Commentary Purg XXVI 82

The word 'hermaphrodite' here doubtless means (and only means) 'heterosexual' (from Ovid's tale of Salmacis and the son of Hermes [Mercury] and Aphrodite [Venus], Hermaphroditus [Metam. IV.285-388], in which their two genders are eventually included in a single double-sexed human being).  If 'hermaphrodite' here meant other than that, the only souls saved from the sin of Lust would have been homosexual and bisexual, that is, there would be no heterosexual penitents on the mountain.  The commentary tradition yields some amusing missteps on this subject.  Francesco da Buti (DDP Buti.Purg.XXVI.76-87), selecting 'hermaphrodite' (in the sense of bisexual) as the second category of the penitent lustful on the mountain, tells the tale of a person he had seen, while he was a youth, who dressed as a man but who sat at the distaff and spun wool, using the name 'Mistress Piera.'  It is only with Gabriele (DDP Gabriele.Purg.XXVI.82) and Daniello (DDP Daniello.Purg.XXVI.82-87) that commentators get the problem cleared up: these are the penitent heterosexual lovers.  There was still so much confusion three centuries later that even Scartazzini (DDP Scartazzini.Purg.XXVI.82) felt that he had to do a full review of the question.  In our own day, however, the confusion has again become manifest.  See Bernard Knox, reviewing W. S. Merwin's translation of Purgatorio (New York Review of Books, 21 September 2000), where the word is translated as 'the performance as both sexes,' and the corrective rejoinder by Peter D'Epiro in the same journal (15 November 2001).  It should be said that it was provocative for Dante to have used the myth as he chose to.  Ovid's original tale is quite startling in its sexual role reversals: Salmacis behaving like a traditional slavering male while Hermaphroditus behaves like a traditional inviting female (even performing an unintended striptease before the excited Salmacis, peeping from her hiding place in the woods).  The tale seems fully intended to serve as the foundation myth of hermaphroditism.  That was not enough, however, to protect it from Dante's by now unsurprisingly elastic and eclectic reading of classical material.  His meaning for the word is clear: 'heterosexual'; to arrive at that unriddling, he probably foresaw, would cause his readers some exertion.