373-388

Metamorphosis

Now comes the fateful moment of transformation enacted by the gods, who take Salmacis at her word and fuse the two beings together (373-9).

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                                 …nam mixta duorum

corpora iunguntur faciesque inducitur illis

una. velut, 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 videntur.  

(373-397)

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'The intermingled bodies of the two are joined together, and one form is brought upon them. Just as if someone grafts a branch onto the bark of a tree - he sees that they are joined in growth and mature equally -, so now that their limbs have come together in a clinging embrace, they are not two but their form is double, such that it is able to be called neither woman nor man, and they seem simultaneously neither and both.'  

375 The emphatic position of una (enjambment, a run-on leading to one word before a sentence end in 376) highlights the oneness.

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'The transformation is sudden and chaotic, leaving a mess of ambiguity in its wake. Ovid uses another arboreal simile, and the fruitful, cooperative union of the grafted branch and tree contrasts sharply with the sterility of the hermaphrodite. The sexually charged verb coierunt drives this contrast home, since procreation is now an impossibility. Wordplay abounds in the final lines of the passage. They are not two, but twofold. Conventional categories of “woman” and “man” become inadequate to the radical doubleness that has been created. The hermaphrodite resists interpretation, concealing its true nature behind a cloak of ambiguity.'  (Hilary Ilkay)

373 vota suos habuere deos 

'Her prayers had their special gods' (to answer them).  

We are expected to be shocked: the horrifying blasphemy of Salmacis’ success in dominating the boy. The union is unnatural, non-mutual.  The misery and the degradation of the boy cry out silently from the text [ANDERSON].  ‘Alcithoë allows no playfulness in her sterile bisexual hermaphrodite.  The ugly enjambment of una, creating a juddering start to 375, highlights this.

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375-9 agricultural grafting normally results in a fruitful, productive tree.

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377 complexu coierunt: the prefixes are deliberately chosen.  This phrase also denotes – or should denote - coitus.

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378-9 utrumque recall the words used by Lucretius 5.839: androgynem, interutrasque nec utrum, utrimque remotum.  See G.Campbell, Lucretius on creation, a commentary of book 5 (2003).

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‘This is striking when remembering that Hermaphroditus is still a boy who at the start of the story seems to go through a rite of passage.  He turns out not to grow into a man, but into a mixed being. Some sort of rite of passage takes place, but it is not in the way it could be expected. This is stressed by the fact that the boy has been called puer since the beginning of the story, even until after the metamorphosis (nec puer, 379).  When the boy realizes he has changed into a half-man (semimarem, 381), then, the word vir occurs for the first time and it is used twice.  The boy is now described as having been a man, not just a boy, at the point he lost his masculinity irrevocably.’

(de Vries 14, referring to Keith 1999, 220)

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Several scholars have raised questions concerning the connection between the aetiology (the water making men weak or effeminized, mollis) and the metamorphosis (which made Hermaphroditus and the nymph one androgynous being), and concerning the interpretation of the nymph’s disappearance. Concerning the terminology, questions rise about the meaning (androgynous or effeminate) of the adjectives, semimas (381), semivir (386) and biformis (387). They may refer to the androgynous being Hermaphroditus and Salmacis have become. The words semivir and semimas may have the same connotation as mollitia, but it remains unclear. 

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In Livy, 31.12.8 the word semimas seems to have the meaning androgynous. In Ovid it does not mean androgynous, but often seems to mean castrated (e.g. Fasti 1.588) and effeminate (Metamorphoses 12.506). Semivir seems to mean the same as semimas, considering the repetition of the adjective mollis in 381 and 386. It is used in Ovid to describe creatures that are half human/half animal, but it does not refer to androgyny, e.g. Ars Amatoria 2.24). See Bömer (1976), 130-132 and Robinson (1999), 213, 220. 
 

Aetiology

“Ergo ubi se liquidas, quo vir descenderat, undas

semimarem fecisse videt mollitaque in illis

membra, manus tendens, sed iam non voce virili

Hermaphroditus ait: ‘nato date munera vestro,

et pater et genetrix, amborum nomen habenti;

quisquis in hos fontes vir venerit, exeat inde

semivir et tactis subito mollescat in undis.’  (380-386)

“When he saw that the waters into which he had gone as a man had made him half-man, and that his limbs had become enfeebled there, stretching out his hands and speaking, though not with a man's voice, Hermaphroditus cried: ‘Oh, grant this gift, my father and my mother, to your son who bears the names of both of you: whoever comes into this pool as man, may he come out half-man, and may he weaken at touch of the water.’

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motus uterque parens nati rata verba biformis

fecit et incesto fontem medicamine tinxit.  (387-388)

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"His parents were both moved and fulfilled the words of their two-formed son; they stained the spring with polluted tincture."

• "they charged the waters with that uncanny power” [Loeb]

• "by infecting the pool with a neutering tincture" [Penguin translation]

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387 rĕor , rătus, a, um : perfect (deponent/pass.) participle = fixed, settled, established, firm, unalterable, sure, certain, valid.

 ‘As one who reckons himself the victim of inanimate water, Hermaphroditus directs his anger and frustration against other innocents, not against the guilty nymph nor the poisonous water of the spring nor even against the weirdly amoral gods.’

But Arminda Whitman: 'I would argue that unlike Alison Sharrock, who argues nothing of Salmacis remains besides her female sex organs, his wish is indicative of precisely the fact that the two have been blended. He could have wished the two to be no longer united—this, I argue, is an indication that the will of Salmacis is still firmly present in the newly formed combined being.'  

She continues: 'Hermaphroditus’ normal progression from desirable object in youth to status as vir has been interrupted, so his ultimate wish is directed at those he should have grown into being—a pointed and dismayed callout to the Roman gender structure.' 

Further: 'The specific descriptions of the spring and the conversion of union into rape are indicative not of a lack of knowledge towards the Halikarnassos inscription, but rather the opposite. [Allen J.] Romano argues that this very act is another punchline of the work: “that [Alcithoë] gets the story so wrong is Ovid’s punchline.” The spring is described as clear of reeds (4.298), a direct contradiction to the inscription’s invocation of Aphrodite as “of the reeds (Schoinitis).” The same goes for the general characterization of both Hermaphroditus and Salmacis: Hermaphroditus is a young man who is unmarried and similar to the daughters of Minyas themselves, the opposite of a figure presented as the inventor of marriage, and Salmacis, a lustful rapist rather than a foster-mother who “tames the savage mind of men. Put bluntly, “Ovid transforms a story of blissful union into one of rape.”'

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Whitman concludes: 'This version of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis directly confront the inscription at Halikarnassos in mission and portrayal, in ways especially violent and destructive.'

Traditionally, the ‘half-male’ was a eunuch, not an actual blend of male and female. Alcithoë and Ovid are using some of the terms of effeminacy, as well as of eunuchs, to describe the special quality of the hermaphrodite.  [ANDERSON]. 

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380-8 Hermaphroditus’ reaction is one of disgust (semimarem is at 12.506 the scornful definition which a centaur gives of Ceneus, and it implies the passive role in sexual congress). Semimas (in the sense of ‘castrated’) is used of the priests of Cybele in Fasti 4.183.

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This is quite puzzling (on lines 380-1):  'Why is the diminished Hermaphroditus preening with evident self-satisfaction before his mirror image?  Should he not be horrified and not absorbed in admiration of himself?  ‘Nothing suggests he regrets this new hybrid condition.’  

Rabun Taylor, The Moral Mirror of Roman Art (Cambridge 2008)

383  It is only here that the boy is actually named Hermaphroditus.  It is as if Ovid wishes to provoke his reader, asking with a wink, "Why didn't you notice this before?"  cf. 291 nomen quoque traxit ab illis.

The prayer is, of course, to Venus and Mercury, his parents.  ‘The boy has learned nothing from his suffering except the desire to have others share his misery.’ [ANDERSON]. The sterile Hermaphroditus, with outstretched hands and a woman’s voice, ironically invokes his parents’ philoprogenitive pietas in liberos.

'Although the gender of the newly formed hermaphrodite is syntactically indeterminate, it is psychologically masculine. Hermaphroditus may not speak in the voice of a man (non voce virili), but he certainly thinks as one. Aside from the female features of the intersex body, Salmacis seems to be preserved merely in the feminine tone of the voice, recalling the incorporeal presence of another vanishing nymph, Echo, in book 3, for whom “only the voice remains” (vox tantum…manet, 3.398-9). While Salmacis originally enjoyed a split existence as both nymph and spring, her entire being is now submerged in the infamous pool, whereas the youth’s name is imprinted upon the new being that has been produced.'  (Hilary Ilkay)
 
‘The aesthetics of ambiguity attracted Ovid.  Betwixt and between liminal states attract his wonder and narratorial intrusions (e.g. 4.661).  His Pythagoras ponders transmutation of bodies (15.317-321, 408-410).  Ovid’s mouthpiece of sorts, the sage from Croton, says that the hyena alternates between male and female stages.  Hermaphroditus presents a new sight in one of Ovid’s dangerous poolscapes.  He enters the pool as a handsome boy with womanish features and deportment.  He remains stuck there forever as a watery half-man.  Like an ivory encased in glass (354-55) he has become a novelty, objectified, immobilised.  Ovid’s story does not celebrate this middlesexed person; both parties seem neurotically self-involved.’  [LATEINER]

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‘It is left unclear how we should respond to this dark tale of sexual violence perpetrated by a woman, told by a female narrator to an internal audience of ‘spinster’ women.  Indeed, we have only Bacchus’ response to the hubristic Minyeides to guide us in an appropriate “reading”of their strange story-telling: he turns the threads of their loom into ivy and vine,  and turns the sisters themselves into shrivelled, squeaking bats  (4.389–415); hardly a ringing endorsement for female poetic endeavour.’  

(Genevieve Lively)

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Indeed, 'a number of questions about Hermaphroditus’s future are raised at the end of Alcithoë’s story. How will they live in the world? Will they try to “pass” as either a woman or a man? What are their desires, their fears? How will they experience themselves? How will others experience them?' (Hilary Ilkay)