Salmacis and her 'Gene' Pool

Ovid’s Salmacis, a literary and sexual hybrid.

Introduction

This article draws together previous approaches to Ovid’s Salmacis narrative, but introduces new perspectives upon the characterisation of the lustful naiad. I argue that Salmacis is both behaviourally and physically a fudged gender, a proto-hermaphrodite ultimately punished for her mimicry of masculine traits. The over-wrought similes she and the beautiful boy attract ‘scramble the pixels’ in visual terms. This is deliberate as the figurative techniques are primarily designed to transport the reader to other victims in Ovid’s mythical landscape and to familiar erotic encounters in Greek and Roman literature. Ovid’s version of events subverts the Halicarnassus inscription which was positive about the nature of the Salmacis pool and the relationship between its denizen and the son of Hermes and Aphrodite. My approach does assume that Ovid’s contemporary readership was not only educated but also revisited the text in order for these overall connections to gain their full force. The fleeting images, confusing in their immediate context, function like a cinematic montage as they evoke the fate of females who suffer bodily annihilation in the epic poem before and after the Salmacis episode.

Scene Setting

This article engages with the ambiguities surrounding the identity of the naiad Salmacis in Book Four of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the final story in a set of three told by the Minyeides. Alcithoe is the narrator. The Salmacis myth is possibly one of the most slippery stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; to adapt the title of Georgia Nugent’s ground breaking article of 1989, Ovid is producing a text which is not one as the form in which ‘the sex which is not one’ can be conveyed to the reader. The ambiguous nature of this water nymph allows the poet to explore the theme of transformation from several perspectives. Salmacis’ identity as girlish nymph and elemental being, as a natural victim and a resourceful rapist, as a combination of feminine passivity and aggressive masculinity is realised through vivid direct description and highly associative imagery. Critics will never tire of plumbing the depths of this corporeal and liquid heroine, a water sprite of distinction.

The naiad, Salmacis, is by her very nature an adaptable amphibian and an ideal medium to blur boundaries in gender physicality, as well as in behaviour. Like the son of Hermes and Aphrodite whom she so passionately covets, Salmacis is visualised as a creature with hermaphroditic characteristics in advance of the bizarre coupling that produces a being of indeterminate sex. Building upon previous scholarly interpretations of the episode of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, I shall argue that although Ovid confines Salmacis to shape shifting in the figurative sense (by his use of multiple metaphors) his similes are carefully chosen to align her with other fluid females in Ovid’s literary landscape who invariably suffer sexual assault and the risk of transformation or disintegration. However, Salmacis’ bodily dissolution follows her pro-active and predatory sexuality.

Ovid’s narrative integrates Salmacis and her pool within his poetic canvas as a variation upon a number of recurrent themes in the Metamorphoses, from the loss of identity to the topos of two in one. Thus, he invents a myth, fit for his purpose, but which undermines a local aetiology and ritual celebrated by the poetic inscription discovered at the site of the Salmacis spring in Halicarnassus in 1995, and dated to the second century BCE. The inscription’s verses pay tribute to the civilising properties of the waters of Salmacis and the positive role played by its denizen. This is an inter-textual conversation conducted by Ovid which has been highlighted and given an ideological motivation by von Stackelberg (2014). From the literary perspective, Ovid’s subversion of the inscription suggests that he could never resist reinventing a myth and redefining the art of allusion.

Ovid’s mouthpiece, Alcithoe, narrates a hitherto unknown mythical back story for the naiad Salmacis and provides an aetiology of the pool’s powers of transformation which are portrayed in purely negative terms. Alcithoe is the final sister to speak before she and her siblings, like Salmacis, the subject of her story, are consigned to oblivion. In Alcithoe’s version the languorous water sprite is suddenly and erotically energised by the sight of a divinely beautiful boy, the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite. The object of desire is eventually named by the narrator as Hermaphroditus but only when he and the amorous nymph have been merged into one hybrid creature, the hermaphrodite. Ovid as the actual author of what seems to be a newly minted myth does not have it introduced as the reason for the biological phenomenon of a double sexed creature – and indeed the result of the bizarre coupling does not really fit such a description. ¹ The fate of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus is, however, tailor-made for the theme of two-in-one (a motif occurring in the frustration of Narcissus both being and having the desired other and ultimately in the tragic una in urna or mingled ashes of star-crossed lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, an earlier story in the Minyades’ repertoire. ²)

The Minyades choose to work away at their looms in due deference to Athena, goddess of weaving and other needlework. In doing so, the sisters shut out the wild worship of Bacchus whose rites have taken hold throughout the realm.³ Bacchus turns the sisters into squeaking bats in a vengeful metamorphosis but he also entwines their tapestries with vine and ivy tendrils so whatever they have been weaving is occluded. The Minyades may have been spinning their stories as well as articulating them in which case, within the framework of the fiction, the visual record has disappeared along with the oral. This kind of silencing provides a parallel with Arachne in Book Six. The humble weaver falls foul of Athena by demonstrating her superiority in the goddess’s own craft, and adding insult to injury with the subject matter, namely a portrayal of gods behaving badly. Athena mimics Bacchus with her spiteful act of ripping Arachne’s tapestry apart. Unlike Bacchus, the goddess of weaving is effectively self harming (all woven fabrics should embody Athenaa) but she is perhaps conceding that, in this instance, she must be distanced from Arachne’s artistic endeavour.⁴

The nature of the naiad

The close encounter between Salmacis and the unwilling recipient of her lust has been explored by scholars for its sophisticated poetic treatment of fluid identities. ⁵ Salmacis is one of the most complex creatures in Ovid’s numinous landscape. She embodies water and its transformative powers but her urbanity and sophistication are at odds with her essence. Georgia Nugent ⁶ in her 1989 article ‘The sex which is not one’ was the first to illuminate the literary strategies Ovid employed to problematize gendered characteristics in the Salmacis and Hermaphroditus story. Synthesizing feminist theories, she skilfully teased out the poet’s ambiguous commentary on female and male eroticism. Subsequent commentators have discussed ways in which Ovid’s imagery muddies the waters and confuses the identities of predator and prey in this story. ⁷

Salmacis is both elemental (watery) ⁸ and corporeal (she has a body but is also the pool she inhabits.) She appears as ultra feminine but displays distinct masculine qualities in her attempted seduction and rape of her male victim. Similarly, the son of gods in this tale is presented throughout as a blushing virgin but his status as victim is a shifting one. By the end of Alcithoe’s story Hermaphroditus seems to prevail as a personality whereas Salmacis is submerged in all senses of the word. This Ovidian narrative is a master class in the psychology of desire and the dissolution of self in pursuit of the other. However, this is not the end of the matter.

During the course of the narrative Ovid displays his dialogic tendencies by cross referencing the behaviour and final fate of Salmacis with other male and female characters in the poem. His figurative language, the use of similes in particular, provides clear connections between the naiad and Narcissus, Diana, Tereus and Thetis. Arethusa and Cyane who appear in Book Five underline the dual nature of water sprites but it is the unexpected associations that need teasing out. What appear to be word pictures in the Salmacis episode make more sense for their narrative connections than they do as mise en scène for the reader. The multiple similes are diversified and over wrought, compromising the ‘to be looked-at-ness’ of the erotically entwined couple both before and after their physical congress.⁹ There is also a powerful case for concluding that Ovid has re-mythologized the ritualistic relationship between Salmacis and Hermaphroditus and undermined the cult status of the naiad’s pool. Ovid’s sardonic engagement with the Halicarnassus inscription, a poetic paean to the positive properties of Salmacis’ waters and their local significance, is one piece of the inter-textual jigsaw Ovidian commentators have only relatively recently included in the picture. ¹⁰

Alcithoe introduces Salmacis as a self contained creature, happy to live in isolation. Salmacis is not known and presumably does not want to be known to Artemis (non nota Dianae 4,304) although the woodland nymphs urge her to join their hunts with this energetic virgin goddess. Instead, Salmacis stays close to her pool and draws self affirmation from its reflective powers. It is her natural mirror but also reminds the reader that as a water sprite she has a distinctly amphibious nature, more so perhaps than her peers. They are happy to cut loose from the trees, glades, and hills that house and define them. Salmacis stays put in her secluded space and has no interest in strenuous activities,

sed modo fonte suo formosos perluit artus,

saepe Cytoriaco deducit pectine crines

et, quid se deceat, spectatas consulit undas;

nunc perlucenti circumdata corpus amictu

mollibus aut foliis aut mollibus incubat herbis,

saepe legit flores. et tum quoque forte legebat,

cum puerum vidit visumque optavit habere.

Met 4, 310-316

On the contrary, she sometimes bathes her beautiful limbs in the pool she possesses and frequently smoothes out her hair with a boxwood comb. She makes up her mind what best becomes her by looking into the glassy waters. At one moment she wraps her body in a transparent robe or reclines on the soft leaves and yielding grass. Often, she gathers flowers. She happened to be gathering flowers the very moment she saw the boy and she desired to own what she beheld.

translations by the author of this article.

Ovid’s Salmacis is a languid creature, one who has no care for the hunt and is largely supine except for gathering flowers and combing her hair on the banks of her crystal clear waters. Salmacis’ grooming tools inspired the imaginative visualisation of the Ovidian narrative by Robbin Ami Silverberg in her art work for the Just One Look exhibition at the University of Washington (Visions, Feminism and Classics 7, Seattle 2016.) In this visualisation Salmacis ‘imbues these prosaic objects with yet more consequential meaning’ and hairbrushes are part of her identity and the annihilating power of her gaze. ¹¹ However, at first glance, Salmacis is the antithesis of an active huntress, preferring to wear diaphanous drapes and pose by her pool like a decorative or ornamental feature. The self-absorbed nymph shows strong narcissistic tendencies by gazing admiringly at herself in her own pool, a scene parodically reprised in Polyphemus’ admiration of his image at 13.840-1. ¹² Ovid has already told the tale of Narcissus in Book Three of the Metamorphoses and his beauty and bizarre fate will constantly intertwine with the two figures in the Salmacis myth, not least because the act of becoming one being means sexual union is out of the question. In her preening activities, Salmacis has a much stronger affinity to Aphrodite than to Artemis, whose company of nymphs she refuses to join. She worships at the shrine of beauty, especially her own, and seems ultra-feminine even from the perspective of ancient stereotypes. ¹³ The association of Salmacis with Aphrodite connects the stay-at-home naiad with the spring celebrated in the Halicarnassus inscription. The author of these verses invokes Aphrodite for inspiration and information before heralding the goddess’s child, Hermaphroditus, nurtured by Salmacis and her waters, as the inventor of marriage.

Ovid’s (or Alcithoe’s) description of the terrain inhabited by the naiad confirms its attractiveness and possibly alludes to the civilising potential of the clearing and the pool. Von Stackelberg (2014, 414-415.) has convincingly argued that the naiad is at the centre of a landscaped garden in cultivated surroundings and Groves (2016, 350) recognises the dichotomy of a garden-like wild (like an English garden). Neither scholar draws explicit conclusions about Salmacis as a simulacrum for the hermaphrodite but the setting is very appropriate for just such a statue and von Stackelberg does see the naiad as the centrepiece of a self fashioning rustic tableau. The visual image of Salmacis scantily clad and positioned by a water feature (in which she is reflected) is not so far away from the sculpture of a resting hermaphrodite. Supine statues of this type were popular in Roman landscaped gardens. The hermaphrodite was represented as a nude or thinly veiled (and invitingly vulnerable) woman from behind only to reveal male genitalia when and if the viewer was able to circle around the sculpture. ¹⁴ It is significant that the domesticated outdoors was one place where the hermaphrodite figure was considered less freakish and could be sanitised and integrated into landscaping art and architecture. Groves (2016, 325-336) has a thorough discussion of the surprise factor of the hermaphrodite figure and the violent revelation of its masculinity expressed in sundry sculptures of the Greco-Roman world.

Cutting to the Chase

The one low impact leisure pursuit the naiad enjoys is the apparently innocent and charming activity of gathering flowers. Those acquainted with classical myth might safely assume that Salmacis, a maiden collecting fresh blooms, will in turn be plucked by a lustful god. ¹⁵ The traditional template is overturned once the beautiful boy blunders into her domain. The alluring youngster, an adolescent on an ill-advised walkabout, has been attracted to Salmacis’ cool and sheltered glade innocent of the fact that such pleasant places (loci amoeni) are frequently inhabited (and indeed owe their physical features) to a divine or numinous presence. The reader realises that Salmacis is soon to mimic the predatory sexuality of male gods featured throughout the Metamorphoses in her vigorous courtship and then attempted rape of the youth who enters her glade. Ovid’s Salmacis is ready to play roles that confound gender stereotypes; she combines the characteristics of the female and male sex by having a desire and acting upon it.

In contrast, the boy is introduced as a passive, put-upon and virginal creature in spite of his being on the verge of manhood, so, as a number of scholars have noted, he too will exhibit female characteristics in advance of becoming a mixture of the two sexes. Robinson (1999, 217) observes that in the scant Hellenistic literature upon this son of Hermes and Aphrodite, the assumption seems to be that he was born a hermaphrodite. For this reason, Robinson views Ovid’s text as full of misdirection as the mythical Hermaphroditus figure would indeed have been biologically hybrid. Ovid feminises Hermaphroditus within a story that constructs a causation or aetiological myth for his actual transformation into a bisexual being. However, Alcithoe, the in-text narrator, claims that her motivation for choosing this myth is that it explains the enervating properties of the Salmacis lake.

In a previous episode (told in Book Three) Actaeon, disturbs the virgin goddess Artemis at her ablutions in just such a pleasing grotto and suffers terrible consequences. The son of Hermes and Aphrodite is also an intruder but he does not incur the wrath of a goddess. Instead, this young man is subjected to an effusive address which is clearly borrowed from Homer. Salmacis echoes the flattering sentiments uttered to Nausicaa by Odysseus (Odyssey Book 6,149-185), asking if the boy is of divine parentage and calling him Cupid. She then exclaims that any brother, sister, the nurse who suckled him and, of course, his promised bride are surely blest because they enjoy physical intimacy with him. ¹⁶ Classical commentators have noted and discussed Ovid’s nimble piece of Homeric intertextuality. In reprising Odysseus’ more delicate compliments to Nausicaa and doing so with distinctly salacious undertones, Salmacis is displaying masculine attributes. However, the spirit of her speech is ‘more an extreme form of Nausicaa’s sly suggestions of marriage’ (Robinson, 1999, 218.) In the Homeric epic the young princess of the Phaeacians is straightaway smitten by the handsome stranger who emerges from the sea. In combining the different motivations and their articulation by Odysseus and Nausicaa, Salmacis is demonstrating that she is equally adept at being the proactive male and the responsive female.

Moreover, Salmacis, in shattering the illusion of mythical temporality and speaking as if she is acquainted with Odysseus’ flattering speech, strikes an epic/heroic pose. Odysseus could display godlike qualities, for instance his ability to improvise with elaborate fictions to match his disguises. Similarly, Salmacis exhibits a flair for eloquence associated with Ovid’s male gods when in erotic pursuit. The association of Salmacis with male divinities who spin a fine line in seduction is also a clear reference to the preceding books of the Metamorphoses. The cajoling of the victim is invariably followed up with force and indeed the naiad will stay true to this strategy. Moreover, the skill of persuasive talk is a particular attribute of Hermes himself. ¹⁷ His son, the object of Salmacis’ advances, does not take his cue from the compliant and flirtatious response of the literary Nausicaa, being initially tongue-tied and then curtly rejecting the naiad. The boy in the Salmacis myth is clearly not as well read as the water nymph.

Instead, the boy plays the role of an affronted deity, namely the very goddess (incidentally shunned by Salmacis) when she was at her ablutions under a waterfall in a mountain greenery. Actaeon, had stumbled into her grotto and Artemis coloured up like a cloudbank struck by a ray of sun or like a brightly coloured Dawn. Both Artemis in this episode and the lovely stranger at Salmacis’ pool attract similes drawn from nature and both feel violated by the unexpected gaze. However, once again, the parallels are deliberately muddled as the boy in Book Four is not the one who gazes and this son of Mercury and Venus is a welcome intruder into a colonised space.

nais ab his tacuit. pueri rubor ora notavit.

nescit, enim, quid amor; sed et erubuisse decebat,

hic color aprica pendentibus arbore pomis

aut ebori tincto est aut sub candore rubenti,

cum frustra resonant aera auxiliaria, lunae.

Met 4, 329-333.

The naiad fell silent at this point. A blush suffused his cheeks, for he did not know the nature of love. But the blushing became him. His face was the colour of apples hanging from a sun-drenched tree, or painted ivory, or the moon in eclipse as red emerges from white and bronze cymbals clash to no avail in her defence.

The water imagery in the Actaeon episode also forms an important linking motif. In lines 169-182 of Book Three, Ovid has given the goddess’s company of nymphs etymologically water-based names. They are washing their mistress and then trying in vain to conceal Artemis (a goddess who stands head and shoulders above them) by protectively ‘pouring’ (circumfusae) around her body. When Salmacis surrounds Hermaphroditus in her pool she aggressively surrounds (circumfunditur) an intended victim both as a liquid and as a more solid body (4.360.) In spite of Alcithoe’s introductory remarks about the remoteness of the Hunt from the hidden abode of Salmacis and the nymph’s lack of interest in the goddess, and all she stands for, Artemis’s own shame and anger are invoked in this scene and transposed to the embarrassed adolescent. Equating the boy with the deity could be an indication that ultimately he will gain the upper hand and the naiad will suffer the same sort of oblivion as Actaeon.

However, for the time being the naiad has everything to play for. Salmacis pretends to yield the place and her pool to the unknown boy but she does not stray far from her watery mirror; instead, she crouches in the undergrowth (perhaps in a suppliant or ‘prayerful’ position on her knees or maybe ready to spring up and claim her prize.) In making a show of departure, she has voluntarily moved away from the very waters that seem to define and confirm her in self love. The nymph’s narcissistic gazing at her reflection has given way to a desire for another only too palpable human form. Ovid’s Narcissus also prefigures the reaction of the boy in Salmacis’ woodland clearing. His story intertwines with both the boy and the naiad as he blushes under the gaze of what he believes to be another creature as alluring as himself. He too was unlucky to find a glade and a pool so strategically placed to seal his doom but there was no nymph of either sex in the clear waters he discovered. ¹⁸ (3, 483-485)

Nugent suggests that (1989,165), in viewing her reflection, Salmacis has always been besotted with herself as the watery and elemental denizen of her clear waters. There is yet another self, a fluid version and a being independent of her reflection waiting in the water to entrap the boy. The Salmacis within the pool not the puella (the girl who preens herself on the bank) tempts the hapless lad further into her special space. As Nugent implies, his testing of the alluring waters is like some delicious foreplay for fluid Salmacis, but yet again the nymph benefits from her duality, able to experience and view this intimacy before the boy succumbs to total immersion in the Salmacis pool. ¹⁹ In Ovid’s / Alcithoe’s narrative the young man stands, presumably, with all his masculine parts on show before he leaps into Salmacis’ liquid embrace. However feminised, the boy, like the hermaphrodite, is still a worthy object of the girlish gaze. Alcithoe, as internal narrator, provides the reader with the visual image of the naked boy through the eyes of Salmacis. He is on the brink of diving into the water, to succumb to her seduction in elemental form, although he firmly rejected the naiad as a bodily manifestation.

tum vero placuit, nudaeque cupidine formae

Salmacis exarsit ; flagrant quoque lumina nymphae,

non aliter quam cum puro nitidissimus orbe

opposita speculi referitur imagine Phoebus;

vixque moram patitur, vix iam sua gaudia differt,

iam cupit amplecti, iam se male continet amens.

4, 346-351.

This was the decisive moment of desire. Salmacis was aflame with passion for the boy’s naked body and the nymph’s eyes blaze like the brightly shining sun with its piercing rays reflected in a translucent disc. She can barely suffer any delay, scarcely postpone her joy. She was beside herself and mad with desire for an immediate embrace.

Salmacis has already imitated the self absorbed gaze of a Narcissus as she preened herself on the bank by her pool. She now has in her possession, and enclosed within her natural mirror, a being that is ‘the other’, not a mere reflection of her own image. When Hermaphroditus disturbs the surface of her pool, he gives Salmacis an opportunity to view a second and separable creature within its waters. It would seem that Ovid is deliberately misdirecting the reader by using a simile of reflexivity, of the sun’s dazzling face in the mirror, to emphasize Salmacis’ bright-eyed desire. She is in fact having difficulty keeping herself together which denotes dissolution or division on more than one level, not mere loss of control. Desire is disturbing Salmacis’ bodily integrity which is already by nature a separable entity, a divided self. Her corporeal identity is further compromised once the boy jumps into her pool.

desilit in latices alternaque bracchia ducens

in liquidis translucet aquis, ut eburnea si quis

signa tegat claro vel candida lilia vitro.

‘vicimus et meus est’ exclamat nais …

4. 353-356.

The boy dived into the ripples. As he swims with alternate strokes his body gleams in the crystal clear waters as if he were encased in clear glass like marble statues or bright white lilies. ‘I have won! He’s mine!’ the naiad exclaimed. ²⁰

The stories of Narcissus and Pygmalion in Book Ten (so acutely analysed for their mutual interdependence by Rosati in his 1983 monograph) are a distinct subtext of the figurative language in this scene which in turn suggests that the outcome for Salmacis and her desires could be either frustrated (like Narcissus’) or fulfilled (like Pygmalion’s.) The statue reference most certainly prefigures the virgo eburnea (ie marble maiden) sculpted by the king of Cyprus. Narcissus (3, 419-424), too, viewed his beloved as a marble statue with an ivory-white neck, such was the effect of his own reflection upon him in his delusional state. ²¹ The objectification of the boy’s body beautiful is also Salmacis’ way of savouring the moment and capturing the image; the simile freeze frames the swimmer in her pool. Her lust goes into overdrive but she also prolongs the pleasure of ogling him as a hot house flower. This is, of course, how Alcithoe is describing him for the reader but it suggests that the boy represents a luxury item for the superficial Salmacis (almost a classical commodity fetishist at this moment) to possess. Alcithoe portrays Salmacis as one who fashions an image of perfection out of the object of her desire. At least he is real and not an unattainable illusion as Narcissus’ lover was or as Pygmalion’s ivory girl would have been without the intervention of the goddess of Love.

When the joyful naiad springs into her pool to join her beloved she seems to become an unmistakeable predator. In entwining herself around the boy Salmacis mimics a sculptural couple familiar to Ovid’s contemporary readers, namely, the depiction of a Satyr struggling with a Hermaphrodite figure. Artworks on this subject have been variously interpreted as a playful and as an aggressive encounter, the bestial wrestling the divine. Robinson (1999, 217) also observes that the hermaphrodite can be represented as the rapist in these strange sculptural couplings. Groves (2016, 339) sums up the image as follows, ‘The tables are turned. The often-aroused hermaphrodite now threatens to penetrate his would-be rapist.’ Ovid’s picture of the naiad wrestling the boy in the water evokes just such sculptures along with the question mark over which will prevail and which is actually the proto-hermaphrodite.

There are further figurative clues to the uncertainty of the outcome as the boy and the naiad are locked in struggle. The narrator Alcithoe has painted a picture of Salmacis with the veneer of a victim, the lovely nymph by her pool, only to turn her into a satyr-like nymphomaniac once she takes hold of the beautiful boy. However, if Salmacis also embodies the duality of the hermaphrodite, she could stay in the ascendant. The similes employed in this scene suggest that predator and prey are already becoming confused especially as they link Alcithoe’s story to other scenarios in Ovid’s epic poem and evoke external literary allusions where victory is unsure or comes at a price.

et nunc hac iuveni, nunc circumfunditur illac,

denique nitentem contra elabique volentem

inplicat ut serpens, quam regia sustinet, ales

sublimemque rapit, pendens caput illa pedesque

adligat et cauda spatiantes inplicat alas;

utve solent hederae longos intexere truncos,

utque sub aequoribus deprensum polypus hostem

continet ex omni dimissis parte flagellis.

perstat Atlantiades sperataque gaudia nymphae /denegat.

4, 360-368

She pours around the boy now this way, now that. Ultimately she entwines him in spite of his struggle against her and his striving to break away. It was as if a large snake, snatched up by the royal eagle and now tightly held high in the air, manages from a hanging position to entangle the raptor’s head and talons, and even to enfold its flapping wings. Or like the ivy which tends to weave its tendrils around vast tree trunks; or as the octopus captures its adversary, with tentacles stretched out to bind the prey on all sides beneath the sea. The great-grandson of Atlas stands firm and refuses the nymph the delights she longed for.

Salmacis is compared with a snake seized by an eagle which tightly constricts her captor and raptor and turns the tables upon him. This simile is also a metaphoric transference of an actual augury, or avian omen, at the Iliad 12, 200-230 (a portent that is incidentally misread by the heroic onlookers) which signifies that the victorious and the defeated at that particular juncture of the battle will change places. ²² The second image for the entwining nymph is that of ivy around a tree which suggests the clinging but also loyal love of a woman (Anderson, 1997,450) and is possibly a more positive and passive portrayal of Salmacis. The Halicarnassus’ verses praise Hermaphroditus as the inventor of marriage so Ovid may be evoking the ‘happy ending’ of the naiad and the divine boy in that local tradition.

The Salmacis of the Halicarnassus spring rapidly reverts to type with a third comparison in which she is visualised as a cephalopod, reaffirming her serpentine nature as a water sprite. Anderson (1997, 451) points out that the tentacles of an octopus were viewed like whips by the Romans which would lend an air of sadism to this almost pantomimic picture of Salmacis with the upper hand, dominatrix and tormenter. ²³ However, the boy ‘planks’ and stays rigid in the her embrace, thwarting her because an unyielding body is the last thing she wants. Like Pygmalion she is aiming to bring an inert love object to life sexually but the reluctant ‘lover’ stays steadfast and impenetrable to Salmacis’ embrace.²⁴ Once again we have the interplay of active and passive, pursuer and pursued, as the naiad holds tight to the boy hoping he will become compliant. ’²⁵

The visualising qualities of this succession of similes is partly Ovidian showmanship as he discards one image in favour of another but in narrative or intra-textual terms the poet is transporting the reader beyond the immediacy of this erotic wrestling match. The similes relate the myth of Salmacis to other moments in the poetic narrative, so once again metaphor becomes montage. This technique is most manifest if we reinterpret the struggle after reading on in the poem to Book Eleven and encountering the description of Peleus entwining his promised bride, Thetis, the water deity, who changes form and tries desperately to avoid his embrace. This correspondence is mentioned by Zajko (2009) but she concludes that Salmacis is primarily a forerunner of Peleus and does not discuss the naiad’s affinity with Thetis. ²⁶ Thetis takes on the shape of a marine bird and then that of a tree actualising the similes used to describe the struggle between Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. This passage taken in conjunction with the scene in the Salmacis narrative (and assuming a second time reader or a receiver well versed in this mythical vignette) is a clear indication that the naiad teeters between predator and prey. Thetis was tamed even though she had the advantage of supernatural power and a special gift of shape-shifting. Her status as sea goddess still did not save her from conquest by the persistent Peleus. Patriarchy, it seems, crosses and trumps the divine divide.

illic te Peleus, ut somno vincta iacebas,

occupat, et quoniam precibus temptata repugnas,

vim parat, innectens ambobus colla lacertis;

quod nisi venisses variatis saepe figuris

ad solitas artes, auso foret ille potitus;

sed modo tu volucris, volucrem tamen ille tenebat;

nunc gravis arbor eras, haerebat in arbore Peleus;

11, 238-244.

There, as you were in repose, fettered by sleep, Peleus lays siege to you, and since you reject the entreaties he woos you with, he resorts to force, interlocking his arms around your neck. He would have possessed you, a daring move, had you not retreated into your customary arts, changing into different shapes. One moment you were a flying thing; however, he holds on to the bird. Now you were a weighty tree. Peleus kept on clinging to the treetrunk.

The Price of Victory

There is one last association that illuminates the persistence of Salmacis, the violence of her passion and the failure of her feminine desire. The response of the naiad to an overwhelming sexual attraction prefigures the sadistic and graphic lust of the Thracian king, Tereus, in Book Six of Ovid’s epic. Tereus is overwhelmed with desire for his younger sister-in-law, Philomena, a passion that makes him eloquent in his deception. He uses all his powers of persuasion upon her royal parents so that he can take the young girl home with him. It is easy for him to pretend to plead on behalf of Procne who is missing her sister. Philomena’s beauty prompts Tereus to imagine kisses given by her sister, rendering these almost incestuous as he supplants her family in his fevered vision. Similarly, Salmacis articulated her passion openly with words to Hermaphroditus about her envy of his nearest and dearest as they could enjoy intimate embraces.

Throughout the scene (455-481) Tereus mimics Salmacis in his inner thought processes. Parallels proliferate as Tereus’ reactions to Philomena’s beauty reprise the emotions of Salmacis when she sees the boy in her own pool. Tereus and Salmacis can ‘scarcely postpone their joy’ (vix animo sua gaudia differt 6.514) and their triumphant and military utterance ‘I have won’ (vicimus 6.513) links them in their anticipation of conquest. Ovid also unites Salmacis and Tereus in terms of the close struggle they conduct with their resisting victims and by the avian imagery which reflects their predatory nature. Philomena is forced to succumb to her unwanted lover once on board his boat. It seems that water is the ideal medium for enabling a predator to entrap and violate a victim. Philomela is now in the Thracian king’s control.

ut semel inposita est pictae Philomena carinae,

admotumque fretum remis tellusque repulsa est,

‘vicimus !’ exlamat, ‘mecum mea vota feruntur!’

exsultatque et vix animo sua gaudia differt

barbarus et nusquam lumen detorquet ab illa,

non aliter quam cum pedibus praedator obuncis

deposuit nido leporem Iovis ales in alto;

nulla fuga est capto, spectat sua praemia raptor.

6, 511-517.

Once Philomena was embarked upon the painted vessel, the sea churned with oars and the land left behind, Tereus cried out, ‘I have won! What I prayed for is by my side!’ The barbarian celebrates his triumph and can scarce postpone his joy, as his eyes never turn from the girl. Like the eagle of Zeus in plunderer mode might drop a hare from his hooked talons into his high nest (eyrie); there is no escape for the captive and the predator (raptor) gloats over his prize.

Inponere (511) carries connotations of controlling and deceiving. It is possible that the painted ship is to remind the reader of the extent of Philomena’s entrapment. The luckless girl is fixed into the tableau similar to the one she herself will weave as a work of art (the story of her rape) and once on board she has to submit to the story. The triumphant Tereus carries off his lovely sister-in-law, Philomena, and imprisons her in a tower in the woods where she is continuously subjected to sexual violenc and her accusing tongue severed by her abuser. ²⁷ She finds herself far away from civilisation, imprisoned, isolated, brutally violated and ultimately speechless. She appears to be helpless until she devises the idea of weaving her fate into a tapestry for her older sister, Queen Procne. ²⁸ Once Philomena is rescued by her sister she and Procne plot a savage revenge.

Tereus can be viewed as a hubristic imitation of Ovidian deities in pursuit of a quarry (think Zeus) but aspects of his destructive desire and its fulfilment can function as a commentary upon Salmacis. The connection between the naiad and the king is not straightforward because Salmacis has affinities with Philomena as well. Once more, Ovid’s choice of similes is telling. When Tereus first sets eyes upon the maiden, she is compared with dryads or naiads with numinous allure – she is the victim Salmacis was set up to be when the reader first encounters her as a passive creature by the pool. In associating Salmacis with both Tereus and Philomena Ovid may be suggesting that (once more with second time reader hindsight) the naiad of Book Four was always playing a dangerous gender bending game in acting as a male aggressor.

The association between sexually voracious male and besotted nymph is severed as Salmacis does not have her passionate way with the boy and her attempt to do so backfires catastrophically. In her anger and frustration, she calls her victim improbe at line 370 which is a puzzling adjective more appropriate for the aggressor, a good fit for Tereus in fact. Unlike Tereus, whose story does not end well, Salmacis will not even enjoy a fleeting pleasure in the boy’s body. The ill-judged prayer removes all hope of sexual congress. Salmacis’ anger at being thwarted of what she sees as an inalienable right to possess the boy is not so unreasonable if the verses at Halicarnassus are brought back into play. He is indeed improbus, almost impious in denying a union with a sacred pool as this is the will of the gods, according to the Halicarnassus poet, and also a guarantee that the Salmacis spring will have a positive place in local history.

Narrative spins

The defeat of Salmacis’ desire is brought about by her carelessly articulated prayer. Clinging close to the boy, she asks the gods that they should never be separated (lines 369-372). The cautionary advice ‘be careful what you wish for’ seems particularly apposite at this moment, for this prayer finds its own gods (vota suos habuere deos), an extremely oblique statement. The boy and the naiad become two in one, the lover and the beloved, the hunter and the prey. When the bodies irrevocably become one, the storyteller compares their union to the grafting of earthbound plants. Von Stackelberg (2014, 416) unravels what Ovid intends by the comparison, interpreting this simile as a sardonic aside and implicit criticism of miscegenated flora which a Roman readership should recognise. ²⁹ She reminds us that Augustus and Livia were evidently fond of grafting plants in their garden but the activities of a ruling family, even at leisure, were integrated into their consistent message of concordia in the state.

For von Stackelberg the simile denotes a fruitful coupling between Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, linking them to the imperial couple and their strongly bonded marriage (yet another nod to the Halicarnassus verses) but the celebration comes with a twist. Von Stackelberg argues that Ovid is equivocally engaging with Augustan imagery of harmonious couplings by indirectly alluding to Hermaphroditus’ role in the Halicarnassus inscription where he is praised as the inventor of marriage. Both the constructed locus amoenus of Salmacis’ glade discussed earlier and the grafting simile of the branch and the treetrunk reinforce the allusion to the imperial couple.

According to von Stackelberg, Vertumnus and Pomona in Met 14 represent a less ambiguous ‘happy coupling,’ but ‘among Ovid’s rapes the union of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus represents a rare instance of successful coupling, a rape that becomes a species of marriage.’ (2014,417) However, the thematic context of Ovid’s poetic narrative compels us to take note of the relationship of the naiad to other creatures on the metamorphic canvas. The granting of the prayer about permanent possession of the boy dooms Salmacis to perpetual frustration. Sexual fulfilment is forever out of the question. ‘Quod cupio mecum est; inopem me copia fecit’ (What I desire I have and in an abundance that leaves me in need’) was the moment of truth for Narcissus at Met. 3, 466 as he realised that he was lover and beloved in one body. Coalescence, sharing one body, is now Salmacis’ situation and probably not what she intended in asking for a permanent union. ³⁰

The emasculated creature that emerges from the pool has the last word and seems to be imprinted with the personality of the boy rather than the naiad. ³¹ The last words in the Salmacis story go to a feminised and petulant voice which sentences passion and desire in a woman to a perpetual non fulfilment. The coalescence of the couple is disastrous for Salmacis whose encounter with Hermaphroditus seems to have obliterated her personality. Not a scintilla of the passionate nymph remains. Now finally named by the narrator as Hermaphroditus, the surviving hybrid creature utters a spiteful prayer of ‘his’ own which is readily granted by the named gods (and his parents) Hermes and Aphrodite themselves, acting as one in this situation. The divine parents of the former boy agree to the request that anyone who enters Salmacis’ pool in the future will be enervated and by implication feminised. To put it crudely, the now solely liquid Salmacis will never get a good lay as she will render any beautiful bather impotent for the rest of time.

Salmacis sinks without trace.

Alcithoe carefully weighed up what was worth telling from her repertoire, discarding certain themes (Janan 1994,444) and then introduced Salmacis as an aetiological myth, an explanation for the malignant properties of the lake. Groves (2016, 355-356) notes that Alcithoe has passed over stories about ‘mythological figures transforming themselves into stone and metallic versions of themselves’ but concludes that the Salmacis episode is replete with references to the hermaphrodite as statue, both by use of simile and more direct visual allusions. Groves suggests that a familiar sculpture has been re-crafted as the centre piece of Ovid’s myth and is, therefore, ‘a truly novel representation of the god, a pre-transformation Hermaphroditus.’ Where does that leave Salmacis?

Although the Salmacis lake continued to be praised for its clarity by classical geographers and historians of the natural world, Ovid’s Pythagoras in Book Fifteen (line 319) calls the waters ‘obscaenae’, obscene, a word denoting loss of virginity and of purity and in this case ‘murky’ or sullied. ³². In spite of her masculine and Terean characteristics, Salmacis is ultimately obfuscated in her liquid form. She has not merely lost her voice and human identity but her crystal clear waters have suffered a kind of rape. This pool had validated her bodily beauty by acting as an unbroken surface for her reflection. Is the reader to assume that it is now reduced to a muddied mirror without the possibility of returning her image? In any case, Salmacis the physical being, no longer has a body, so has lost material substance and her subjective self awareness. She does not seem to be part of the consciousness of the hybrid figure that emerged from her pool. Like Philomena, and keeping company with luckless nymphs Callisto and Io, she ends up violated and certainly silenced.

Salmacis the naiad is now permanently anonymised, not just non nota Dianae (not known to Artemis) but hidden from the whole world. Such is her punishment for transgressing gender stereotypes but also for disturbing the figurative language traditionally appropriated to describe masculine aggression and pursuit. The narrators, the Minyeides are turned into bats so it could be said that Salmacis’ fate dies a death in the fictional world of the poem. Hers was always a story with a strong strand of concealment. Hitherto, the reason for the waters’ weakening force (itself a paradox) had been concealed ‘causa latet.’ Once the Minyeides are metamorphosed, the story is lost again. The dissolution of mythic memory mirrors the fate of the lustful naiad who has sunk without trace. On each re-reading the plot (or the text) thickens. Ovidian scholars have drawn attention to the way the poet blurs boundaries between poetic settings, insinuating within an epic framework the literary characteristics of elegiac courtship, of pastoral poetry, and also dramatic even pantomimic moments.

The Halicarnassus inscription adds another layer of allusiveness to the story, encouraging recent commentators to read Ovid’s version as a partial dialogue with the myth in situ as it were. The story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus is, in Ovid’s hands, the text which is not one as well as the sex which is not one. Last but not least is the question of ideological timbres. However much the methodology of Ovid appears at times aesthetically modern or post-modern, he is a poet of a long past century. I have argued that Salmacis cannot ultimately escape the fate of her suffering sisters on Ovid’s poetic canvas and does not break free from the bonds of patriarchy. The naiad could not be allowed to sustain her ultra-femininity alongside her appropriation of the male role; this was neither her time (mythological Greece through the lens of imperial Rome) nor her place (the epic genre with more than one elegiac twist) to do so.

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1 Kirk Ormand (presentation at Feminism and Classics 7, Seattle, May 2016) argued that Ovid’s version is not helpful for thinking about the hermaphrodite, especially as a positive and sacred symbol. In Book 4, the poet expresses the prevailing patriarchal view of feminised men in Roman society and culture. I agree that the fate of Salmacis suggests that boldly masculine women can never really gain their desires without paying a terrible price. Whether Ovid is withholding judgement on this reality or challenging an ideological status quo is still up for debate. See the concluding paragraphs.

2 Fratantuono (2011, 93) contrasts the fate of Pyramus and Thisbe with Salmacis and Hermaphroditus but notes the lack of consummation suffered by both pairs. The tale of Mars and Venus enmeshed in Vulcan’s net (4.169-189) is another variation on the theme and part of the Minyades’ repertoire whereas Leucothoe (4.190-270) is the tragic centre of an eternal (?) triangle.

3 Hardie (2002,171-2) believes that Bacchus’ influence can be detected in the tales told by the Minyades in their secluded palace quarters. He argues that Bacchus has insinuated suitable subject matter and Dionysian themes into their narratives, (‘the god is already in the house.’). Fratantuono (2011, 93) reinforces the paradox of the Minyades ‘weaving Bacchic yarns.’ He points to their bad timing which compounds their impiety. This is the tragic condition, of course, doing the right thing (in this case women dutifully keeping to the seclusion of the palace and performing domestic tasks) when the circumstances are not normal and unnatural behaviour is called for.

4 Arachne, a humble weaver, who has produced a remarkable tapestry depicting gods in erotic pursuit of luckless females, frames her work with a representation of the ivy associated with Bacchus. This is a direct provocation to her divine rival Athena. Arachne’s claim to have developed her skill and artistry with no teacher is a direct and deliberate affront to the goddess of weaving. Other features of the fate of Arachne are alluded to within the Salmacis story. See Janan (1994, 437-444.) for a stimulating interpretation of weaving women, silenced spinners, and the relationship their narratives have with the fine handiwork of Hephaestus on the entrapment net (the exposure of Ares and Aphrodite caught in the act is another of the Minyades’ stories) which prefigures Arachne’s tapestry.

5 Ovid’s text can certainly benefit from the light post-classical critical methods and modern fictions focused on ‘how to be both’ in gender terms might cast upon the Salmacis story. There is much of interest in Ali Smith’s 2007 novel, Girl Meets Boy especially as she plays with Ovidian fluidity in both the form and content of her writing. See Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos, (2009, 293-8) For Tudor and Stuart poetic renditions of the myth in Ovid that demonstrate a very different fascination with androgyny alongside extensive moralising see Sarah Annes Brown’s and Andrew Taylor’s collection of 2013, 65-92.

6 Nugent (1989) gives a comprehensive feminist reading to the myth, applying Iragaray’s methodology to the story. This article is indebted to her insights. I have also engaged with subsequent scholarly treatments of the Salmacis episode which has attracted a wide range of critical methodologies and approaches from literary, psychological, art historical and anthropological angles. I also greatly benefited from the very different readings proposed in papers delivered at the Seattle conference, Feminism and Classics 7, in May 2016, namely Rebecca Lees (University of Cambridge), Christian Lehmann (University of S.California), and Kirk Ormand (Oberlin College.) See note 1.

7 Von Stackelberg is a must-read for Ovid’s treatment of the Salmacis story. She makes a very plausible case for Salmacis’ location as a landscaped garden (2014, 414-7.) If, as she argues, the hermaphrodite statue is central to an understanding of the hermeneutics of Roman gender relations in a villa exterior setting, not unlike the exterior setting of an English country estate, Ovid has created a space where the hybrid being is a ‘natural’ feature, disarming a Roman distaste for the double-sexed creature. Christian Lehmann (Seattle 2016) put the case that Ovid’s text enriches our view of mythical figures visualised in the gardens at Pompeii. In turn, the depiction in art and architecture of the myth and the motifs it shares with other narratives in the first four books of Metamorphoses functions as a reflection on and extension of Ovid’s twisty tale.

8 Charles Segal in his 1969 book Landscape in Ovid’s Metamorphoses recognised the significance of water as a site of transformation in the epic poem, water being an element in which shifting shapes might be concealed, revealed and created. Stephen Hinds (in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid 2002, 145) observes, ‘Water, moving as well as still, will tend to be what most insistently draws the eye in a landscape; water is also, both in its fluidity and in its power to reflect and distort the quintessentially metamorphic element.’

9 This is a term transposed from film criticism and coined by Laura Mulvey in 1975. See Keith, (1999, 218-9) for its application to Ovid. From a broader perspective, Ovid’s metaphorical technique resembles the kind of montage that cinema employs to make narrative connections. It is worth bearing this in mind when using the vocabulary of film criticism to illuminate ancient poetic strategies. It seems trite to observe that Ovid’s readership did not go to the movies but the poet could rely upon the recognition of visual imagery drawn from the world of art, architecture, and theatre for the moving image.

10 Contributors to The Salmakis Inscription and Hellenistic Halikarnassos (2004), particularly Sourvinou –Inwood (59-84) do indeed note where Ovid departs from the story implicit in the Greek verses, so the assumption is that he knew of the dedication. Romano (2009,543-561) takes both Ovid and the inscription in conjunction, arguing that (544) ‘investigation of these two distinct modes of myth making helps bridge the space between the two accounts and reveals that seemingly divergent elements in fact bind the two poems together.’ Groves (2016, 321-324) gives a full account of the ‘historical’ Salmacis but is guarded about Ovid’s knowledge of the inscription.

11 Salmacis uses a boxwood comb on her hair as part of her armoury of beautification. It is a boxwood shuttle that Athena takes up to strike Arachne on the head. With hindsight, this across-canvas connection hints at Salmacis becoming a victim rather than a victor once the gods are called upon to intervene. Arachne is another strong-minded female who precipitates a contest with the goddess of weaving. Boxwood was the material used in the making of the flute, but its inventor, Athena, threw it aside after seeing how unflatteringly inflated her virgin cheeks became as she played upon it. (Ovid, Fasti, 6, 693-710) The discarded flute caused the downfall of Marsyas in yet another ill-judged contest with a deity. Thanks go to Estella Ciobanu for pointing to the significance of Salmacis’ boxwood brush. Clearly, much could be done with this reference and its resonances. Liz Gloyn also suggested that I take the boxwood allusion further and offered very helpful comments on my work in progress.

12 I am grateful to one of the critical readers on an earlier draft of this article who observed the similarities between Salmacis and the ‘feminised’ Cyclop Polyphemus in Ovid. The same reader suggested that Perseus is taking on the traditional masculine role of seeing and desiring in a split second at 4. 676.

13 A post-classical water sprite figure akin to an alluring Aphrodite can be found in the delightful 1948 movie Miranda directed by Ken Annakin. Miranda (the name is significant), played by Glynis Johns, is a mermaid who saves a comely man from drowning but then manipulates male admirers on dry land, making her apparent vulnerability part of her seductiveness.

14 I refer to the discussions on Hermaphrodite sculptures and associated tableaux that appear in Ajootian (1997) and Robinson (1999). These articles do not suggest that Ovid’s Salmacis is mimicking the hermaphroditic pose, but it was mooted in presentations at the 2012 Feminism and Classics conference held at Brock University, for instance in von Stackelberg’s paper, ‘Not-so-strange encounters’. This was a prelude to the aforementioned article on Garden Hybrids. Rebecca Lees (Seattle 2016) introduced nuanced readings of blurred genders at the heart of Ovid’s metamorphic myths arguing that costume and coiffure determine function and performance which can override ontology.

15 The literary motif is Hellenistic. The Greek bucolic poem Europa by Moschus of Syracuse features an elaborate ecphrasis upon the princess’s basket and this artwork prefigures her abduction as she gathers meadow flowers. Ovid employs the topos for Proserpina (Persephone) in both the Metamorphoses and the Fasti.

16 To my mind, Ovid continues to play games with the Halicarnassus inscription as in a parallel mythical universe (that of the Halicarnassus verses) the lustful sprite was indeed nursemaid to the boy, information suppressed by Alcithoe who starts her story with the suckling of the baby boy by (unidentified) naiads.

17 Mercury-Hermes is, as it happens, unsuccessful in persuading Aglauros to give him access to her sister, Herse. He is laconic and matter-of-fact in his request at 2,743-746. The divine lover then tries honeyed words at 2,815-6 but to no avail.

18 Narcissus could be forgiven for assuming that the reflection in the pool was another boy. His mother was a water nymph who presumably had a watery extension of her being. He also had recently encountered an auditory reflection (Echo) who at that point still had a body, so something sending his own words back to him was actually another person. (See Lawrence, 1991, 2; James, 2004, 8, Bartsch, 2006, 84-102).

19 Like the Narcissus episode this scene is a prime example of Ovid using liquid reflections to complicate issues of identity and perception. Classical commentators continue to wrestle with Ovid’s conceptual complexity and to harness Jungian, Lacanian and Iragarayan terminology and approaches to tease out the perspective of the internal and external viewer.

20 The victory cry suggests the elegiac vocabulary of militia amoris. vicimus ‘I have prevailed, I have conquered’ is used by Propertius, in the persona of the anxious lover, when Cynthia abandons her trip abroad (1.8.28.) Nugent (1990, 175) sees this as a reference to Ovid’s erotic poetry.

21 There are a number of complex interpretations of Narcissus and the figurative games Ovid plays with the boy’s gaze and reflection and what this suggests about the implied role of the reader / viewer. See Hardie’s 2002 Poetics of Illusion, Sharrock’s ‘Looking at Looking’ in the same year, Salzmann-Mitchell (2005), Elsner (2007, 132-176) and von Glinski (2012, 115-130).

22 As Rebecca Bushnell demonstrated in her 1982 article on Homeric winged words, augury omens are there to be decoded by the actors in the text. These avian metaphors are for the eyes of the readers but in both cases the interpretation is neither uniform nor secure.

23 Richlin (1992,174-6) comments on the theatrical and performative resonances of Ovid’s scenarios, ‘Pantomime sets Ovid’s rapes in 3-D.’ (174) and see also Feldherr 2010, 204.

24 At this point the boy is called great-grandson of Atlas who craved fixity to bear his burden of holding the heavens up. (See James, 2004, on perstat Atlantiades.) The allusion is therefore much more specific than suggesting he is heroically resisting (Nugent 1990,175.) In Book Four of the Metamorphoses Perseus grants Atlas’ wish, turning the eyes of Medusa upon him so he can rest forever as a mountain range, south of the Sahara.

25 Krabbe (2003, 431-433) concludes her chapter, ‘Salmacis and Psyche, Fugal Variations,’ with a reference to Aristophanes’ humorous theory on the divided self as a subtext for both Cupid and Psyche and Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. She notes that Hephaistos offers to weld a pair of lovers together (Symposium 192D) ‘so that you could always be together, day and night, and never to be parted again.’ A figuratively eight-tentacled creature trying to unite with the object of desire is Aristophanes’ humorous explanation for the attraction between the sexes. Nugent (1990,178) does not discuss the comparison but it would strengthen her conclusion that both Salmacis and Hermaphroditus express desires ‘remarkably similar to that state of erotic union, which in the Symposium’s androgynous myth, Aristophanes posits as the summum bonum sought by all lovers.’

26 Once again Ovid is anticipating a later scene. Both Zajko and I, like so many before us, are moving beyond the response of the first time reader in Ovid’s day as the totality of the epic only really comes into view on a second encounter with the text. We must be saying that Ovid is writing for a reflective and analytical audience to ensure this critical and cerebral response. He could rely upon the heightened sense perceptions of his readers to live in the moments he created and fully appreciate his skill in producing special effects of the ecphrastic kind (see Webb 2009,20-25.) He does bombard ancient and modern recipients with multiple imagery which only gains full force on repeated readings.

27 Richlin (163-171) produces a thorough analysis of Philomena’s fate and the significance of the snake simile when the violated princess has her accusing tongue severed by Tereus.

28 Norton (2013, 188-195) explores the nature of Philomena’s weaving as part of the war between pictures and words, speech and silence. There is no elaborate description (ecphrasis) of her artwork as the poet has already narrated the horrors of her rape and mutilation.

29 Anderson (1972, 453-4) has an extensive and helpful note on this and the other similes. His commentary on Ovid is, as ever, invaluable, but for a more recent excursus see Barchiesi and Koch (2007.)

30 I am assuming that Salmacis joins other permanently frustrated lovers in the Metamorphoses but the documentary ‘Secrets of the Living Dolls’ shown on the UK’s Channel 4 on the 7^th of January 2014 offered a different perspective on the two in one experience. The documentary dealt with rubber doll masking by adult men who desire to live in a female body. The men from all walks of life (interviewees were from the USA and UK) wear latex body suits with face masks and realistic female genitalia. Robert, a Californian pensioner, who had dated ‘fit’ women close to his own age, finds much more pleasure in having superimposed upon his own body what he perceives as a beautiful blonde bosomy and ageless girl, Cherie. He loves being what he wants in a sexual partner. This was an intriguing and disturbing documentary which demonstrated a complex range of motivations for superficial trans-gendering.

31 In her 1991 monograph, Amy Lawrence brought the Echo and Narcissus myth into a dialogue with movies where the female voice was compromised and controlled. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) is given an excellent critique by Lawrence and it is well worth reading her chapter with the myth of Salmacis in mind. The hero (William Holden) is a corpse in the crystal clear water of the swimming pool at the beginning of the film, but he voices the narrative, telling how he succumbed sexually to, was emasculated, and finally shot, by ageing silent screen actress narcissistic Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). Norma is all about receiving the adoring gaze. She moves (and hisses) like the sinewy serpent she wears upon her arm and clings just as obsessively to the object of her desire as Salmacis. Hers is a house of mirrors and self-gazing. There are many other parallels that could be drawn between this superb piece of self referential cinematic narrative and the Ovidian myth.

32 This is the meaning when the adjective is applied to the women of Cyprus in Orpheus’ Pygmalion narrative. They have been forced into prostitution by Aphrodite as a punishment for denying her divinity. (Book Ten, 238-9)