#salmacis

[orpheus-has-lyreizz]

Hermaphroditus and Salmacis...

[srednod]

François-Joseph Navez The Nymph Salmacis and Hermaphrodite 1829

[ms-cornucopia]

Roberto Ferri - Salmace e Ermafrodito

Salmacis and Hermaphrodite

[mythologypaintings]

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.

François-Joseph Navez depicts the nymph and the object of her affection just before the metamorphosis. Hermaphroditus’s reticent gesture and the passionate embrace by the infatuated nymph constitute an ingenious and elegant ballet in an almost abstract play of lines.

[callmealioness]

A different version of Hermaphroditus’ “origin story” found in Greece

“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.”

- Romano, Allen J. “The Invention of Marriage: Hermaphroditus and Salmacis at Halicarnassus and in Ovid.” The Classical Quarterly 59, no. 2 (2009): 543–61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20616705.

[motleythings]

I would like to think that after what Salmacis did to Hermaphrodite, when she died and Hermes had to shepherd her soul... he just didn't. He let her be a lost soul forever wandering the world restlessly, deciding she didn't deserve the solace of death.

[aliciavance4228]

Opinions on the myth of Hermaphroditus and the nymph Salmacis?

As far as I'm concerned the most explicit and complete text about their myth is Ovid's Metamorphoses, where it's quite clear that Salmacis forced herself onto him, and that the entire scene was basically male SA. However, because we're talking here about a (former) male character or at least an intersex person who identified themselves as male (and because lots of people out there are craving for signs of LGBTQ+ themes in Greek Mythology regardless of their nature), Hermaphroditus' trauma is overlooked, similarly with Hippolytus', Bellerophon's or Narcissus'.

[junie-bugie]

Hermaphroditus and Salmacis