Ovidio senza DioOvidian Myth and Sexual Violence in the CommediaJulie Van Peteghem

The Language of Sexual Violence

In the Commedia, instances of sexual violence do not occur where one might most expect them: in the circle of lust (Inferno 5) and among the sodomites (Inferno 15) in hell. In Dante’s poem, the punishments of the lustful ‘peccator carnali’ (those who ‘sinned within the flesh’; Inf. 5.38) and sodomites are not explicitly connected with sexual violence — a remarkable contrast, as Teodolinda Barolini has often pointed out, with earlier vision literature and artistic representations of the Christian afterlife, which featured graphic depictions in word or image of the sexual punishments of these sinners.77See for instance Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Dante’s Sympathy for the Other, or the Non-Stereotyping Imagination: Sexual and Racialized Others in the Commedia’, Critica del testo, 14 (2011), pp. 177–204 (pp. 178–82). The most violent presence in Inferno 5 comes from the force of the ‘bufera infernal’, the infernal whirlwind (Inf. 5.31) that without any pause ‘mena li spirti con la sua rapina; | voltando e percotendo li molesta’ (‘drives on the spirits with its violence: | wheeling and pounding, it harasses them’; Inf. 5.32–33).88The text is quoted from Dante Alighieri: ‘La Commedia’ secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. by Giorgio Petrocchi, Società Dantesca Italiana, Edizione Nazionale, 2nd rev. edn, 4 vols (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994). English translations come from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. by Allen Mandelbaum, 3 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980–82). Molestare in Dante’s verse — here in Inferno 5.33 and in its other attestations in the poem (Inf. 13.108, Inf. 28.130, Par. 17.130) — does not have the sexual connotation that the verb contains in modern Beginning of page[p. 264] Italian and its English cognate ‘to molest’. Similarly, the violent force of rapina is, at least in the poetry of Dante, physical but not sexual.99The word rapina was attested with sexual connotations during Dante’s time: we find ‘rapina di lussuria’, perhaps not surprisingly so, in the Tuscan translations of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (late thirteenth–early fourteenth century). On these translations see Publius Ovidius Naso, I volgarizzamenti trecenteschi dell’‘Ars amandi’ e dei ‘Remedia amoris’, ed. by Vanna Lippi Bigazzi, 2 vols (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1987). ‘Veneris […] rapina’ in Ovid’s verses ‘quaecumque est Veneris subita uiolata rapina, | gaudet’ (Ars am. 1.675–76) in Italian translation became ‘Qualunque rapina di lussuria è isforzata, si gode’ (p. 255), and the less accurate ‘qualunque cosa le sia fatta per subita rapina di lussuria, ella se ne rallegrerà’ (p. 428). The original text of Ovid’s amatory works is quoted from Publius Ovidius Naso, Amores; Medicamina Faciei Femineae; Ars Amatoria; Remedia Amoris, ed. by Edward J. Kenney, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Rapina’s Latin root, rapere, however, lays bare the difficulty in adequately rendering in English what this Latin verb and the cluster of words derived from it, both in Latin (e.g., raptus, raptio) and in Italian (e.g., rapina, rapinare, rapire, ratto), precisely indicated in the Middle Ages. Literally meaning ‘to violently carry off’, rapere already in classical Latin expanded its meaning over time from the forceful seizure of material goods to include the abduction of women. In Roman law, raptus was ‘the abduction of a woman against the will of the person under whose authority she lived’,1010James A. Brundage, ‘Rape and Seduction in the Medieval Canon Law’, in Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church, ed. by Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1982), pp. 141–48 (p. 141). but, as Mariah L. Cooper notes, it ‘did not necessarily include coitus’. During the Middle Ages, however, raptus ‘became synonymous with abduction and/or sexual violence’.1111Mariah L. Cooper, Representations of Rape and Consent in Medieval English Laws and Literature (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2024), p. 6. In Gratian’s Decretum, raptus is one of five different kinds of ‘illegal coitus’.1212See the brief discussion in Elena Lombardi, ‘“Che libito fe’ licito in sua legge”: Lust and Law, Reason and Passion in Dante’, in Dantean Dialogues: Engaging with the Legacy of Amilcare Iannucci, ed. by Maggie Kilgour and Elena Lombardi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 125–54 (p. 130) <https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442663213-008>. See also Schildgen, ‘Violence in the Domestic Sphere’, p. 61. Not every illicit coitus should be called raptus, we read in Gratian; it refers to when a girl is ‘violently (‘uiolenter’) taken away from her father’s house, in order to have her, after she has been corrupted (‘corrupta’), as his wife, whether the force (‘uis’) be carried out only on the girl, or only on her relatives, or on both’ (Dec. C. 36 q. 1 c. 2).1313For the relevant Latin text of the Decretum see Lombardi, ‘“Che libito fe’ licito’”, pp. 146–47 note 12. Translation mine.Beginning of page[p. 265] Not every raptus was rape as it is understood today, but force was always part of it. Thus, when Dante’s Piccarda in the heaven of the moon tells the pilgrim that her brother’s men ‘fuor mi rapiron de la dolce chiostra’ (‘took me — violently — from my sweet cloister’; Par. 3.107), she is not talking about sexual assault; rather, she means that they forced her by violent means to abandon monastic life for a politically advantageous marriage arranged by her brother.1414See the Piccarda episode in Schildgen, ‘Violence in the Domestic Sphere’, pp. 72–90.

Within the realms of medieval Christian mysticism, raptus took on a different meaning. As Dyan Elliott describes, in that context the term raptus (rapture in English) denoted ‘a trance-like state of abstraction induced by proximity to the Godhead’, the ‘idea of being physically overpowered by the divine presence’, an experience which for some, like Thomas of Aquinas, took on violent connotations.1515Dyan Elliott, ‘Raptus/Rapture’, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. by Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 189–99 (p. 189) <https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139020886.013>. This concept is also featured in Dante’s Commedia, most notably in the references to Saint Paul’s rapture into the third heaven (2 Corinthians 12.2–4). ‘“Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono”’ (‘“For I am not Aeneas, am not Paul”’; Inf. 2.32), a doubtful pilgrim told his newly minted guide Virgilio in the dark wood after learning of his upcoming journey from hell to heaven — Paul’s raptus and Aeneas’s descent into Hades (Aeneid 6) served as notable precedents of living men visiting the afterworld. At the opening of Paradiso, Paul’s rapture is again evoked when the pilgrim, together with his guide Beatrice, moves from earthly paradise on top of mount purgatory to the first heaven of paradise (Paradiso 1). Dante does not call this ascent a rapture — he coins the phrase ‘trasumanar’ (Par. 1.70) and illustrates the concept with the transformation of Ovid’s Glaucus (Par. 1.67–72) — but Pauline language permeates the passage.1616See Kevin Brownlee, ‘Pauline Vision and Ovidian Speech in Paradiso i’, in The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s ‘Commedia’, ed. by Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 202–13 <https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503623422-017>.Beginning of page[p. 266]

At a previous moment of transition in the poem, Dante does explicitly recall the concept of mystical rapture through the use of the verb rapire. In Purgatorio, the poet marks the transition from ante-purgatory to the gate of purgatory with a dream experienced by the pilgrim, in which an eagle ‘terribil come folgor discendesse’ (‘terrible as lightning, it | swooped’) seemed to have snatched him up (‘me rapisse suso’) to the flames (Purg. 9.29–30). In this passage Dante exploits the multiple meanings of rapire: it is the mystical experience to be transported closer to (a pagan or Christian) god, the abduction of a person, and the sexual violence that accompanies that act. The earlier reference to the Ovidian myth of Ganymede (Purg. 9.19–24) makes clear that Dante indeed intended rapire also to evoke rape as we understand it today.1717On this episode see especially Bruce W. Holsinger, ‘Sodomy and Resurrection: The Homoerotic Subject of the Divine Comedy’, in Premodern Sexualities, ed. by Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 243–74 (pp. 252–59); Leyla M. G. Livraghi, ‘Raptus e deificatio ovidiani nel sistema della Commedia’, in Ortodossia ed eterodossia in Dante Alighieri: atti del convegno di Madrid (5–7 novembre 2012), ed. by Carlota Cattermole, Celia de Aldama, and Chiara Giordano (Alpedrete: Ediciones de la Discreta, 2014), pp. 691–709. The eagle is the bird of Jupiter, king of Roman gods who, as we read in Ovid, burned with love (‘amore | arsit’) for Ganymede (Met. 10.155–56)1818The text is quoted from Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Richard J. Tarrant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). and took on the shape of an eagle, the only bird who could also carry his characteristic lightning bolts (Met. 10.158), spreading his wings up into the air in order to snatch (‘abripit’) Ganymede away (10.159–60). Ovid’s abripere (an intensified rapere) becomes ‘fu ratto’ in Dante’s account of the myth:

Ovid well documents Jupiter’s predatory behaviour toward boys and girls, often in animal disguise, in the Metamorphoses.1919See James Robson, ‘Bestiality and Bestial Rape in Greek Myth’, in Rape in Antiquity: Sexual Violence in the Greek and Roman Worlds, ed. by Susan Deacy and Karen F. Pierce (London: Duckworth, 1997), pp. 65–96 (pp. 83–88). If there would be any doubt about the sexual nature of these raptus, the pregnancies that often follow effectively underscore it. Dante tempers the violence of the Ganymede myth in his purgatorial dream by mentioning next the Greek hero Achilles who woke up, confused, in an unknown location — his mother had secretly carried him away while asleep to avoid the Trojan War draft (Purg. 9.34–42). While still done without Achilles’s consent, this abduction was not violent and was motivated by maternal love — quite the contrast with Jupiter’s raptus of Ganymede in the shape of an eagle, the majestic bird of prey. It is precisely this combination of animal imagery and Ovidian myth that defines the passages in Dante’s poem where sexual assault is most clearly depicted: canto 25 of the Inferno.

In the seventh ditch of Dante’s Malebolge (Inferno 24–25), the fraudulent thieves are punished. Those who stole in life have their human shape taken from them in the afterlife, as they are transformed into snakes and other hybrid creatures. The descriptions of these transformations are some of the most graphic and violent scenes in Dante’s poem. After first seeing a giant heap of slithering snakes (the souls of thieves who had already turned into serpents), the pilgrim and Virgilio witness three transformations: the thief Vanni Fucci, bitten by a snake, bursts into flames and immediately rises from his ashes like a phoenix, taking on his former shape once again (Inf. 24.97–118); a snake-shaped thief violently attacks a human-shaped thief, morphing into a single creature that is half-man, half-snake (Inf. 25.49–78); and a snake-shaped thief attacks a human-shaped thief, with the two exchanging forms (Inf. 25.79–141).

As scholars have long noted, these Dantean transformations are modelled after stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Vanni Fucci’s transformation should be read alongside Pythagoras’s description of the phoenix (Met. 15.391–407), the hybrid man-snake transformation alongside the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (Met. 4.274–388),Beginning of page[p. 268] and the man-snake shape-swap alongside the myth of Cadmus and Harmonia (Met. 3.95–114 and 4.563–603).2020To explore Ovid’s and Dante’s parallel passages side by side, see Intertextual Dante, ed. by Julie Van Peteghem, Digital Dante (Columbia University Libraries, 2017) <https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/intertexual-dante-vanpeteghem/>. Dante is not coy about the Latin poet’s relevance: right before the final transformation in Inferno 25, he calls out Ovid together with Lucan, who went deep into snake lore in book 9 of his epic poem Pharsalia. Dante boasts: ‘Taccia Lucano […] del misero Sabello e di Nasidio’, ‘Taccia di Cadmo e d’Aretusa Ovidio’ (‘Let Lucan now be silent, where he sings | of sad Sabellus and Nasidius’, ‘Let Ovid now be silent, where he tells | of Cadmus, Arethusa’; Inf. 25.94–97). In other words, be silent now, classical poets, on the transformations of your characters; Ovid ‘due nature mai a fronte a fronte | non trasmutò’ (‘never did | transmute two natures, face to face’; Inf. 25.100–01), as Dante was about to do. Dante’s numerous literary borrowings from these two singled-out Latin poets, in a bolgia of hell meant to punish theft, bring to the foreground questions about poetic authority and influence, as well as Dante’s positioning of his Christian poetry in the vernacular against pagan Latin verses.2121See in particular Robert J. Ellrich, ‘Envy, Identity, and Creativity: Inferno 24–25’, Dante Studies, 102 (1984), pp. 61–80; Caron Ann Cioffi, ‘The Anxieties of Ovidian Influence: Theft in Inferno 24 and 25’, Dante Studies, 112 (1994), pp. 77–100; Leyla M. G. Livraghi, ‘Esemplarità del mito e agone con gli antichi in Inferno 24– 25’, in I classici di Dante, ed. by Paola Allegretti and Marcello Ciccuto (Florence: Le Lettere, 2017), pp. 59–90; and Leyla M. G. Livraghi, ‘Sabello e Nasidio, Cadmo e Aretusa: strategie dell’aemulatio dantesca nelle metamorfosi di Inferno 25’, Dante: Rivista internazionale di studi su Dante Alighieri, 14 (2017), pp. 55–66. My focus here is on Dante’s poetic choice to adopt Ovid’s imagery of sexual assault through his reading of the Salmacis and Hermaphroditus story.2222I briefly mention two less prominent Ovidian myths that further inform Dante’s descriptions of sexual violence in this canto. Dante’s mention of the nymph Arethusa in ‘Taccia di Cadmo e d’Aretusa Ovidio’ (Inf. 25.97) has long puzzled Dante scholars, since this Ovidian character (Met. 5.572–641) seemingly plays no role in Inferno 25. The entry point to Arethusa’s relevance, as Teodolinda Barolini rightly signaled, is the rape occurring in Ovid’s account. See Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Inferno 25: Shape, Substance, Sex, Self’, in Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante (Columbia University Libraries, 2018), pars. 49–50 <https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-25/> [accessed 29 May 2025]. The Theban prophet Tiresias (Met. 3.316–38) appears among the diviners punished in the fourth ditch of the Malebolge, where Dante recounts his transformation from man to woman and back to man (Inf. 20.40–45). Both these transformations occurred when Tiresias disturbed mating serpents, as Ovid writes (Met. 3.325), which Dante repeats (‘li duo serpenti avvolti’, ‘the two entwining serpents’; Inf. 20.44) and then evokes again in the violent copulation scenes in Inferno 25. Especially when comparing Dante’s rendition of Salmacis’s Beginning of page[p. 269] sexual aggression in the Commedia with the interpretations in medieval commentaries on the Metamorphoses, Dante’s distinct reading practices are on full display.

Reading Ovid’s Story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in the Middle Ages

Today rape is no longer ‘the dirty little secret of Ovidian scholarship’, as the classicist Leo C. Curran wrote in 1978,2323Leo C. Curran, ‘Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses’, Arethusa, 11.1–2 (1978), pp. 213–41 (p. 214). For a short overview of the current scholarship, see Ovid, Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid, trans. by Jane Alison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 137. even though until Stephanie McCarter’s 2022 translation of the Metamorphoses, Ovid’s Latin accounts of sexual assault had largely remained ‘lost in translation’.2424Stephanie McCarter has written extensively about the reticence around rape in the poem’s modern English translations. See, for instance, Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. by Stephanie McCarter (New York: Penguin Books, 2022), pp. xxi–xxx, xxxiv–xxxv. At the time, Curran criticized his field’s refusal to take rape seriously and the ‘commentators’ arabesques of euphemism’ around this prevalent topic in Ovid’s poem.2525Curran, ‘Rape and Rape Victims’, p. 215. In ‘Reading Ovid’s Rapes’ (1992), Amy Richlin further unpacked her fellow classicists’ treatment of sexual assault in the Metamorphoses, noting that critics ‘have ignored [Ovid’s stories of rape], or traced their literary origins, or said they stood for something else or evidenced the poet’s sympathy with women’.2626Richlin, ‘Reading Ovid’s Rapes’, p. 158. Richlin likely did not intend her observation to have such a long reach, but with the exception of Ovid’s presumed sympathy for the violated women (of no interest to medieval commentators), these different critical responses to Ovid’s rapes are also found in the medieval commentaries on the Metamorphoses, as will become clear from their interpretations of the Salmacis and Hermaphroditus story. These commentators rarely speak in one voice,2727As I summarized in Van Peteghem, Italian Readers of Ovid, p. 19: ‘The medieval Ovidian commentary tradition is not a monolith, but a diverse, varied, and changing corpus of texts’. See also the works cited in note 3. but they all do, to use Curran’s phrase, ‘arabesques’Beginning of page[p. 270] around Salmacis’s sexual assault.2828On the medieval reception of Ovid’s stories of rape, see Mark Amsler, ‘Rape and Silence: Ovid’s Mythography and Medieval Readers’, in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 61–96, which focuses on the commentary tradition and the literary works of Chaucer, Gower, and Christine de Pizan. Enenkel studied the early modern reception of the myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in the commentaries (from the fourteenth century on) and in the visual arts in Karl Enenkel, ‘Salmacis, Hermaphrodite, and the Inversion of Gender: Allegorical Interpretations and Pictorial Representations of an Ovidian Myth, ca. 1300–1770’, in The Figure of the Nymph in Early Modern Culture, ed. by Karl Enenkel and Anita Traninger (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 53–148 <https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004364356_004>. And while their conclusions about the story’s meaning may at times baffle us readers today, they had clearly read their Ovid and engaged with specific passages in this myth. So let us start with a summary of the story.

In the Metamorphoses, we find the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in book 4 (vv. 274–388), as part of the stories the daughters of the Boethian king Minyas tell each other while abstaining from the festivities for the god Bacchus. The narrator Alcithoë announces she will tell how the spring Salmacis, which makes the limbs of anyone who entered its waters soft, got its bad reputation (vv. 285–87). The young boy, Hermaphroditus, son of Mercury (Hermes) and Venus (Aphrodite) with traits of both in his face and his name (vv. 290–91), had left his native mountains to travel the world and one day ended up in Caria near this Salmacis spring (vv. 288–301) — the territory of the namesake nymph Salmacis. Unlike other followers of the virgin goddess Diana, Salmacis showed no interest in hunting, but instead enjoyed doing her hair, lounging by the spring, and picking flowers (vv. 302–15). Salmacis is immediately taken by Hermaphroditus: the moment she saw him, she had to have him (vv. 316–19). The nymph does not turn to force right away; she first flatters Hermaphroditus with words, which makes the boy, who did not know what love was, blush and become even more attractive to her (vv. 320–33). Unable to contain herself, Salmacis then tries to steal a kiss, but Hermaphroditus threatens to go away if she does not leave him alone. Salmacis ostensibly complies, but hides nearby the spring to keep gazing at the boy, who, thinking he is finally alone, undresses and gets into the water (vv. 334–55). At the sight of his naked body, Salmacis can no longer contain herself. She jumps into the spring and triumphantly forces herself Beginning of page[p. 271] on Hermaphroditus, who fails to push off her aggressive advances (vv. 356–70). Two transformations occur in the conclusion of the story — the prayers of both Salmacis and Hermaphroditus are heard. Before jumping in the water, Salmacis prays to the gods that they may be together forever (vv. 370–72). Salmacis’s rape of Hermaphroditus leads to the two fusing together; Hermaphroditus becomes a half-man (‘semimarem’, v. 381, ‘semiuir’, v. 386), a child of two forms (‘biformis’, v. 387). The violated and transformed Hermaphroditus requests his divine parents that from now on anyone entering the spring be altered the same way he was, thus transforming the waters of the Salmacis spring (vv. 380–88).

The commentary on the Metamorphoses by the French schoolmaster Arnulf of Orléans (second half of the twelfth century) offers a good entry point into the medieval reader responses to this Ovidian story. Arnulf divided his commentary into three parts: philological glosses, lists of all the mutationes pertaining to each book, and allegorical explanations of those ‘mutations’.2929Arnulf’s allegorical readings differ from the oldest surviving commentary on the Metamorphoses, the Metamorphoseon narrationes (probably fifth or sixth century). The Narrationes, short prose summaries inserted in between Ovid’s stories, survived in seven medieval manuscripts, including three written in Italy (Van Peteghem, Italian Readers of Ovid, pp. 20–21). Even though the narratio on Salmacis and Hermaphroditus is on the longer side, it still packs the story’s main events into just fourteen lines (Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoseon Libri xv, Lactanti Placidi Qui Dicitur Narrationes Fabularum Ovidianarum, ed. by Hugo Magnus (Weidmann, 1914; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1979), pp. 648–49). On Arnulf’s list of transformations featured in book 4, we find ‘Salmacis in fontem. Ermofroditus in semivirum’ (‘Salmacis [transformed] into a spring. Hermaphroditus [transformed] into a half-man’).3030The text is cited from Ovide moralisés latins: Arnoul d’Orléans, ‘Allegoriae’; Jean de Garlande, ‘Integumenta’; Giovanni del Virgilio, ‘Allegoriae’, ed. by Jean-Marie Fritz with the collaboration of Cristina Noacco (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2022), pp. 132–33. Translation mine. Adding tituli to Ovid’s myths was common practice in commentaries, and is still custom in many translations. Stephanie McCarter’s different translation approach is clear in her title for this story: ‘Salmacis rapes Hermaphroditus’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses, p. 105). As Jean-Marie Fritz noted, this allegoria of the story is absent from many manuscripts, even though Salmacis and Hermaphroditus are consistently featured among the book 4 mutationes (p. 133 note 95). In his two-sentence note, Arnulf first traces Hermaphroditus’s genealogy, and then explains the meaning of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus: ‘coniuncti fuerunt, id est se compassibili et indissolubili amore dilexerunt. De fonte nihil aliud est Beginning of page[p. 272] quam locus ille deliciosus erat, et ex nimiis deliciis sequitur luxus et effeminatio quoniam loca placentia invitant nos ad pausandum’ (‘they were joined together, that is, they held each other dear in a passionate and indissoluble love. The spring is nothing else than a lovely place, and from excessive delights follow debauchery and feminine softness because pleasant places invite us to pause’). As we see here for the first time, Arnulf cancelled Salmacis’s aggression and Hermaphroditus’s firm refusal from Ovid’s story: it was love (‘amore dilexerunt’) and the two literally became inseparable (Arnulf’s adjective ‘indissoluble’ was clearly chosen with the location of their ‘love’ encounter, the spring, in mind). In his moralizing reading, Arnulf did not point the finger at Salmacis, the aggressor in Ovid’s tale, but at anyone who, like Hermaphroditus, stops to enjoy a pleasant place. And enjoying such pleasantries in excess leads to luxus and effeminatio.

The English schoolmaster John of Garland followed Arnulf’s example in his Integumenta Ovidii, a 520-verse long commentary on select Ovidian myths (ca. 1230), and also read the Metamorphoses through an allegorical lens, setting out to reveal the ‘sermo […] uerus’ (‘true account’) of Ovid’s stories, hidden under the cover (‘integumentum’) of history (vv. 57–62).3131The text is quoted from John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii, ed. and trans. with commentary by Kyle Gervais (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2022). English translations mine. John does not shy away from the sex featured in the myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, but interprets it in purely biological terms (vv. 193–94): ‘Cellula matricis fons fertur Salmacis in qua | infans conceptus hermofroditus erit’ (‘The spring Salmacis is said to be the chamber of the womb in which the hermaphrodite child is conceived’). This reference to the cellulae of the womb in a literary commentary illustrates how concepts from medieval embryology had become widespread during the thirteenth century. Medieval naturalists, as Leah DeVun has most recently analysed, designated a place for intersex individuals, referred to as hermaphrodites, within biological reproduction.3232Leah DeVun, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), pp. 102–33 (especially pp. 113–15). In their view, the womb consisted of multiple chambers (ranging from three to seven), and the sperm’s location, together with the quality and the quantity Beginning of page[p. 273] of the male and female sperm, were defining factors to the sex of the foetus — presenting an understanding of biological sex not as a binary but along a spectrum where men and women could be more or less masculine or feminine. The hermaphrodite, however, conceived in the middle chamber of the womb, was equally both.

John of Garland’s compact verse interpretations of Ovid’s myths were influential and often quoted in later commentaries. The anonymous commentator of the so-called ‘Vulgate Commentary’ on the Metamorphoses, created around 1260 in central France and circulating widely in France and Italy, cites John’s couplet about Salmacis twice (without attribution) in his extended glosses on the story.3333The text is cited from Commentaire Vulgate des ‘Métamorphoses’ d’Ovide. Livres i–v, ed. by Frank T. Coulson and Piero Andrea Martina, trans. by Piero Andrea Martina and Clara Wille (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021), pp. 597–613. English translations mine. As Frank Coulson has noted, the Vulgate commentator pays close attention to the literary qualities of Ovid’s poem, often signalled through references to other Ovidian, classical, or contemporary works.3434Frank T. Coulson, ‘Literary Criticism in the Vulgate Commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, in Medieval Textual Cultures: Agents of Transmission, Translation and Transformation, ed. by Faith Wallis and Robert Wisnovsky (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 121–32. For instance, the Vulgate commentator clarifies Ovid’s grafting simile used to explain how the nymph and the boy became one in their union with technical botanical language from Vergil’s Georgics (note at v. 375). After explaining Ovid’s statement that the merged Salmacis and Hermaphroditus seemed ‘neutrumque et utrumque’ (‘both neither and either’) in simple biological terms — the transformed Hermaphroditus is now ‘partim uir partim femina’ (‘part man, part woman’) — the commentator mentions ‘magister Galterus’ (the twelfth-century French poet Walter of Châtillon), and cites verses, without attribution, from his Latin poem the Alexandreis describing the fading light at dusk with the same adjectives ‘neutrum’ and ‘utrum’ (note at v. 379). While mainly presenting a literary connection, in comparing this Ovidian transformation with a natural phenomenon, the Vulgate commentator is hinting at different meanings behind Ovid’s literal words. He did this more explicitly in his gloss on Salmacis’s ‘loca […] haec tibi libera trado, | hospes’ (‘I freely leave you this place, guest’), in response to Hermaphroditus, who, desperate about her harassment, threatened to Beginning of page[p. 274] leave. The commentator explained ‘this place’ not as the literal spring, but through citing, without attribution, John of Garland’s distich interpreting the spring as the womb’s chamber where hermaphrodites were conceived (note to vv. 337–38).

The Vulgate commentator fully embraces this allegorical approach in his final interpretation of the story (note to v. 388). ‘Moralis est ista mutatio’ (‘This transformation is moral’), he opens the note, and the author Ovid teaches us how to explain it. The explanation is simple: What else can the spring (Salmacis) mean than lust (‘luxuriam’)? And what else is the half-man (Hermaphroditus) than someone who is ‘mollem’ (‘soft’) and ‘effeminatum’ (‘effeminate’)? Arnulf’s luxus that followed from excessively enjoying lovely places here becomes luxuria, even though its source — in men or in women? — is unknown.3535Ovid indeed explicitly stated that ‘causa latet’, the cause is unknown (Met. 4.287). The Vulgate commentator expresses this doubt through a (unattributed) verse from the Amores (1.9.29): ‘Mars dubius, nec certa Venus’ (‘Mars is doubtful and neither Venus is certain’). But then the commentator offers a second way to understand the story: Hermaphroditus’s transformation refers to ‘carnalem copulam’ (‘copulation’), when a man and a woman are mixed together (his verb ‘ammiscetur’ recalls Ovid’s ‘mixta duorum | corpora’ at Met. 4.373–74) and seem ‘neutrum et utrumque’ (‘neither and either’). The Vulgate commentator focuses on the man, not the woman, in the act, noting that during sex he is considered a half-man. Or, option number three: the spring refers to Christ, because Christ is ‘fons […] uiuus’ (‘the living source’) from which all true rivers flow, and Christ ordered marriage to our ancestors, according to the biblical verse ‘Et erunt duo in carne una’ (‘and they will be two in one flesh’), found in Genesis 2.24 (the creation of Adam and Eve), and Mark 10.8 (Jesus’s discussion on the lawfulness of divorce). Here again, the commentator does not shy away from the sex featured in the Ovidian story, but even more explicitly replaces the rape scene in Ovid’s story with sexual intercourse within the bounds of marriage. And, as if three different readings do not suffice, the commentator offers a final interpretation ‘secundum aliam allegoriam’ (‘according to another allegory’), citing again without attribution John of Garland’s verses on the hermaphrodite’s creation within a certain chamber of the womb.Beginning of page[p. 275]

Giovanni del Virgilio, Dante’s correspondent in the Eclogues, is another commentator who embraces the biological interpretation of this Ovidian story. Giovanni was the first to teach the classical Latin poets Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius at the University of Bologna in 1321. His Expositio and Allegorie librorum Ovidii (1322–23), which combine interpretations in prose and poetry, are connected to these teachings.3636The text is cited from Ovide moralisés latins, pp. 344–47. On Giovanni del Virgilio’s teachings, see pp. 38–39. First interpreting Salmacis ‘naturaliter’, in the natural sense in the Allegorie, Giovanni’s short verses on the conception of hermaphrodites are similar but not identical to John of Garland’s distich.3737‘Cellula matricis que concipit Hermofroditum | Salmacis est medio cum fuit usa Venus’. His prose interpretation reads: ‘Salmacis est quedam cellula in matrice in qua, si mulier recipiat sperma hominis, nascitur hermofroditus, id est homo habens utrumque sexum’. Giovanni’s moral reading (‘ad mores’), on the other hand, offers new interpretations of Ovid’s myth. While Salmacis is voluptas or lust (so far, nothing too new), Hermaphroditus is what happens when lust is joined (‘unitur’) with sermo or speech: lustful speech pervades the thoughts and words of humans and renders them ‘libidinosus’ (‘lustful’). This interpretation addresses Salmacis’s (failed) attempts to seduce Hermaphroditus with words — she was indeed very direct in communicating her desire (Met. 4.320–28).3838As Jean-Marie noted in Ovide moralisé latins, p. 347 note 93, Giovanni del Virgilio may be elaborating on the work of the so-called Third Vatican Mythographer, also counted among Arnulf of Orléans’s sources (Arnulf of Orléans, Ovide moralisés latins, pp. 23–27) and dated to the eleventh century (The Vatican Mythographers, ed. and trans. by Ronald E. Pepin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 8–10). The Third Vatican Mythographer does not systematically provide allegorical interpretations of Ovid’s myths, focusing instead on select classical divinities. Mercury’s son Hermaphroditus, he explains, signifies a ‘certain wantonness of speech’ (p. 284), using ‘lascitavitem’, while Giovanni has ‘voluptatem’. Giovanni also integrates Hermaphroditus’s request that others be made the same (Met. 4.383–86). The literal union of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus becomes lustful speech, which, in Giovanni’s view, could spread.3939Instead of Inferno 25, Giovanni’s interpretation rather brings to mind Inferno 18, where pimps, seducers, and flatterers are punished.

The 1322–23 dating of Giovanni’s Expositio and Allegorie, right after Dante’s death, excludes these works from Dante’s possible Ovidian reading list. Two other commentaries on Ovid’s Metamorphoses Beginning of page[p. 276] from first half of the fourteenth century — the anonymous Ovide moralisé (composed between 1316 and 1328) and Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus (first version started in 1340) — similarly cannot be considered possible sources for Dante’s engagement with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but nevertheless are, like Giovanni’s writings, valuable reference points in understanding Ovid criticism during that time. Often confused for their similar titles, the Ovide moralisé and the Ovidius moralizatus both place God and Christianity front and central in their interpretations, but otherwise take very different approaches to Ovid’s poem. The anonymous author of the Ovide moralisé, a loose French translation and extensive explanation of the Metamorphoses five times as long as Ovid’s poem, first explains Salmacis and Hermaphroditus according to ‘the art of physical science’, repeating the hermaphrodite’s conception within the woman’s womb (vv. 2224–49).4040The text is quoted from Cornelis de Boer, Ovide moralisé; poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle (Amsterdam: Müller, 1915), vv. 2224–2389, and the translation from The Medieval French Ovide Moralisé: An English Translation, ed. and trans. by K. Sarah-Jane Murray and Matthieu Boyd, 3 vols (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Brewer, 2023). He then explains Salmacis is a woman wasting her life in vain delight (vv. 2250–81), a ‘whore’ who corrupts the ‘perfect’ and ‘manly’ Hermaphroditus (vv. 2326–32). The myth’s real meaning, the author concludes, is God’s condemnation of religious men who, when abandoning monastic life, try to both live religiously and pursue the delights of the world (vv. 2333–54). The Benedictine monk Pierre Bersuire (ca. 1290–1362), who interpreted the same myth in the Ovidius moralizatus, a series of mythological exempla for preachers, reaches a different, positive conclusion.4141The text and translation are cited from Pierre Bersuire, The Moralized Ovid, ed. and trans. by Frank T. Coulson and Justin Haynes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023), pp. 296–99. Bersuire interpreted the union of Salmacis (‘human nature given to leisure’) and Hermaphroditus (Christ), who descended upon the fountain (the ‘glorious Virgin, clear, limpid, and pure’), as the dual nature of Christ, part divine (Hermaphroditus) and human (Salmacis). Bersuire had to alter Ovid’s account to make his line of interpretation work: Ovid’s Salmacis drips with desire and pursued Hermaphroditus aggressively with words, but Bersuire’s Salmacis loved Hermaphroditus ‘through charity’ and ‘humbly asked for him at the Incarnation through the prophets’Beginning of page[p. 277] (par. 27–28). The transformed Hermaphroditus’s softness (‘mollis’) is benign: the Virgin made him feminine (‘effeminavit’) in changing his hardness into piety, the Christian pietas (par. 28).

Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in the Commedia

Dante’s reading of the Ovidian myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in the Commedia significantly differs from the medieval commentators writing before, during, and slightly after his time. No guidance of a commentary is needed to understand the role of erotic desire — or luxus (Arnulf of Orléans), luxuria (the Vulgate commentator), voluptas (Giovanni del Virgilio) — in Ovid’s myth, but when reading only the medieval commentators’ interpretations, one would never realize this story features rape. While none of them ignored the ‘union’ of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, they all glossed over Salmacis’s sexually aggressive behaviour. According to Arnulf of Orléans, the two were joined in love. The Vulgate commentator mentioned their ‘carnal copulation’, but sanitized Salmacis’s rape, interpreting it as sexual intercourse within the bounds of Christian marriage. Pierre Bersuire reframed her erotic desire for ‘coupling’ as the humble longing to be one with God. The others skipped over the sex, only focusing on Hermaphroditus’s resulting transformation, explaining it in moral or natural terms.

Seemingly uninterested in any hidden meanings, Dante focuses directly on Ovid’s verses and translates several features of Salmacis’s sexual assault into the text of the Commedia: like Ovid’s Salmacis gripped Hermaphroditus, Dante’s serpent-shaped soul clung (‘implicat’, Met. 4.362; ‘s’appiglia’, Inf. 25.51) to another soul. Salmacis’s hands grabbed Hermaphroditus’s body (‘subiectat’, Met. 4.359), while Dante’s serpentine attacker grips (‘avvinse’, Inf. 25.52) the other soul’s belly, and after attacking his victim’s arms and face, moves his tail in between his thighs and straightens it behind his loins (Inf. 25.52–57). And like Ovid, Dante uses natural similes to underscore the violence of the attack. Ovid’s first comparison features a snake, caught in an eagle’s beak and aggressively coiling its body around the bird’s talons and wings (Met. 4.362–64). Dante directly copies Ovid’s next image of ivy gripping a tree: Ovid’s simile ‘utue solent hederae longos intexere Beginning of page[p. 278] truncos’ (‘or as ivy twines around large trunks’; Met. 4.365) becomes ‘Ellera abbarbicata mai non fue | ad alber sì, come l’orribil fiera | per l’altrui membra avviticchiò le sue’ (‘No ivy ever gripped a tree so fast | as when that horrifying monster clasped | and intertwined the other’s limbs with its’; Inf. 25.58–60). While Ovid tempers the language of violent assault by reducing in the following simile Salmacis and Hermaphroditus’s union to the horticultural technique of grafting a branch into a tree (Met. 4.375–76), Dante is in this particular instance more explicit than Ovid in describing sexual assault. Ovid describes Salmacis’s assault with the language of military battle,4242See Ovidio, Metamorfosi, ed. by Alessandro Barchiesi and Gianpiero Rosati, trans. by Ludovica Koch and Gioachino Chiarini, 6 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 2005–15), ii (2007): Libri iii–iv, p. 291, for several examples, including ‘pugnantem […] tenet’, ‘hostem’, ‘pugnes’. but ‘subiectat […] manus’ (‘Salmacis moves down her hands’; Met. 4.359), with the verb communicating her downward movement through the prefix sub‑, is the closest Ovid’s text comes to approaching Hermaphroditus’s groin. Dante’s serpent-shaped thief aggressively attacks with his tail (a stand-in for the male sexual organ) the human-shaped thief between his legs. In Dante’s final metamorphosis, modeled after Ovid’s Cadmus and Harmonia story, the poet again mentions the male sexual organ without naming it: the snake-shaped soul’s hind feet became ‘lo membro che l’uom cela’ (‘the member that man hides’; Inf. 25.116), while the opposite happened to ‘del suo’ (‘that of’) the human-shaped soul (Inf. 25.117). Like Ovid did for Cadmus (Met. 4.576–89), Dante points out how various human body parts took on serpentine forms, but only Dante included genitals in that list. Medieval commentators on the Metamorphoses did not address the sexual violence in Ovid’s story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, but even Dante’s more explicit scenes are rarely described for what they are: ‘sexualized Ovidian transformations’, ‘rape’.4343Gary P. Cestaro, ‘Sodomite, Homosexual, Queer: Teaching Dante LGBTQ’, in Approaches to Teaching Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, ed. by Christopher Kleinhenz and Kristina Olson, 2nd edn (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2020), pp. 103–09 (p. 107); Barolini, ‘Inferno 25’, pars 23–25.

Inversion marks both Ovid’s and Dante’s accounts of sexual assault. At first, Ovid’s Salmacis displays gender-conforming behaviour: the nymph took pleasure in distinctively feminine activities, like doing Beginning of page[p. 279] her hair and picking flowers on the meadow — an activity that often gets girls (arguably most famously Persephone) noticed by predatory men.4444See for instance Ovidio, Metamorfosi, iii: Libri v–vi (2009), pp. 203–04. But from the moment Hermaphroditus shows up, he is subject to her ‘male gaze’.4545Salzman-Mitchell analysed the gender instability in this episode in Patricia B. Salzman-Mitchell, A Web of Fantasies: Gaze, Image, and Gender in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), pp. 160–66: Salmacis is ‘a sexually ambiguous character who wavers between being an object of the gaze […] and having an intrusive gaze’ (p. 162). As Ovid noted from the beginning, Hermaphroditus’s father and mother appear in his face and name, and throughout the story the boy presents as sexually ambiguous: manly in his desire to explore the world, blushing like a virgin girl at Salmacis’s flattery. This is not the sole instance in Ovid’s poem where a woman pursues a man, but only in this story does Ovid recount a woman’s sexual aggression in such great detail.4646Ovid dedicated eighteen verses to Salmacis’s unwanted verbal advances and twenty-three verses to the actual assault. In contrast, he captures the story of another raped man in only a half-verse: Cephalus mentions that Aurora ‘took him away against his will’ (‘inuitumque rapit’, Met. 7.704). On the few female predators in Ovid’s poem, see Curran, ‘Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses’, p. 216. Salmacis’s modus operandi is similar to that of many male predators: her initial reaction to Hermaphroditus (Met. 4.316) — ‘puerum uidit uisumque optauit habere’ (‘She saw the boy, and once she saw him, wanted to have him’) — is not much different, for instance, from Pluto’s response when he first saw Persephone (Met. 5.395–96): ‘paene simul uisa est dilectaque raptaque Diti; | usque adeo est properatus amor’ (‘almost all at once Dis saw her, loved her, and seized her away; that was how fast his love was’). Ovid also infuses this role-reversing in the story’s similes. As Alessandro Barchiesi and Gianpiero Rosati noted, the aggressor Salmacis is ‘ut serpens’ (‘like a snake’) attacking an eagle (Met. 4.362) — turning raptor into prey.4747Ovidio, Metamorfosi, ii: Libri iii–iv, p. 291.

In Dante’s canto, too, the prey become the predators. As Teodolinda Barolini writes, ‘When the thieves are in their human shapes, they are victims of their comrades in their serpent shapes. When they are in their serpent shapes, the previous victims are now perpetrators, intent upon victimizing their fellow thieves’.4848Barolini, ‘Inferno 25’, par 19. In this shape-shifting cycle of victims changing into victimizers, Dante transforms Ovid’s Beginning of page[p. 280] female aggressor Salmacis (only ‘ut serpens’ in the Metamorphoses) into an actual male serpent attacking a human man.4949On the presence of reptiles in representations of hell, see Giuseppe Ledda, Il bestiario dell’aldilà: gli animali nella ‘Commedia’ di Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 2019), pp. 22–27, 29. Like female perpetrators, male-on-male sexual aggression is rare in Ovid’s poem — there are only a few passages on male same-sex desire and force is only present in Jupiter’s raptus of Ganymede, the Ovidian myth Dante featured in Purgatorio 9.5050For instance, Apollo ‘loved’ Hyacinthus ‘above all others’ (Met. 10.167); after Eurydice’s death Orpheus ‘transferred his love to young boys’ (Met. 10.83–84). Salmacis’s fixed gaze on the young boy (Met. 4.316) becomes in Dante’s ditch of theft a pattern of intense stares: first, the pilgrim’s sustained focus on the three thieves, right before one of them is attacked by a snake (‘Com’ io tenea levate in lor le ciglia’ (‘As I kept my eyes fixed upon those sinners’; Inf. 25.49)); then, the other two human-shaped souls (and, by extension, the pilgrim, Virgil, and the reader) are looking at the incredible joining of snake and man (‘Li altri due ’l riguardavano’ or ‘The other two souls stared’; Inf. 25.67); and finally, in the canto’s last metamorphosis, the intense stare-off between a small serpent and one of those remaining human souls: ‘Elli ’l serpente e quei lui riguardava’ (‘The serpent stared at him, he at the serpent’; Inf. 25.91).5151Staring also features in Ovid’s story of Cadmus. After killing a giant serpent, Cadmus learned about his future transformation (Met. 3.97–98): ‘quid, Agenore nate, peremptum | serpentem spectas? et tu spectabere serpens’ (‘Why are you looking at the snake that you have killed, son of Agenor? You too will become a snake and be looked at’). But while Salmacis’s eyes fixate on Hermaphroditus’s beautiful face and body, it is not the beauty of their human and serpentine bodily shapes that drives Dante’s fraudulent thieves to eye and then sexually assault each other.

Dante’s reading of the ‘biformis’ Hermaphroditus (Met. 4.387) draws on the ambiguity and instability inherent in Ovid’s myth. His language to describe the snake-man hybrid is rooted in Ovid’s verses: when Salmacis and Hermaphroditus’s limbs were joined in a ‘complexu […] tenaci’ (‘tight embrace’), they were ‘nec duo […] sed forma duplex’ (‘not two but a double form’) and seemed ‘neutrumque et utrumque’ (‘both neither and either’; Met. 4.377–79). ‘Vedi che già non se’ né due né uno’ (‘Just see, | you are already neither two nor one!’; Inf. 25.69), both witnessing thieves on the sideline yelled when Beginning of page[p. 281] the serpent-shaped and human-shaped soul were mid-transformation, and, once joined together, ‘Ogne primaio aspetto ivi era casso: | due e nessun l’imagine perversa | parea’ (‘And every former shape was canceled there: | that perverse image seemed to share in both | and none’; Inf. 25.76–78). In their avoidance of rape, medieval commentators did not make much of ‘forma duplex’, the two-in-one-ness of the transformed Hermaphroditus, but focused instead on the biology of intersex hermaphrodites (John of Garland, the Vulgate commentator, Giovanni del Virgilio) or the literary quality of the ‘both neither and either’ phrase (the Vulgate commentator). Only Pierre Bersuire, writing after Dante, interpreted it — in line with his overall positive reading of the myth — as Christ’s dual nature. Dante instead applies the concept of inversion prevalent in Ovid’s myth: after replacing the female nymph with a male serpent and intensifying the sexual violence in the attack, he presents the resulting ‘forma duplex’ as an ‘imagine perversa’ (‘perverse image’; Inf. 25.77), perhaps with a tinge of the Ovidian phrase ‘obscenae Salmacis undae’ (‘the filthy waters of Salmacis’) used in a later reprise of the myth (Met. 15.319).5252I follow Stephanie McCarter’s translation of ‘obscenae’ as ‘filthy’, capturing how the word, as McCarter noted, suggests ‘both “polluted” or “unclean” and sexually “obscene”’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses, p. 564 note 17). It reads as a crude inversion of Christ’s human and divine nature.5353Especially in contrast with the Christ-like ‘biforme’ griffin (Purg. 32.96) in earthy paradise (Barolini, ‘Inferno 25’, par. 34). Nothing truly generative can come from their union: like Ovid’s Hermaphroditus who presented sexually ambiguous from the beginning and through his transformation only became more explicitly what he already was, the transformed souls shift shape but ultimately remain forever fraudulent thieves punished in hell.

Dante features the Salmacis and Hermaphroditus story in purgatory as well. In hell, sexualized punishments are not inflicted on the lustful and sodomites but featured, through Ovid’s myth, as violent male-on-male sexual intercourse in the ditch of theft. On purgatory’s terrace of lust, two groups of souls appear; Guido Guinizzelli identifies his group’s sin as ‘ermafrodito’ (Purg. 26.82), distinguishing it from the others who yell ‘Soddoma’ (‘Sodom’; Purg. 26.79) — to be understood, using our contemporary terms, as excessive heterosexual Beginning of page[p. 282] and homosexual desire, respectively.5454While I read Dante’s ‘peccato […] ermafrodito’ here in purgatory alongside his reading of the Salmacis and Hermaphroditus myth in Inferno 25, I recognize the various meanings of the hermaphrodite beyond the interpretations of medieval commentators on the Metamorphoses. The figure was perhaps most frequently associated with sodomy, but, as Holsinger notes, ‘the association of hermaphroditism with both heterosexual and homosexual practice is ubiquitous in high medieval treatments of the subject’ (Holsinger, ‘Sodomy and Resurrection’, p. 261; and more examples in John E. Boswell, ‘Dante and the Sodomites’, Dante Studies, 112 (1994), pp. 63–76 (p. 71)). For a positive reading of ‘Jesus the Hermaphrodite’ in alchemical literature, see DeVun, The Shape of Sex, pp. 163–99. Some medieval commentators picked up on Ovid’s language about Hermaphroditus’s ‘softening’ — ‘remolliat’ (Met. 4.286); ‘mollita’ (Met. 4.381); ‘mollescat’ (Met. 4.386) — and referred to Hermaphroditus’s ‘soft’ side by calling him ‘mollis’, or even mentioning his ‘effeminatio’, which were terms also associated (but not exclusively) with sodomy (see, for instance, Erin V. Abraham, Anticipating Sin in Medieval Society: Childhood, Sexuality, and Violence in the Early Penitentials (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), pp. 140–42). No medieval commentator on the Metamorphoses, though, directly associates Hermaphroditus with sodomy, while they do mention male same-sex desire in their glosses on the Ganymede myth. For a short overview on Ganymede in the commentaries, see Holsinger, ‘Sodomy and Resurrection’, p. 258. With the term ‘hermaphrodite’, Dante captures again the sexual violence and deviance he recognized in Ovid’s myth; that the Latin poet was on his mind becomes clear from the subsequent reference to Pasiphaë who, aided by a wooden frame, had sex with a bull and got pregnant with the hybrid Minotaur (Met. 8.131–37).5555Ovid described the Minotaur with the same phrase ‘semiuir’ used for Hermaphroditus (Met. 4.386) in the Ars amatoria (2.24: ‘semibouemque uirum semiuirumque bouem’ (‘the man who was half-bull, the bull who was half-man’)). As in Inferno 25, Dante features a half-human, half-animal creature resulting from sexual intercourse, but here in purgatory Dante is even more forceful in framing excessive desire as bestial: the lustful souls, Guinizzelli states, followed their appetite ‘come bestie’ (‘like beasts’; Purg. 26.84), calling out the name of Pasiphaë, she who ‘s’imbestiò ne le ’mbestiate schegge’ (‘in | the bestial planks, became herself a beast’; Purg. 26.87). Ovid’s poem offers again the language and imagery to poetically formulate these views.

Several scholars have connected Dante’s readings of Ovid with certain medieval commentaries or even specific manuscripts of the Metamorphoses. While that could in some cases explain Dante’s word choice at certain points in the Commedia, none of these medieval ‘editions’ of the Metamorphoses can be considered as Dante’s only and Beginning of page[p. 283] unquestionable Ovidian text.5656See my discussion on the search for Dante’s (copy of) Ovid in Van Peteghem, Italian Readers of Ovid, pp. 172–80. The comparison of Dante’s treatment of sexual violence, such a prevalent topic in Ovid’s poem, with the interpretations in medieval commentaries on the Metamorphoses especially underscores Dante’s different reading practice. I am not suggesting to remove these commentaries from Dante’s radar, but perhaps he may have found that its commentators’ ‘hermeneutic guidelines’ — everything in the Metamorphoses is about something else, mainly faith and morality — ‘overdetermined’ the readings of Ovid’s poem, to return to Barolini’s definition of ‘detheologizing’. In contrast to these medieval commentators, Dante did not gloss over the sexual assault in Ovid’s story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, but instead recognized the ambiguity and instability Ovid explored in this myth. A ‘reader against the grain’ of Ovid during his own time,5757On ‘Reading Against the Grain’, see the introduction to Teodolinda Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), pp. 1–20. Dante ultimately aligns more with the view prevalent in modern Ovid criticism that the Metamorphoses ‘portrays human identity as something unstable and uncertain’.5858Charles Segal, ‘Il corpo e l’io nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio’, in Ovidio, Metamorfosi, i: Libri i–ii (2005), pp. xv–ci (p. xviii and note 2). Translation mine.