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 sun
is 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 chevrefoil
that 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 arranged
in a harsh tercio frame it; the moist ground
is 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.
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.
