Musaeus' Hero and Leander

Introduction, Greek Text, Translation and Commentary

Silvia Montiglio

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351137003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This book offers a new English translation of Musaeus' poem Hero and Leander, with the original Greek on the facing page, a substantial introduction and a detailed commentary.

The tragic romance of Hero and Leander has had and still has a great appeal, inspiring countless writers, painters, sculptors, and musicians. The Introduction aims at situating the poem within its literary tradition and cultural context as well as at drawing its major themes and describing the salient features of its style. Because Hero and Leander enjoyed an immense and uninterrupted popularity, the Introduction also devotes a large section to the poem's reception in literature, which crosses paths with the reception of the other main ancient poetic treatment of the legend, Ovid's Heroides 18 and 19. The commentary, which follows the Greek text and its translation, is addressed to a variety of readers: the student and the scholar of Greek literature, as well as those of other literatures in which the poem has been inspirational. This work has no precedent in the English language.

This new translation will be of interest to students and scholars of Greek and late antique literature, as well as those working on mythology and classical reception.

1 Introduction

The legend of Hero and Leander before Musaeus

The story of a lover who crosses a body of water to meet his beloved and eventually drowns has its roots in folklore. A Briton might be familiar with the Scottish ballad Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow; a German will know another ballad, Die Königskinder (“The Royal Children”), and an Italian might have encountered a variation on the same story, Malgherita and the Hermit, by the writer and collector of fairytales Giovanni Francesco Straparola (1480–1557).¹ The Greek tale which Musaeus (henceforth M., except in the genitive) put into charming verse in his Hero and Leander (H&L) follows the same folkloric plotline and in his version stays close to folkloric simplicity: Hero and Leander meet at a religious festival and fall in love but are barred from marriage by her parents; he swims every night to her while she holds out a torch from the tower where she lives in seclusion, until one night a storm puts out the light and with it Leander’s life, and Hero throws herself onto his body.²

As is often the case with Greek legends, however, the one of Hero and Leander has a real geographical setting: there is no such folktale vagueness as we find, for instance, in the German ballad, which starts with the signature beginning of fairytales: “There were…” (“Es waren…”), and features nameless characters and nameless places. The topography of the Greek tale is so precise that a scholar claimed that the legend might have developed from a factual event,³ and in M. the locale is given as early as in line 4: Hero lives in Sestos and Leander in Abydos, two cities facing each other on the Hellespont, about seven stadia or slightly less than a mile (1,295 m.) apart. The story, which is not attested in the archaic or classical period, originated in this area, probably after the construction of the imposing lighthouse of Alexandria (named “Pharos” after the island where it was erected) in the early third century BCE, and seems connected with the building of another lighthouse in Sestos or of several along the shores of the Dardanelles.⁴ It is also grounded in a local cult of Aphrodite, whom Hero in the version of M. serves as virgin priestess.⁵

How the legend entered literature remains nebulous. Possibly a collector of regional lore committed it to writing in the Hellenistic period,⁶ when it subsequently became the subject of song. The story must have appealed to Hellenistic taste because of its novelty, of its foundation in local realities and especially of its subject matter: a passionate love with a tragic ending. Three poetic fragments seem to relate to the legend. The first, 10 hexameters, is on a papyrus (now at the John Rylands Library in Manchester) which is usually dated to the first century CE, but the text is Hellenistic. In it the name Leander appears three times, though spelled Laandros.⁷ There are also invocations to the stars and to Vesper. Divergent reconstructions have been offered: either the two lovers featured separately, each praying on their last night, she to the stars, he to Vesper, or Hero alone invoking the stars, or again lamenting over Leander’s body.⁸

Of the other two fragments, one consists of 50 hexameters and is preserved on a papyrus from Hermoupolis, dated to the fourth or the fifth century and now in Berlin: most scholars place the poem prior to the Augustan age, though strong arguments have been raised in favor of a much later date.⁹ It has the words “love,” “sea,” “fearful (or fearless) heart,” “night,” “longing,” “labors,” “tiredness,” “death,” “tower” and possibly an “embroidered” dress.¹⁰ These would fit well in a narrative of Leander’s swim, the couple’s night of love, and the double death. The last fragment, on an Oxyrhynchus papyrus dated to the third century CE, consists of 20 iambic trimeters and goes back to the Hellenistic period; it contains the report of a dirge delivered by a woman, as well as references to a storm and to the Hellespont.¹¹ If the lost work dealt with the legend, we are witnessing its early dissemination across genres, for the fragment’s meter indicates that it comes not from a narrative poem but from a dramatic composition, probably a mime.¹²

Whether or not the legend spread across genres early on, it quickly achieved popularity. Apparently it gave luster to the region: Strabo reports that a “tower of Hero” was still visible in his time, as places that Napoleon allegedly visited still dot the island of Elba.¹³ There is no doubt that by the time of Strabo the fame of the love story had also reached far from its original setting, all the way to Rome, for it became fashionable among the Augustan poets to treat it. Virgil, in our evidence the first author to engage with the tragic story, does so elliptically, assuming knowledge of it:

What of the lad into whose bones harsh love pours a great fire? He swims across troubled waves through sudden storms, late in a night with no light. Over him the powerful door of the sky thunders, and the sea, broken by the rocks, roars. His wretched parents cannot bring him back nor can the maiden, about to die over his mangled body.

(Georgics 3. 257–263)¹⁴

The abrupt incipit, the absence of the protagonists’ names, the concentration on the final episode and the rapidity with which it is sketched imply that Virgil’s projected readership was conversant with the story. Horace likewise makes reference to its setting without mentioning the protagonists, while Propertius probably alludes to it in an even more oblique manner.¹⁵ Ovid, for his part, seems to be obsessed with the story: it appears in the Amores (2. 16. 31–32), in the Art of Love (2. 249–250), most extensively and originally in the Heroides (18 and 19), and again in the Tristia (3. 10. 41–42) and in the Ibis (589–590). (May I venture that the only reason for its absence from the Metamorphoses is that Hero and Leander, unlike Ceyx and Alcyone or Pyramus and Thisbe, were not changed into birds or plants?) Under the empire the legend continued to attract the attention of Roman writers (Seneca, Lucan, Statius, Martial, Fronto, Ausonius, Sidonius Apollinaris), but also of painters (it is the subject of several frescoes in Pompeii), possibly sculptors (Martial appends an epigram to a Leander carved in marble) and choreographers (there is evidence for a hydromime staging Leander’s swim, and for a pantomime centered on Hero’s wait). The two lovers, he swimming, she holding her lamp, are also engraved on coins from Sestos and Abydos dated to the Severian period and appear in other artifacts, from Africa to Gaul.¹⁶ By the late fifth or early sixth century, the legend must have been so familiar that Fulgentius deemed it worthy of a moral allegory (Mythologies 3. 4).

A striking feature shared by the majority of the Roman sources is the privilege allotted to Leander’s feat of swimming, whereas Hero’s anxiety and the lovers’ death receive relatively little attention. The most expansive treatment of Hero’s worrying and lamenting on the stormy night is in Ovid’s Heroides 19, and mentions of her wait are in Statius (Thebaid 6. 546–547) and Fronto (Correspondence 3. 14. 3–4). Otherwise, engagements with the legend favor the segment in which Leander successfully cleaves the waves while Hero makes light for him. This is most noticeable in artifacts, but the same is true for a number of literary treatments. Ovid, especially in Heroides 18, depicts Leander as a nimble, athletic swimmer. Though the setting of the letter is the stormy night, the core of it is devoted to Leander’s nostalgic and self-complacent reminiscence of his first swim. Statius follows suit, casting Cupid himself in the role of an admiring observer of the youth’s energetic arms “rivaling the oars” (Silvae 1. 2. 87–88), and even in the passage from the Thebaid that describes Hero waiting, he spends more time on Leander’s swim, without attaching any intimation of the tragic ending to the account of his feat:

This young man swims here with contempt for the sea of Phrixus and blue does he shine through the colored waves. One hand seems to move sideways and he seems to be about to switch arms. Do not think that his hair is dry in the thread. In front the girl from Sestos sits in vain, anxiously, looking from the top of the tower, and the privy fire soon dies.

(6. 542–547)

A foreshadowing of the tragic ending surfaces only in the last line and death lies in the future, while the swimmer’s body is vividly brought before the readers’ eyes.¹⁷ On the other hand, when the tragedy is in focus, it is Leander’s death rather than Hero’s, to which only Virgil, Ausonius and Sidonius Apollinaris make reference. This selective outlook entails the overall shrinking of Hero’s role compared to the lost Greek poems, in which, from what we can gauge, her wait, her despair and her death seem to have been center stage.¹⁸

The author of Hero and Leander

We know very little about M. He lived in the late fifth or early sixth century, probably in central Egypt, and he might be identical with a figure of the same name, the cultivated friend of the orator Procopius of Gaza (ca. 465–528).¹⁹ He was strongly influenced by the poet Nonnus of Panopolis (in the Egyptian Thebaid), the fifth-century author of a 48-book epic on the adventurous life and deeds of Dionysus, the Dionysiaca, and of a poetic Paraphrase of the Gospel of John.²⁰ He could have been a Christian, but this cannot be proven.²¹ It is true that Egypt by the fifth century was strongly christianized and that Nonnus at some point embraced the new religion;²² it is also true that M. borrowed expressions from Christian literature, especially Nonnus’ Paraphrase.²³ But it might be asked whether admiring and following a poet as poet entails sharing his religious beliefs, and whether using Christian texts as a storeroom for turns of phrases equals espousing the Christian faith. The new religion apparently did not leave an imprint on the poem of M., unless it is read as a Neoplatonic-Christian allegory.²⁴ On a surface level, the subject matter would have offered a Christian a juicy opportunity to brand love outside of marriage as illegitimate and ungodly, and to exploit the couple’s tragic death to teach a lesson, as several medieval authors will do;²⁵ but M., as we shall see, issues no moral condemnation of the affair, or even of Hero’s suicide.

In three manuscripts M. is called grammatikos, that is, “a scholar and a professor of literature” at a level intermediate between the didaskalos and the rhêtôr or sophistês. As a grammatikos, he would fit in the intellectual and educational landscape of Panopolis, for which several grammatikoi are recorded between the third and the sixth centuries. Among them is the third-century poet Triphiodorus, the author of a short epic, The Sack of Troy.²⁶ Like Triphiodorus, M. wrote a brief epic poem (343 lines), the subject of which, however, is not war but love. Hero and Leander, his only work,²⁷ follows the story in chronological order ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Text and translation
• 3 Commentary
• Bibliography
• Index