Hero and Leander
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Hero and Leander is a Greek myth.
Contents
The myth
Hero was a priestess of Aphrodite who dwelt in a tower in Sestos, at the edge of the Hellespont. Leander, a young man from Abydos, on the other side of the strait, fell in love with her and would swim every night across the Hellespont to be with her. Hero would light a lamp every night at the top of her tower to guide his way.Succumbing to Leander's soft words, and to his argument that Aphrodite, as goddess of love, would scorn the worship of a virgin, Hero allowed him to make love to her. This routine lasted through the warm summer. But one stormy winter night, the waves tossed Leander in the sea and the breezes blew out Hero's light, and Leander lost his way, and was drowned. Hero threw herself from the tower in grief and died as well.
The myth in later literature and the arts
Literature
- Ovid treated the narrative in his Heroides, 18 and 19, an exchange of letters between the lovers. Leander has been unable to swim across to Hero in her tower because of bad weather, her summons to him to make the effort will prove fatal to her lover.
- Byzantine poet Musaeus also wrote a poem; Aldus Manutius made it one of his first publications (c. 1493) after he set up his famous printing press in Venice (his humanistic aim was to make Ancient Greek Literature available to scholars). Musaeus's poem had early translations into European languages by Tasso (Italian), Boscán (Spanish) and Marot (French). This poem was widely believed in the Renaissance to have been pre-Homeric: George Chapman reflects at the end of his completion of Marlowe's version that the dead lovers had the honour of being 'the first that ever poet sung’. Chapman's 1616 translation has the title The divine poem of Musaeus. First of all bookes. Translated according to the originall, by Geo: Chapman. Staplyton, the mid-17th century translator, had read Scaliger's repudiation of this mistaken belief, but still could not resist citing Virgil's 'Musaum ante omnes' (AeneidVI, 666) on the title page of his translation (Virgil's reference was to an earlier Musaeus).
- Renaissance poet Christopher Marlowe began an expansive version of the narrative. His story does not get as far as Leander's nocturnal swim, and the guiding lamp that gets extinguished, but ends after the two have become lovers (Hero and Leander (poem));
- George Chapman completed the same poem after Marlowe's death; the Marlowe poem with its completion by Chapman was repeatedly printed in the first half of the 17th century, with editions in 1598 (Linley); 1600 and 1606 (Flasket); 1609, 1613, 1617, 1622 (Blount); 1629 (Hawkins); and 1637 (Leake).
- Sir Walter Ralegh alludes to the story, in his 'The Ocean's Love to Cynthia', in which Hero has fallen asleep, and fails to keep alight the lamp that guides Leander on his swim (more kindly versions, like Chapman's, have her desperately struggling to keep the lamp burning).
- Ben Jonson's play Bartholomew Fair features a puppet show of Hero and Leander in Act V, translated to London, with the Thames serving as the Hellespont between the lovers.
- It is also the subject of a novel by Milorad Pavić;
- Leander is also the subject of Sonnet XXIX by Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega of the 16th Century;
- The story has also been briefly alluded to in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, both when Benedick states that Leander was "never so truly turned over and over as my poor self in love" and in the name of the character Hero, who, despite accusations to the contrary, remains chaste before her marriage. It was also briefly alluded to in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in the form of a malapropism accidentally using the names Lysander and Helen in the place of Hero and Leander. The most famous Shakespearean allusion is, however, the debunking one by Rosalind, in Act IV scene I of As You Like It:
- Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and being taken with the cramp was drowned and the foolish coroners of that age found it was 'Hero of Sestos.' But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
- Sir Robert Stapylton published a translation of Musaeus's poem in 1645, which he republished with annotations in 1647, also including his versions of Ovid's Heroides 18 and 19. His dedication of the volume to 'the Ladyes' expresses the wish that the poem might encourage married women to have sex with their partners: ‘Courtship here is directed to a Sacred end, and onely invites you after our Deluge of bloud …to restore your now unpeopled Country’. Stapylton also wrote a heroic tragedy on the lovers, unperformed, but published in 1669.
- In the same year, William Wycherley published his 'Hero and Leander in Burlesque', a lengthy parody, cuminating a tradition of parodic treatments initiated by Ben Jonson. Versions by Alexander Radcliffe, and a scatological treatment of the theme probably by James Smith followed.
- Hero and Leander (Hero y Lleandro) is the title of one of the first preserved works of Asturian literature, written by Antón de Marirreguera.
- Hero and Leander inspired the feat commemorated in the poem, "Written After Swimming from Sestos To Abydos" by Lord Byron. Byron found the swim hard going, and caught a cold.
Art
In the visual arts, 'Hero and Leander' was a popular theme. From about 1625, Mortlake tapestries were being woven: there is a set at the Primatial Palace in Bratislava. Another large tapestry hangs beside the main staircase in Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire. There are 17th century paintings by Nicholas Regnier (c.1626, National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, Rubens, and Dominico Feti (1623). There are many later treatment, including eightyon's Last Watch of Hero in which the heroine's anxiety is signalled by the way she twists the curtain-cloth in her hand. 'Hero and Leander' was a popular artistic subject because it offered the chance of a mild eroticism, alongside a moral warning about love recklessly pursued. The story could, after Ovid's version, be given an anti-feminist slant, in which Leander dies because Hero's desire dooms him to the last swim through the stormy night.See also
External links
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