#salmacis

The Nymph Salmacis and Hermaphrodite

Artist: François-Joseph Navez (Belgian, 1787-1869)

Date: 1829

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium

Description

The story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus is a chapter in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The nymph Salmacis fell in love with Hermaphroditus, Hermes and Aphrodite’s son. Hermaphroditus rejected her but Salmacis managed to outwit him in the water. Yet again Hermaphroditus rejected her, so Salmacis prayed to the gods that she would be united with him until the end of time. They fused into a hermaphroditic creature, with male and female characteristics.

Roberto Ferri - Salmace e Ermafrodito

“The story of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis is well known from Book 4 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.¹ In Ovid’s account, the daughters of Minyas, toiling on their looms while the other women of Boeotia dutifully observe the rites of Dionysus, tell a series of stories about love, including the story of how the rapacious nymph Salmacis tried to seduce the handsome and chaste youth Hermaphroditus. By the end of the story, Hermaphroditus has been transformed into a hermaphrodite and the spring of Salmacis has been given an emasculating power. In 1995, a Greek poetic inscription, dated to the second century B.C.E. and found at the very site of the spring Salmacis in Halicarnassus, revealed a very different account.² Composed in elegiac couplets, this poem about the excellence of Halicarnassus shows, at first glance, little trace of the details of the Hermaphroditus and Salmacis story known from Ovid:

τὸν τ᾽ ἐρατὸν μακάρεσσιν ἀειδόμενον παρὰ χεῦμα

Σαλμακίδος γλυκερὸν ναισσομένη σκοπέλον

νύμφης ἱμερτὸν κατέχει δόμον, ἥ ποτε κοῦρον

ἡμέτερον τερπναῖς δεξαμένη παλάμαις

῾Ερμαφρόδιτον θρέψεν πανέξοχον, ὃς γάμον εὗρεν

ἀνδράσι καὶ λέχεα πρῶτος ἔθηκε νόμῳ

αὐτῇ τε στάζουσιν ὑπὸ ναμάτων ἄντρου

πρηνέα φῶτινων ἀργῦρεντα νόον.

Halicarnassus settles the lovely hill beside the stream of Salmacis, called dear to the immortals in song, and she occupies the lovely home of the nymph, who once took our boy in her sweet embrace and raised him, Hermaphroditus, to be outstanding, he who discovered marriage and was the first to bind the marriage bed in law. And she herself [Salmacis] beneath the holy streams dripping in the cave tames the savage mind of men. (15-22)

In the inscription, Hermaphroditus invents the institution of marriage and 'binds the marriage bed in law'. The spring of Salmacis, on the other hand, does not make men less manly or manufacture hermaphrodites; instead it 'tames savage minds'. A far cry from Ovid's chaste boy and lustful girl, in the Salmacis inscription, we find Salmacis the nurturing nymph and Hermaphroditus the lawgiver.”

Mecha pilots of Hermaphroditos in my new Hades Calculus novella fic... that's kind of just Hades Calculus inspired as it's several layers of abstraction away. You just really have to know 'Greek Mythology sci-fi mecha that's very LGBT'.

And also darker than most of my writing.