Yes. The Jaci or Aci is a real, very short river on the eastern coast of Sicily, springing from beneath volcanic rock at the foot of Mount Etna and reaching the sea at Acireale. The myth may have been invented or elaborated to explain the river’s sudden emergence from the lava, and in Sicilian tradition the water was long called the blood of Aci.