This thesis will commence with an exploration of these ideas about how separate
works intersect as we examine the merging texts of Plato, Lucretius, and Ovid within the
Metamorphoses as marked, appropriately, by the merging bodies of Ovid’s lovers in the
stories of Narcissus and his reflection (III.339-510), ... Salmacis and
Hermaphroditus (IV.276-388), ...
Narcissus is
merged with the one he loves in that he is in love with himself, even uttering the
memorable wish:
utinam a nostro secedere corpore possem!
votum in amante novum: uellem quod amamus abesset.
(Met. III.467-8)5
Would that I were able to withdraw from my own body! A strange new wish
in a lover, I wish that what I love were absent!
Hermaphroditus is unwillingly merged with Salmacis, a nymph
who prays to be absorbed into the body of the youth and is granted her wish. Like the text of which they are all a
part, the characters in these stories find that, whether they desire it or not, their
bodies do not exist “in isolation,” as Fowler would say, but instead combine in ways that
preserve and expand their significance within the Metamorphoses.
When considering such images of the merging bodies of lovers in these stories,
we may recall Aristophanes’ lovers in Plato’s Symposium, each of which is a half of what
was once a rather interestingly-shaped whole:
The shape of each person was wholly spherical, having the back and the
sides in a circle, and each had four hands, and as many legs as hands, and
two faces on a round neck, alike in every way. There was one head for
both of the faces, which were facing in opposite directions, and four ears,
and two sets of genitals, and all the other things were as one might
imagine them. And each walked upright, as now, whichever way it wished
to. And whenever it began to move quickly, just as tumblers cartwheel moving around in a circle with their legs out straight, these creatures then
had eight limbs which, supporting them, bore them along.
Love, Aristophanes explains to his fellow symposiasts, is the natural longing of the
halves to reunite into this whole. Again, this is not far from Lucretius’ description of
lovers in book four of
De Rerum Natura, who press together in the throes of love so
passionately that they seem to want
penetrare et abire in corpus corpore toto (“to penetrate and absorb wholly with body into body,” 1111). In fact, as Philip Hardie suggests,
this line indicates that, “Lucretius may remember the speech of Aristophanes in the
Symposium, which tells of the ever-frustrated desire of the human individual to join up in
the primal union with his or her other half.” Phillip de Lacy includes this passage among
those he cites as proof that “Lucretius did indeed have a first-hand knowledge of Plato’s writings and that he not only rejected Platonism but even derived anti-Platonic arguments
from the Dialogues, thus turning Plato against himself.” Doubtless, their similarity is
intriguing.
But lest the discussion become entirely entrenched in ideas about love, we should
at this point take a brief step back from this highly focused topic, the merging bodies of
lovers in the Metamorphoses, to remind ourselves of the overarching theme it
instantiates. “As a metaphor,” Stephen Wheeler explains, “metamorphosis gives
coherence to change by revealing the mysterious interconnectedness and parity between
things.” Ovid’s stories are intended not to make us think about love as much as to see
the fluidity of the physical world he created as a representation of the fluidity of the
intellectual, of the world of fiction and literature. His characters, their surroundings, what
they metamorphose into, all preserve traces of one another in themselves in a way similar
to that in which Ovid’s poem intertextually preserves the poetic characters and
atmosphere and works of his age. The merging-body episodes are a particularly apt
metaphor for this, as they present us with distinct forms within the story blending
together into one while Ovid, in his position as storyteller, is blending the text of
Lucretius and Plato into his own. Thus, the merged quality of his text itself reminds us
not to see anything as isolated and wholly contained in its own form.
We shall begin this thesis with a detailed exploration of the specific intertextual
connections that recall the words of Lucretius and Plato in these abovementioned episodes from the
Metamorphoses. Next, we will take a survey of
Ovid’s potential mythological sources for these four stories, with an eye to determining in
each case whether Ovid’s emphasis on the merging of the characters’ bodies was likely
an original innovation on his part. From there, we will proceed to a discussion of the
significance of the word
corpora in the
Metamorphoses and to an examination of Ovid’s
ideas about the immortality of his poetic corpus as evinced by the final lines of his epic
and modified later in his exile poetry. Finally, we will conclude by looking at a number
of visual representations of Narcissus in the form of wall paintings from first-century
A.D. Pompeii, evaluating the claim that these works reflect an Ovidian influence and
suggesting alternative ways of reading them in relation to Ovid’s poem.
CHAPTER 2
INTERTEXTUAL CONNECTIONS
As we begin to examine the merging-body stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and
the intertextual parallels that recall Plato’s Symposium and Lucretius’
De Rerum Natura
within these stories, we should start by noting their thematic similarity. On some level, all
three works deal with the relationships between bodies, whether human or animal or floral or
atomic, and with the joining and parting and transforming of these bodies. Ovid states his
goal for the Metamorphoses at the beginning of the work:
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
corpora
(Met. I.1-2).
My mind urges me to speak of forms changed into new bodies.
Lucretius’ aim is not dissimilar:
…rerum primordia pandam,
unde omnis natura creet res auctet alatque
quoue eadem rursum natura perempta resoluat,
quae nos materiem et genitalia corpora rebus
reddunda in ratione vocare et semina rerum
appellare suemus et haec eadem usurpare
corpora prima, quod ex illis sunt omnia primis.
(DRN I.55-61)
I will lay out the origins of things, from which nature creates all things and
increases and nourishes them, and into which the same nature releases
them again, having been destroyed, things which we are accustomed,
when delivering a rational account, to call matter and the bodies of
creation for things, and to name as the seeds of things, and to call them
also the first bodies, because from these first everything else comes.
As with Ovid, Lucretius promises to tell the reader of corpora and of the generation of
new things. Ovid focuses on the amorous couplings of corpora throughout the
Metamorphoses, and Lucretius, too, treats the subject, spending the latter half of book
four of De Rerum Natura supporting his admonishments about love. Lucretius’ caution to
readers, however, is far from what we think of when we read Ovid:
sed fugitare decet simulacra et pabula amoris
absterrere sibi atque alio conuertere mentem
et iacere umorem coniectum in corpora quaeque
nec retinere, semel conuersum unius amore,
et seruare sibi curam certumque dolorem.
ulcus enim uiuescit et inueterascit alendo
inque dies gliscit furor atque aerumna grauescit,
si non prima nouis conturbes uolnera plagis
uolgiuagaque uagus Uenere ante recentia cures
aut alio possis animi traducere motus.
(DRN IV.1063-72)
But it is fitting to flee from images and to drive off the fuel of love from
yourself and to turn the mind elsewhere and to cast the collected liquid
into any body whatsoever and not to retain it, once twisted up with the
love of one, and to preserve for yourself care and certain grief. For the
ulcer comes to life and establishes itself by feeding, and day by day the
madness swells and distress grows heavy, if you do not mix up the first
wounds with new cuts and take care of them, fresh, wandering with wide-ranging Venus (meaning here not "Aphrodite" but "erotism," through metonymy), or if you are not able to direct your train of thought in
another direction.
Lucretius writes of passion, so central to the plot of most of the stories in the
Metamorphoses, as a vice, urging his readers to prefer satisfying their immediate physical
desires with a prostitute or catamite over binding themselves unwaveringly to a single partner. “What
Lucretius is attacking,” Aya Betensky states, “is a romantic and obsessive attitude to love
which may have existed in life, then and now, and which we certainly find reflected and
amplified in literature,” such as the romantic-lyric poetry of Lucretius’ contemporary Catullus. And
while Lucretius does not deny the possibility of achieving and sustaining a peaceful marriage, he asserts at the close of the fourth book of
De Rerum Natura that it has
nothing to do with passion:
Nec diuinitus interdum Uenerisque sagittis
deteriore fit ut forma muliercula ametur.
nam facit ipsa suis interdum femina factis
morigerisque modis et munde corpore culto,
ut facile insuescat te secum degere uitam.
quod super est, consuetudo concinnat amorem;
nam leuiter quamuis quod crebro tunditur ictu,
uincitur in longo spatio tamen atque labascit.
nonne uides etiam guttas in saxa cadentis
umoris longo in spatio pertundere saxa?
(DRN IV.1278-87)
Nor is it by divine influence and the arrows of Venus (ie erotism) that sometimes a
little wench with an inferior appearance is loved. For sometimes a woman
manages, by her actions and her obliging ways and by her neat and well
groomed body, to easily accustom you to spend your life with her. What’s
more, habit creates love; for that which frequently is struck lightly with a
blow, is nevertheless conquered in the long run and breaks. Do you not see
that even drops of water falling on rock bore through that rock in the long run?
As the poet indicates here, Betensky explains, Lucretius believed that monogamous love and marriage
should be a “gradual, conscious, and realistic process of learning to live with another
person,” as he “describes marriage in terms of friendship” instead of passion. The last
two images of book four may cause us to smile: the implication that growing to love
one’s wife is similar to being beaten down and worn away is surely an attempt at humor
on Lucretius’ part. But Brown sees such joking as indicative of disdain on the part of the
poet, suggesting that “it is as if Lucretius recognizes the attraction of domestic intimacy
but at the same time sees it as a surrender to human weakness and is careful to maintain
the proper philosophical attitude of aloof independence. Ultimately, therefore, the
conclusion is equivocal and ends quite fittingly with a question.” Of the characters from the Metamorphoses who allow themselves to feel passion for others, some fare well in
their amorous pursuits, some poorly; however, those who attempt to repulse it outright
fail overwhelmingly. Determining how and why (in light of the failure of Lucretius’
advice to prove entirely prudent in the world of the Metamorphoses) Ovid used Lucretian
imagery in these stories of merging bodies is one of the goals of this chapter.
It may, however, be worth asking why we can read features of Aristophanes’ speech in
the Metamorphoses when the Symposium affords so many others, when Aristophanes’
speech might be said to serve merely as a stepping-stone leading up to Socrates’ superior
description of love later in the dialogue. In answering this, we should consider that
Aristophanes’ amusingly large, roly-poly humans cut apart by the gods for their sins
against heaven hardly seem out of place in Ovid’s diverse landscape of
mutatas formas.
Further, the meaning behind the story, that there exists for each one of us a specific
“other half” that will complete us, would be undeniably appealing to many of the lovers Ovid describes in the Metamorphoses and, indeed, to many of us today. As Allan Bloom
explains,
To say, ‘I feel so powerfully attracted and believe I want to hold on
forever because this is my lost other half (compare
better half or
media naranja),’ gives word to what we actually
feel and seems to be sufficient. It does not go beyond our experience to
some higher principle, which has the effect of diluting our connection to
another human being, nor does it take us down beneath our experience to
certain animal impulses or physical processes of which our feelings are
only an illusory superstructure. Once one knows Aristophanes’ speech, it
is very difficult to forget it when one most needs it. It is the speech for an
experience that is speechless.
Aristophanes’ ideas about love are rather more conventional than those of Lucretius and
seem often to be shared by Ovid’s lovers. Robert Brown notes the disparity between the
sentiments that characterize Lucretius’ and Aristophanes’ presentations on the subject,
explaining that, “For Plato’s Aristophanes, sexual passion is symptomatic of a deep
human need to achieve completion through an intimate relationship. Lucretius, in
contrast, sees it as a superficial obsession and scornfully rejects the possibility of selffulfillment through love—even in the union of bodies, let alone that of the souls.”In
examining the parallels existing among the three texts, we shall keep in mind the
apparent harmony between Ovid’s merging body stories and Aristophanes’ speech in the
Symposium, and keep in mind as well the seeming discord between Lucretius’
recommendations in De Rerum Natura and the impact that shunning love has for many of
Ovid’s characters. Let us now begin to lay out more explicitly what the merged quality of
the text means within each of the four stories mentioned above.
Narcissus
One of the first bits of information Ovid reveals when introducing Narcissus in
book three of the Metamorphoses is that
multi illum iuuenes, multae cupiere puellae;/ sed
(fuit in tenera tam dura superbia forma)/ nulli illum iuuenes, nullae tetigere puellae
(“Many young lads desired him, many girls. But in his tender form was such unfeeling pride;
none of the lads, none of the girls touched him,” III.353-55). In shunning these
potential affairs and pursuing the hunt, Narcissus’ behavior seems in accordance with
Lucretius’ advice on love cited above,
decet…alio conuertere mentem (“it is fitting to
turn the mind elsewhere,” DRN, IV.1063-64). Further, by viewing all of his admirers as
inferiors, by condescending, Narcissus appears to avoid one of the major pitfalls of those in love as described
by Lucretius, who says that one may remain unconquered by passion
nisi…praetermittas animi uitia omnia primum/ aut quae corporis sunt eius, quam
praepetis ac uis (“if you do not first overlook all the faults of the mind and body which
belong to her whom you strive after and desire,” DRN, IV.1150-52). Reiterating that one need not become a slave to their beloved if
alio possis animi traducere (“you are able
to direct your train of thought in another direction,” DRN, IV.1072), Lucretius seems to
prescribe just the sort of life Narcissus has chosen for himself, a life uninterrupted by
dependence on anyone other than himself.
Of course, it is precisely this sole dependence on himself that eventually becomes
problematic for Narcissus. For the order which, according to Lucretius’ philosophy,
should have followed from Narcissus’ purity of mind is quickly shattered. With the
prayer of a suitor spurned by him,
sic amet ipse licet, sic non potiatur amato (“Thus,
although he himself may be in love, so let him not attain what is beloved!” Met. III.405), Narcissus is soon forced to suffer from the very same symptoms of extreme desire which
his avoidance of passionate love should have rescued him from. What follows is, as
Hardie puts it, “almost…a fantasy based on a dreamlike meditation on the Lucretian
discussion of sense-perception and delusion.”
In identifying the textual parallels between Ovid’s Narcissus in the
Metamorphoses and Lucretius’ lovers in book four of the
De Rerum Natura, we shall
start with Hardie’s discussion of the subject in “Lucretius and the Delusions of
Narcissus.” Hardie points out how Ovid’s language “mirrors” Lucretius’ from the
moment Narcissus sees his reflection in the pool. Both poets, he notes, describe love as a
kind of thirst. Compare, for example, the following passages, in the first of which
Narcissus, wandering in the forest, comes upon the little pool of water:
hic puer et studio uenandi lassus et aestu
procubuit faciemque loci fontemque secutus;
dumque sitim sedare cupit, sitis altera creuit
(Met. III.413-15)
Here the boy, weary with hunting and the heat, lay outstretched, drawn by
the appearance of the place and the spring. And while he wants to allay his
thirst, another thirst arises.
We see the repetition of the idea of love as an unquenchable thirst when Lucretius
describes how desire for a lover cannot be satisfied by any amount of physical contact:
ut bibere in somnis sitiens quom quaerit et umor
non datur, ardorem qui membris stinguere possit,
sed laticum simulacra petit frustraque laborat
in medioque sitit torrenti flumine potans,
sic in amore Uenus simulacris ludit amantis
(DRN IV.1097-1101)
As when in dreams one, thirsting, seeks to drink, and there is no water
given which could extinguish the burning throughout one's body, but one
seeks the image of water and labors in vain and in the middle of a rushing river one, drinking, thirsts, thus in love does Venus tease the lover with
images…
Lucretius warns of laticum simulacra, and, soon after, Narcissus is enslaved by his own
image in the spring. And even though he seems to take some pleasure in the act of
gazing, it will never be a fulfilling act, for, Lucretius continues,
nec satiare queunt
spectando corpora coram (“bodies before one’s eyes are not able to satisfy one with
looking,” DRN IV.1102). One's eyes are always So, as Hardie suggests, “Narcissus becomes the Lucretian
lover, thirst raging in the midst of water.” (Hardie, “Lucretius and the Delusions of Narcissus,” 82.) Dying of thirst before the fountainhead. Narcissus himself recalls this later when,
having recognized that he has fallen in love with his own reflection, he remarks,
quod
cupio mecum est; inopem me copia fecit (“What I desire is with me: its abundance makes
me poor,” Met. III.466). Just like the extreme thirst they share, both Narcissus and
Lucretius’ misguided lovers are described as burning with desire and bearing the fire of
love, as is typical of elegiac lovers. Here, Narcissus describes his burning desire for the
boy whose reflection he has just recognized as his own:
iste ego sum! sensi, nec me mea fallit imago.
uror amore mei, flammas moueoque feroque.
(Met. III.463-64)
I am he myself! I understand, my image does not deceive me. I’m on fire with
love for myself; I both stir up and suffer from the flames.
With similarly fiery imagery, Lucretius explains why enjoying a lover’s body cannot
ultimately satisfy desire:
namque in eo spes est, unde est ardoris origo,
restingui quoque posse ab eodem corpore flammam.
quod fieri contra totum natura repugnat;
unaque res haec est, cuius quam plurima habemus,
tam magis ardescit dira cuppedine pectus.
(DRN IV.1086-1090)
For in this there is the hope that, from the same body from which the
beginning of the burning comes, the flame might also be extinguished. On
the contrary, nature wholly denies that this can happen; and this is the one
thing of which the more we have, so much more does one's chest burn with
terrible desire.
Ovid has ensured that Lucretius’ predictions come true in Narcissus’ punishment:
Narcissus surely cannot extinguish his burning with its source, as he himself is that very
source. At this point, Narcissus almost appears to be a character in a comedy in which
Lucretius’ dramatic love scenarios are played out point-by-point, scenarios involving dire
consequences for falling in love. Ovid has, in a sense, inflicted Narcissus with a
punishment from
De Rerum Natura for seeming to follow Lucretius’ rather stoic advice.
With Narcissus’ recognition of himself as his own lover and beloved, we get
another important Lucretian parallel, in which the image of merging bodies appears as
Narcissus prays in vain:
o utinam a nostro secedere corpore possem!
uotum in amante nouum: uellem quod amamus abesset.
(Met. III.467-8)
Would that I could withdraw from my own body! A strange new prayer for a
lover, I wish that what I love were absent.
Narcissus’ prayer rings as a strange inversion of Lucretius’ remarks on the desperate
movements of lovers:
Nequiquam, quoniam nil inde abradere possunt
nec penetrare et abire in corpus corpore toto;
nam facere interdum uelle et certare uidentur
(DRN IV.1110-12)
It is in vain, since they are not able to rub anything off from there, nor to
absorb into each other and to move with entire body into body; for
sometimes they seem to wish and to strive to do this.
According to Lucretius, the couplings of lovers are nequiquam because lovers cannot
achieve what seems to be the goal of the act:
abradere and penetrare et abire. Narcissus,
however, has a desire entirely opposite to the impossible wish of the Lucretian lovers, as
he already shares a body with the one he loves. Alessandro Barchiesi and Gianpiero
Rosati remark upon Narcissus’ acknowledgment that he is, in a sense, two bodies in one
as evidenced by his switch from the singular to the plural in his speech to his reflection,
explaining, “dopo una lunga sequenza di prime persone, il plurale, pur linguisticamente
legittimo, ha un efetto patetico, perché implica il desiderio impossibile di trasformarsi da
“uno” in “due”; al v. 473 Narciso chiuderà il suo monologo con un plurale che, nelle sue
intenzioni, è vero: moriemur.” (Alessandro Barchiesi and Gianpiero Rosati, Ovidio Metamorfosi Volume II (Libri III-IV) (Milan:
Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 2007), 203.) Narcissus has achieved the goal of the Lucretian lovers,
to become two in one, but is miserable because of it.
To address the possible Platonic intertext, Hardie suggests that, “Ovid’s Narcissus
suffers the fate of the Aristophanic halved beings before Zeus turned round their
genitals:
When, then, our form was cut apart, each half, longing for its own other
half, united with it, and casting their hands around one another and
entwining, desiring to grow together, they perished from hunger and other
forms of inactivity, not being willing on account of this to do things apart
from one another.
Narcissus resigns himself to a similar fate, saying that he will die with his “lover”
because he cannot bear his condition:
nec mihi mors grauis est posituro morte dolores;
hic qui diligitur uellem diuturnior esset.
nunc duo concordes anima moriemur in una.
(Ovid, Met. III.471-3)
Death is not difficult for me, who will lay down my cares in death; this
one who is beloved, I wish, would live longer. But now, we two will die
together in one spirit.
In Aristophanes’ account, Zeus, seeing the halved humans dying, moved their genitals to
the fronts of their bodies so that they could bring them together. Before this alteration,
their genitals were positioned so that they did not touch when the two halves clung
together. Because of this, the halves could neither get any relief from their clinging nor
produce offspring, as they were too preoccupied with the clinging to think of reproduction the way they did before they were cut apart, when “they begot not on each other but on the earth,” (Symposium 191b7-8). After Zeus’ action, the lovers found their clinging to produce
satisfaction.
Narcissus’ physical form, based on Aristophanes’ speech, is the one described here
(which we shall call the stable form). But, after his realization that he has fallen in love with himself, he speaks of himself as being two people in one body (Met. III.473), like
the roly-poly humans before they were halved. Physically, he requires a specific other
half. But while this other half has come to exist in Narcissus’ emotional world, it is not
part of the physical one he inhabits. For this reason, he suffers the fate of one unsatisfied.
The youth, as Hardie noted, appears more akin in behavior to the intermediate humans
(the ones separated but with their genitals not yet repositioned), as he, like them, wastes
away by refusing to draw himself away from his reflection:
Non illum Cereris, non illum cura quietis
abstrahere inde potest, sed opaca fusus in herba
spectat inexpleto mendacem lumine formam
perque oculos perit ipse suos…
…sic attenuatus amore
liquitur et tecto paulatim carpitur igni.
et neque iam color est mixto candore rubori
nec uigor et uires et quae modo uisa placebant
nec corpus remanet
(Met. III.436-40; 489-93)
Neither a concern for food nor for rest can draw him away from there, but
spread out on the shadowy grass he looks at the deceitful form with
unfulfilled eyes, and through his own eyes he perishes
…thus diminished
by love he wastes away and little by little he is consumed by a hidden fire.
And no longer is his color that of a blush mixed with whiteness, nor is
there vigour and strength and what used to be pleasing, just recently seen,
nor does his form remain.
We observe a similarly-worded passage in Lucretius, despite the fact that his lovers
should, by Aristophanes’ account, be stable:
Adde quod absumunt uiris pereuntque labore,
adde quod alterius sub nutu degitur aetas,
languent officia atque aegrotat fama uacillans.
(DRN IV.1121-23)
Add the fact that they use up their strength and they perish with the labor,
add the fact that their time is spent in obedience to the nods of another,
their duties languish and their reputation, tottering, sickens.
If we consider Lucretius’ lovers in the terms of Aristophanes’ speech, they certainly do
not behave like the stable lovers; they behave, rather, like the intermediate lovers who
perish through refusing to let go of one another. While Aristophanes’ stable lovers are
able to complete their erga, Lucretius’ lovers have abandoned their officia. And although
the result of love in Lucretius is that one's reputation
aegrotat, Aristophanes speaks of
how joining in love allows his stable lovers "to heal
the human form,” (Sym. 191d3). This healing is a jarring contrast to much of the
language in the above passages from Ovid and Lucretius, in which we see so many verbs
of weakening, sickening, and diminishing: pereo (to perish), carpo (to use up, consume),
dego (to spend), langueo (to be weary, languish), etc. And to relate Plato directly to Ovid,
while Aristophanes holds that love makes human nature a stable one,
nec
corpus remanet in the case of Narcissus. Why do Lucretius’ lovers, being stable
Aristophanic lovers in form, not behave thus? Because although Aristophanes says that
συνουσία may provide enough satisfaction for lovers to be reasonably productive
(Symposium 191c1-8), Lucretius seems to disagree. Rather, he characterizes the desire for
συνουσία as unremitting and disruptive:
tandem ubi se erupit neruis coniecta cupido,
parua fit ardoris uiolenti pausa parumper.
inde redit rabies eadem et furor ille revisit,
cum sibi quod cupiant ipsi contingere quaerunt,
nec reperire malum id possunt quae machina uincat.
usque adeo incerti tabescunt uolnere caeco.
(Lucretius, DRN IV.1115-20)
Finally, when the collected desire has erupted from their genitals, there
may for a moment be a little break in the violent burning. Then the same
madness returns and that fury comes back, when they seek for themselves
what they desire to happen, and are not able to figure out what device
might overcome the evil. Indeed, uncertain, they continually waste away
from a hidden wound.
While Aristophanes speaks of synousia with one’s beloved as a cure, Lucretius describes
it as a kind of drug.
In Narcissus’ situation, all of these ideas have appallingly converged. It hardly
matters whether synousia is stabilizing or not, because Narcissus does not allow his
stable physical form to be of use to him by choosing a lover from among his admirers, by
considering that one might be the right other half for him. He is given a kind of corrupted
merged form as a punishment, from which he paradoxically desires to withdraw so that
he may have the pleasure of reuniting with it. Narcissus lives not wholly in Aristophanes’
world nor in Lucretius’, but in Ovid’s, where the suffering of Lucretius’ passionate lovers
and of Aristophanes’ intermediate lovers is gathered up and hurled at him
indiscriminately when he refuses to accept his form. Would he have suffered like
Lucretius’ lovers if he had accepted the advances of one of the striplings or maidens
pursuing him? Or would he have found satisfaction like Aristophanes’ stable lovers? It
hardly matters, because deviant characters like Narcissus have ensured that whatever
Ovid might consider to be the normal course of passionate love is rarely realized. Instead,
employing the language and imagery of Lucretius and Plato, Ovid has created a world
that seems not to have fixed rules, with his own work pulling in other works like
De
Rerum Natura and the Symposium to the point that the reader senses that the range of
possible outcomes of love, indeed, of any action, is interminably expanded, entirely
metamorphic, and infinitely variegated.
Salmacis and Hermaphroditus
With the introduction of Hermaphroditus shortly after the Pyramus and Thisbe
episode, we come upon a youth whose age, beauty, and habits are so similar to Narcissus’
that we immediately feel apprehensive for the child of Hermes and Aphrodite. Just as
Narcissus spent his time hunting, Hermaphroditus, too, is preoccupied with the natural
world:
is tria cum primum fecit quinquennia, montes
deseruit patrios Idaque altrice relicta ignotis errare locis, ignota uidere
flumina gaudebat, studio minuente laborem.
(Ovid, Met. IV.292-5)
As soon as he was fifteen, he abandoned his native mountains, and, with
his foster mother Ida left behind he rejoiced to wander in unknown places
and to see unknown rivers, his eagerness lessening the effort.
Thus sped, dear friends, a decade and a half,
until his yearning turned the most intense,
and too narrow the reach of childhood's glen;
no longer a child, not yet a young man
was our hero; on the threshold stage
he stood, and thus, suppose him at sixteen: ...
The lad, excited, left his native seat,
thinking no more of childhood's cool retreat,
and southward, without steed or car, he traced
his strides, for he had heard the southron were
cultured and fond of everything that's fair.
Thus, he might find a clue to his descent,
and the young, restless heart might be appeased.
The love, care, and concern of guardians
had watched his every golden morn and night;
now years had flown by at the speed of light.
Thus, the proud stripling tore himself away
from those who'd raised him; out into real life
he stormed, wild and free, a hazel staff,
to measure the wide world, in his right hand.
Would he a stranger come home to his land? ...
What matters is that, to his eager heart,
walking through thorny patches is just like
on a wildflower meadow; surging streams
of rapids crossed as easily as rills:
good cheer and youthful impulse give him wings,
and sense of wonder makes his labour light.
Coming to the land of the Carians near Lycia, he finds a pool that Ovid describes in some
detail:
uidet hic stagnum lucentis ad imum
usque solum lymphae. non illic canna palustris
nec steriles uluae nec acuta cuspide iunci;
perspicuus liquor est. stagni tamen ultima uiuo
caespite cinguntur semperque uirentibus herbis.
(Ovid, Met. IV.297-301)
Here he sees a pool of water sparkling right down to the bottommost part.
There is no marshy reed nor fruitless sedge nor rushes with spiky tip; the
water is clear. Nevertheless the edges of the pool are surrounded with
fresh grass and plants forever green.
sparkling like diamonds in the August sunis the prize for the weary to be won.And now he stands before the long-wished spring,whose beckoning call he has just heard sing:the pines around, centennial parasols,are overgrown so thick with chevrefoilthat they seem curtains, their refreshing shade,that adds more comfort to the thornless glade,projecting on the stage of the clear pool,upon which the cliff pours a rill so cool:no spear-like reeds or pike-like canes arrangedin a harsh tercio frame it; the moist groundis fresh and soft and scented with spearmint,and the crystal-clear liquid, pure and cool,not looking-glass-steeled like most springs should be,through which fine quartzy pebbles can be seen,entices the young quester: "Take a sip!Drink from my draught, refresh your weary frame!"
Here again, we think of Narcissus, whose pool is described as similarly clear and tranquil
and surrounded by soft green grass (Met. III.407-12). Segal notes this similarity of
settings, remarking that, of the various associations ancient readers would have made
with water, “the virginal associations of freshwater and pools” was particularly useful for
Ovid because “characteristically, it also symbolizes the reverse.” (23 Charles Segal, Landscapes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner Verlag, 1969), 24.) For, like Narcissus,
the male virgin Hermaphroditus is an object of desire for others, specifically, in his case, for
the nymph Salmacis. It is in Ovid’s description of Salmacis that the themes of chastity
and sensuality are brought to the forefront of the myth. Salmacis, who
sola…Naiadum
celeri non nota Dianae (“alone of the naiads is not known to swift Artemis,” Met. IV.304),
prefers bathing to the hunt and lounges at the pool admiring her appearance and arranging her hair, “implicitly for a man,” Anderson comments. (Anderson, Ovid’s Metamorphoses Books I-V, 445) This contrasts with “the
characteristic mode of the chaste nymph,” he states, which is “neglect of her looks, to let
her hair blow in the breeze, only loosely filleted, to bathe after hunting, never to consult a
mirror. (Ibidem) Salmacis inhabits the stagnum
lucentis…lymphae upon which Hermaphroditus
happens, and she was picking flowers
cum puerum uidit uisumque optauit habere (“when
she saw the boy and desired to have what she saw,” Met. IV.316).
Approaching Hermaphroditus and praising his beauty, Salmacis expresses her
desire and proposes either marriage or, alternatively, a
furtiua uoluptas (“secret
pleasure,” Met. IV.327) (Barchiesi and Rosati, Ovidio Metamorfosi Volume II (Libri III-IV), 288-90 provides a discussion of
similarities between Salmacis’ advances on Hermaphroditus and Echo’s on Narcissus, as well more general
commentary on verbal parallels in Ovid’s characterization of Hermaphroditus and Narcissus, observations
which help to further establish the relationship between the two episodes.) if he already has a wife. Like Narcissus with Echo,
Hermaphroditus wants nothing to do with his admirer and is only embarrassed by her
advances, nescit enim quid amor (“for he does not know what love is,” Met. IV.330).
Crying out when the nymph begs for a kiss and tries to embrace him, Hermaphroditus
warns Salmacis that he will depart if she does not leave off in her pursuit of his affection.
Not to be dissuaded, she hides on the edge of the pool until the boy is bathing naked and,
stripping off her own garments, ambushes him. Unlike Narcissus and Pyramus and
Thisbe, Salmacis finds no physical boundary cutting her off from Hermaphroditus. The
boy has removed it by undressing and immersing himself willingly in the pond, a pond
which, Hermann Fränkel notes, Ovid seems to represent as an extension and embodiment
of the nymph herself. (Hermann Fränkel, Ovid: a Poet between Two Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945),
88.) And while Narcissus strove to reach someone immaterial in his
empty pool, Hermaphroditus is horrified to find that his own is not empty after all. He tries to push away Salmacis, but she clings tenaciously to his body, catching him in her
embrace as if she were a snake or ivy or an octopus, Ovid remarks in a series of similes
(Met. IV.362-7). Hermaphroditus cannot disengage himself from the nymph, and we see
once again our merging-bodies motif:
Perstat Atlantiades sperataque gaudia nymphae
denegat; illa premit, commissaque corpore toto
sicut inhaerebat, “pugnes licet, improbe” dixit,
“non tamen effugies. ita di iubeatis, et istum
nulla dies a me nec me diducat ab isto.”
uota suos habuere deos; nam mixta duorum
corpora iunguntur faciesque inducitur illis
una. uelut, si quis conducat cortice ramos,
crescendo iungi pariterque adolescere cernit,
sic, ubi complexu coierunt membra tenaci,
nec duo sunt sed forma duplex, nec femina dici
nec puer ut possit, neutrumque et utrumque uidentur.
(Met. IV.368-79)
The descendant of Atlas endures, and refuses the nymph her hoped-for delights;
she presses hard, and attached with her entire body as if she were fastening
on, she said, “It is allowed, o wicked boy, that you fight, but not that you
flee. Thus let the gods decree, and let no day separate that boy from me,
nor me from him.” Her prayers compelled the gods; for the mingled
bodies of the two are united and one face is introduced to them, just as
when someone brings together branches under bark, and sees that they are
united as they grow and that they become strong together. Thus when their
limbs met in a firm embrace, they were not two, but their form was
twofold, so that it could neither be called a female nor a boy: they seemed
neither and still both.
"...
Gods of Olympus, hear this maiden's prayer:
let this young man and I for e'er be one,and may our unity ne'er come undone!"And thus, instantly, only Gods know how,the two youthful forms are conjoined as one:his and her legs fuse, like strands of warm wax;so do their arms, their bellies, and their chests, entering one another gradually;she feels his youthful blood in every vein,and he feels hers warm his cold heart again,receiving from her warmth, and love, and life;and last, two necks, two heads, are joined as one,as lovely and as bright as twice the Sun:the green-eyed nymph's will is finally done.
They are two, yet no longer form a pair:
a common frame that holds two spirits there,
both of them, and yet neither one, as fair."
Once again, we see definite verbal parallels with the merging-body passages of Lucretius
and Plato. As in the Pyramus and Thisbe story, we find a repetition of the Lucretian
lovers’ pressing together corpore toto (DRN IV.1111) when Salmacis clings to
Hermaphroditus corpore toto (Met. IV.369). Salmacis behaves exactly like the reckless
and impassioned lovers Lucretius warns us not to emulate. She exarsit (Met. IV.347)
when, after desperately begging Hermaphroditus to embrace her and subsequently being rejected by him, she spies the youth swimming naked. She never entertains Lucretius’ idea that consuetudo concinnat amorem (DRN IV.1283), resorting, rather, to force and prayer to achieve her desire. But instead of allowing her to continue suffering like the misguided Lucretian lover who is crippled by his devotion to his beloved, Ovid has Salmacis’ wish granted, though perhaps not in the way she intended. (Matthew Robinson, “Salmacis and Hermaphroditus: When Two Become One,” The Classical Quarterly 49 no. 1 (1999): 222-3 proposes an interesting answer to the question of why the gods grant Salmacis’ wish, suggesting that the merging was affected by Hephaestus, who has the power to fuse together lovers in Aristophanes’ speech, and who likely resents Hermaphroditus, as the latter is proof that his wife Aphrodite was unfaithful to him: “The offer made by Hephaestus [Sym. 191e1-e4] to the two lovers is identical to the request made by Salmacis to the gods. The idea of some divine force actually physically merging two bodies into one is far from common, and this passage of the Met. cannot but recall the Symposium.”) Here, the theme of two-in-one appears again, when mixta duorum/ corpora iunguntur faciesque inducitur illis/ una (Met. IV.373-375) as the unnamed gods proceed, in the words of Aristophanes, to cleave one into two (Sym. 191d2). And although Salmacis has not explicitly asked for a iuncta mors or Liebestod of the sort mentioned above, she has prayed that istum nulla dies a me nec me deducat ab isto, reproducing the Aristophanic lovers’ wish as explained by Hephaestus (Sym. 192e1-e4). Nevertheless, the duplex forma that results from the merging is not really what Salmacis seemed to desire. For, as she stated when she first met Hermaphroditus, she was after the voluptas that she believed would come from sex, be it furtiva or within the context of marriage. Her prayer that she never be separated from Hermaphroditus is an extension of this desire. But the gods take her words more literally than she seems to have intended them, and “Il s'agit à première vue, semble-t-il,” Jean-Marc Frécaut writes in considering the metamorphosis, “d'une application de la théorie exposée par Aristophane dans le Banquet de Platon. (Jean-Marc Frécaut, L'Esprit et l'humour chez Ovide (Grenoble: University of Grenoble Press, 1972), 263.) But after the merging, we are left not with a pair of roly-poly Aristophanic lovers, but a distorted version of Hermaphroditus. For although the narrator at first refers to the merged form in the plural, neutrumque et utrumque uidentur (Met. IV.379), (Barchiesi and Rosati, Ovidio Metamorfosi Volume II (Libri III-IV), 292 notes that Ovid’s wording here is
quite similar to Lucretius’ definition of the “androgynem” at DRN V.839.) it is clear that the creature
still considers himself to be Hermaphroditus and does not react to the change as if
someone has been added to him, but as if he has lost some of himself: se liquidas, quo uir
descenderat, undas/ semimarem fecisse uidet mollitaque in illis/ membra (“he sees that
the clear waters, in which he had submerged himself as a man, had made him half-male,
his limbs enfeebled in them,” Met. IV.380-2). His name is revealed explicitly as
Hermaphroditus for the first time here (before it was only suggestively alluded to that,
being the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, nomen quoque traxit ab illis, “even his name he took from both,” Met. IV.291), and he prays that men visiting the pond henceforward suffer a similar fate: quisquis in hos fontes uir uenerit, exeat inde/ semiuir et tactis subito mollescat in undis (“Whoever comes to these waters as a man, let him emerge from them
a half-man and suddenly become soft in the waves he has touched,” Met. IV.385-6).
Hermaphroditus views his body as a corrupted version of his original self; he has not
been completed with an other half, but perverted with something foreign. Matthew
Robinson explains his unexpectedly curious metamorphosis more fully, focusing on the
adjectives Ovid uses to describe the transformed Hermaphroditus:
The problem is that Ovid, in spite of what he says at 378-9, seems to
present the result of the metamorphosis not as a seamless combination of
Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (neutrumque et utrumque videntur), but
rather as just Hermaphroditus alone, angry at the loss of his masculinity:
Salmacis has been removed from the narrative. Furthermore, although
described as biformis at 387, Hermaphroditus is also described with terms
more appropriate to effeminacy than to androgyny (381 semimarem,
mollita…membra; 382 non noce virile), almost as if he himself were a
victim of the curse he is about to put on the spring (386 semivir, mollescat). - Robinson, “Salmacis and Hermaphroditus: When Two Become One,” 220.
Hermaphroditus becomes a Narcissus-like figure whose body is useless to him and
cannot be categorized as half or whole. On the other hand, as Robinson indicated,
Salmacis’ identity has virtually disappeared. The merging has caused her to become lost
in Hermaphroditus. She neither completes him, nor is she able to gain her desired
uoluptas. Anderson explains her mistake:
Salmacis has achieved the very opposite of satisfactory love and sexuality.
Instead of winning the heart and mens of the boy to mutual love, so that
their separate bodies could then give and receive pleasure in intercourse,
she has forced an unnatural physical melding that destroys sexual
differentiation and ignores the incompatibility of feelings. Ovid strongly
emphasizes in this poem that love results from the symbolic union of the
mind and emotions, not mere physical linkage. (Anderson, Ovid’s Metamorphoses Books I-V, 453-4.)
Salmacis and Hermaphroditus are, at least in Hermaphroditus’ opinion, not halves of a
whole meant for one another. Salmacis, nevertheless, has tried to pretend otherwise by
behaving as one of Lucretius’ or Aristophanes’ lovers while completely ignoring
Hermaphroditus’ opposition to the idea. But the couple does not fit the type described by
Lucretius or Aristophanes, and instead of going through any sort of desirable merging,
they combine into a lonely amalgamation of male and female parts. We should note that
this story, like Pyramus and Thisbe’s, is one told by a Minyeid named
Alcithoe, but that here, too, Ovid’s voice is discernible through her from the beginning,
as the Minyeid, like Ovid, emphasizes the newness of her story: dulcique animos nouitate
tenebo (“I will captivate your minds with a sweet novelty,” Met. IV.284). The subject
matter, a willful nymph who does not conform to the ways of those around her, may fit
Alcithoe, but Ovid remains in control of the narrative. Once again, we see a layering of
old and new voices, a combination of the familiar and the unexpected. Much like
Alcithoe describes the merging of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in terms of the grafting together of trees, we may consider how her voice has been grafted onto Ovid’s story,
along with Lucretius’ and Plato’s. Looking closely, we may see these various voices
crescendo iungi pariterque adolescere.
ALTERNATE VERSIONS OF THE MERGING-BODY MYTHS
In the previous chapter, we gathered evidence for the idea that Ovid’s merging
bodies can justifiably be viewed as metaphorical representations of intertextuality by
examining the intertextual presence of the texts of Lucretius and Plato in the stories of
Narcissus, ... Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, ... But in the Metamorphoses, this element of two-in-one, of bodies and stories
containing other bodies and stories, is expanded to the point that we may pick out not
merely two, but any number of voices in each of Ovid’s tales. Though we have thus far
limited this discussion to the relationship between Ovid, Lucretius, and Plato in a group
of four stories, we will see in this chapter that we can identify various other voices
present in the same passages. Richard Tarrant explains Ovid’s eclectic approach:
Whatever the form with which Ovid is engaged, his eye takes in the full
sweep of Greco-Roman poetry, and the story he tells about his work is
always being rewritten. If ‘literary history’ connotes a stable record of
writers’ careers and of their relations to one another, Ovid is an antihistorian, who delights in reshuffling the data and producing constantly
new accounts. (Richard Tarrant, “Ovid and ancient literary history,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip
Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002))
Though we have a rather vague idea of Ovid’s sources for our myths, a
review of recent scholarship on the origins of these stories will still be useful in
suggesting that the merging of bodies in each story should be regarded as significant
Ovidian inventions. In prefacing a case-by-case examination, we should note a number of
general ideas about Ovid’s use of Greek and Latin works. Anderson (William S. Anderson, Ovid’s Metamorphoses Books I-V (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997),
14) offers a useful
description of Ovid’s wide-ranging selection of material for the Metamorphoses:
Some of Ovid’s material came from finely worked literary treatments of the same myth; for instance, Lucretius 5 stands behind parts
of the Creation story in 1; Vergil’s Council of the Gods and the councils in
earlier epics help to shape Ovid’s account in 1.163 ff.; the battle of
Perseus at the banquet against Phineus and his motley supporters in 5.1 ff.
borrows from the scene of Odysseus and the Suitors in Homer’s epic and
from heroic battle episodes in the Aeneid. The stories of Phaethon in 2 and
Pentheus in 3 have models in Euripidean tragedy. And Callimachus stands
behind Ovid’s pairing of crow and raven in 2.524 ff. Many of the stories,
however, apart from Ovid, are known to us only from badly narrated
summaries in mythological handbooks or from chance comments. The
handbooks of Parthenius, Apollodorus, and Antoninus Liberalis (all in
Greek) and of Hyginus (in Latin) have survived from the time of Ovid to
the second century…They indicate, of course, that Ovid had much more to
work with than we now possess; but they also suggest that he may have
used his own creative genius to build upon bare handbook entries.
Despite the challenges posed by Ovid’s “anti-historical” attitude toward literary history,
we will begin this second chapter by determining, where possible, the degree to which
Ovid was “reshuffling the data and producing…new accounts” when he wrote these four
stories, with an eye to showing in each case whether the merging of the characters seems
to have been an Ovidian innovation.
Fritz
Graf comments that Nicander’s poem “provided the ancestry, though certainly not the
poetology, for the Metamorphoses.” He cautions us, in Myth in Ovid, not to assume too close a link
between Ovid and the handbooks and remarks on the inventiveness of Ovid even in the
face of well-established versions of the myths he tells in the Metamorphoses:
Ovid is in full command of his mythological tradition, wherever he picked
it up; it has rightly become unfashionable to posit as his sources
mythological handbooks, so favoured by nineteenth-century scholarship.
Of course, there could always have been other précis besides the ones we
have by Parthenius to assist Roman poets, although they elude us—yet
there is nothing to prevent us from assuming that Ovid read avidly and
systematically. Even the overall arrangement of the work owes less to the
structure of mythological handbooks than to that of universal histories like
the one of Diodorus Siculus. And where he had to cope with overpowering
master-texts, from which he could not easily get away, he again decided to
be short and to elaborate the stories not told by them…In all of this, he
shows the sheer, infinite adaptability of mythical narratives.
Even when Ovid selected source material from other authors and traditions, he likely felt
no qualms about manipulating the plot to fit his own purposes. Perhaps the most obvious
example is Ovid’s subversion of traditional epic accounts of the Trojan War in Met. XII
and XIII. Because Ovid was writing for a very specific and well-educated group of men
familiar with Greek literature, his alterations may have been even more readily
appreciated as clever innovations rather than deviations from established traditions. F. Graf (in Myth in Ovid) explains that, “Where the collectivity of recipients is no longer society at large, but the
group of like-minded literati and their patrons, literary or aesthetical strategies become
the group concern that justifies choices of variants as well as changes and inventions in
the tradition. Specific texts gain authority, and myths are chosen according to aesthetic values.”
Further, we should not neglect to consider the broader literary and historical
context in which Ovid was writing, as well as the need for him to engage with and to
revise the vast mythological repertoire available to him from Greek and Latin sources.
“Ovid,” Anderson says, “has often been seen as occupying a transitional place in literary history, between a ‘Golden’ and a ‘Silver’ Age. This depiction in part arises from
another aspect of Ovid’s inclusiveness: he is the first and the last Imperial Roman poet to combine
a broad knowledge of Greek literature with an intimate awareness of the new Latin
‘classics.’” - Tarrant, “Ovid and ancient literary history,” 19.
In departing from his sources, Ovid has certainly made the myths of the
Metamorphoses discernibly his own. “The consistent quality of the Metamorphoses,”
Anderson suggests, “whether in tales derived from recognizable sources of literary merit
or in those so rare (such as Narcissus) as to defy all attempts to identify a source, attests
to the fact that Ovid’s poetic genius shaped all stories regardless of origin.” (Anderson, Ovid’s Metamorphoses Books I-V, 14.) Reading
Ovid, we may feel that we would never mistake his stories for the work of another poet,
and that even without having read all of his tales we would have no trouble identifying
his version of a particular myth from a lineup of narratively similar stories. With this in
mind, we shall begin to identify the possible sources of each of our stories.
Salmacis and Hermaphroditus
As was true of the first Minyeid to narrate a tale, Alcithoe desires to
tell her audience an uncommon story: dulcique animos novitate tenebo (“I will hold your
attention with sweet newness,” Met. IV.284).
And, surely enough, we are once again
uncertain of Ovid’s source for the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. Nevertheless,
Alcithoe goes on to preface her story:
Unde sit infamis, quare male fortibus undis
Salmacis enervet tactosque remolliat artus,
discite. Causa latet, vis est notissima fontis.
(Met. IV.285-7)
Learn, whence it is famous, why Salmacis weakens and softens limbs
touched by its strong waters. The cause lies hidden, but the power of the
spring is most famous.
I will reject all these, and then some more,
and charm your hearts and minds with little known
a story, so unknown and sweet and new,
which I heard in a song as a young child,
about a stubborn lover's dream come true
and a spring which unnerves the drinkers' limbs,
changing them, from without and from within,
into half the ones that they used to be.
The reason why's a secret, reader friends,
but the effect was once known left and right,
before the tale was censored by the stern
and only brought by few ones to the light.
Robinson points out that Alcithoe’s statement about the notoriety of the spring of
Salmacis seems to have been accurate, and he cites various references to its enervating
properties in the works of Strabo, Vitruvius, Festus, Vibius Sequester. (Robinson, “Salmacis and Hermaphroditus: When Two Become One,” 212-3. Robinson cites Strabo,
Geographica XIV.2.16, Vitruvius De Architectura II.8.12, Festus De Verborum Significatu 329, and Vibius
Sequester, De Fluminibus, Fontes 152.) Quoting from
these, Robinson concludes that, “It is clear that whatever its precise nature, the rumored
effect of the spring has something to do with sex (venerio morbo), and involves making
those who drink it malakos, mollis, impudicus, and obscenus.” (Ibidem) According to Vitruvius,
however, this negative characterization of the spring of Salmacis developed out of earlier
notions that the spring merely had a civilizing effect. He claims that the rumor of
Salmacis’ waters having effeminizing properties is false, and that it developed after
Greeks colonized the area. Vitruvius explains that the displaced Carian barbarians
gradually re-entered the area to visit a newly established Greek tavern (built near
Salmacis because of the spring’s excellent waters), and that the Carians became civilized
by the customs of the Greeks and, consequently, softer (De Architectura II.8.12).
Hermaphroditus does not always appear connected with the spring (or nymph) of
Salmacis. According to Allen Romano, “the only extensive accounts about both
Hermaphroditus (as well as Salmacis),” apart from a second century B.C. inscription on
the remains of an ancient wall in Halicarnassus which will be discussed below, “are from Ovid’s time or later.” (Allen J. Romano, “The Invention of Marriage: Hermaphroditus and Salmacis at Halicarnassus and in
Ovid,” The Classical Quarterly 59 no. 2 (2009): 552.) Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood offers a useful summary of the
Greeks’ initial conceptions of Hermaphroditus:
The earliest extant evidence for Hermaphroditos comes from early fourth
century B.C. Attica [in the form of an epigraph on a statue base] and
pertains to his cult. Scholars have long argued that the androgynous
Hermaphroditos was connected with sexual unions, fertility and marriage:
he was, it has been suggested, a protector of marriage, or, as Delcourt has
argued, of the sexual union…The earliest extant source on his parentage is
Diodoros, who tells us that Hermaphroditos was the son of Aphrodite and
Hermes. No competing version of his parentage is known, and his name
suggests that Hermaphroditos was always the son of Aphrodite and
Hermes, a parentage which is also significant in terms of his nature and
functions.
In Athens Hermaphroditos came to be identified with Aphroditos,
the name attached to a bisexual persona of Aphrodite in Cyprus. Some
time in the fifth century at least knowledge of some form of this Cypriot
deity Aphroditos was imported in mainland Hellas…Since the evidence for
Hermaphroditos’ cult in tge mainland suggests that his persona (at the very least
in its basic lines) was not different from his persona elsewhere, it would
seem that any elements of the persona of Aphroditos that may have been
known to the Athenians had become submerged into the persona of
Hermaphroditos; it is possible that such elements had consisted simply of
the name Aphroditos and perhaps some notion of a connection with
androgyny, and that the notion that Aphroditos was Hermaphroditos
simply articulates the perception that Aphroditos was a name of
Hermaphroditos. (Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, “Hermaphroditos and Salmakis: The Voice of Halikarnassos,” in The
Salmakis Inscription and Hellenistic Halikarnassos, ed. Signe Isager and Poul Pedersen (Odense:
University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004), 60)
The discovery of a late fourth-century B.C. terracotta mold for a figurine of
Hermaphroditus in the anasyromenos pose found in the Coroplasts’ Dump in the
Athenian Agora suggests that the figure was somewhat in-demand during the
Hellenistic period, and such figurines may have been used as votive offerings. (Aileen Ajootian, “Hermaphroditos,” in Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae 6 no. 1 (Zurich:
Artemis Verlag, 1992), 283-4.) Hermaphroditus also seems to have been a popular subject for full-scale sculpture in
gymnasia, public baths, theatres, and private settings. For example, replicas of the well-known sculpture type representing Hermaphroditus lying on his stomach and thought to have
originated in the second century B.C. have been found in a variety of Roman contexts
including Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli.
The first significant mention of Hermaphroditus in literature comes from
Theophrastus (370-288 B.C.) in the Characteres, a work comprised of descriptions of
thirty different characters who display aberrant behaviors. Theophrastus says that the
“Superstitious” hangs garlands on Hermaphroditus on the fourth day of the month,
which the Greeks believed to be sacred to Hermes and Aphrodite, but also on the seventh
day of the month which the Greeks believed to be sacred to Apollo (compare our present-day Sun-days). Nevertheless,
Romano claims that, “This particular Hermaphroditus is likely to be a herm and an
inscription from the fourth century points to dedications to a Hermaphroditus also likely
to be a herm. It may even be that it is in herms that we have the origin of Hermaphroditus
himself since there are a number of examples of herms with the head of Aphrodite rather
than that of Hermes.” (Romano, “The Invention of Marriage,” 553.) Further, as Aileen Ajootian explains, various editors do not even
accept the reading of Hermaphroditos in Theophrastus’ text, preferring Hermes, Aphronein, or Hermas podinois. After its occurrence in Theophrastus’ work, the name was the title
of Poseidippus’ third century B.C. comedy called Hermaphroditos, of which only two lines
are extant.
The earliest surviving narrative concerning Hermaphroditus comes from a sixty-line Greek poem in elegiac couplets inscribed on an ancient wall at the site of the spring
of Salmacis in Halicarnassus, discovered in 1995 and dated to the second century B.C.E. (figs. 3.2, 3.3). The wall was part of the central complex of a series of structures related
to the monumentalization of the fountain on the Kaplan Kalesi or Salmakis promontory
of Halicarnassus (fig. 3.4). In its first few lines, the poem, addressed to Aphrodite, poses
the question of why the town of Halicarnassus is honorable. Zeus, according to the inscription, was
born at Halicarnassus and raised by the Earth-born Halicarnassians (who sprung up spontaneously from Gaia). As a reward,
Halicarnassus was blessed with the spring of Salmacis, where Hermaphroditus was
received by the spring’s nymph and raised into the man who invented the custom of
marriage. The poet here speaks of Salmacis’ sacred streams softening the hard,
uncivilized minds of men, a theme present in Vitruvius, as mentioned above. (For images of the original inscription in stone, as well as a transcription and translation of the text thereon, see Signe Isager, “The Pride of Halikarnassos: Editio princeps of an inscription from Salmakis,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 123 (1998): 1-23.) The
inscription also asserts that Halicarnassus received the benefit of Greek colonization,
which, as Sourvinou-Inwood explains, is not presented as “an incoming Greek elite
imposing its ‘racist’ ideologies to an oppressed native population; it is the perspective of
a multiethnic and multicultural Halikarnassos, in which the perceived superiority of
Greek culture has dominated the Karian perspective—at least that of the elites who made
the cultural choices—for centuries.” (Sourvinou-Inwood, “Hermaphroditos and Salmakis” 63.)
Did Ovid know of the myth attested in the inscription at Halicarnassus? In the
Greek inscription, we do not see the spring described as having any kind of a detrimental
effect on men for which Ovid’s Alcithoe claims it is famous. But Romano believes that
the seemingly opposed views on the spring of Salmacis as beneficially civilizing on the
one hand and debilitatingly effeminizing on the other “results not from fundamental
agreement or disagreement about the effects of the spring (such that we can triangulate between them to recover the true effect of the spring) but rather from the complexities of
describing the aphrodisiacal effects of the spring: the right amount of potion does one
thing but too much can cause the opposite effect.” (Romano, “The Invention of Marriage,” 556) Romano argues for the possibility
that Ovid was familiar with the myth from the inscription at Halicarnassus. He does not
view the spring from the inscription and the spring from Alcithoe’s account in the
Metamorphoses as having different effects on men. “Hermaphroditus suffers the
consequences of too much love potion,” Romano argues, “and indeed the description of
the young man floundering in the water, overwhelmed by Salmacis’ advances, seems a
particularly striking translation of this idea. That Hermaphroditus’ state is permanent is
an effect of the overdose rather than the powers of the spring in themselves.”(Romano, “The Invention of Marriage,” 556). If Ovid
has borrowed directly from this Halicarnassian myth, Romano concludes, he “transforms
a story of blissful union into one of rape,” thus obscuring the idea of Hermaphroditus as
the inventor of marriage and highlighting the Roman idea of marriage as rape as seen in
the myth of the rape of the Sabine women.
Although Sourvinou-Inwood considers the idea of the spring as civilizing to be in
opposition with the idea of the spring as effeminizing, she, too, sees the version present in
the Metamorphoses as representative of innovation on Ovid’s part. She focuses on the
difference in the relationship between Salmacis and Hermaphroditus as represented in the
Halicarnassian inscription and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, arguing that Salmacis did not
have an erotic relationship with Hermaphroditus in the former account. Instead, she
claims that:
A case can be made for the view that the erotic relationship had been
invented outside Halikarnassos, almost certainly by Ovid, out of elements
that had originated in the Halikarnassian myth, which were transformed
through the deployment of, and in interaction with, elements from other
Greek myths [such as that of Hylas], and that Ovid’s text signals its
intertextual relationship to the Halikarnassian myth and also allows the
possibility that the story it tells maybe [sic] untrue, simply its narrator’s
[i.e. Alcithoe’s] invention. - Sourvinou-Inwood, “Hermaphroditos and Salmakis,” 71
Thus, Sourvinou-Inwood concludes that Hermaphroditus was traditionally a Greek god
androgynous from birth and associated with heterosexual union, fertility, and marriage.
The civilizing powers of the spring of Salmacis, positive in the eyes of the Greek
inhabitants, may have appeared to outsiders to be potentially weakening. And along these
lines, Ovid seems to have reworked the traditional story of an androgynous god to tell of
a reluctant male youth who became corrupted with the body of an aggressive female
nymph. Thus, even if Ovid knew of this earlier story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus,
the merging of male and female into an androgynous mixture of the two seems to have
been his own creation, as it is not attested elsewhere.
CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION
In this thesis we began by examining Ovid’s merging-body stories of Narcissus,
... Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, ... as they
relate to the larger intertextual framework of the Metamorphoses. We began by
identifying the specific intertextual connections existing among Ovid’s merging-body
stories, Lucretius’ discourse on passion in the De Rerum Natura, and Aristophanes’
speech on love in Plato’s Symposium. We determined that the potential for Ovid’s
language and imagery to recall the words of the De Rerum Natura and the Symposium
could have prompted a reader familiar with these earlier texts to recall them as he read
the merging-body stories and to consider their thematic realationship to the
Metamorphoses.
We next explored Ovid’s possible sources for the merging-body myths by
discussing literary, visual, and epigraphic evidence for their history before Ovid. Though,
ultimately, it is impossible to determine how he was familiar with each of the four myths
in question, as the oral culture must have provided him with a significant portion of his
repertoire of Greek myths, it is clear that Ovid’s innovations in telling these myths
included either adding to them the motif of two becoming one, or, at least, placing a
greater emphasis on the presence of merged bodies in a way that is indiscernible in any of
his proposed sources.
In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius describes lovers who strive to
merge in corpus corpore toto to show the deceptive nature of passion, which is similar to
the phenomena of echoes and reflections in that it deludes its sufferers into forgetting the
well-established rules of the physical universe. To be sure, the merged bodies in Ovid’s
narrative form as a result of the passion of his characters, whether this love is perverse as
with Salmacis and Hermaphroditus or endearing ... But unlike
the Symposium and the De Rerum Natura, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is not merely a
comment on human conduct, nor is it a didactic or philosophical text describing how his
readers should pursue love. Ovid’s stories are outwardly concerned with these things,
with love and with the physical world in which his characters live; but, as we saw in our
analysis of Pythagoras’ speech in book fifteen of the Metamorphoses, he transcends his
models and the stories he chooses for his narrative by subjugating this physical world to
his grander purpose of exploring the nature of poetic composition and the preeminence of
the poet’s immortal words in a world where physicality precludes permanance. Ovid’s
text is less about love, more about poetics.
Thus, Ovid wants his
readers to take away from the Metamorphoses is not only a familiarity with a series of
mythological narratives, however psychologically interesting they may be, but an
understanding of his poetic commentary. This explains why he uses the last lines of the
Metamorphoses to remind us of his preeminence as immortal poet. In the end, the
Metamorphoses and the merging-body stories we have examined here show us the
remarkable degree to which Ovid was concerned with his position in the literary sphere,
with which other texts would have been reflected in his own, and with how his text would
represent him after his death. In representing a physical world in which characters are
constantly blending and becoming anew, Ovid draws his reader’s attention to his own
skill at engaging with what has been written before him and working it into his own
inimitable corpus.
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