I was reading a discussion of Sandys’s Ovid (1626) by Liz Oakley-Brown in which she draws attention to his use of the word ‘cleaving’ in the translation of the tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. Salmacis, the desiring nymph, prays to be united with the reluctant youth, and they are metamorphosed into a single androgynous being:

Her wishes had their Gods. Euen in that space
Their cleauing bodies mix: both haue one face.
As when wee two diuided scions ioyne,
And see them grow together in one rine:
So they, by such a strict imbracement glew'd,
Are now but one, with double forme indew'd.

As she points out, it’s a felicitous word choice as it can mean both to split and to stick fast. He is doing his best to split, whereas she is clingy. These lines made me think of Milton’s description of good and evil in Areopagitica (1644):

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world.

Milton is known to have drawn on Sandys’s translation of Ovid, and I wondered if there was some memory of Sandys’s hermaphrodite at work here – particularly because the word ‘cleaving’ also has the same double-edged force in Areopagitica, describing two opposites (good and evil) which are yet complexly intermixed. Milton’s reference to the apple’s ‘rind’ seems slightly superfluous, and that perhaps strengthens the case for seeing these lines as a faint echo of Sandys’s image of the shoots, ‘scions’, which cleave (together) and then cleave (apart).