Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, bathed in the Carian fountain of Salmacis; the nymph clung to him until their bodies merged into one biform shape, and the youth prayed that any man who entered the pool would issue softened — a curse his parents made eternal.1
The nursling god
The Naiads nursed an infant son of Mercury, gotten of Venus — Atlantius, who bears both parents' names and is called Hermaphroditus. When he reached fifteen he left Mount Ida's nurses and wandered Caria and Lycia, beautiful enough that man or woman might have loved him.2
The fountain
He came to a pool clear as glass, stripped, and plunged in. Salmacis, unlike her sisters who hunted or spun, lived only to bathe and dress her hair at that spring. She saw him, burned, offered herself, and when he refused grew bold — feigning to leave, then springing from hiding to clasp him in the water.3
The merged body
Salmacis prayed that no day might ever part them. The gods fused their limbs: nor man nor woman wholly, but both in seeming neither one. Hermaphroditus, feeling his form soften in the guilty spring, begged father and mother that whoever bathed there would issue half-man and enervated. Moved, they made the fountain infamous forever.4
· EXEUNT ·
How the centuries saw it
Sleeping Hermaphroditus
Unknown (Roman copy); mattress by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, c. 2nd century CE (mattress 1620)
The Borghese Hermaphrodite — the Carian fountain's afterlife in marble, languid until the other side reveals the biform body.
In play
Sleeping Hermaphroditus
The Borghese Hermaphrodite — Hellenistic languor with Bernini's mattress — remains the myth's most famous body: Salmacis' embrace made marble.
Metamorphoses
Ovid
Book IV tells the Carian fountain — the nymph who will not let go, the prayer that softens every man who bathes, and the biform body that names the figure.
Hermaphroditus
Child of Hermes and Aphrodite — the Salmacis episode still supplies the West's vocabulary for dual-sexed form.