OVID BOOK 4 Hermaphroditus
340-349
Second complication, peak and resolution:
the attack & metamorphosis 340-386
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340 suddenly in the fifth foot, the attention shifts to the boy.
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341 contains a problem of textual reading.
...at ille,
ut puer et vacuis ut inobservatus in herbis,
huc it et hinc illuc et in adludentibus undis
summa pedum taloque tenus vestigia tinguit; OCT
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But he, seeing that he is a boy, and seeing that [he thinks] that he is not being watched, walks up and down on the grass, dips his toes in the lapping waters, and his feet.
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Mark Possanza (Pittsburgh) reviewing Tarrant's OCT:
ut puer (F4L) et uacuis (EMc) ut [Heinsius]
scilicet ut uacuus et Ω
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'If ut inobseruatus in this line represents Hermaphroditus's false assumption that he is not being watched, then it is incompatible with ut puer, which cannot represent what the boy is thinking as he prepares to dip his feet in the water, but rather is appropriate to the narrator's view of the action. If, on the other hand, ut puer is understood as the narrator's comment, then it is incompatible with ut inobseruatus, which the narrator knows to be false. We cannot have the following shift in perspective; "seeing that he is a boy" (narrator), and "seeing that [he thinks] that he is not being watched" (narrator's representation of what the boy is thinking).
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'Moreover, this use of causal ut to introduce a supposition that is false is a peculiar one since it is normally used to introduce a consideration or reason that supports an assertion. Because of these difficulties I would prefer to retain scilicet and read (scilicet it uacuis ut inobseruatus in herbis) ("naturally he goes about as though unwatched in the deserted grass"). This parenthesis is the narrator's suggestive hint at what Hermaphroditus might do in such surroundings while under the mistaken impression that he is alone, and at what Salmacis might hope to see from her secret vantage. The repetition of it, once in a parenthesis and once in the narrative (342), is not offensive.'
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342 adludentibus undis : Ovid adds a nuance of seductiveness to the play of water, l’acqua che gioca seduttivamente (Rosati).
et in adludentibus undis
summa pedum taloque tenus vestigia tinguit;
He dips his toes and then his feet up to his ankles in the playful waters.
See Catullus 64.66-7 of Ariadne on Naxos, and Arethusa in Met. 5.592ff. The waters of Salmacis’ spring are luring the boy into love-play. Notice the virginal innocence of testing the water with foot. He is now penetrating her domicile.
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‘The watery part of Salmacis has now won the boy over. He rejected the nymph, but is at the same time attracted to her in her watery form. This is stressed by the structure of line 344: the word captus is surrounded by the pleasant water blandarum […] aquarum.’ (de Vries 13, referring to Anderson [1997], 449)
Cicero, de natura deorum II.100 mare sic terram appetens litoribus eludit, ut una ex duabus naturis conflata videatur. See Met. 5.592ff., an analogous scene of ‘seduzione erotica’ and for the verb, Catullus 64.66-7.
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344 blandarum continues the implicit personification of the spring, which is ‘gentle’ and ‘inviting’. Notice, too, the sensuous choice of adjective, mollia (345), for his clothing.
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Narrative surprise
346 After Hermaphroditus jumps (desilit, 353) naked into the pool, we see him through Salmacis’ eyes, through her gaze. Robert Groves points to a narrative surprise here, observing that the ‘knowing’ reader anticipates the dismay Salmacis will feel when Hermaphroditus disrobes and his strange (intersex) form is revealed. But, of course, this is not the case and she is actually excited: tum vero placuit, nudaeque cupidine formae/ Salmacis exarsit (345-6).
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(La sensualità della scena culmina nella vista nudità di Ermafrodito [Rosati])
The androgyny and modesty were not yet marks of the dual-sexed god, but simply of a pubescent god.
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Background: Hellenistic statues
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Robert Groves (The Classical World, Vol. 109, No. 3 (SPRING 2016), pp. 321-356) refers to the ambiguity of hermaphroditic sculpture (mostly Hellenistic or based on Hellenistic originals), which at first appears female, but proves to be more complicated. 'The satyr who sneaks up on what he believes to be a nymph is confronted with a shocking discovery.' (p.325).
The primary criterion for identifying a statue as that of Hermaphroditus is "the unambiguous rendering of dual sexual features", most commonly female breasts an a penis, cf. A. Ajootian, "Hermaphroditus," LIMC 5 (Zurich 1990) 268-85. A large number of representations of the god depict him at a moment of the discovery of his special sexual nature. One of the most common types of representation of Hermaphroditus is the "anasyromenos". These figures "draw up, or sometimes pull down, their clothing to reveal genitalia. The figure is predominately female in hair, face, build, breasts, and dress, but with the (highly significant) exception of the penis.
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There are a large number of Roman statue groups, considered to draw on Hellenistic originals, that depict violent struggles between Hermaphroditus and a satyr. The two types of "struggle groups" imply a narrative; the satyr and Hermaphroditus must be fighting for some reason. The viewer of these statues is immediately plunged into that narrative, and the statues themselves do not fully explain it, though satyrs are famous for their sexual aggression. The aggressor (whether satyr, Pan, or Silenus) closes in from behind Hermaphroditus, whom he believes to be an attractive maenad, with the intent to have sex with her. At some point thereafter, Hermaphroditus' true nature is revealed, often through the unveiling of his erect penis, and the satyr tries to flee. But instead the tables are turned. The often-aroused Hermaphroditus now threatens to penetrate his would-be rapist (as in a wall painting from the House of the Dioscuri in Pompeii).
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Grove also discussed one further sculptural type, the so-called "Borghese Hermaphrodite", in which a female sleeping figure is, on closer inspection, discovered to have a penis. There are ten extant copies of an original thought to be from the second century BC. Most extant copies are from the two centuries after Ovid, with a particular concentration in the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, but a small, late-Hellenistic example of the type was found on Kos. The popularity of the type suggests its fame in antiquity.
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The viewer may try to figure out when he first should have known (or suspected) who this figure was. On a second viewing, the viewer can come to appreciate how he was deceived, how his "mistake" was not a mistake after all, but rather an experience carefully contrived for him by the artist, a contrivance at least as complex as the statue itself. This process of the deception of the viewer, confrontation of that deception and then provocation to reexploration is a process that Groves believes Ovid attempts to evoke, by recreating in textual form the kind of deception and surprise implicit in the sculptural tradition.
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Back to the text...
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A moment of disorientation. Hermaphroditus "puts down the soft coverings from his delicate body" (mollia de tenero velamina corpore ponit, 345), a gesture that is the inverse of the anasyromenos gesture and functionally equivalent. The reader expects the gesture to reveal the aspects of Hermaphroditus that signify his identity. The language of softness (mollia, tenero) seems to confirm Hermaphroditus' effeminacy and thereby the surprise awaiting Salmacis. This gesture should be the visual revelation of Hermaphroditus as intersex, the moment preserved in wall paintings and anasyromenos statues. But this does not happen. The reader must now recognize that he has been duped, that the figure he had been reading as intersex is in fact a biological male.
On the analogy with the scene with Arethusa: see Charles Segal, Landscape in Ovid (Wiesbaden, 1969), 10 + 55-56.
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347 The verbs exarsit and flagrant are a little paradoxical for a water-nymph.
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347ff.
flagrant quoque lumina nymphae,
non aliter quam cum puro nitidissimus orbe
opposita speculi referitur imagine Phoebus;
‘Her eyes shone brightly, just as the brilliantly shining perfect circle of the sun is reflected in the reversed image of a mirror/ the image of a mirror held up to it (opposita).’
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The blazing eyes may be a description of sunlight dazzlingly reflected from the surface of the water. ‘But the fire-image primarily signifies sexual desire. Unfortunately for the nymph, her desire is not shared, and the mirror-comparison does not signify that the boy’s heat is reflected as is the sun’s. Rather, the interposed mirror suggests the frustration of contact between nymph and the object of her eager gaze.’
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Alison Keith (218): ‘Her eyes blaze like the reflected image of the sun, in which the nymph’s eyes blazed just as the sun-god at his most radiant in a bright orb is reflected in a mirror’s surface held opposite, as though her person itself exhibited the catoptric properties of a mirror.’
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Hermann Fränkel observes [88]: ‘The reader expects one of two remarks: either that the dazzling beauty of the naked youth was reflected in the water like the glorious sun or moon; or that hot flames of passion flashed through the naiad’s eyes into her soul. Since the mirroring water and the eyes of the woman were one, Ovid was able to blend both observations.