Hermaphroditus and Salmacis
The nymph Salmacis embraces Hermaphroditus and prays that they never be separated, leading to their bodies becoming permanently joined.
The Story
Hermaphroditus was the child of Hermes and Aphrodite.
His name itself reflected the union of those two divine parents.
As a young figure he travelled away from the places where he had been raised.
During his wanderings he came to a clear spring associated with the nymph Salmacis.
Salmacis saw Hermaphroditus and desired him.
He rejected her advances.
Believing the nymph had gone away, Hermaphroditus entered the water.
Salmacis had remained nearby.
She entered the spring and embraced him.
Hermaphroditus resisted.
Salmacis prayed that the two of them should never be separated.
The prayer was granted in a literal and extraordinary way.
Their bodies became joined into a single form possessing characteristics traditionally associated with both male and female bodies.
Hermaphroditus emerged transformed.
In Ovid's influential version, Hermaphroditus then asked his divine parents to ensure that any man who entered the same spring would likewise lose masculine strength.
The story became the best-known literary explanation for the figure of Hermaphroditus.
It also became one of the most distinctive transformation stories preserved from antiquity.
Unlike myths where transformation creates an animal, plant or natural feature, this story centres on the permanent merging of two bodies into one.
Key Figures
Why It Matters
The myth became the principal literary explanation for Hermaphroditus' combined male and female characteristics and is one of antiquity's most distinctive stories of bodily transformation.
Traditions & Variations
The fullest surviving narrative is Ovid's Metamorphoses. Earlier Greek evidence for Hermaphroditus exists independently of Ovid, so the Salmacis episode should not be treated as the sole origin of the deity or concept.