The Myth of Hero and Leander

The History and Reception of an Enduring Greek Legend

Silvia Montiglio

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786722904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la antigua Grecia

Hero and Leander are the protagonists in a classical tale of epic but tragic love. Hero lives secluded in a tower on the European shore of the Hellespont, and Leander on the opposite side of the passage. Since they cannot hope to marry, the couple resolves to meet in secret: each night he swims across to her, guided by the light of her torch. But the time comes when a winter storm kills both the light and Leander. At dawn, Hero sees her lover's mangled body washed ashore, and so hurls herself from the tower to meet him in death. Silvia Montiglio here shows how and why this affecting story has proved to be one of the most popular and perennial mythologies in the history of the West. Discussing its singular drama, danger, pathos and eroticism, the author explores the origin of the legend and its rich and varied afterlives. She shows how it was used by Greek and Latin writers; how it developed in the Middle Ages - notably in the writings of Christine de Pizan - and Renaissance; how it inspired Byron to swim the Dardanelles; and how it has lived on in representations by artists including Rubens and Frederic Leighton.

CHAPTER 1

Seduction, Love and Athleticism: Leander (and Hero) in Roman Literature and Culture

THE EXEMPLARY LOVER

In the extant evidence, Virgil is the first poet to allude to the legend:

What of the lad (iuvenis) into whose bones harsh love (durus amor) pours a great fire? He swims across troubled waves through sudden storms, late in a night with no light (nocte […] caeca). 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. 257–63)¹

‘What of the lad?’ This dramatic attack assumes familiarity with the unnamed hero. As the ancient commentator Servius points out, ‘[Virgil] did not mention Leander because the tale was known’.² Other late antique scholars contested this reading and rather took the youth's anonymity to stress his paradigmatic role: Leander has no personal identity because he stands for The Lover.³ The two interpretations that divided ancient critics can in fact live side by side and complement each other. From its first appearance the well-known story is invested with the universally exemplary force that will guarantee its enduring and widespread attraction across cultural and linguistic boundaries.

For Virgil, Leander's death serves to illustrate the ruinous power of erotic passion, which hits humans and animals alike: amor omnibus idem (244). So again Servius: ‘Lest the reader object that those animals lack reason, he says that humans as well are impelled to love rather strongly’.⁴ Leander's example marks a climax. It is introduced by an abrupt question and placed almost at the centre of the demonstration (242–82). He is also the only human illustration of durus amor among the great number of animals, which include lions, bears, boars, tigers, horses, lynches, wolves, dogs and deer. Virgil's choice of him over other mythic lovers suggests not only that his story was familiar, but also that he stood out in the poet's imagination and presumably his audience's as the archetype of the lover driven to fight against every obstacle by his passion. His swim in the swelling waves, though, is not a romantic deed. It does not bespeak ‘that true love which knows no fear and which is still victorious even in death’, as one critic takes it, but is recklessness.⁵ The nox caeca in which he swims – possibly another oblique allusion to the legend, to the quenching of Hero's lamp – is the externalization, as it were, of the blindness of love itself (caeci […] amoris 3. 210).

The legend must have appealed also to Propertius, not as a cautionary tale but for its resonance with his own fantasies of love in death. Though he does not mention Hero and Leander, he almost certainly has them in mind for two poems that are dominated by the theme of shipwreck (2. 26a and 2. 26b).⁶ The first describes a nightmare: Propertius has a vision of Cynthia fighting the waves and almost drowning. She confesses her infidelities and cries out his name in repentance as she is about to die, but a dolphin comes to her rescue. While he is attempting to throw himself into the sea from a high rock, terror awakes him. The compositional setting is similar to that of the mythic tale: the sea separates the lovers; one of them (almost) goes under, while the other sees her from his elevated position. Additional evidence that the tale is behind the poem is the comparison of the drowning Cynthia to Helle's falling into the sea and giving it her name (2. 26a. 5–7). The latter detail is particularly significant because Ovid mentions it in his own treatment of the legend (in Heroides 19. 123–8). Propertius, though, effects a reversal of roles that emphasizes his imprisonment in a frightening helplessness: it is Cynthia who, Leander-like, wrestles with the sea, whereas her lover can only look on and make repeated but pointless efforts (19) to throw himself into the waves to help her.⁷

While in this poem Leander is no more than a mythic archetype for a drowning swimmer, his exemplary role as absolute lover underlies the second text, which recounts not a dream but a waking fantasy, the content of which is not the poet's nightmarish separation from Cynthia but his union with her in death, or their ‘death’ in the act of love. The core of the poem is the imagining of a sea journey that Propertius will undertake, no matter how dangerous it might be, to accompany Cynthia: ‘If my girl should think of going far on the sea, I will follow her’ (2. 26b. 29–30). The odyssey ends with the fancied death of the lovers: ‘If I must leave my life on your body, departing in this way will be an honour for me’ (57–8).

According to an insightful reading, Propertius is revelling in a union that joins physical and sexual death.⁸ He will breathe his last and climactic breath lying on top of Cynthia, after they will have been ‘thrown naked together onto the same shore’ (43). It is quite likely that the death of Hero and Leander inspired this fantasy. Though we do not know how it was narrated in the poem Propertius read, the version of Musaeus, which might depend on the same poem, ends with this highly erotic line: ‘They took joy of each other even in the extremity of death’.⁹ Propertius' imagined journey terminates in the same way: two bodies, one on top of the other, die in the act of love at the edge of the sea.

The string of mythological characters that populate the sea journey further suggests that Propertius had a poem on Leander in mind. After imagining Cynthia's body and his own cast naked onto the same shore, the poet for a moment shrinks back from the death scene, reassuring himself that the gods of the elements, Neptune, Jove, Boreas, are propitious to lovers for having been lovers themselves. He recalls Neptune's passion for Amymone and Boreas' for Orithyia. The same divine loves are mentioned by Hero and by Leander, imploring the same gods in Ovid's account (Heroides 18. 39–42 and 19. 131) and, partially, also in Musaeus' (Hero and Leander 321–2). Since this cluster of characters seems to belong to the Hero and Leander theme, it is probable that Propertius echoes a poem about the couple in which the same figures appeared.

At the very least Ovid read the tale into Propertius' fantasy. This surfaces from a poem in the Amores (2. 16) that has points of contact with Propertius' and in which Leander makes an explicit appearance.¹⁰ Frustrated with his separation from his (unnamed) mistress, Ovid imagines himself embarking on the most arduous journeys with her. In her company all routes will be easy, even the Alps, the Syrtes, Cape Malea and Charybdis. This flight on the wings of love seems modelled on the section of Propertius' elegy in which he exaltedly states that with Cynthia as travelling companion he will bear up with everything: all the elements that opposed Odysseus, the Greeks at Aulis, or the Argonauts (2. 26b. 35–40). The climax of the strenuous journey is the same in the two poems – a shipwreck. But no hardship at all in the company of the beloved: ‘Provided she will never be away from my eyes, let Jupiter himself set the ship on fire’ (Propertius 2. 26b. 41–2); ‘But if the windy might of Neptune should hold sway and the waves should sweep off the gods that might come to our help, put your snow-white arms around my shoulders, and it will be easy for my body to carry the sweet burden’ (Ovid Amores 2. 16. 27–30). Ovid, though, continues: ‘Often, seeking Hero, the lad had swum across the waves. He would have swum across then also, but the way was blind (via caeca)’ (31–2). The addition of the example could have been pushed by its subterranean but recognizable presence in Propertius' poem.

Ovid's exploitation of the tale, however, fits a different design: not to evoke an erotic and macabre fantasy with Hero's and Leander's love unto death as underlying model, but to prove the energizing power of his mistress' presence, sufficient to ease any amount of effort. Accordingly, Ovid puts a premium on Leander's swimming (‘he had swum’, ‘he would have swum’) rather than on the tragic end. He suggests the latter only with the allusive phrase via caeca, an oblique reference to the stormy night and a wink at Virgil's nocte caeca.

All the same, this intimation of Leander's demise strikes a dissonant note, since Ovid is not glamorizing a journey to death. The echo of Virgil's dark treatment of the story and more generally the evocation of its ending clash with Ovid's imagined élan, his overconfident claim that in his mistress' presence no weather hazard would be an obstacle. What is the point then in bringing Leander's death, no matter how allusively, into the picture? Is Ovid's facility with verse running ahead of his thought, his stylus itching with the urge to imitate the Virgilian phrase? Or does he share aspects of Virgil's interpretation of Leander's daring swim as a reckless act caused by indomitable love?

Ovid might have been altogether rushed in topping his imagined journey with the exemplar of Leander, alive as well as dead. The comparison seriously limps, for the poet would swim carrying his mistress in his arms, whereas Leander swam to reach his.¹¹ Ovid's feat of swimming would not be driven by the absence of his beloved but would be made possible and even desirable by her presence. While the incongruity has pushed editors to expunge the lines, others observe that this is not the only time Ovid comes up with an ill-fitting comparison.¹² The allusion to Leander's death makes the pairing even less appropriate. If it is true that Ovid was careless in choosing his exemplar, it is also likely that he did not intend to endorse Virgil's view of Leander but only to echo his language.

In fact, the spirit of Ovid's second exploitation of Leander could not be more distant from Virgil's. In the Art of Love, he argues that a lover must be ready to suffer anything to prove his devotion and brings in Leander to demonstrate not the destructiveness of erotic passion but the bravery that it elicits:

She will be happy and will know that she is a cause of danger for you: this will be the token of certain love for your mistress. Often you could have been without your girl, Leander. But you swam, so that she'd know your feelings.

(2. 247–50)

The Virgilian victim of durus amor lightens up, as it were, turning into a worldly, even cynical connoisseur of women, and in this outfit he becomes the paradigm for the apprentice in seduction. Leander's exemplar serves to show ‘how to keep your girl’, the topic of the second book of the Art of Love. The one feature Ovid's character shares with Virgil's is his exclusive entitlement to embody the model lover; but his exemplarity from negative becomes positive and from tragic, elegiac.

Leander is the one mythic model suited to illustrate the point that love is war. It is true that Ovid in the same context also adduces Apollo tending Admetus' cattle for love of him (2. 239–41),¹³ but the divine example is brought in not to prove that erotic passion requires the same courage as war, but to preach that if even gods can be slaves to love and for it submit to humble tasks, so, too, must a mortal accept to drop his pride for love's sake. It is also true that in Amores 1. 9, in arguing that ‘every lover is a soldier’, Ovid puts forward not Leander but other heroes: Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector and the god of war himself (33–40). These characters, however, do not exemplify lovers fighting all kinds of battles in the name of their passion, but warriors turned lovers or armed by their loved one (Andromache in the case of Hector), thus, allegedly, supporting the equivalence of war and love.¹⁴ It is Leander and he alone that Ovid produces to demonstrate that, if you take risks to be with your domina, she will feel loved. Leander's daring is not recklessness, as in Virgil, but courage, albeit a theatrical courage, for he braves the sea not because he cannot be separated from Hero, but in order to give her a token of love (pignus amoris). Rather than to be with her, he means to impress her by proving that he cannot be without her.

‘How to keep his girl’ seems also to worry Leander in Ovid's most extensive treatment of the legend, notably, in the two Heroides in which the lovers exchange letters when forced to be apart.¹⁵ The letters reveal that the question, ‘was Leander courageous or reckless in swimming a stormy sea?’ – a question implied in the mention of via caeca in Amores 2. 16 – was of much interest to Ovid. As we shall see, the answer he gives in the Heroides is not dissimilar to that of Virgil.

WHY WILL LEANDER SWIM? HEROIDES 18 AND 19

Parental opposition

When they write to each other, Hero and Leander have been kept apart for seven nights by winds and waves. He is in the same predicament as the elegiac lover barred from his girl by a locked door and, like him, he laments before that wall, the stormy Hellespont.¹⁶ His closest equivalent is the protagonist of Amores 3. 6, Ovid praying to a swelling river that separates him from his girl as Leander prays to the swelling sea, using the same arguments. But Leander, unlike Ovid, has had an opportunity to cross. He tells Hero that he was ready to board the only boat that had braved the sea and brought her his letter. He did not embark, however, because ‘all of Abydos was on the outlook. I could not escape my parents, as before, and the love that we wish to keep hidden would have been revealed’ (18. 12–14). In the tradition of the legend this is the first appearance of the familial obstacle, which adds to the natural impediment, the impassable sea.¹⁷

Ovid, though, does little with parental opposition. He utilizes the motif essentially to provide Leander with a justification for not sailing to Sestos. Hero might have wondered why he did not come, since a boat after all crossed the sea and carried his letter. His parents' hostility to the marriage gives him a good reason but it itself remains underdeveloped. It might not be by chance that the author of the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé in his rewriting of the two Heroides retained only the sea as the barrier to the lovers' union (4. 3165–6 and 3171–2). The presence of family opposition in the original was so thin that it could be missed or dismissed.¹⁸

Hero, to be sure, is fixated on the obstacle (19. 42; 99–100; 115; 171–2), but we are not even told why Leander's parents are against the union: because of Hero's ethnicity? As a Thracian, she fears that she might be considered unworthy of his bed.¹⁹ But is her worry grounded in fact? Not all her fears are; those of betrayal, for instance, are simply paranoid.²⁰ Her anxieties are misplaced: while she should be wary of the real wind which will soon kill Leander, she casts off her fear of it ...