In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Hermaphroditus (Ancient Greek Ἑρμαφρόδιτος) is the child of Aphrodite and Hermes. Associated with androgyny, intersexuality, and marriage, the figure is portrayed in Greco-Roman art with a body combining male and female attributes. The fullest narrative is Ovid's: the beautiful youth merges with the nymph Salmacis in her pool near Halicarnassus. An earlier Cypriot cult of Aphroditus — a bearded, masculine Aphrodite — is often treated as ancestral to the god.
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I.Symbolism
Hermaphroditus had long been a symbol of androgyny or intersexuality, portrayed as a female figure with male genitals. As a minor romance deity the figure represents erotic love and, by embodying both masculine and feminine qualities, the institution of marriage — the coming together of man and woman in sacred union. Parents Hermes and Aphrodite were also protectors of brides.
In a Hellenistic tradition Salmacis is nurse or wife rather than rapist; as a couple they were sometimes called the first marriage, living by Salmacis' spring near Halicarnassus and associated with a curse that made the waters soften men — an aetiology for Carian "effeminacy" in local lore.
II.Mythology
Earliest forms of the figure shade into Aphroditus, a masculine Aphrodite of Cyprus. A Halicarnassus inscription of about the second century BC has Aphrodite name Salmacis as the nymph who nursed the infant. Diodorus reports both that Hermaphroditus is a god who appears among men with a body combining male and female, and that some treat such births as rare portents.
Ovid's Metamorphoses (4.274–388) gives the classic transformation: nursed by naiads on Mount Ida, the fifteen-year-old travels to Caria, rejects Salmacis' advances, bathes in her empty pool, and is forcibly embraced until their bodies fuse "a creature of both sexes." Hermaphroditus then prays that any man who bathes there be similarly softened — a prayer the parents grant. Modern scholars often treat Ovid's rape-and-fusion plot as late rather than archaic; Lucian implies the child was born androgynous because of Hermes.
III.Cult and worship
The oldest Greek traces are on Cyprus: Macrobius cites a bearded statue of male Aphrodite called Aphroditus; Photius equates Aphroditus and Hermaphroditus; Philochorus linked Aphroditus with garment-exchange sacrifices and the Moon. A seventh-century BC terracotta from Perachora depicts Aphroditos. Eastern religions that imagined a primitive double-sexed generative being are often invoked for the cult's background — a fertility logic also attached to Dionysus and Priapus.
Theophrastus' Characters (third century BC) already mentions Athenians crowning Hermaphrodites on lucky wedding days of the month. After an Athenian introduction (probably fifth century BC) the deity seems to have declined as a public cult, surviving in sectarian homage; Alciphron mentions an Athenian temple and the god's care for married people.
IV.In the arts
Greek vase-painting could show a winged youth with male and female attributes; Pompeian and Herculanean frescoes place Hermaphroditus with satyrs, Pan, and Silenus. The Sleeping Hermaphroditus (Borghese type) became the canonical sculpture; a life-size Pergamene statue stands in Istanbul. Renaissance and later painters — Spranger, Carracci, Ingres, Navez — returned obsessively to Salmacis and the pool; Swinburne's poem "Hermaphroditus" was inspired by the Louvre's Borghese Hermaphroditus.