Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (From the podcast Literature and History)

To many generations of readers, authors, and artists, the Metamorphoses served and still serve as a card catalog for classical literature, encompassing a thousand years of Ancient Mediterranean stories in a single volume, stories which moved loosely from the moment of creation up to Ovid’s contemporary world of the Pax Augusta.

The twelve thousand lines, and over 250 stories of Ovid’s Metamorphoses focus on a single theme. This theme is not only in the epic’s Latin title – Metamorphoseon libri, or Books of Transformations, but also in its very first line. “Changes of shape,” writes Ovid, “new forms, are the theme which my spirit impels me / now to recite” (I.1-2). Whether they transform to birds, trees, flowers, rocks, water, or dozens of other things, the humans, nymphs, satyrs, and gods of the Metamorphoses live in a world of perpetual flux, in which one’s identity and physical form are endlessly mutable.

The challenge of reading the Metamorphoses is formidable – one not only has hundreds of tales occurring in rapid succession - these tales also often contain or interpenetrate one another like Russian nesting dolls. At the end of Book 10, for instance, Ovid describes Orpheus telling the story of Adonis, in which (in turn) Aphrodite tells the story of the beautiful huntress Atalanta and her lover Hippomenes. Stories are told within stories being told within stories, and tales break off at unlikely moments. As one critic remarks, “Even when we turn to the individual tales, beginning as they do in mid-sentence and mid-hexameter, straddling book divisions, and framing each other, they resist separation and reordering. While tales are often sundered and woven together according to the formal whims of the poet, they are also filled with a galaxy of proper nouns – places, deities, both well-known and obscure, mythological creatures, mythical and semi-legendary historical figures, and a dizzying meshwork of legends and lineages that makes even the most experienced reader turn to the footnotes from time to time.

One of the advantages to doing a serial podcast on literary history is that we have covered much of the salient material that Ovid uses in the Metamorphoses. Ovid read and incorporated stories from Hesiod and Homer, Sophocles and Euripides, Apollonius of Rhodes, and Callimachus, and nearer to his own time, Catullus and Virgil. Scholar Peter Levi writes that “Few generations of genius have devoted such prolonged and deep study to what poetry is and can be as Virgil’s did,” and in our many shows on Roman writers thus far we have learned that Latin literature’s golden age was characterized by an overall interest in erudition and synthesis. Catullus wrote widely in a range of meters; Horace’s poems span many genres and tones; Virgil’s three works self-consciously display his encyclopedic learning; and Propertius, though he died relatively young, was even by his fourth book of poems enthusiastically moving beyond the constraints of love elegy. And Ovid, perhaps more than any of his predecessors, marked the apex of Augustan-age literature’s desire to consume and repurpose the entire literary history that had preceded it.


Because of the scope, the density, and the intermingled nature of the Metamorphoses, offering you a summary of Ovid’s 250 interlinked stories presents me with a challenge. On one hand, we could group the tales by theme, talking about the stories involving rape (ie pride before a fall), or tales involving hubris, or narratives concerned with specific mythological events. On the other, it’s quite important to remember that the Metamorphoses is a continuous narrative poem that begins with the faceless chaos that preceded creation, and ends with the ascendancy of Augustus, and that almost without exception Ovid moves us from story to story with notoriously brilliant little narrative inserts. In other words, while the stories that fill the Metamorphoses are deservedly their centerpiece, the structure of the Metamorphoses also ended up being quite influential, inspiring the linked short story collections of Chaucer and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, not to mention many others. And because the form, as well as the content, of the Metamorphoses was widely prominent in later literary (and scenic, and musical, and visual artistic) history, I’ve decided to summarize the epic in chronological order.

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Salmacis and Hermaphroditus

Now remember, in Book 4 of the Metamorphoses we’re still in a frame narrative, and the blasphemous sisters who deny the sacred rites of Bacchus are still telling the stories. With the tale of the sun’s ill-fated romance wrapped up, another sister began the next story – the story of a certain magical fountain. The fountain in question is the fountain of Salmacis, whose waters could make even the brawniest and most manly man soft and effeminate, and the story is about how this fountain came to be.

François Joseph's The Nymph Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1829) shows the moment when Salmacis, watching the bathing youth, can stand it no longer, and rushes to embrace him. 

Once, there was a boy, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite. At just 15, the young man began a long trek through the rugged terrain of modern day Turkey. After many adventures, he found a still pool unclogged by aquatic plants, full of clear water and surrounded by a carefully manicured lawn. A nymph lived there called Salmacis – a nymph who had rejected the virgin cult of the huntress Artemis, and spent her days preening her hair and gazing into the still pool. This nymph, again Salmacis, saw the adventurous fifteen-year-old boy tramping around her pond.

The nymph Salmacis carefully arranged her hair and then gave lavish compliments to the boy, whose resulting blushes were becoming on him. Unable to resist, she leaned in for a kiss, but the boy wouldn’t let her, and so Salmacis retreated to a hiding place, leaving him alone to bathe. And bathe the boy did. Salmacis watched him, drinking in the details of his naked body as he paddled around her pool. Finally, she could resist no longer. The nymph Salmacis tore off her clothes and flung herself into the pool, seizing the boy and twining her limbs together with his. He resisted her kisses and other efforts, but she told him that even if he would not yield, he’d never escape. The nymph Salmacis prayed that she would never, under any circumstances be parted from her beloved youth, and the gods granted her wish – Salmacis and the boy were fused as one, and the new being was rightfully called Hermaphroditus (which incidentally was the name of the lad before this animesque fusion!). Hermaphroditus prayed to their divine parents that, for the sake of what they’d endured, anyone who touched the fountain of Salmacis would be softened and made effeminate, as they had been, and the gods granted their wish. [short music]