The Myth of Hero and Leander: The History and Reception of an Enduring Greek Legend 9781350988941, 9781786732903

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To Don Juedes Bibliothe´caire extraordinaire

Illustrations

FIGURE 0.1 Rubens, Hero and Leander, c.1607, Yale University Art Gallery. Credit: Gema¨ldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany q Staattliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / Bridgeman Images.

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FIGURE 0.2 William Henry Rinehart, Hero (1866), Washington, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Peabody Institute.

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FIGURE 0.3 Frederic Leighton, The Last Watch of Hero (1887), Manchester Art Gallery. Credit: Manchester Art Gallery, UK / Bridgeman Images.

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FIGURE 1.1 Coins: (a) from Sestos, minted under Caracalla (description in LIMC Suppl. VIII, vol. 1, p. 621, #15 and 16); (b) from Abydos, minted under Alexander Severus (description in LIMC Suppl. VIII, vol. 1, #20; image in vol. 2, p. 384). Credit: Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. (http://www.cngcoins.com).

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FIGURE 2.1 Pierre-Claude Delorme (1783 – 1859), He´ro et Le´andre, Brest, Muse´e des beaux-arts. Credit: q Muse´e des beaux-arts de Brest me´tropole.

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FIGURE 2.2 William Etty, Hero, Having Thrown Herself from the Tower at the Sight of Leander Drowned, Dies (1829), Tate Gallery.

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The Myth of Hero and Leander

Credit: q York Museums Trust (York Art Gallery), UK / Bridgeman Images. FIGURE 3.1 Epıˆtre Othe´a, illumination from the Harley Manuscript 4431, The British Library, Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts. Open access (www.bl.uk).

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FIGURE 4.1 The two illustrations contained in the 1517 Aldine edition of Hero and Leander. Source: Aldo Manuzio and Andrea Torresano (eds), Mousaiou poieˆmation ta kath’ Hero kai Leandron. Orpheoˆs Argonautika. Tou autou Hymnoi. Orpheus peri lithoˆn. Musaei opusculum de Herone & Leandro. Orphei Argonautica. Eiusdem hymni. Orpheus de lapidibus (Venice, 1517).

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FIGURE 5.1 Domenico Fetti, Hero and Leander (c.1621), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Credit: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria / Bridgeman Images.

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Acknowledgements

Writing this book has been an exciting journey but at times on rough waters, and if I have not drowned, it is thanks to the beacons held by supportive friends and colleagues. A section of Chapter 3 has been presented at a giornata di studio hosted by Joshua Smith and Shane Butler at Johns Hopkins University, while I have inflicted other parts (now in Chapters 2 and 4) on audiences at the Fifth International Conference on the Ancient Novel in Houston, at the Classical Association in Canterbury and at the University of Crete in Rhethymno. At Johns Hopkins, Martijn Buijs and Kristina Mueller have offered invaluable help with translations from old Dutch and German, and Michele Asuni, Ryan Franklin and Jonathan Meyer have contributed insightful observations in the classroom. Gordon Braden, Phiroze Vasunia and a third, anonymous reader have been supportive of this project, as has Alex Wright, senior editor at I.B.Tauris. I owe him special thanks also for his patience and cheerfulness all along. To him, to his colleague Thomas Stottor and to Robert Wagman at the University of Florida goes my gratitude for helping me in various ways with securing the images. A warm thank you to Mary Whiting, who has read the entire manuscript and lavished her finesse and erudition on it. My love and thanks, as always, to Gareth Schmeling, whose light shines in the darkest sky. Finally, I dedicate this book to Don Juedes, librarian at Johns Hopkins, for all his competent and generous help over the years. He is, truly, an extraordinary librarian.

Introduction

Ne vous sans moi Ne moi sans vous Marie de France, Chevrefoil

THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOK Like Pyramus and Thisbe or Romeo and Juliet, Hero and Leander are star-crossed lovers. She lives secluded in a tower in the city of Sestos on the European side of the Hellespont and he in Abydos on the Asian side. Since they cannot hope to marry, they resolve to meet in secret: each night he swims across to her, guided by the light of her torch, and at daybreak he swims back to Abydos. But one winter storm kills both the lamp and Leander. Hero, who has spent the whole night anxiously straining her eyes over the sea, at dawn sees his mangled body washed ashore and hurls herself from the tower to meet him in death. This story has enjoyed great popularity from antiquity to the twenty-first century, and in every possible medium. Marlowe’s effervescent, erotic and somewhat comic poem, which Seamus Heaney imaginatively called ‘a work happily in love with its own own inventions’,1 is perhaps the most familiar treatment of the legend in English, followed by Donne’s elegant epigram (‘Both robb’d of air, we both lie in one ground; / Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drown’d’) and Tennyson’s delicately sensual lyric Hero to Leander. The lovers from the Hellespont have met with

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favour also in the visual and the performing arts, including nonclassical music. Adam Guettel’s cycle Myths and Hymns (1998), for instance, contains a song titled Hero and Leander. The youth’s feat has additionally earned him a place of honour among athletes, leaving its imprint in the name of the ‘Leander Swimming Club’ in West London (www.leanderswimmingclub.org.uk), and has challenged swimmers to gather on the Hellespont yearly in order to repeat his achievement in a sports race that is also a commemoration.2 Once every summer they engage in an act of ‘mimetic memory’ by reproducing Leander’s crossing.3 To English-speaking readers (and not only them) this athletic ritual will conjure up its first and most famous celebrant: Lord Byron, who during his grand tour made it across the Hellespont on his second attempt and became so proud of his accomplishment that he could not refrain from recording it over and over. He had not just overcome his physical disability (he was born with a clubfoot) as well as cold and strong currents but had also, as one critic perceptively notes, made a legendary tale real in his own person: ‘In re-enacting Leander’s exploit, Byron temporarily became the hero of an ancient legend, a character in a treasured story’.4 His best-known account of his feat, however, is not boastful but delightfully ironic: If, in the month of dark December, Leander, who was nightly wont (What maid will not the tale remember?) To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont! If, when the wintry tempest roared, He sped to Hero, nothing loath, And thus of old thy current poured, Fair Venus! how I pity both! For me, degenerate modern wretch, Though in the genial month of May, My dripping limbs I faintly stretch, And think I’ve done a feat today. But since he crossed the rapid tide, According to the doubtful story, To woo and Lord knows what beside, And swam for Love, as I for Glory;

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‘Twere hard to say who fared the best: Sad mortals! thus the gods still plague you! He lost his labour, I my jest; For he was drowned, and I’ve the ague. (On Swimming the Hellespont)

With a light and self-deprecating tone, Byron teasingly pairs his endeavour with Leander’s, distancing his feeble self from the legendary swimmer, their motivations and the end results of the two exploits. Leander, driven by love, swam in the winter storm and died, while his ‘degenerate modern’ follower is moved by an epic ambition to earn glory, to become himself a legendary hero, but his efforts leave him exhausted, sorely tried and barely moving, even in the friendly (‘genial’) springtime – prosaically feverish rather than romantically dead. As this famous episode and its modern imitations show, the legend’s success has been secured by more factors than just the universal attraction of love stories, especially tragic ones. The swimming component has proven to be another major key to the tale’s strong hold on the imagination, and this not only among sportsmen, as in recent times, but also and more enduringly in literature and art. We shall see how often the figure of Leander cleaving the waves has caught the fancy of Roman poets and figurative artists. As recently as a decade ago it has also appealed to the American sculptor Rod Patterson (Swimmer-Leander, 2004), who has conveyed the muscular vigour of Leander’s arms by means of volumetric contrasts and light effects that detach them forcefully from the surrounding sea which the swimmer fully controls. Another ingredient of the tale has turned out to be productive, the storm, because it has allowed displays of poetic as well as pictorial bravura. Perhaps the most renowned example of the latter is Rubens’ painting Hero and Leander (Figure 0.1), where the swelling sea has the appearance of a thick material substance, so threateningly powerful as to hold on the top of its surge the body of the dead swimmer and the Nereids who are caring for him.5 But the storm did not have to wait until the baroque period to fire the imagination. Already the fifth-century Greek poet Musaeus, one of the main ancient sources for the story, describes the virulent sea with pathos and effectiveness in his Hero and Leander, making the roaring waves reverberate in the reader’s ears.6

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The Myth of Hero and Leander

FIGURE 0.1 Rubens, Hero and Leander, c.1607, Yale University Art Gallery. Credit: Gema¨ldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany q Staattliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / Bridgeman Images. Hero’s anticipation, especially on the night of the tragedy, has been yet another inspiring component of the legend. To capture her anxiety, writers and musicians have filled the episode with a monologue in which the worried woman blames or interrogates the elements, while in the visual arts and in dance her state of mind has been conveyed by gestures, bodily postures or facial expressions. The scene has appealed to composers of cantatas, such as Nicholas Lanier (Nor com’st thou yet, 1628).7 Its creative potential for a sculptor can be exemplified in a work of William Henry Rinehart (Figure 0.2), in which the torso of an eagerly waiting Hero leans forward, her right arm touching her breasts near her heart; while the pre-Raphaelite painter Frederic Leighton (Figure 0.3) expresses her agitation by the movement of her two arms, one encircling her head, the other grabbing the window curtain, and by the almost tearful and immobile stare that takes in the stormy sea. Among the legend’s further attractions are subjects that could be invested with moral and ideological implications: the lovers’ passion, their illegitimate dalliance and Hero’s suicide. These motifs elicited such questions as, Were Hero and Leander right to yield to love in the face of family, society, law and religion? Did they deserve to die?

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FIGURE 0.2 William Henry Rinehart, Hero (1866), Washington, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Peabody Institute. Did their death, and hers in particular, condemn them in perpetuity, or did it eternize a passion stronger than life itself? Finally, a major key to the tale’s success in literature is the simplicity of its core development. It includes: the protagonists’ falling in love;

FIGURE 0.3 Frederic Leighton, The Last Watch of Hero (1887), Manchester Art Gallery. Credit: Manchester Art Gallery, UK / Bridgeman Images.

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Leander’s swim and their first night; his death in the storm; and Hero’s suicide. The bare storyline, which sets this legend off against many Greek myths with their intricate plots, allowed for inventions and expansions. Writers had great leeway, much freedom to augment, deepen or interpret. And, in fact, a remarkable number of modern retellings are longer, often much longer, than their classical precedents, and several introduce new episodes and characters. The legend is so widespread that any attempt at producing a study that marries comprehensiveness and detailed analysis is probably bound to fail. The project of retracing the fortunes of the two lovers in all their particulars is, as one critic recently put it, ‘almost utopian’.8 Scholars have been drawn to the legend almost as much as creative writers and artists, but, judiciously, no one has dared come up with an overarching treatment of it. To do so with some credibility one should master a great number of skills and languages, ancient and modern. Besides, an all-encompassing review of materials so vast and sprawling risks being straitjacketing (if not superficial). As a result, studies tend to focus on one or a limited number of instances of the ‘Hero and Leander theme’, as it has been called:9 on a specific art form, one author or genre, or one definable culture. More farreaching investigations do exist, but the rare specimens that aspire to weave the evidence together end up offering only highlights, while, more often, comprehensive surveys do not even attempt to tell a story but have the quality of well-arranged lists of texts, images, musical and dramatic compositions, accompanied by little or no interpretation.10 This study seeks to tell a story, both by connecting treatments of the legend to one another and by offering individual analyses of a large number of them, but this within chronological limits: it follows the adventures of Hero and Leander in Greco-Roman antiquity, in medieval Europe and in Byzantine literature. Why this time frame? One reason for my choice can be gleaned from the above paragraph: I am a classicist, not a scholar of modern literature, an art historian or a musicologist. Several medieval texts concerned with the legend are in Latin and Greek (though Byzantine Greek), languages that a classicist should be able to navigate. But knowledge of a language alone obviously does not give one a grasp of the world it inhabits. A classicist has to acquaint herself with aspects

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of other literatures and cultures at large in order to situate instances of the Hero and Leander theme in their appropriate contexts. I have tried to do this for the selected periods, but to extend the research to later centuries would have been outside my purview and the end result would have been an unwieldy volume. Further, my choice is dictated not only by pragmatic considerations, including the standard refrain, ‘you have to stop somewhere’, but also, and as importantly, by the historical trajectory of the tale’s reception. The linguistic continuum between ancient and medieval literature, especially in the East, justifies treating the two periods together. In addition, medieval authors depend heavily on classical sources: even Western European writers who recounted the tale in the vernacular mostly knew Latin and Latin texts, and used them primarily and in some cases exclusively for their own narratives. More striking, virtually all extant Byzantine references to the legend can be traced back to Musaeus. The decision to confine the discussion to antiquity and the Middle Ages stems also from the pivotal role of the Renaissance in the history of the knowledge of the tale, its diffusion and interpretation. In Greco-Roman antiquity its main sources are two of Ovid’s epistles (Heroides 18 and 19) and Musaeus’ Greek poem. Musaeus was hardly known in medieval Europe, while the Heroides were not common currency in the East, though a few authors might have read them.11 This distribution creates a split in the reception of the legend: in the West its rewritings descend primarily from Ovid, while in the East from Musaeus. The division is further deepened by the largely different moral attitude toward the love affair in the two areas of the former Roman Empire. While in Western Europe Christian moralizing versions are legion, Byzantine authors retain a classical outlook. The Renaissance transforms this state of affairs, and does so not just as a cultural movement. Equally important, or even more for the legend’s fate, is the spreading of knowledge of Musaeus in Western Europe, which is amply documented for the second half of the fifteenth century and accelerated further by the printed editions of his poem that multiply after the two pioneer releases by Laurentius de Alopa in Florence and, more famously, by Aldus Manutius in Venice at the end of the century. Soon thereafter Musaeus emerges as a

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formidable competitor of Ovid for writers and artists interested in the legend – and often he wins. To help him gain advantage over the immensely popular Ovid is not only the general appeal of novelty, but also a fortunate error: when Musaeus became widely known in Western Europe, he was confused with the mythic character of the same name, the friend, disciple or even son of Orpheus and a legendary polymath, seer, poet and philosopher. In short, a primeval fountain of Greek wisdom. Indeed, in Aldus’ edition as in others, Hero and Leander is printed together with literature attributed to Orpheus, a coupling that both evinces and extols the prestige of Musaeus’ poem. By allowing it to become an alternative or a complement to Ovid, its dissemination in Western Europe ends the split that characterizes the medieval reception of the legend. My study, in turn, ends with the publication of Musaeus by Aldus, which is the most decisive factor in propelling these changes. The book is organized into four chapters. The first deals with the Roman world, where the legend apparently came to be a classic in the Augustan period and quickly spread outside literature into the visual and the performing arts. An intriguing hallmark of Roman treatments is the privilege they tend to allot to Leander and his swimming: to the youth capable of an athletic feat rather than to the maiden forced to wait for him and capable only of love and lament. With Musaeus, the subject of the second chapter, the balance is redressed. Though Leander remains the chief protagonist and monopolizes the poet’s sympathy, Hero plays an active, even transgressive role on the wedding night, and her suicide seals the poem, achieving the lovers’ definitive reunion. Interest in the story’s ending increases in medieval versions of the legend, both in Western Europe and in Byzantium. European authors both idealize the lovers’ demise and concern themselves with its moral and religious purport, while Byzantine writers develop almost exclusively the romantic implications of the love-in-death motif that they find in Musaeus. These two sets of authors are the focus of Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 respectively. In Chapter 3 I deal with medieval narratives from France, Italy, Germany and the Low Countries, and the Iberian peninsula, the areas in which the tale has most currency. This chapter is significantly longer than the others because it contains fuller

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citations of texts that are not as readily available as Ovid or Musaeus and because these regions and this time period provide the richest amount of materials pertaining to the legend. Its success was due to the interpretive possibilities that the extramarital liaison of Hero and Leander could offer as an emblem of courtly love on the one hand, and as the illustration of the dangers and immorality of erotic passion on the other. Connected to these issues are perceptions of the respective roles of Hero and Leander in the relationship: who is to be admired or blamed the most? An undercurrent of misogyny pervades several texts, but is forcefully rebuffed by one of the most passionate narrators and interpreters of the story, the late medieval French writer Christine de Pizan. In the East, on the other hand, no misogynous slant affects readings of the tale. As I show in the final chapter, two main concerns of Greek-speaking authors are to engage with Musaeus’ poem by means of subtle allusions and linguistic borrowings and to elaborate on his presentation of the lovers’ deaths. One author in the Byzantine tradition even imagines the pair in their afterlife, down in Hades, where they can love forevermore without meeting with obstacles. The prominence of the lovers’ deaths across medieval literature is reflected also in pictorial images which take the tragic end rather than Leander’s swimming as their subject. This study is intertextual in the broadest sense: it seeks to unearth the relations that versions of the legend entertain with one another, regardless of authorial ‘intention’ or even awareness. For intertextuality to exist it suffices that the reader recognizes the presence of one text embedded in another, whether or not the author of the second consciously worked the first into it.12 The relationship between texts, however, is only one facet in the history of the appropriations of a legend by disparate authors and in disparate media and milieus. More largely cultural and ideological forces, generic pressures and individual idiosyncrasies will have to be considered. The goal of covering the story’s main ingredients both in individual versions and over an extended time period, in other words, of writing a chapter on the history of its reception, calls primarily for a thematic approach, the most apt to reveal continuities and changes in the reworking of a tale in a variety of contexts. However, close attention has also been paid to diction, style and even

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textual problems when they significantly bear on thematic analysis. In such cases and whenever the argument requires, I have printed the original alongside the translation, which otherwise appears alone for reasons of space as well as to save the book from looking like a Tower of Babel.13 THE (NEBULOUS) ORIGINS OF THE TALE AND ITS (NEBULOUS) LITERARY BEGINNINGS The first exercise in which I will engage is a hopeless one: by what channel did the story enter literature and when? A depressing lack of evidence allows only tentative answers. Related conundrums include: where did the legend originate? And which ones of its components found favour in its first literary consecrations? Every student of the tale’s adventures in antiquity faces these stumbling blocks, and in recent times almost everyone has admitted that short of new discoveries, of papyri, objects or testimonies of other kinds, only speculative advances can be hoped for. In the state of our knowledge both the legend’s pre-literary origins and its entry into literature present only misty contours. The following observations have no pretense to originality. They merely serve to offer a hypothetical historical background against which to read the first fully documented treatments of the legend, which will be the subjects of the opening two chapters. The tale is not attested in archaic or classical Greek poetry. This could suggest that it is not as old as other Greek myths. Though we cannot exclude that it circulated orally earlier, scholars tend to agree that it originated in the region of the Hellespont after the construction of the monumental lighthouse of Alexandria (the ‘Pharos’, from the name of the island where it stood) in the early third century BC , because, subsequently, more lighthouses came to dot the Mediterranean shores. The legend appears connected specifically with the building of a lighthouse in Sestos or with the several on the two opposite banks of the Dardanelles. It is also likely to have roots in local cult, as seems suggested in Hero’s investiture as a priestess of Aphrodite in Musaeus’ version.14 The legend, in other words, is aetiological: it explains and expands on existing realities.15 By the

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time of Augustus it had become the claim to fame of its site, as is demonstrated by the ‘tower of Hero’, which, according to the geographer Strabo, was still visible in Sestos. The monument’s nickname reflects the renown of Hero around the region.16 A side comment on terminology appears necessary at this point. Considering the tale’s strong tie to local history, perhaps ‘legend’ is a more accurate term than ‘myth’. However, I am using the two interchangeably (as well as more generic terms, such as ‘story’ or ‘tale’) in the interest of variety, because their definitions are the subject of continuing discussion. Furthermore, already in the judgement of the sixth-century mythographer Fulgentius, the story had mythic status. Fulgentius included it in his collection titled Mythologiae. And further back, six centuries earlier, Leander was elected as a mythic paradigm for lovers in Roman poetry. But how did the tale become known to Roman poets? It is possible that a Greek antiquarian of local traditions committed it to writing sometime in the Hellenistic period.17 Then, one or more poets, in search of new exciting topics of song, reworked this version into Greek verse, these efforts giving it literary status. The legend would indeed appeal to Hellenistic taste because of its foundation in regional realities, its novelty (it does not bear the stigma of the ‘much-trodden path’, as Callimachus would say) and, especially, its subject matter: a love story with a tragic ending. Who those first poets were and when exactly in the Hellenistic period this song acquired literary dignity, or even where, whether in Greece or already in Rome, is, however, highly uncertain. Three fragments seem germane to the story. One, on a papyrus from Hermopolis now in Berlin, is desperately lacunose though a few words – love, the expanse of the sea, fear of it, night and, most significantly, a tower – strongly suggest that it belonged to a poem concerned with the tale. The papyrus dates to the fourth century AD , but the poem is generally attributed to the third century BC , though some prefer a later date.18 The main speaking voice appears to have been not a character but an outside narrator who tells the story from beginning to end. The second fragment is on a papyrus at the John Rylands Library in Manchester and is dated to the first century AD , but the text it

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contains probably dates from one or two centuries earlier. The name Leander appears, though with the spelling Laandros, which has puzzled critics.19 The narrative might have featured both lovers praying on the evening of Leander’s last swim: Hero for the stars not to shine and vie with her lamp and Leander for the Evening Star to help him on his crossing; alternatively, Hero alone invoking the stars, or else lamenting over Leander’s dead body.20 The poetic fragment in the third papyrus from Oxyrhynchus and dated to the third century AD , seems to contain the report of a dirge delivered by a woman as well as references to a storm and to a corpse.21 The verses might be Hellenistic and their subject Hero and Leander, specifically the portion of the tale following Leander’s death. The attribution of the fragment to the legend has been disputed on the basis that ‘Hellespont’ is the only proper name that appears in it and the strait is the theatre of other tragic deaths in Greek myth: of Hecuba’s son Polydorus and of Laodamia’s beloved husband Protesilaus. The objections, however, are inconclusive.22 If the lines deal with Hero and Leander, we are confronted with the legend’s early dissemination across genres, for this fragment differs from the other two because it consists of iambic verses, not hexameters: it comes from a dramatic rather than a narrative composition. Scholars have suggested a tragedy, but the simplicity of the storyline does not lend itself to a full tragic plot (when modern authors adapt the legend to the theatre, they have to invent episodes and to introduce new characters so as to enliven and complicate the action). It seems more plausible to think of a mime.23 Critics variously postulate that the fragments of the papyri in Manchester and in Berlin contain sections of a hypothetical Hellenistic model from which Ovid, as well as Virgil and other Augustan poets, drew inspiration. Sceptics abound, however.24 In particular, a dissenting voice has indicated that the correspondences between Ovid’s treatment and the fragment in the Berlin papyrus are too slight and general to prove the former’s dependence on the latter. The same scholar recognizes in the fragment’s diction turns of phrases that might suggest a much later date than even the late Hellenistic period, perhaps as late as the fifth century.25 If this is the case, Ovid and the other Augustan poets who treated the legend

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could not have used it. But we enter too shadowy a realm. We cannot exclude either that there were many more Greek poems on the subject than we can gauge and that one or more of those lost creations were the triggers of poetry in Latin. One possible fact, however, emerges from this dangerously speculative review: the central presence of Hero. In two of the three fragments she seems to star as the main character, and she appears in the third papyrus as well. This liking for a woman in love – waiting, praying, lamenting – fits Hellenistic literary taste. But as soon as the legend was appropriated by Roman poets, her displays of love and passion, with all their melodramatic potential, entered in competition with Leander’s flamboyant feat of swimming. We shall see this development in the first chapter.

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

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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

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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.

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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 e´lan, his overconfident claim that in his mistress’ presence no weather hazard

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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

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The Myth of Hero and Leander

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

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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 moralise´ 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 to brood over a figurative wind, the suspected fickleness of his love (95 – 6). Her expression of social inadequacy, sandwiched as it is between this groundless worry and the longer outburst of jealousy that it sets off (101– 19), belongs to an unfounded train of thought. Her ‘Thracian complex’ might be only or mainly in her mind. The superficial treatment Ovid gives to the familial obstacle has invited critics to speculate whether it was coeval with the legend and in what form. One view is that Leander’s parents functioned as opponents already in the original, local tale. Their role has been connected to the historical prominence of Abydos over Sestos: as the wealthier party and the residents of the more powerful city, they objected to the alliance with a lesser family.21 Alternatively, the opposition came from Hero’s father, who assigned her to the priesthood of Aphrodite.22 When the

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The Myth of Hero and Leander

story made its way into literature (and detached itself from local realities), the reasons for the prohibition to marry were lost.23 The oral roots of the legend, however, have been understood as militating against the presence of the parental obstacle in its original core.24 In folktales facts are not always accounted for by rational logic. Sometimes they are just plugged in as facts requiring no explanation as to why they have been deemed relevant or particularly pertinent to a tale. To defend the thesis that in the earliest version of the story the only obstacle was the sea, a critic has adduced the medieval German ballad Es waren zwei Ko¨nigskinder (‘There were two royal children’), which has a strikingly similar plotline – a lad swims to his beloved guided by her light, but a mean figure quenches it and so he dies; the girl finds his body and drowns herself – and in which the only reason for the lovers’ difficulty to meet is a perilous stretch of water: ‘They loved each other dearly. They could not come together. The water was far too deep’.25 A rational reader might ask: why did the two not marry if the only obstacle to their union was geography? The ballad does not bother to explain. Along this line of reasoning, it would be at a later stage, when the legend of Hero and Leander acquired literary status, that the need was felt to give a plausible motivation for the lovers’ predicament by adding a social impediment to the material one. The argument that a tale originating in popular lore escapes the strictures of rational logic is sound; but this does not rule out the possible presence of parental opposition in the Ur-version of the legend, because that motif is widespread, uncomplicated and common in folktales, and could therefore have entered the tale at an early stage. In fact, one version of the German ballad does contain the motif.26 Several French and Canadian songs inspired by the Hero and Leander theme explain the imprisonment of the girl in the tower by her father’s fear that she might take a lover.27 And, in an Italian variation on the story, Malgherita and the Hermit by the writer and collector of fairytales Giovanni Francesco Straparola (1480 – 1557), the girl’s brothers become her enemies and cause her death at sea one night while she is swimming to her lover. For these reasons I am inclined to believe that parental opposition is coeval with the legend.28 But, we must ask, coming from whose

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family? I will tackle this tricky question in the next chapter, on the Greek poet Musaeus, since he puts more emphasis than his Roman predecessor on the parental obstacle. Ovid’s failure to develop the Romeo and Juliet motif has displeased at least one critic.29 But, as I hope to show in the following sections, its dismissal has a poetic rationale: it allows the two letters to focus more sharply on the psychology of the frustrated lovers.

Hero’s swinging mood It is the swelling sea that keeps Leander ashore, but will Hero believe this? His words in the first 50 lines or so suggest that he thinks she will not, for he devotes most of his efforts to persuading her that nothing else detains him. He starts off by protesting that he would rather come in person but that the gods prevent his crossing and urges her to accept his claim as true by stressing that they see exactly the same sight: ‘You see yourself the sky, blacker than pitch, and the waves troubled by the winds and hardly approachable by hollow ships’ (18. 7– 8). He continues to explain why he did not board the only boat leaving the harbour, then goes on to express frustration at having to employ his hand to write rather than swim and tells her that he made three vain attempts to dive into the sea. He even seeks to convey to her the rumbling noise (47) of the wind that rejects his prayers and whips the waves. Leander’s apology fails to convince Hero. She marches to the drummer of her own emotions, following, as she writes, her violent shifts of mood, which Leander’s words do little or nothing to affect.30 The other two female protagonists of the double epistles, Helen and Cydippe, are stirred by their suitors’ writing and engage with it, for instance, by commenting on its power and effects (21. 150; 212; 17. 1; 111), deceitfulness or sincerity (21. 145; 17. 36), and details of content (21. 207; 17. 41; 44; 51 – 2; 65). The letters steer their moods and actions. So Cydippe, in response to Acontius’ request that he should come and visit her (21. 207), first feels wronged and even hurt by his weapon-like words, worthy of his name, ‘Javelin’ (208– 12);31 but soon she changes her mind, and again referring to the letter, exclaims: ‘Would that you might sit by me, as you yourself were pleading’ (227). Helen likewise replies to Paris’ request, ‘You ask that

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The Myth of Hero and Leander

we speak of these things in secret, teˆte-a`-teˆte’ (17. 261), by telling him that he is too hasty. Hero, in contrast, does not actively engage with Leander’s letter.32 True, she is not required to acquiesce or refuse because his goal is not to seduce her but to reassure her and keep her company. In other words, while Helen and Cydippe must come to grips with their suitors’ written advances and take action in response, Hero is not urged to do anything but wait and be persuaded of Leander’s love. But he still seeks to influence her disposition, to foster sympathy and, I think, he does not succeed in this. The only time Hero relates to Leander’s letter empathetically is when she writes that she chides the stormy sea ‘in words almost your own’ (19. 22), that is, the words Leander has penned (18. 37 – 46).33 But to his opening protest that he wished he could come if only the waves should drop, she does not rejoin, in sympathetic unison, ‘oh, the unrelenting waves!’, but asks him to do exactly what he said he could not do: come! (19. 2). She mentions the savage force of the elements only 20 lines later (21) and only as one possible reason why Leander is loitering. Besides, there looms the fear that he might be unwilling (24), that his love might wander like the wind (96), that another love might hold him (101 – 6). She finally settles on faulting the elements but this of her own accord, not under the soothing influence of Leander’s letter: ‘But you won’t sin and my fear is empty. It is the jealous storm that fights to prevent you from coming. Wretched me! How big are the waves that hit the shore, and the day has disappeared, covered by a dark cloud!’ (119– 22). After writing these words, Hero does not relapse into her previous fear. Her acquired confidence launches her on a mythological tour de force in which the well-read girl (136) for the first time displays her erudition. Casting reproaches against the Hellespont and Neptune, she lists the mythological characters relevant to them name by name and ends by stating her familiarity with poetry explicitly (136 – 8). The self-gained assurance that Leander is faithful invigorates her mind, as it seems, stimulating her literary memory.34 Hero’s confidence contrasts her with Penelope in the first epistle of the collection. Odysseus’ wife, to be sure, is wary of weather hazards as of other dangers: ‘Whatever perils the sea contains, whatever the earth, I suspect these are the cause of such a long delay’ (1. 73 – 4).35

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But she instantly adds: ‘While foolishly I fear these things, you might, as men are wont, be the captive of a foreign love’ (75 – 6). Dreading storms is ridiculous, considering that Odysseus is more likely to be enjoying a lady’s company. After tilting the balance in favour of a rival as the cause of his detention, Penelope cannot recover confidence again but can only make a wish: ‘May I be wrong!’ she says (79), not, like Hero, ‘my fear is empty’. For Penelope foolish is fear of the sea, for Hero empty is that of a rival. The different dispositions of the two heroines nicely fit their age, the age of their love and the duration of their solitude. Penelope is in midlife and has been separated from her husband for 20 years. Her fading looks seriously worry her. She says so in the last two lines of her letter, giving her fear prominence: ‘As for me, who was a girl when you left, even if you should come quickly, you will find that I have become an old woman’. Given her mindset, it is understandable that she finds it difficult to believe that her husband has been prevented from coming home only, or even mainly, by hurricanes. Hero, on the other hand, is young, her love is young and Leander has failed to come to her for only seven nights. Though this short time feels like an eternity to her and though her passion launches her on a fiery outburst of jealousy (19. 101 – 12), which in length and fervour by far outweighs Penelope’s sober expression of concern (1. 75 – 80), deep down she knows that Leander loves her and she can persuade herself, without needing his protestations, that sea and winds alone are to blame.

Should he stay or should he go? An essential theme of the two letters is: ‘should Leander stay or go’? As suggested above, his fearless swimming is tainted, though faintly, with recklessness in Amores 2. 16, which alludes to his death by mentioning the ‘blind way’ that stopped him. This poem is in the background of the two Heroides, as pointed verbal and thematic parallels strongly indicate:36 just as Ovid in his mistress’ company will find any journey molle (‘kind’, Am. 2. 16. 20), so does Leander, energized by Hero’s lamp, find the waves mollior (‘kinder’) than they actually are or than he claims they are (Her. 18. 88); the eyes of Ovid’s mistress are his stars (Am. 2. 16. 44) like Hero’s torch for Leander

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The Myth of Hero and Leander

(Her. 18. 149 – 56); and, when the latter pledges soon to make real his promise to come ( pignora polliciti non tibi tarda dabo, Her. 18. 192), we think of Ovid exhorting his mistress to do the same (incipe pollicitis addere facta tuis, Am. 2. 16. 48). On a broader thematic level, the nature and the consequences of Leander’s boldness, only touched upon in that poem, are at the centre of the two Heroides. The correspondents spend much emotional energy wavering between the urge of their impatient longing, which would plunge Leander into the storm, and the call of prudence, but they settle differently. It is true that both letters end on a note of restraint: no swimming until the sea becomes quiet. The similarity of the message, however, is only superficial. Hero means to wait, while Leander’s passion overrides caution even as he writes, prefiguring his death. As has been noted,37 the two epistles are exceptional in the collection because they do not conclude with ‘come’, but with ‘since you cannot come, may this letter keep you company in my stead’. Their exceptionality applies also within the smaller set of the three double epistles. In contrast to Hero, Helen and Cydippe end with both the suggestion that they will soon meet their suitors and a stated emphasis that their writing is over. So Helen: ‘My hand is tired to write. We’ll talk through my companions, who counsel me’ (Her. 17. 265 – fin., summarized); and so Cydippe: ‘My hand is sick and there is nothing more to write, since I long to be with you’ (Her. 21. 245 – fin., summarized). The strongest contrast, however, is with Penelope’s epistle, which begins: ‘There is no point in writing back: come yourself!’ (Her. 1. 2), and almost closes with a similar exhortation: ‘Come quickly!’ (110). While for Penelope a letter will not do, for both Hero and Leander it is an ersatz, though pale, of the loved one.38 But the movement of the young man’s writing and its ending suggest that for him the ersatz will not be enough, not even temporarily. Leander starts off in a cautious disposition by wishing that, instead of entrusting his greetings to the letter, he could bring them himself but only ‘if the waves of the sea should abate’ (Her. 18. 2).39 He does not consider swimming under the present circumstances. Yet, he almost instantly proceeds to tell that he would have boarded the

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boat of the only audax sailor who braved the sea and that he was deterred not by prudence but by fear of being discovered (9– 12). Though he has made no more attempts at swimming after he was almost drowned three times, he seems only half resigned to wait, as is suggested by the reckless wish he pronounces early in his letter: ‘If only Daedalus should give me daring wings, though the shore of Icarus lies far from here! I would suffer anything, if only I could lift my body to the sky’ (49 – 52). The ill-boding myth that fills Leander’s invocation betrays the intensity of his longing, which speaks ahead of him, formulating a death sentence. This lover’s amorous impatience grows stronger in the course of his writing. As it nears its end, the prospect of the approaching winter with its gales incites him further: Either I do not know how bold (temerarius) I am, or even then a love not cautious (non cautus) will send me into the deep. And so as you don’t think that I have made this promise because the time is far away, I will give you instant tokens of my pledge. Let the sea be swollen still for some nights! I will try to cross the unwilling waters. Either my happy boldness ( felix audacia) will find me safe, or death will be the end of this anxious love! (Her. 18. 189–96)

Leander will not come back ashore if the surge should submerge him, as in his three past attempts, but is ready to drown and fantasizes about his death. Though he eventually both recedes from this thought and checks his impatience, the closure of his letter has a strong forward momentum, which conveys his inability to wait. He does not say, ‘I will wait as long as the sea swells’, but he asks Hero to join her prayers to his so that the sea may be quiet for just time enough to get to her (203 – 5); he will be ‘cautious’ (cautus) – but on the way back (210). The last lines intimate that soon he will go in spite of the conditional, ‘When the storm will allow, I will use the oars of my body’ (215). For this wish seals his letter: ‘And I beg that I may follow it myself in the shortest time (minima [. . . ] mora)’. Hero is more reconciled with waiting. She ends her own epistle: ‘Meanwhile, since the waves cannot be crossed by swimming, may the letter that I send you soften the hateful delay (invisas [. . . ] moras)’. She does not pen something like, protinus ut venias praecor (‘I beg you,

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The Myth of Hero and Leander

come straightaway!’), and instead hopes that her writing will keep him from swimming the impassable sea. The term mora signs both epistles but, while Leander burns with eagerness to follow his quickly, Hero restrains him and concludes with the wish that her letter might soothe him. Though all along she dithers between asking him to brave the elements so as to prove his commitment – like the Leander of the Art of Love – and pleading for caution,40 by the end fear prevails and with it patience. Let us follow the movements of her mind. The first two lines sharply contrast with the last two and conjure up the beginning of Penelope’s epistle: ‘Come, Leander, so I can have in your presence the greetings that you sent me in words!’ Hero’s exhortation connects to Leander’s opening lines but in order to put pressure on him. As I have suggested, she has no thought for the stormy sea, which is much on his mind (Her. 18. 2). The written ersatz will not do. Her impatient and all-absorbing love (Her. 19. 4; 15 – 6), the love of a woman, who lacks the distractions that entertain men’s lives (9– 16), tolerates no mora: ‘I will die, if you add even a small delay’ (8). Her memory of a recurrent erotic dream further fuels her frustration with Leander’s absence, prompting this ironic rejoinder: ‘Why, sluggish loiterer, are you so often away from me?’ (70).41 Admittedly the sea is rough now, but the previous night it was calmer (71 –2), yet Leander let it pass: ‘Why did the night go by? Why did you fear something that would not come? Why is the opportunity for such a good journey gone and you didn’t grab it?’ (73 –4). She continues in the same vein, blaming him for his fearfulness. Her caution is in the past, when he was supposedly more – nay, too – daring, for which she reprimanded him (83 –8). Now she scolds his timidity, perhaps firing back at his proud mention of his swimming, a labour dedicated to her (18. 95 –6): ‘Where is that great swimmer, who scorned the waters?’ (19. 90) Suddenly, her outburst subsides: ‘But be rather as you are now than as you used to be. Make your way when the sea is calm, safely’ (Her. 19. 91–2). The reason for this abrupt change of mind is revealed in the next line: provided our love is the same! A fear stronger than her passionate impatience takes over, namely fear that the cause for Leander’s absence might be not the winds but a wind-like love. This worry makes everything else, even his absence, pale by comparison (101).

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When, in the course of her nightmarish paroxysm of jealousy, she calls for his presence again, she does not blame his cowardice as before but wants to make sure that it is not another woman who keeps him from her but only the wind or his father (115– 16), implying that if this is so, she can wait. After fear of betrayal is dispelled, however, Hero becomes impatient again. She reads the sputtering of her desk lamp as a good omen, which awakens her hope and pushes her to exhort Leander to return to his ‘camp’ like a good soldier of love and to cease acting the deserter (Her. 19. 157): ‘There is nothing to fear!’ she says (159), echoing her earlier protest (73). But soon she draws back and turns for a second time toward caution, as she compares Leander with Jason and Paris, who abducted the woman they desired instead of leaving her every day – but they also sailed, it occurs to her, while Leander swims, and with swimming there comes more danger (180). This awareness instantly changes her disposition from reproachful (you should dare to kidnap me!) to apprehensive: ‘But, young victor over the swelling waters, so despise the sea as to fear it!’ (181 – 2). Like the first strong reversal (at 91 –2), this shift of mood is emphatically marked by the adversative tamen. Hero wavers once again toward the end of her letter. Though more firmly settled on caution (she spends six lines discouraging Leander’s attempts), she wishes that her warning will not persuade her lover, that he will be more courageous than her words want him to be (Her. 19. 187 – 8). It takes the awareness of a chilling fear each time she turns toward the sea and, more decisively, the recollection of a dream in which she saw a dead dolphin cast ashore, to put a definitive end to her fluctuations (191 – 204). Her two dreams have opposite effects: the first, exhilarating vision increases her impatience; the second and gloomy one urges her to embrace prudence. In the last seven lines she shows that she is resigned to wait and deters Leander from a rash attempt, asking him to swim only when he can do so safely.42 While at the beginning she pleads with him to come and make his letter real, at the end she counts on the consolatory power of her own writing. Taken together, the two epistles strongly suggest that Leander will undertake his last swim driven not by Hero’s words but by his

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The Myth of Hero and Leander

own character and love.43 It is true that four lines before the end her hope for a calm sea takes over her mind and abruptly redirects her thoughts: ‘Yet (tamen) the beaten waves give hope that peace is near’ (Her. 19. 207). But this surge of optimism or, rather, of wishful thinking, does not wipe away her fear and caution, which have the last word. It is, in the end, not her letter that kindles Leander’s audacia. In fact, one critic has argued that even while Hero is writing, Leander, ‘having rashly followed his letter across the sea, already lies dead on the shore below’.44 Leander’s last words make this timing quite possible. But, even if we are supposed to postpone his departure, it will not happen because the waters will have become swimmable, as was Hero’s wish, but because his frustration and passion plunge him headlong into them. Ovid intimates that Hero would be willing to keep on writing ‘softening letters’ as long as the sea keeps swelling, but that Leander will not.45 Soon his non cautus love will drown him, as is suggested by the evocation of death that accompanies his two fantasies of braving the elements: as Icarus, endowed with audaces alas (‘daring wings’, Her. 18. 49), and as a temerarius lover, whose audacia might meet with success but also kill him – and his thoughts dwell only on the tragic alternative (195 –202). The repetition of audax and cognates, with their prevalent negative connotations, and the insisted coupling of daring with death cast Leander not as courageous but as reckless.46

Leander remembers: and shows off In Hero’s absence Leander has only one pleasure: to go down memory lane (Her. 18. 54 – 5). He takes refuge in the recollection of the first night of love, his swimming, her running to the shore to meet him, their kisses and embraces, and ‘the rest’, which ‘night knows [. . .] and we and the privy tower’ (104 – 5). Leander’s reminiscence, which fills the central section of his letter, has two main narrative purposes. First, it builds a stark contrast between past and present, between that happy crossing and his current predicament. That night was illumined by a caressing moonlight and enveloped in calm and silence: ‘The moon gave my path a quivering light, like a serviceable companion of my journey’

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(Her. 18. 59 –60). The enamored swimmer bathed in its rays, which dominate the evocative nocturne: The waves were shining with the reflection of the moon, and in the silent night there was the light of day. Not a voice, not a whisper ever reached my ears but the murmur of the water cut by my body. (Her. 18. 77–80)

The stillness of the sea, the almost total absence of sound, enhances the radiance of the moonlight that surrounded Leander on his first passage. His recollection seems to be coloured by the embellishing power of memory, for the sea might not have been perfectly calm after all (18. 88). The idealized quiet of that night remembered with longing makes the rough noise of the present storm sound all the louder. The sea ‘is seething with hoarse waters’ (26) and Boreas, whose name was derived from the Greek for ‘scream’ and taken to suggest the sharp noise with which this wind blew, ‘rumbles’ (47) in response to Leander’s prayer.47 The second important function of the reminiscence is to give an account of the climactic night of love which, in the temporal setting of the two letters, could only be narrated in the form of a recollection in the voice of either protagonist. Ovid chooses Leander. Is this in order to save the lady from a willing indulgence in memories of lovemaking? Indeed, the attribution of erotic dreams to Hero might push this line of argument.48 Like Penelope in the Odyssey, she is a compulsive dreamer but, unlike the Homeric character, who has a vision of Odysseus lying by her side only when he is actually very close, one flight of stairs below her room (Od. 20. 88 – 90), she dreams of having sex with Leander on a regular basis: But when the longest part of the night has passed for me in such delusions, stealthily sleep comes to my weary eyes. Perhaps you sleep with me, though unwillingly, wicked one, and though you yourself do not want to come, you come. For now, it seems to me that I see you already swimming near and putting your wet arms on my shoulders, and that I see myself already giving you the accustomed coverings for your drenched shoulders and warming your breast clasped to mine and many other things, which a modest tongue must not say. To do them is a delight, but to say them makes one blush. (Her. 19. 55 –64)49

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Hero uses the present tense, suggesting the dream’s recurrence. Apparently it comes to her when she falls asleep from weariness of fantasizing about Leander’s visit. She lives waiting for him and night after night she imagines his journey to her step by step, in a narrative that matches his recollection by repeating key moments of his crossing: has he left; has he taken off his clothes; now he swims; now he might be in the middle of the sea (Her. 19. 41 – 50). Hero stretches her eyes toward his coming and hears it in every noise that reaches her (53 – 4). The last steps of his journey, their embrace and the ‘many other things’, however, materialize only in her nocturnal vision. She hopes to bring into the present the bliss that Leander recalls as past, but the switch to the dreaming mode clears her mind from active and conscious participation in increasingly erotic imaginings. Yet this reading of Hero’s dream activity must be qualified. If it were meant to preserve the modesty that she claims for herself, she would, in fact, step back earlier from detailing her vision. As it is, she restrains herself only when having to mention the acts of love; and even so she lets her desire run free: ‘To do them is a delight’. This phrase tints her reticence with the erotic pleasure she has been savouring in recalling her dream and savoured still after her self-imposed silence: ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’ Though less expansive, her dwelling on love’s joys matches Leander’s in his reminiscence, which also strikes a note of modesty (Her. 18. 105–6) but without the sententious tone of Hero’s self-censorship. Thus, the fact that it falls on Leander to recollect the first night of love seems not, or not primarily, related to concerns with feminine decorum. Ovid’s choice might instead be owing to a different concern: that of sustaining readerly desire. An effective way of prolonging desire is by deferring its satisfaction, by lingering on the movement – Leander’s swimming – towards fulfilment. In fact, Leander’s narrative privileges his forward-looking crossing over the reward at its end. In the longest section (Her. 18. 55 – 96) he is all bent toward the future and filled with excited anticipation, which restores his strength (83 – 7) as he cleaves the sea. He recalls the labour of his arms striking the waves (95) and his increasing eagerness the closer the shore appeared (91 –2). His emphasis on his going expresses his expectancy and fuels the reader’s. Neither one lives in the present but

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both are projected onward and take pleasure in anticipating the joy that will crown the journey.50 The love night in comparison is granted a small number of lines (97 – 118), of which fewer are dedicated to the actual lovemaking (105 – 10) than to its preliminaries and aftermath: the pair’s meeting on the beach and their separation at sunrise (97 –104; 111 –18). But the preference Leander gives to his crossing is not only designed to keep the readers riveted to his narrative. It also fits his self-centredness and vanity. While Hero lives waiting for him, he thinks only of his going and his frustration with his unmanly imprisonment: of his thwarted attempts to enter the water rather than of the lonely and secluded life of the woman he loves. His recollection serves to give voice to his narcissism, which feeds on his prowess as swimmer and writer alike.51 Leander’s narrative is filled with athletic pride, a signature trait of his character. His hand is good at ‘whipping the sea’ (Her. 18. 23).52 Even now that the storm rages, he has made three attempts; and should the weather cooperate, he would need no ‘artificial help’, call it a ship or the Golden Fleece, to cross the Hellespont.53 He takes care to emphasize his vast experience of the sea: he is acquainted with dolphins and fish (131– 2) and swims across known (6), accustomed waters (22). He further conveys the ease and expertise with which he cleaves the waves by minimizing his trepidation. While Musaeus’ character needs to encourage himself (Hero and Leander 245– 50), Ovid’s claims that he took fear off at once together with his clothes (57). He strikes the sea powerfully with pliant arms (58), or, in a translation that fully renders the Latin, ‘I drove my strong supple arms slowly and perseveringly through the yielding water’.54 The surge gives way to him of its own accord (76), as to a sea god.55 And even when his arms get weary, he still finds the strength ( fortiter, 84) to lift himself to the top of the water. Not content with congratulating himself on his athleticism, Leander offers it as a spectacle. His swimming is a performance with Hero as ‘watcher’ (Her. 18. 94): ‘I strive to please you, my lady, by swimming, and I throw (iacto) my arms for the benefit of your eyes (oculis [. . . ] tuis)’ (95 – 6). The wording highlights Leander’s theatricality in addition to enacting his amorous efforts. He seeks to ‘please’

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Hero, that is, to obtain her appreciation as spectator as well as her erotic favours;56 ‘by swimming’, that is, a strenuous endeavour that demonstrates his commitment to her, but also an almost animal display of physical strength, aimed to impress a possible mate and to entice her by betokening foreplay: the arms that ply the waves will soon clasp her, the heaving body that cuts into the waters with the undulating movement of a dolphin will undulate on top of her . . . Leander’s showiness in advertising his capable body reveals itself unmistakably in his choice of iacto, which connotes display and boastfulness, for the movement of his arms beating the waves,57 and grammatically in the dative of advantage that spells out the goal of his crossing: it is intended for Hero’s eyes, rather than simply as a means of transportation to her. Why all this ostentation? For seven days Leander has failed to prove to Hero that he loves her by swimming, as he had done night after night (his insistence on his familiarity with the sea also aims to remind her of how many times he has swum to her). Hence he re-performs his feat of swimming in his writing. He equates the two acts – swimming and writing – early in his letter, thus giving a programmatic force to the equivalence: though his hand is better at cutting the waves, ‘it is also an apt servant of my feelings’ (Her. 18. 24). His reminiscence of the first night provides him with an opportunity for showing off in words since he has been barred from doing so in deeds. He demonstrates his hand’s aptitude at writing by producing an account of his swimming that is flattering both to him and, I will now add, to his lady, according to the dictates of the Art of Love. Leander recalls the words with which he praised Hero’s beauty to the Moon goddess, claiming that it was second only to Venus’ and her own and urging her to see for herself if she does not believe him (Her. 18. 66 – 74). By reporting his words in direct speech, he makes them reverberate and seeks to enhance their impact on his addressee.58 He flatters Hero further by playing down his stamina and attributing part of it to her: ‘And already my arms under both shoulders are tired, but strongly I lift myself up to the top of the water. When I saw a light afar, “my fire is in it! That shore has my light”. And instantly strength came back to my tired arms and the waves seemed softer than they were’ (83 – 8). The real torch is also

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figurative: as Hero, the light of Leander’s love.59 Though he is far from admitting to his weakness (‘strongly I lift myself up’), he credits the Lamp that fuels his passion with rebuilding his muscles – in no time! Leander expatiates on the motif ‘your lamp gives me strength’ by producing another, even more flattering variation of it: ‘your lamp is my only guidance’. He will not follow Andromeda, the bright Crown, or the Bear, for ‘there is another light, much surer than these, and when it leads me, our love does not wander in the darkness’ (Her. 18. 155–6). Leander dismisses well-known astral beacons in favour of the light that Hero both provides (the lamp) and has in herself (the power to ignite love). The stars listed had been women who had earned exceptional lovers: Perseus, Bacchus and Jove. Yet Leander casts those richly favoured ladies aside because ‘our love has no use of stars available to everyone’ (150). As critics have noted, Ovid here reformulates Callimachus’ principle, ‘I hate the path trodden by many’, in erotic terms.60 In the same breath as Ovid issues a statement of poetics, Leander pays compliments both to himself, by vaunting his aristocratic taste in love, and to Hero, whom this most discriminating lover chooses over famous heroines turned into immortal stars.

Leander in the Heroides and in the Art of Love The brave swimmer thus acts as if he had read the Art of Love and in particular had studied his own role in it. He impresses his lady with his verbal display, all dedicated to proving his passion as was his fearless and muscular swimming. It is true that he has been loitering, which prompts Hero to accuse him of cowardliness. In this respect he does not quite meet the requirements of love’s soldiery.61 While the model lover and his own incarnation in Ovid’s manual of seduction will brave anything, he has been idling on the shore, waiting for a calmer sea. He has tried the crossing thrice, but when beaten by the waves he has not persevered. Nonetheless, he promises Hero that soon he will swim again, even in a swelling sea; that he is about to make up for his inadequacy and to impersonate the intrepid character of the Art of Love. His pledge also chimes with Ovid’s prescription there: ‘Make promises galore’; ‘they cannot harm, and women are won by them’ (1. 443 – 4 and 631, paraphrased).

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These correspondences between the teachings of the magister amoris and Leander’s posturing could suggest that even the character of the Heroides does not illustrate the unconditional force of love with its proximity to death, as Leander does in Virgil and implicitly in Propertius, but embodies the tactician of Ovid’s treatise, who dares everything not because he is compelled by his passion but to prove it to his girl so as not to lose her.62 He has no choice but to (say that he will) swim, as Hero’s reply demonstrates by blaming his sluggishness. If he cannot persuade her that he will go, she might leave him. The boastful and ostentatious persona of the writer of Heroides 18 militates in favour of this reading. To push it further is the appearance of the marked term pignus, ‘token’, in conjunction with Leander’s pledge that he will swim: ‘And so as you don’t think that I have made this promise because the time is far away, I will give you instant tokens ( pignora) of my pledge’ (191 – 2). Pignora evokes the pignus amoris that the Leander of the Art of Love offers his lady by means of his heroic swimming, which is incited not by irresistible longing but by a desire to show to her that he cannot live without her (‘But you swam, so that she’d know your feeling’). The character of the Heroides, however, really cannot live without Hero. He describes himself as Odysseus when he longs for home on Calypso’s island. Kept prisoner by the sea like him, he imitates his response: ‘Sitting on a rock, I watch your shores, sadly, and where the body cannot take me, the mind does’ (18. 29 – 30), just as Odysseus watches the sea day in, day out from the shores of Ogygia, his only desire being to see the smoke rise from Ithaca’s chimneys.63 This merging of Leander with Odysseus yearning for his native land not only casts Hero(’s) as his own;64 it also moulds his longing on the strongest and prototypical expression of nostalgia in Greek myth, while suggesting by association that he, too, will soon brave an epic storm to reach his ‘native land’. True, it is Leander who presents himself as a romanticized Odysseus. He could be following yet another strategy recommended by the magister amoris: ‘Let your letter [. . .] carry words that imitate the lover’ (Art of Love 1. 439– 40). But Leander’s writing is not coldly calculating and insincere like the ‘words that imitate the lover’. His letter betrays strong emotions, the surge of which he cannot always

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control. When he pledges to make real his promise, for instance, the convoluted syntax conveys his agitated state.65 In the same context, he calls himself temerarius, which designates an impetuous lover.66 Unlike the more detached seducer of the Art of Love, whose promises are declaredly false, ‘perjuries of lovers’ (1. 633), this writer is earnestly drowned in passion. Of course his promise, for the time being, is only on a waxed tablet. But the readers, who know that he will fulfil it and die in the process, can testify to the truthfulness of his words even before they are turned into deeds. In addition, a telling feature of his pledge sets him in contrast to the seducer of Ovid’s manual. This gentleman will invoke as many gods as he wants to witness his empty oaths – all bound to be dispersed by the winds (1. 632– 4) – whereas Leander does not call on any god to testify to his sincerity; he does not even make an oath. Since lovers’ oaths are proverbially false, including in the Art of Love (1. 633 – 4), even the (hardly imaginable) reader who should not know the story’s ending will be inclined to take Leander’s oath-free pledge at face value. To sum up: there is no question that Leander in the Heroides follows the script of an elegiac lover, a soldier and a servant of love, who has been barred from his desired girl and is ready to suffer anything to prove his devotion;67 but this does not mean that his longing is not real and intense. He is not the same character as his namesake in the Art of Love, who braves the sea because he has no choice if he wants to keep his girl rather than because his passion urges him on. While in Ovid’s treatise Leander emblematizes the cynical aspect of elegiac love, in the Heroides he speaks for its romantic side.68 While in the Art of Love he swims to make Hero believe that he cannot spend one night without her, in the Heroides he is about to swim – and die – because he truly cannot spend one more night without her.69 FROM EMBLEM OF LUST TO BRIDEGROOM Leander’s exemplarity as lover kept its appeal in the Roman world. Seneca is almost certainly alluding to him in this stigmatization of lust, which he compares to anger: ‘Let him [who thinks that anger is a noble passion] also think that lust (libido) betokens a great soul: lust swims across straits, castrates flocks of boys, comes under the sword of

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a husband, despising death’ (On Anger 1. 21. 3). This is the first and only time in Roman literature that Leander’s amor is debased to libido.70 The degradation allows Seneca better to pair erotic desire with the other negative drives to which he assimilates anger: luxuria, avaritia, ambitio. Though the Stoic philosopher preaches the eradication of all the passions, including amor, perhaps, if he had placed this other-directed and non-materialistic affection alongside selfish and acquisitive urges such as avarice, he would have weakened the argument by ennobling anger.71 By using libido instead, Seneca runs no such risk. Leander reappears as the paragon of the burning lover, this time with positive connotations, in Statius’ epithalamium for Stella, an elegiac poet and the dedicatee of Book 1 of the Silvae, and for Violentilla, a young and rich widow. The speaker is Cupid, who explains that he has caused Stella to fall in love more fiercely than mythic characters: I saw the eager Hippomenes running down the harsh field, but even when he reached the post he was not so pale. I saw also the arms of the youth from Abydos rivaling the oars and I praised his hands and often made light when he swam. Yet his heat, which warmed the waters, was less than yours. Youth, you have surpassed the ancient loves. (Silvae 1. 2. 85–90)

Leander’s swim receives a more extensive treatment than Hippomenes’ race to win Atalanta and features the dedicated cooperation of Cupid himself. The god only ‘saw’ Hippomenes running, from a detached vantage point; but he involved himself in Leander’s crossing threefold: ‘I saw’, ‘I praised’, I made light’. The three verbs build a climax, which expresses Cupid’s increasing admiration for and participation in this lover’s feat. We might be puzzled by this preference given to Leander, who did not earn his bride by an athletic endeavour, like Hippomenes, but accomplished his nightly swimming to meet her in secret. We might be puzzled by the use of the Hero and Leander legend altogether in the context of a wedding song, both because their affair ended in death and because they were not permitted to marry. Their union, as described especially by Musaeus, is a non-wedding, marked by the absence of celebrations, including wedding songs

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(Hero and Leander 278).72 Ceremonially, Leander is the least adequate exemplar for a bridegroom. Why then did Statius choose him and give him first place? Stella is represented as a suitor who loves for the first time and uncompromisingly. No one took his heart until he met Violentilla, to whom he is devoted ‘with all his blood’ and whom alone he loves (1. 2. 170 – 1). No peril would have stopped him: Heracles’ labours or the Argonauts’ passage through the Clashing Rocks would have been worthwhile with Violentilla as the reward (38 – 40). The evocation of Leander fits Stella’s romantic bravery. Hippomenes did demonstrate the courage required of a lover by accepting Atalanta’s challenge, knowing that failure to outrun her would mean his death; but he won by cunning, and thanks to the help of Aphrodite, who gave him the three golden apples. Statius omits this detail and insists on the racer’s visible exhaustion, more flattering than guile for a wooer who has been ready to face dangers for his beloved. Unlike Hippomenes’ victory, Leander’s feat is unambiguously heroic.73 His exploitation in a context – a wedding – mismatched with his predicament and its dire consequences, suggests that his exemplarity as lover was so firmly established in contemporary Roman culture that it could easily override the secrecy of the arrangement and its tragic ending. There might be more at stake in the choice of the exemplar. Statius makes much of Stella’s gifts as elegiac poet, inviting Elegy herself to the wedding ceremony as the tenth Muse (1. 2. 7– 10) and fashioning the groom as a latter-day Ovid, who chose elegy declaredly over epic (96 –9). His behaviour as a suitor fits his poetic persona: he courted Violentilla in the fashion of an elegiac lover, with ‘tears and wakeful nights’ (196). The vates of love at last will no longer be locked out: he will have no more fear of ‘janitor, law or shame’ but will take his fill of the embrace he sought, still remembering ‘harsh nights’ (34 – 7).74 Since Leander was a model lover in the genre of elegy, could not mentioning him also point to the dedicatee’s poetic vocation? Stella the love poet and elegiac wooer lived by the dictates of Ovid’s Art of Love, facing Leander-like dangers. Now he can rest: after toiling and ‘crossing your hard way, you have reached the harbour’ (202 – 3). The erotic image of the haven, though commonplace, also resonates

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with the nautical metaphors that Ovid’s Leander deploys to express his longing for Hero (Her. 18. 205 – 8). Statius is indebted to Ovid’s treatment of the legend in other details. The heat of love protects Leander from the cold sea in the Heroides (18. 89 – 90) as in the Silvae. Both texts mention, and with the same term, the reward that repays the lover’s efforts (merces, Her. 19. 98 and Silvae 1. 2. 38); and the image of Cupid illuminating the way for the swimmer develops the conceit of love as guiding light in Heroides 18, where Hero’s lamp merges with Leander’s passion (155 – 6). In Statius the passion, externalized and personified, takes the shape of the god of love himself. Cupid’s role as helper fits the celebratory occasion, erasing even the slightest intimation of the tragic ending by suggesting that no matter how harsh the storms of love might have been, Stella has emerged victorious not in the sense that he has stopped loving, of course not, but because Cupid, the igniter of his passion, has always been there to give him strength (91 – 3). The association with a Leander who not only loves passionately but also swims assuredly and enjoys the protection of the god of love endows the dedicatee with the same exceptional favours. Cupid, who has caused Stella to feel his arrow even more sharply than had Leander, has always stayed by his side: no rough sea could ever drown him. The exemplar of Leander, however, fits Stella only for the period of courtship, until his wedding day. The mythic swimmer is not a model for the husband Stella but for his past persona as a suffering lover bearing the ‘yoke’ of his passion for many years (1. 2. 78). Cupid has helped him endure the fevers of love just as he has helped Leander brave the sea. But now that Stella has reached the harbour, he will no longer be either Leander or an elegiac poet-lover, for the two roles, as we have seen, merge: after his wedding the respectable and wellconnected man will devote his creative efforts to celebrate Domitian’s Dacian triumph and ‘recent victories’ (180– 1). Martial events, which the Leander-like suitor disdained in favour of elegy, will occupy the life of the married man. Some four centuries after Statius, Sidonius Apollinaris used the tale of Hero and Leander again in a wedding song, for Ruricius and Hiberia (11, titled Epithalamium). Speaking to his mother, Cupid

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vaunts his victory over the ‘proud Ruricius’ (62), just as in Statius where he boasts of having conquered Stella, who had long been sought in vain by many women as a groom for their daughters (Silvae 1. 2. 74 – 8).75 Sidonius echoes Statius also in his exploitation of Leander as mythic paradigm, though with a change of emphasis. While for the Flavian poet Leander is the touchstone against which to measure Stella’s passion, for Sidonius he serves to celebrate Ruricius’ appeal: ‘For him Dido would choose death by the sword, Phyllis by hanging, Evadne by fire and the girl from Sestos by sea’ (70). Even tragic suicides – even those caused by love deceived – are made to fit into the joyous celebrations as evidence of Ruricius’ irresistible attractiveness. Sidonius might be alluding to a poem by his compatriot Ausonius, Cupid Crucified, in which mythic women who died for love and still bear the tokens of their passion take their revenge on Cupid by tying him to a cross and asking his mother to whip him. ‘The girl from Sestos’ is among them, carrying her torch, the emblem of her love, and casting herself from the tower (22 – 3).76 Sidonius, however, mentions Hero right after a paradigm of marital devotion, Evadne (who does not appear in Ausonius’ list of heroines), rather than after Dido or Phyllis. The pairing glosses over the illegitimacy of Hero’s passion. As with Leander in Statius’ poem, the detail that Hero could not marry becomes irrelevant. Her tragic ending, which in fact was caused by the constraints imposed on a forbidden love, is made to resonate with the suicide of a lawfully wedded wife who could not bear to live on without her husband. HERO’S SELFISHNESS ACCORDING TO FRONTO A shared feature of the legend’s treatments discussed so far is the sympathy which the doomed couple is accorded.77 This is not the case for Fronto’s take on the story. The mentor of Marcus Aurelius engages with it coldly and critically, viewing it as an illustration not of true love but of a self-serving kind of love, to which he offers the positive alternative.78 His regal pupil is kept outside of Rome by his office and must maintain epistolary contact with administrators in all the provinces of the empire. Worried by this Herculean task, his

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caring teacher decides to space his own correspondence for fear that the young emperor might drown in a sea of exhaustion: Considering [. . .] how much you labour from writing letters, I had resolved to address you more rarely, when you wrote daily to me. Upon receiving those letters, I was in the same predicament as a lover who sees his sweetheart running towards him on a rough and dangerous path. For he rejoices at her coming, but at the same time he fears the danger. Hence I am displeased with the story, famous among actors, in which a loving lass, standing in a tower, with a lighted lamp, awaits her loving lad, who swims in the sea. For, though I burn with love for you, I’d rather be without you than allow you to swim across so vast a sea so late at night, lest the moon set, the wind kill the light, you be enfolded by the cold there and a wave, a ford, a fish somehow harm you. This way of speaking would be more appropriate, better and more sound for a lover, and not to seek, at the peril of one’s life, to enjoy a pleasure that does not last and is fraught with regret. Now to turn from fiction to reality, I was not a little bit anxious lest I should add trouble and burden on top of your unavoidable labours, if in addition to the letters that you write every day to many people because of unavoidable obligation, I should tire you with writing back to me. For I’d rather do without all the enjoyment of your love than that you should suffer even the slightest misfortune for the sake of my pleasure. (Correspondence 3. 14. 3 –4)

Fronto dislikes the tale because, in his reading, it illustrates the egotism of erotic passion, which cares only to satisfy itself. He corrects the story’s gist (‘This way of speaking would be more appropriate’) to make it fit the behaviour he considers ideal in a lover: patient, concerned with the welfare of the beloved, ready to give up the gratification of pleasure. If Hero had truly loved Leander, she would not have allowed him to take such great risks to come to her.79 Fronto overtly refers to a theatrical version of the tale (on which I will say more below), but his criticism of Hero seems to aim specifically at the character of Heroides 19 for her allegedly hasty urging of Leander. The topic – letter writing – strongly promotes this possibility, all the more so because Fronto plays with the Ovidian binomial swimming/writing. In the two epistles the former is in a tension with the latter. Leander’s hand would rather swim than write but the longer the lovers should keep writing the longer he would be kept from braving the storm. Conversely, Fronto

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identifies writing and swimming by casting Marcus’ intense epistolary activity as a plunge into a wearying sea. His tutor, unlike Ovid’s Hero, abstains from responding so as to keep him from ‘swimming back’. While the purportedly selfish character of Heroides 19 pleads with Leander, ‘come’, the selfless Fronto measures his letters in order to protect Marcus from the dangers of writing too much and ‘drowning’. The emperor’s teacher reads Hero’s epistle as do those medieval interpreters and modern scholars who charge it with spurring her lover on, regardless of the strong note of caution on which it ends, and he contrasts her passion with his own affection as fervent but capable of self-abnegation.80 Fronto’s original take on the tale is yet one more testimony to its strong currency. The reader is required to recognize the legend at large through the writer’s sophisticated play with Ovid’s version; the story itself is only alluded to, he does not even provide the lovers’ names. As we shall see in the next section, the popularity of the story in the early centuries of the Roman Empire is further demonstrated by frequent allusions to it in contexts unrelated to erotic love, ranging from a poet’s affection for his faraway friend to another poet’s claustrophobia, from celebrations of idyllic and peaceful landscapes to saucy jokes. NOT ONLY A LOVE STORY A reference to the lovers’ tale in a non-erotic context appears already in one of the earliest allusions to it. Horace exploits the couple’s predicament to express his concern for his friend Julius Florus, who is campaigning in the East: ‘Is it Thrace and the Hebrus, bound in snowy shackles, or the sea running between the neighbouring towers, or the rich fields and the hills of Asia that detain you?’ (Epistles 1. 3. 3– 6). Horace’s phrasing is as oblique as Virgil’s: he does not call the Hellespont by its name, as he does Thrace, the Hebrus and Asia, but evokes it by hinting at the main attraction of its landscape, the lighthouses of Sestos and Abydos. Horace expects his readers to be familiar with the story and its site.81 To Ovid the tale’s location is not just an item of abstract knowledge but the entrance to the place of his exile on the shores of

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the Black Sea. Among its many plagues are the long and frozen winters, which stop all navigation: ‘Where ships had gone, now men go on foot, and the hoof of the horse beats waves solidified by the cold’ (Tristia 3. 10. 41 – 2). The coat of ice exposes the local inhabitants to attacks from the surrounding barbarians, who ride their horses across ‘new bridges’ (33). Ovid himself has ‘stepped on the hardened sea, and the wave was solid under the dry foot. If the strait, Leander, had been like this then, your death would not be blamed on the narrow stretch of water’ (39 – 42). While Leander was prevented from crossing by inclement weather and was killed by it, Ovid ingeniously invents inclement weather conditions favourable to the swimmer-turned-walker. A second stroke of ingenuity is the contrast Leander’s predicament builds with the poet’s: the congealed sea would have allowed the former to cross over but it makes the latter feel not only endangered but more firmly shackled in his prison: cut off from all communication with the Mediterranean and with Rome. As one critic notes, ‘Ovid goes one-up on Leander in the failure stakes: both are exile figures desperate to return over treacherous seas, but unlike his counterpart, Ovid can’t even start a journey’.82 Ovid stays closer to the transmitted legend in yet another use of it, when he wishes the worst of evils upon a mysterious enemy, in all circumstances. Will he throw the disk? Let him be struck down like Hyacinthus. Or, ‘if you will beat a wave with alternating strokes of arms, may every sea be worse for you than Abydos’! (Ibis 589– 90). In this allusion to Leander, Ovid shows himself interested in the skilled swimmer as in the Heroides. But here the swimmer serves as model for a sportsman rather than a lover, even one with athletic talents. The strength of the story’s popularity and in particular the appeal of Leander’s bold feat can be gleaned also from another poem, by Statius: Let fame boast of Sestos’ gulf and the sea that the daring (audaci) youth crossed, surpassing the dolphins. Here is eternal quiet (aeterna quies), here no storm rules, the waters never boil. Here it is possible for sight, voice and almost hands (et voces et paene manus) to pass across. (Silvae 1. 3. 27–31)

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Statius is overtly praising the idyllic calm of a tiny river that runs through the villa of one Manilius Vopiscus, an aspiring poet with apparent Epicurean sympathies. In agreement with that philosophical creed, Statius decries turbulent fame in favour of tranquility, which Vopiscus cultivates.83 While the swelling Hellespont and Leander’s daring symbolize agitation and striving, Vopiscus’ villa is a monument to that key Epicurean value and protects its enjoyment. But the poem seems to contain subterranean ironies, which undermine Vopiscus’ Epicureanism as well as his literary pretensions, and instead characterize him as a rich man devoted to pleasures, including long naps (23; 42) in a sleep-inducing and soundproofed landscape.84 The heavenly garden where the river peacefully flows is the work of man, not nature; the stream itself has been channelled (2) to run in the middle of the estate and has been muzzled, as it were, since it roars right before and right after flowing quietly through the villa (20 – 2); and the house displays urban luxuries, such as gilded beams and glittering marbles (35 –6), running water in the rooms (37) and mosaic floors (55 – 6).85 Furthermore, the narrow and tranquil river conjures up business values rather than Epicurean quietude, for the proximity of its banks is described in terms of commercial transactions (3).86 A reader who catches these ironies will take Leander’s swim as the heroic, spirited antithesis of the materialistic, uninspired, lethargic, even deadly life of Vopiscus in the funereal aeterna quies of his villa. The lifeless calmness of his place loses to the blustery Hellespont that the brave Leander crosses every night with muscular energy, ‘surpassing the dolphins’. Audax as such is an ambivalent term, but its coupling with this compliment casts a glorious light on the fearless and nimble swimmer. This poem served as a template for a section of Ausonius’ Mosella: Who would admire the Sestian sea, the water of Helle, daughter of Nephele? Who would admire the strait of the youth from Abydos? Who the sea bridged across from the Chalcedonian shore, the work of the Great King, where the channel with intervening waves prevents the lands of Europe and Asia to meet? Here is not the cruel fury of the strait or the savage fights of the northwest winds. Here it is possible to join in an interchange of speech and to weave discourse with alternating

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The Myth of Hero and Leander strokes of voice. The gentle shores mingle sounds of greeting, sounds and almost hands (et voces et paene manus). The echo returns words that resound from either side, carrying them swiftly over the intervening waves. (287–97)

The context of the allusion to Leander is the same as in Statius: Ausonius is praising a pleasant and tranquil landscape, the Mosel, dotted with villas on both banks. He proceeds to imitate the earlier poet by contrasting the stormy strait and the peaceful river, which allows, and in the same phrasing as in Statius, verbal and almost tactile communication from one side to the other (et voces et paene manus). But Ausonius disambiguates Statius’ ironic encomium by attaching to the Hellespont unquestionably negative attributes and to the Mosel unquestionably positive ones and by expatiating on both further than Statius. To begin with, he does not pit the calmness of the river against the boisterous renown of the strait but questions the latter’s impressiveness compared to the former’s: ‘who will admire the Sestian sea?’ The Mosel, in other words, is not obscure like Vopiscus’ villa but earns even more fame than the Hellespont – a fame free from turbulence or perils. Additional adjustments to Statius’ poem add to the glamorizing of the Mosel and the belittling of the Hellespont. First, Leander is neither daring nor athletic, nor even portrayed in the act of swimming. Second, he is not called by his personal name but survives only in the abstract, almost as a toponym (‘the strait of the youth from Abydos’). Third, the sea does not just swell, as in Statius, but is cruel and wages wars, using its winds as weapons. It has the power to separate two continents, as Xerxes learnt at his expense when a bridge he built collapsed under a storm (Herodotus 7. 33–5) and another suffered the same fate (8. 117). The pairing of Leander’s story with Xerxes’ catastrophe darkens the reputation of the Hellespont by associating it with the demolished king, whose massive plans were torn apart by the fury of winds and sea, and with the mythic enmity between Europe and Asia. While the Hellespont is at war with those who attempt to cross it and keeps two continents apart, the peaceful Mosel unites people by bringing them nearer to each other than does the creek in Vopiscus’ villa, where it is possible for hands and voices to ‘pass across’.

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The Mosel furthermore causes them to ‘join’ and ‘mingle’, making one of many. The echo, absent from Statius, adds to this image of easy human intercourse. These disparate allusions to the lovers from the Hellespont in nonerotic contexts share a negative feature: they ignore Hero. Their focus is Leander or the hostile sea he had to cross. This preference for the youth aligns these texts with all the other Roman sources pertaining to the legend, which likewise tend to privilege him, especially as accomplished and brave swimmer. Only the Heroides accords equal treatment to the two lovers, though even there, as we have seen, Leander’s swimming is centre stage.87 Are Roman authors original in giving the floor to Leander and in particular to his crossing? From the extant evidence, it seems that Hero was the main protagonist in the earlier Greek poems devoted to the legend. Two of the three fragments that survive might feature her as dramatis persona in the act of lamenting over the dead Leander, assumingly before killing herself.88 If this is the case and if this sample is representative, the section of the legend preferred by Hellenistic poets was Hero’s discovery of Leander’s body and her outburst of despair, the dramatic and pathetic potential of which appealed to Hellenistic taste. Ovid might echo these poetic voices in Heroides 19, a lament filled with longing for a lover whose absence Hero hopes is only temporary while her fears and the reader’s knowledge anticipate its permanence; but otherwise Roman authors shifted the focus from the woman’s distress to the man’s daring crossing. The adjustment, though not overtly misogynous, led the way for treatments of the legend unfavourable to Hero.89 This preference for Leander’s spectacular feat reflects the attraction of swimming for a Roman audience. Though not as widely practised as other sports, it was well regarded and could make an impression.90 Horace lists it among honourable and fashionable exercises (Odes 1. 8. 8), capable of seducing a woman (Odes 3. 7. 22 – 8). The Leander of the Heroides might have taken a hint from Horace, so to speak, since, as we have noted, he devotes much effort to fashion himself as a skilled swimmer and to convey in words the rhythmic beat of his arms and the movement of his body nimbly (and erotically) cutting through the waters.91 Statius likewise asks

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the reader to admire Leander’s prowess by having Cupid himself sing his praise: ‘I saw also the arms of the youth from Abydos rivaling the oars and I praised his hands’ (Silvae 1. 2, above). We are invited to watch along with Cupid the swimmer’s powerful limbs in action. Leander’s arms are once again centre stage in perhaps the most irreverent ancient allusion to the legend.92 They appear in the words of a cook praising his art in The Judgment of a Cook and of a Baker with Vulcan as Umpire, composed by one Vespa (possibly in the fourth century AD ): ‘Orpheus, you receive strings (chordas); Leander, arms (lacertos)’ (89). The cook is inviting to dinner famous mythological characters, who are offered each a dish that conjures up the myth in which they act. For instance, Pentheus is served a head, Actaeon a stag, Meleager a boar. But what about Orpheus’ treat and Leander’s? Even the most adventurous Roman chef would not bring strings or arms to the table. Vespa is playing with semantic ambiguity, for chordae also means ‘guts’ (its primary sense in Greek) and lacertus ‘lizard’.93 The athletic arms of the youth in love have become savoury reptiles! OUTSIDE LITERATURE In the Roman world the story of Hero and Leander reached further than literature, into the figurative and the performing arts.94 It is represented on several Pompeian paintings in the fourth style, most of which feature Leander swimming while Hero leans over from a tower, holding a torch, though in one instance she stands on the beach. In another, dolphins swim with Leander, and in yet another, his servant waits for him on the shore of Abydos with his clothes. Alternatively, on the same shore there is a fisherman. The inspiration for these frescoes might have been illustrations accompanying copies of the Heroides, as is suggested by the absence of iconographical treatments of the legend prior to Ovid, by the poor quality and the small dimensions of the paintings and especially by the preferred direction of Leander’s swimming, left to right, which matches the unrolling of a papyrus.95 Though we cannot be certain of this filiation because there is no evidence for the existence of illustrated volumes of the epistles, it is likely that the proliferation of paintings devoted

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to Hero and Leander is owing to Ovid’s prestige, whether or not copies of the Heroides decorated with images circulated. In fact, several scenes or details in the paintings find correspondences in Ovid’s letters. For instance, the picture (in the Casa di Ero e Leandro) of Hero standing on the beach instead of leaning from her tower96 calls to mind Leander’s recollection of her eager dash to the shore in order to welcome him. Another painting (in the Casa dei Vettii) represents Leander in the sea with his head crowned: an odd accoutrement for a swimmer, hardly explicable without the backing of Leander’s self-presentation as the skilled athlete who strives to win the race, as it were.97 The painter enhances the youth’s boastful pride as a swimmer by placing a victory wreath on his head. The athleticism of Ovid’s character attracted also the artist of a version of the scene in the Casa dei Pittori, who took care to endow the swimmer’s body with highly muscular definition, to convey his strength as he cleaves the sea.98 The tale might also have made its way into the plastic arts. One of Martial’s epigrams presenting a festive gift (the apophoreta that compose Book 14) is purportedly appended to a ‘Leander in marble’ (Leandros marmoreus): ‘The daring Leander was crying in the swelling waves: “Drown me when I will return”’ (14. 181). This conceit is original to Martial,99 who seems fond of it (see also 25b, below). Possibly, the poem was conceived as a card to accompany an actual gift. If not, does it point to the existence of one or more sculpted images of Leander or is it a caption without a material referent? The epigram’s witticism assumes familiarity with the story to be understood but not necessarily with a statue of the swimmer. As is often the case in Greek and Roman literature, the poem could invent the object. All the more so in this case because it does not give even the slight illusion of a referent by describing it but has the statue speak, breaking out of its artistic medium. On the other hand, to buttress the possibility that Leandri marmorei circulated are the four preceding poems: epigrams 177 to 180 all make reference to real objects.100 If sculpted images of Leander existed, they are more likely to have captured the moment in which the youth, standing, is about to dive rather than the act of swimming; Greek and Roman sculptors chose this activity as their subject matter only rarely.101

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We are on more solid ground when we turn to the performing arts. Martial is again one of the witnesses for the tale’s diffusion in the theatre. Leander’s ‘out of medium’ apostrophe to the waves in the epigram accompanying his alleged statuette might have been inspired by a mime.102 In fact, the same apostrophe appears in one of the two poems from Martial’s Book of Spectacles that explicitly refer to an aquatic choreography enacted for the inauguration of the Coliseum in AD 80: ‘When the daring Leander was travelling to his sweet love, and, tired, was already covered by the swollen sea, so the wretched spoke, they say, to the pressing waves: “Spare me while I hasten there, drown me when I return”’ (25b). The second epigram changes the story’s ending: ‘Stop marvelling that the nocturnal wave spared you, Leander. The wave was Caesar’s’ (25a). The inscription might point to an actual performance that did not follow the transmitted storyline but had a happy ending. Alternatively, it could be a playful unmasking of theatrical make-believe: Leander survives even his last swim because he is an actor and the waves are faked. Either way, Martial attributes his safe crossing to the emperor’s protection and clemency. The poet, always careful to ingratiate His Highness, grabs the opportunity offered by the medium to celebrate his power, which he credits with neutralizing storms and tragic endings. Caesar’s numen can overcome the fiercest natural forces and alter the irreversible pattern of a myth.103 This aquatic spectacle is likely to derive from a mime of the Augustan period.104 Though there is no trace of it, there is evidence for pantomimes dramatizing the tale. The witness this time is Fronto expressing displeasure ‘with the story, famous among actors, in which a loving lass, standing in a tower, with a lighted lamp, awaits her loving lad, who swims in the sea’ (Correspondence 3. 13. 3, above). It is tempting to speculate that the two Heroides were the main source for the dance; first because Fronto, as we have seen, has Ovid’s Hero in mind, and, second, because Ovid himself informs us that some of his poems were choreographed (Tristia 2. 519) and performed in front of enthusiastic spectators in a packed theatre (Tristia 5. 7. 25 – 6). The best candidates are held to be his epistles.105 If this is the case, their theatrical transposition testifies to their popularity, and, as regards Hero and Leander, also to the growing appeal of the legend.106

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Pantomime, in turn, must have contributed further to its diffusion across the Roman Empire, as happened to the story of Dido and Aeneas, which became known in the eastern Mediterranean also thanks to pantomime performances.107 Whatever the role of the dance in advertising the legend, from the second to the fourth century artistic representations of it span a vast portion of the Empire, from Gaul to Africa to Athens to the East, and appear in a large variety of artefacts: mosaics, medallions, reliefs, lamps (most appropriately) and coins. Of these various objects, a relief from Tunis dated to the late second century deserves special attention for the original inscription it carries: ‘Leander goes by the light of only one candle: he is stupid’.108 This dismissive comment makes for the first parodic treatment of the legend, highlighting its lack of verisimilitude. Distortions of this kind will become fashionable in early-modern Spain, France and England. Perhaps the best known of them is Go´ngora’s Romance burlesco, which pokes fun at the intrepid swimmer for not having enough money to afford a boat and at his girl for being likewise too destitute to buy a real lamp. The lovers’ epitaph brands them as ‘no less foolish than famous’ (no menos necios que ilustres):109 a caustic judgement that has a remote forerunner in the ancient inscription, which similarly deflates the heroism of Leander by attributing his gesture to lack of common sense. A second source of representations are coins, which date to the Severian period and come from Sestos and especially from Abydos (Figure 1.1). They depict Leander swimming to Hero, who is holding her torch. In two of them Eros flies above Leander, bearing another light. The god’s presence has been taken to suggest Leander’s longing;110 but it could point to the favour Eros bestows on the swimmer as it does in Statius. The two ideas ultimately merge, for the impulse of love that drives Leander is as strong and energizing as the help offered by the god of love himself. As in the Pompeian paintings, the favoured direction of the swimming on the coins is from left to right. This detail becomes connected with local realities in that it serves to accommodate a perspective from Abydos and the Troad rather than from Sestos. For a viewer standing on the shore of Abydos with his back to

FIGURE 1.1 Coins: (a) from Sestos, minted under Caracalla (description in LIMC Suppl. VIII, vol. 1, p. 621, #15 and 16); (b) from Abydos, minted under Alexander Severus (description in LIMC Suppl. VIII, vol. 1, #20; image in vol. 2, p. 384). Credit: Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. (http://www.cngcoins.com).

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Asia Minor, a swimmer directed to Sestos follows a course to the right. The orientation reflects the greater historical importance of Asian Abydos over European Sestos, which might have determined that coins minted in Sestos adopted the same Asian perspective.111 Leander’s swimming is the preferred subject matter of the coins as of the other artefacts: or rather, Leander’s swimming to Hero while she holds out her torch. These two acts are the legend’s staple, its distinctive features, which figure in no other story. Visual artists chose the tale’s signature actions. They also privileged two movements that happen simultaneously, thus avoiding the difficulty of narrating, of translating time into a spatial medium. Hero’s extending her lamp with outstretched arm is the only signifier of her wait. Ancient artists do not convey her agitation by means of bodily movements as do modern painters and sculptors. The only visual representation of Hero’s anguish in the Roman evidence is fictional, a literary creation in Statius’ Thebaid: ‘In front the girl from Sestos sits in vain, anxiously, looking from the top of the tower, and the privy fire soon dies’ (6. 546– 7). The absence of Hero’s disquiet from Roman artefacts seems to be owing to the artists’ choice to give precedence to Leander. Hero appeals to them only as the torch-bearer, the light towards which he swims. The prominence of the swimmer in iconography matches the literary landscape, where, as we have seen, references to the tale tend to single him out. Statius’ ekphrasis in the Thebaid is yet another case in point. Though the poet is free to make readers visualize any moment of the story he wishes, he spends twice as many lines on Leander’s cutting the waves than on Hero’s agitated waiting (6. 542 – 5, below). The swimmer’s nimble and muscular body appeals to artists as to writers.112 Dance seems to be the exception. If the first transposition of the legend into this medium was inspired by the Heroides, the same performer must have played Leander and Hero in turn, following the order of the two epistles.113 Hero might have even held first place in the pantomime that displeased Fronto. He puts her waiting for Leander in the foreground and introduces the dance to exemplify the condition of a lover ‘rejoicing at his loved one’s coming at the same time as he fears the dangers’. This reference to

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Hero’s feelings suggests that the thematic core of the dance was her shifting states of mind.114 Hero’s greater importance in the pantomime seems connected to the distinctive resources of this art form, for dance thrived and thrives on gestures and movements that convey inner turmoil. For comparison, we might think of the beginning of the Balcony Scene in the choreography of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet by Kenneth MacMillan, where Juliet dreamily moves around outside her room, listening to her heart in love, when suddenly Romeo appears in the garden below. Amorous anticipation and apprehension could be effectively danced in pantomime as they can in ballet, which is a direct descendent of the ancient mimetic dance.115 Lucian mentions ‘girls in love’ (On dance 2) and generally lovers (ibid. 67; 70) as subject matters of pantomimes. One of them is Parthenope (2), a novelistic heroine who suffers a long separation from her dearly loved husband. The dance about her is likely to have imitated her effusions of despair over her loss. A bodily enactment of a lamentation might have been the centrepiece or at least a sequence also in the pantomime of Dido, likewise mentioned by Lucian (ibid. 46).116 Choreographing lament was certainly easy, especially through hand gestures (x1irotonίa), which in the best dancers were able to ‘talk’ (63). Staying with amatory topics, Lucian also includes Medea’s frightening dream of Jason in Apollonius of Rhodes among the subjects of pantomime (53). If such a dream, with its strong swings of emotions, could be danced, so could Hero’s anxiety, which perhaps found expression in gestures figuring a lovesick lamentation.117 The choreographic possibilities that her predicament offered might explain the prominence uniquely given to her in pantomime, just as her lament apparently captured the imagination of a Hellenistic mimographer because of its melodramatic potential. 118 Dancers could hardly pass by the rich opportunities of displaying their virtuosity by inventing moves fit to stage the girl’s amorous pangs. A noticeable feature of the visual renditions of the tale is the absence of the lovers’ death, especially Leander’s, which we might expect to find because of the privilege accorded to him. In the extant evidence it is never pictured. Only one material object, a gem,119

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might suggest the storm by the presence of the wind gods, though the direction of their blowing, towards Sestos, pushes the possibility that they are not gales but mild breezes helping Leander. He is not fully immersed in the sea but is stretching his arm toward Hero, as if about to reach her. Whatever the case, he is not dead. In the other images, both real and fictional, Hero’s torch is shining and Leander is successfully crossing over to her. In the painting of the Casa dei Vettii and in some of the coins, the two movements of Leander swimming toward Hero and of Hero leaning toward Leander almost meet, suggesting an electrified anticipation of desire fulfilled rather than prompting thought of the tragic future.120 Though the pantomime features Hero waiting for her lover, there is no clear suggestion that the setting is the last, doomed night.121 Martial’s two poems in which Leander prays to be drowned on the way back ask the viewer to imagine him swimming in the stormy night, but not (yet) dying. The same is true for the ekphrasis in Statius’ Thebaid, which describes Leander’s last swim. Statius transports the tale into the most remote mythic age by imagining it embroidered on a cloak given by Adrastus to Admetus as a prize for a horse race:122 This young man swims here with contempt for the sea of Phrixus and blue does he shine through the coloured 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 – 7)

Contrary to what one might think, a garment depicting Leander’s last swim is deemed fit to flatter a victorious athlete. Possibly this is because the stormy conditions increase the strenuousness of the feat. The poet-embroiderer is indeed careful to put before the readers’ eyes the swimmer’s body, including its hue and wetness, and the alternating strokes of his arms. Even here, however, the tragic ending, intimated by the quenching of Hero’s lamp and by the detail that she ‘sits in vain’, lies in the future, beyond or outside the imagined visual field. It is Leander’s confident and energetic swimming that occupies the picture. Why then do representations of the tale shy away from his death?

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The legend was the claim to fame of its setting.123 The Hellespont took its name from Helle, but a passage by Silius Italicus renames it after Leander: ‘When great Mycenae invaded Troy, the Hellespont of Leander (Leandrius Hellespontus) saw a thousand ships’ (8. 620 – 1). As Statius in the Thebaid, Silius Italicus endows the tale with the grand old age of a primeval myth, more ancient than even the Trojan War. When Agamemnon’s invasion occurred, Leander had already given his name to the Hellespont, which draws its renown from him rather than from the – more recent – crossing of the ‘thousand ships’. Ausonius follows suit in attaching Leander’s name to the region: ‘who would admire the strait of the youth from Abydos?’ (Mosella 288, above). The power of the tale to immortalize its setting explains why it was displayed on the coins of Sestos and Abydos. We might speculate that a picture of the tragic ending would have been less appropriate to commemorate the cities that minted the coins than Leander’s successful swimming. Several authors who attach the two cities’ renown to the legend indeed pass over its ending. So, for instance, does Statius when he sings of the ‘fame [. . .] of Sestos’ gulf and the sea that the youth crossed’ (Silvae 1. 3, above); and so does the geographer Pomponius Mela (first century AD ): ‘Abydos is famous for the traffic of that great love of yore’. ‘And in front of Abydos lies Sestos, most famous because of Leander’s love’ (Geography 1. 19. 97 and 2. 2. 26 respectively). Other sources, however, in attributing the fame of the two cities to the tale do not shrink from mentioning Leander’s death. Lucan alludes to it, though obliquely: ‘Caesar [. . .] crosses the passes of Thrace and the sea notable for that love and the tower of Hero on the tearful shore’ (9. 954 – 5). The lachrymose story enhances the reputation of the site in later poetry as well. Musaeus asks an imaginary traveller to look for the harbour of Abydos, ‘which still laments the death and the love of Leander’ (Hero and Leander 27). And the sixth-century historian Agathias couples Sestos’ fame with Leander’s death: ‘There is the city of Sestos, famous [. . .] for the love and the death of Leander’.124 This survey suggests that the absence of the tale’s ending from iconographical representations, including the coins, is not owing to

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perceptions of its tragic quality as ill-fitted to the functions or contexts of the artefacts. Rather, by isolating the episode of Leander’s successful swimming that ends with the lovers’ meeting, the images avoid suggestion of the damning moral that could be drawn from a reminder of their tragic deaths. In this respect the distance between Virgil’s take on the story and the artists’ could not be greater. At the same time, however, in disregarding the lovers’ demise those visual representations go hand in hand with the majority of Roman literary renderings, some of which might have influenced them directly and among which only Virgil focuses, and briefly, on the ending.125 In the most extensive and influential version, Ovid’s Heroides, death lies in the future. Some authors, including Ovid in the Amores, allude to Leander’s but do not narrate it, and only Virgil, Sidonius Apollinaris and Ausonius allude to Hero’s. Neither death appears in Seneca, Martial or Statius. In contrast, Leander’s drowning and Hero’s suicide are of high significance in Musaeus’ poem, to which we now turn.126

CHAPTER 2

Musaeus’ Hero and Leander, or ‘Love Against the World’

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION There is no evidence for representations of Hero and Leander in Greek and Roman art after the fourth century, but the fifth or the early sixth produces the second most important poetic version of the tale in ancient literature alongside Ovid’s: Hero and Leander (henceforth H&L) by Musaeus. We know almost nothing about this poet’s life. The epithet grammatikos that appears in several manuscripts suggests that he was a scholar of literature. Possibly he was a Christian, though the arguments adduced are inconclusive.1 Possibly a student of the epic poet Nonnus of Panoplis, he imitated his teacher’s style and followed patterns established by him for hexametric composition. He also gave his own poem a strong Homeric flavour, using the Odyssey as his main subtext. A few examples, to which I will return: the great speech with which Leander sweeps Hero, echoing Odysseus’ to Nausicaa; the descriptions of his two swims and of the storm that kills him on the second, designed to conjure up Odysseus’ eventful crossing from Calypso to Phaeacia; and the bath-scene on the first night of love, showing several parallels with the Odyssey. Musaeus, however, did not follow either Homer or Nonnus in the size and subject matter of his project: while Nonnus wrote the longest epic in Greek, an Iliad-cum-Odyssey recounting Dionysus’ victorious wars in India in

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48 books, Musaeus composed an epyllion, a brief epic poem of 343 lines, and he chose not war but love as his topic. Did Musaeus know Ovid? It is generally believed that he drew from the same Greek poem as Ovid because of the numerous correspondences, even in matters of detail and phrasing, between the epyllion and the two epistles.2 Based on the widespread assumption that Greek poets, even in later antiquity, would not bother to use Latin authors as models, scholars have been reluctant to consider the possibility that Musaeus exploited his Latin predecessor.3 But I would leave the option open, because Nonnus might have known and used Ovid’s Metamorphoses.4 Then, could not his admiring and highly cultivated student have been inspired by the Heroides? At the same time major differences of conception – two letters written by the characters at one point in their affair versus a continuous narrative that tells the story from beginning to end in the voice of an external narrator – make the hypothesis of a shared model attractive: the original was a linear account like Musaeus’, and Ovid, the more innovative poet, changed focus and perspective. Musaeus might have had before his eyes both Ovid’s letters and a Hellenistic poem, the narrative structure of which he preserved.5 Whatever the main sources of H&L, an impressive number of influences and borrowings can be spotted in it. The most detailed commentary to date provides painstaking lists of parallels in almost every entry.6 The reader interested in the sources of Musaeus at large can usefully consult this monumental work, while the present discussion will have a thematic emphasis, aimed to appreciate the importance of H&L in the history of the tale’s reception, and will engage with the poet’s use of previous literature with this goal. DARKNESS AND LIGHT In the attack of his epyllion, ‘tell, goddess’, Musaeus pays homage to Nonnus, who begins with the exact same words.7 The apparently simple phrase is in fact an ingenious mix of the two best-known invocations in Greek epic, the Iliad’s, ‘sing of the wrath, goddess’, and the Odyssey’s, ‘tell of the man, Muse’. Both Nonnus and Musaeus cast their poetic personas as greedily Homeric. But both

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also startle readers steeped in classical epic by pushing forward the act of telling, the poetic afflatus, rather than the subject matter, which appears not before the imperative verb, as in the Homeric invocations, but after, and by announcing a topic that does not belong in the traditional range of that genre.8 Nonnus’ muse will speak about ‘the messenger of the son of Cronus with fiery light’. She will dictate an epic centred not on human heroes but on a god. Musaeus’ goddess will devote her efforts to an even more outlandish subject: ‘The lamp, witness of secret loves’. He combines the two Homeric incipits to call on the Muse but asks her to deal with a powerful symbol of a radically different genre, erotic poetry. The (postponed) appearance of a markedly un-epic subject in a thickly epic invocation has a surprise effect.9 The lamp crowds the 15-line proem with five more occurrences, thus driving home the message that this epic is about love. The ‘witness of secret loves’ is also ‘the lamp announcing the service of Aphrodite’ (6), the herald of Hero’s ‘nocturnal wedding’ (7) and ‘love’s delight’, accompanying the couple’s ‘nocturnal toil’ (8 – 9).10 Hero’s torch plays the role of bringing the lovers together, a task usually given to a trusty servant in Greek and Roman love poetry.11 Musaeus further enhances the associations of that light with the domain of love by merging imagery of erotic poetry with religious beliefs and cultic practice, since the lamp of Aphrodite conjures up the perennially burning and divinized flame that is attested in connection to her worship.12 But the lamp is not the only subject. The muse will also speak about the ‘nocturnal swimmer of the nuptials that crossed the sea’, the ‘gloomy marriage’ and Sestos and Abydos, ‘where was Hero’s nocturnal marriage’ (2– 4).13 This list puts emphasis on the additional motif of darkness, which surfaces already at the very beginning, in the chiaroscuro of a lamp shedding light on a secret dalliance. Contrasts of light and darkness pervade this poem: appropriately, since it narrates the story of a union wrapped in black night but preserved by a guiding beacon.14 It is night that rules over the lovers’ movements from beginning to end.15 Early references to the lamp are intertwined with it (1; 7; 9), and the four opening lines all contain adjectives pertaining

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to the dark. In the first two, the words krywίvn (‘of secret [loves]’) and nύxion (‘nocturnal’), with their similar phonetic and prosodic structure,16 give audible resonance to the motif of darkness from the outset. The action that follows is almost entirely nocturnal, with only Hero’s lamp flashing in the sky. Daylight is mentioned but in the negative, when it goes down (110) or in a wish that it should go down (287 – 8). There are no named stars dotting the nocturnal firmament except – tellingly – the Evening Star (111).17 Though dawn comes every day, it does not see the couple: ‘The gloomy wedding, which immortal Dawn did not see’ (3). As long as the two meet, ‘it never saw the groom’ in Hero’s bed (282 – 3), and even when he dies, it does not show his body to Hero. The appearance of the morning light is paired not with discovery but with a failure to see: ‘The Early-Born came, and Hero did not see her spouse’ (335). We might expect the opposite: ‘Dawn came, and Hero saw Leander mangled by her tower’. Instead, she has to strain her vision, to ‘cast her eyes everywhere over the broad back of the sea’, ‘now that the lamp was quenched’ (338). Dawn does not reveal.18 Nor does it mark new developments in the plot as it does in Homeric epic, where time and again it brings fresh action together with its light. Rather, it falls on darkness to introduce three momentous events: Leander’s emboldened second approach to Hero on the evening of their encounter, his swim on that night and his last crossing. Evening descends after Leander has come near to Hero and the two have exchanged furtive glances: While Leander was waiting for the secret hour, then the day, having curbed its light, sank, and at the horizon the deep-shadowed Evening Star was rising. And boldly did he approach the maiden, when he saw black-robed darkness leaping on. And silently squeezing the rosy (ῥodo1idέa) fingers of the maiden, he sighed from his chest. (109–15)

Musaeus overwrites the nocturnal setting – the day goes down, Evening Star rises, darkness rapidly comes – enwrapping seduction scene in its thick cloak. Through it, though, we Hero’s fingers. The colour of the Homeric dawn, they shine in pitch-black sky, prefiguring the identification of her lamp with

the the see the the

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fire of love that will spur Leander on to cross the sea: ‘The day has set [. . .] but Hero is Leander’s light’.19 The sky is gloomier still when Leander prepares to swim: ‘But already the black-robed darkness of night was coming quickly, bringing sleep to men but not to the longing Leander’ (232 – 3). Musaeus is inconsistent here, for the light of day has long sunk and yet darkness is said to fall afresh. The discrepancy is another instance of overwriting: the poet is obsessed with driving home the point that it is night. A ‘dark night’ already accompanied the lovers’ separation (227), but this does not prevent them from calling on it to descend (again): ‘Often they prayed for darkness, the escort to their wedding, to come’ (231). The prayer, which is to become routine in their shortlived love (‘often they prayed for the day to go down and set’, 288), glosses over the inconsistency, allowing the poet to add another layer of black paint and to frame the new event with a thickening night and the spreading of sleep.20 The first line in the narrative of night descending is very close to a verse that describes the coming of darkness in coincidence with Leander’s advance: ‘When he saw black-robed darkness leaping on’ (113). The echoing connects the two developments. But, in the later and more climactic instance, night sets in more dramatically: it is introduced by the adverb ἤdh, ‘already’ (232), which increases the momentum of this second beginning by placing it under a blacker sky. Another phrase ties the two episodes together: ὡ6 ἴd1, ‘as he saw’, predicated of Leander noticing the night (113), reappears identically for Hero when she likewise marks the cloak of darkness (238). In the second occurrence, however, the phrase effects a switch in narrative focus, from Leander to Hero, and introduces a contrast between the shadows of the night and the brightness of the day: ‘But when she saw the darkness of black night that leaves the light, Hero showed the lamp’ (238– 9). This same contrast pervades the narrative of Leander’s nocturnal waiting for the lamp that will ‘show the way to the wedding’ (235), ‘the far-seeing announcer of a secret marriage’ (237). The second phrase captures in an expressive oxymoron the two thematic cores that underlie the motif of darkness and light: Hero’s bright beacon and the lovers’ concealed union.

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The sight of Hero’s torch spurs Leander on to brave the sea by inflaming him with desire: ‘And with the lighting of the lamp Eros set fire to the heart of the eager Leander. He burnt together with the burning of the lamp’ (239 – 41). Like Dawn, Hero is ‘the bringer of light’ (256), but the torch she holds out is also a kindling of passion.21 With its twofold power to spark off both light and love, it will be the swimmer’s only guidance in the black sky. Leander had asked Hero: ‘Only make one lamp [. . .] shine in the darkness, so that marking it I will be a vessel of Eros, having your lamp as star and ¨ tes, Orion or the Wain (213 – 14). looking at it’ (210 – 13) – not at Boo The three constellations are those that orient Odysseus when he sails from Calypso’s island.22 Mention of them prompts the reader to note that while Odysseus keeps his eyes fixed steadily on their brightness, Leander would have no use of it but will follow only the gleam of Hero’s beacon. Byron will remember the conceit: ‘His eye but saw the light of love / The only star it hail’d above’ (The Bride of Abydos 2. 1. 14 – 15). Ovid had already romanticized the lamp along these lines. As we have seen, his Leander also dismisses the other stars in favour of Hero’s, which would guide his love unerringly all the way to Colchis (Her. 18. 149 – 58). The sight of the lamp that hosts his love is enough to energize his tired arms on his first crossing (85 – 7). But he does not mention Hero’s torch until well into his recollection of his swimming, after rehearsing his words to the Moon goddess, and does not attribute to that light the power to cause him to ‘burn with its burning’ and plunge into the sea. When blocked by the storm, Ovid’s Leander thinks he sees the lamp or strains his eyes to catch sight of it, and perhaps in response to his imagining and efforts, he attempts to swim. The narrative, though, is paratactic and does not connect the two events as cause and effect (31 – 4). In contrast, the character of Musaeus waits for the signal of fire and swims summoned by it, under a sky with no moon or stars but only that fire. He speeds to it: ‘And he hurried, always in front of the lighted lamp’ (H&L 254). The Greek line puts more emphasis on the guiding brightness of this beacon than I am able to convey, for it begins with ‘lighted’ and concludes with ‘lamp’, surrounding the swimmer’s fast movement with its spark.

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The frame of darkness that introduces Leander’s last swim warrants a more dramatic and suspenseful phrasing, evocative of Virgilian beginnings: ‘It was night’ (309). This time notation also echoes the incipit of Leander’s reminiscence in Ovid: Nox erat (Her. 18. 55). If Musaeus knew Ovid, he moved the temporal indicator from Leander’s successful swim to his deadly one, thus marking the latter as the climax of the narrative, worthy of an introduction in epic style. Hero’s torch on this night again urges Leander to swim, as it did every night. Musaeus might once again have adjusted a detail in Ovid to make it fit the prominence of the lamp in his own poem: in the Heroides Leander claims familiarity with the sea (18. 22: ‘the accustomed waters’); in Musaeus he is instead familiar with the beacon: ‘The service of the tower, showing forth its accustomed lightbringing sign of marriage, urged you to pay no heed to the raging sea’ (301– 3). Whereas Ovid’s character styles himself as a habitual and consummate swimmer, Musaeus’ cannot resist the invitation of the habitual light that calls him to his love. But the same light is now ‘short lived’ (306) and pulls him to his death: ‘She shone forth the torch of death, and no longer of love’ (308). The lamp is short-lived also as a textual presence. While on the first night it makes four appearances – Leander waits for it, Hero lights it, he speeds to it, she protects it from the wind – now it disappears from the narrative right after she kindles it, even before it is actually quenched by the wind. The development that begins with ‘it was night’ follows the lighting of the torch but is filled not with its brightness but with the roaring sea and its threatening sound, richly described (313 – 18) and made audible in a beautifully onomatopoeic and alliterative line: ἤdh kύmati kῦma kylίnd1to, sύgxyto d᾽ ὕdvr (314: ‘And already wave was rolled on wave, and the water was troubled’). The line expands on the Homeric nexus kῦma kylίnd1to (Iliad 11. 307) by multiplying phonic effects, so as to imitate the dull noise of the ruffled waters with the six-fold sounding of – u.23 By shutting off the light, as it were, the framing ‘it was night’ sets off the increasing clang of the waves, the initial mutter of which rises to a ‘roar from everywhere’ (315), then to an ‘unceasing din’ (318). In Ovid’s description of Leander’s first swim

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the silence of the sea enhances the moonlight (Her. 18. 78). Musaeus’ account of the storm darkens the sky to focus our ears on the thunderous waves. Hero’s torch reappears only for the wind to put out its light (329) and, with it, ‘the life and love of the much-suffering Leander’ (330). The merging of the lamp with Leander’s life is original with Musaeus and is another recurrent motif of the poem.24 It is spelled out with great emphasis already in the prologue, where it takes up the last two lines and calls for a second appeal to the Muse: ‘Sing with me at once the end of the put-out lamp and of the dead Leander’ (ἀll’ ἄg1 moi mέlponti mίan synά1id1 t1l1ytὴn / lύxnoy sb1nnymέnoio kaὶ ὀllymέnoio L1άndroy, 14 –15). This invocation, which is in a pendant with the opening line, gives the prologue the closural force of a ring composition, marking a halt.25 To underscore it further are sonic effects: ‘lamp’ and ‘Leander’ for the first time appear in the genitive case, sounding ou-ou at both ends of the second line, while throughout the proem they figure in the accusative, sounding -on.26 This phonetic shift in the last verse of a proem that has proceeded almost breathlessly, with very few pauses, over 15 lines, is another stop sign that draws the readers’ ears to the interlocked genitives ‘lamp’ and ‘Leander’. Leander’s life and the lamp are also collapsed into one by their chiastic placement (literally, ‘of the lamp put-out and of the dead Leander’) and by the similar phonetic pattern of their modifiers, sb1nnymέnoio, ὀllymέnoio: -u, -e, -oio.27 Leander himself, speaking to Hero, intertwines his life and her torch in an even tighter, more intricate manner: ‘But, dear, watch for the hard-blowing winds, lest they put it out – and instantly I lose my life – the lamp, the light-bearing guide of my life’ (ἀllά, wίlh, p1wύlajo barypn1ίonta6 ἀήta6, / mή min ἀposbέssvsi, kaὶ aὐtίka uymὸn ὀlέssv, / lύxnon ἐmoῦ biόtoio wa1swόron ἡg1monῆa, 216 – 18). ‘Lamp’, lύxnon, is the apposition of ‘it’ and the object of ‘lest they put out’, but in the word order it is so close to ‘life’, uymόn, the object of ‘I lose’, that it could appear to be its apposition (‘I lose my life, the lamp’). The grammatical object of ‘lest they put it out’, the lamp, is separated from the verb by the intervening phrase ‘and instantly I lose my life’, which ties the two events together.

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For the identification of Hero’s light with Leander’s life Musaeus seems to have been inspired by the belief, widespread in later antiquity, that a lamp could symbolize the human soul. The idea underlies the practice of employing lamps in aggressive magic and specifically of attaching curse tablets to them and throwing them into springs or fountains: to offer a lamp was to offer a man; to toss it into a cold place was to commit a symbolic homicide.28 The pairing of lamp and life is playfully recorded in Lucian’s True History (1. 29), which describes a Lychnopolis where our doubles are ‘candles of the soul’. Each visitor recognizes one’s own candle and talks to it.29 In this community of walking lights, ‘death is to be put out’, as is Leander. Musaeus has combined the lamp of Aphrodite in all its variants – as divinized object, accomplice of lovers, metaphor of erotic passion – with the lamp of the soul.30 THE BOLD LOVER Each of the three movements framed by the coming of darkness fits into one of the three main sequences that build the poem: the lovers’ meeting, the night of love and the killing storm.31 Musaeus devotes by far the longest number of lines to the first section. The happy night comes a distant second and the catastrophe is even shorter. We can also assume that he has been more original in the first part, that he saw the detailed narrative of the lovers’ encounter as his own signature.32 Scholars observe that the correspondences between H&L and Ovid thicken in the accounts of the love night and of the storm. (In Ovid the latter is only foreshadowed, but the winds are already raging when the lovers write to each other.) For instance, both authors specify that the sea is not navigable (Her. 18. 8; 138; H&L 299); in both Leander reminds Boreas of his passion for Orithyia (Her. 18. 40 – 2; H&L 322); love’s fire wins over the cold or fear of the sea (Her. 18. 89 – 90; H&L 245 –7);33 and Hero goes to meet Leander and embraces him (Her. 18. 101; H&L 261).34 In contrast, Ovid’s characters do not even recall their first encounter, though a version of it must have been in the Hellenistic poem he used.35 The extended narrative that Musaeus devotes to the preliminaries of the night of love has displeased some readers, who criticize him for

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allotting a maximum of words to a minimum of action and for cutting the climax, the catastrophe, short.36 But instead of judging, I will focus on the possible rationale of this imbalance: is there any point in Musaeus’ choice to give so much prominence to the protagonists’ meeting and falling in love? One purpose, I will submit, might be to characterize Leander, the main actor in this section, with reference to novelistic heroes, especially Clitophon, the protagonist of Achilles Tatius’ novel. The influence of the Greek novels on Musaeus’ epyllion is obvious and has long been recognized. It can be spotted already in the title, TA KAQ’ HPV KAI LEANDPON, ‘The story of Hero and Leander’, which a reader contemporaneous with the poet would instantly identify as novelistic.37 The girl’s name appears first, again in accordance with a pattern of novelistic titles.38 Only the narrative of the couple’s meeting, however, is filled with borrowings from the novels.39 This concentration suggests that Musaeus conceived his own episode against the background of corresponding scenes in them. Though evocations of lovers’ first encounters are characteristic of Hellenistic poetry (Simaetha and Daphnis in Theocritus’ Idyll 2 is a famous example), numerous details in Musaeus’ narrative point to the novels as his main referent. When Eros ‘hit both cities together with one dart’ (jynέhk1n, 18), we are reminded of Chariton’s Callirhoe, where the god steps in to ‘bring together’ an exceptional couple (syllέjai, 1. 1. 3).40 And just as Hero and Leander meet at a festival for Aphrodite and Adonis, Chariton’s heroine is going to the temple of Aphrodite when she sees the hero.41 The religious context also conjures up the protagonists’ first encounters in the novels of Xenophon and Heliodorus; and the heroine of this text, who is a priestess of Artemis, might have inspired Hero’s investiture as the priestess of Aphrodite and might have contributed a detail to her description: her rosy fingers, whose radiance, evocative of the Homeric Dawn, matches the dazzling beauty of Chariclea, the very embodiment of ‘rosy-fingered Dawn’ (Aethiopica 3. 4. 1). The great emphasis placed by Musaeus on the protagonists’ sameness is likewise novelistic. In Ovid only Hero’s beauty is in the spotlight (Her. 18. 66 –74). It is true that Musaeus as well devotes

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much attention to her appearance (H&L 55 – 67; 74 – 8) and none at all to Leander’s when the two make their entrance; but earlier he calls them both beautiful and hammers their identical attractiveness into the reader’s head by overwriting: they are ‘both exceedingly beautiful stars of both cities (ἀmwotέrvn polίvn p1rikallέ16 ἀstέr16 ἄmwv), and similar to each other’ (22 – 3).42 The two cities are joined just like their two stars in a phrase in which ‘both’ interlocks the two pairs by its position at the beginning and at the end of the line. The cities have already received equal treatment as a duo: ‘both’ are the targets of Eros’ shooting (18). And the boy and the girl are interwoven in a chiasm even before they meet: ‘Their names were lovely Leander and the maiden Hero. She lived in Sestos, he in the city of Abydos’ (19 – 21).43 Further details in the setting and the narrative of the encounter – the great number of visitors, especially young men who come to look at the girls; the pictorial description of Hero’s face; and Leander’s inner conflict at love’s onslaught – have exact parallels in the novels, the first in Xenophon’s Ephesian Tale, the last two in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon. As noted long ago, this novel in particular has left a strong mark on Musaeus’ epic, which borrows ideas, words and entire episodes from it.44 But Leander is not a novelistic lover, and Musaeus crafts a long seduction scene that shows this. Leander’s courtship of Hero is modelled after the lessons that Clitophon, Achilles Tatius’ protagonist, receives from his savvy friends: approach the girl quietly, don’t talk sex, sigh, squeeze her finger, call her mistress and kiss her neck.45 But Musaeus’ character behaves more courageously than his novelistic counterpart, who is passive, clumsy, scolds himself for his timidity and is scolded by others for it (see especially Leucippe and Clitophon 2. 4. 3 – 6). The extended presence of this subtext brings out Leander’s initiative against the backdrop of Clitophon’s shyness. If we believe him, Clitophon becomes less cowardly only after he succeeds in kissing Leucippe,46 whereas Leander, on his first move, ‘boldly (uarsalέv6) [. . .] advanced’ (99 –100), darting sensuous glances in silence. And again, when night comes, ‘boldly (uarsalέv6) he came near to the maiden’ (112), this time to press her rosy fingers. And once more: ‘Boldly (uarsalέv6) he pulled her richly wrought

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dress with his hand’ (118). uarsalέv6 is beaten into the narrative with each advance and at the beginning (or almost) of each line that describes them, as a keynote that sounds the message: bravely, bravely, bravely. Musaeus is fond of repetitions.47 For instance, the word koύrh, ‘maiden’, appears time and again in the account of Leander’s seduction of Hero. Its recurrence has been compared to a basso ostinato, the constant pounding of one theme in the same lower voice and pitch along a musical development.48 The three instances of uarsalέv6 set up a similar resonance, pairing Leander’s moves with bravery. Significantly, the musical theme is heard in closer succession from the second to the third move (six lines) than from the first to the second (12 lines), and, according to a manuscript variant, in the last instance the abstract adverb is replaced by the concrete image of a daring hand (uarsalέῃ palάmῃ). These details cue the reader to Leander’s growing boldness as he progresses from squeezing Hero’s fingers to the more aggressive gesture of grabbing her dress. In the variant uarsalέῃ, the line that narrates his last move closely imitates Nonnus’ description of a fighter. Compare: x1irὶ dὲ uarsalέῃ polydaίdalon ἀspίda t1ίnvn (‘holding out his richly wrought shield with his bold hand’, Nonnus 36. 224) and u1rsalέῃ palάmῃ polydaίdalon 1ἷlk1 xitῶna (‘he pulled her richly wrought dress with his bold hand’, H&L 118).49 The echoing pushes the reader to associate Leander with a warrior ready for battle. Though the image of the militia amoris does not appear in Musaeus’ poem (probably because of its Homeric patina), its protagonist is a braver soldier of love than Clitophon, who calls himself one such soldier (2. 10. 3). Leander does not even make an attempt at fighting or hiding his passion, as novelistic lovers do. Musaeus introduces him with an epic apostrophe: But you, much-suffering Leander, when you saw the renowned maiden, were not willing (oὐk ἔu1l16) to consume your heart with secret pangs, but, unexpectedly conquered by inflaming arrows, you were not willing (oὐk ἔu1l16) to live bereft of the beautiful Hero. (86 –9)

‘You were not willing’, repeated at a short interval and in the same metrical position (at the beginning of the line), is yet another musical

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theme, which underscores both Leander’s similarity with novelistic protagonists, for he will not live without the woman he loves, and his difference from them, for he is also unwilling to let his passion eat him alive without him taking action. His determination sets him apart from the other fellows attracted to Hero, one of whom audibly comments on her beauty while others ‘hide their wound’ (85) in a novelistic mould, when he steps in with a strong adversative (‘But you’) against their meaningless background noise and inaction.50 The fellow who speaks does not love as uncompromisingly as Leander, for he is ready to die only after sharing Hero’s bed (79); and should he not be allowed to touch the priestess of Aphrodite, he would be happy to have an ersatz bride provided she looks like her (82 – 3)!51 The contrast intimates on the one hand that this love story will not feature the typically novelistic rivals threatening the couple’s union,52 since these potential antagonists do not act on their love, and on the other that Musaeus’ protagonist is not himself a typical novelistic lover. Leander’s distance specifically from Clitophon is further brought to light by the description of the emotional conflict he experiences, which is identical to his counterpart’s in its components but not in its initial outcome. Both characters are prey to trembling, to astonishment at the girl’s beauty, ‘shame’ for having fallen to love, and ‘shamelessness’. But, for Leander, the last emotion listed is love driving out shame (H&L 98), while, for Clitophon, it is shame (Leucippe and Clitophon 1. 4. 5).53 Consequently, the novelistic hero tries to oppose his passion whereas Musaeus’ character makes no such attempt; he instantly furthers his, ‘embracing shamelessness’ (99).54 In the account of Clitophon’s psychomachy shamelessness is only one of the forces that fight inside him. In Leander’s soul, by contrast, it is also the one that emphatically wins along with the triumph of love. Leander’s audacious and wordless advances find exact parallels in Nonnus’ epic, where a lover’s glances and nods are core moves in the game of seduction.55 The poor Dionysus, madly in love with Aura, laments that the girl is so hard hearted that he cannot charm her ‘with a lover’s nods’, ‘moving eyelids’, ‘a love-mad eye’ or ‘wooing endearments’ (48. 500 – 2). Women employ the same tricks:

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‘She imitated the ways of love-mad women with contrived nods, rolling her eyes’ (34. 275 – 7). And Pan gives this advice to Dionysus, smitten with passion for Beroe¨: ‘Charm the maiden to love with a meaning silence. Nod to her with moving eyelids’ (42. 231 – 2). This is what Leander does in his first approach, while in his last, he boldly grabs Hero’s dress, a move which repeats that of the Indian Morrheus who seizes Chalcomede’s dress with a ‘bold hand’ to take her virginity (35. 205 – 6). Leander’s keenness on Hero’s throat also points to Nonnian lovers. Though the allure of a woman’s neck is a literary commonplace, 56 they are drawn to this body part almost obsessively. Nonnus conveys their inclination by mentioning an enticing throat much more frequently in connection with their desire or intent gaze than from the narrator’s external, objective perspective.57 The same is true for Musaeus. The introductory and authorial description of Hero’s beauty does not contain a reference to her neck. It follows Clitophon’s portrayal of Leucippe in praising the gleam, as of lightning, of her face, the whiteness of her cheeks tinted with blush, and in drawing a comparison with the moon.58 But, while Clitophon does not pay attention to Leucippe’s neck and instead rhapsodizes on several highpoints of her face, Leander is all taken with Hero’s throat. He kissed ‘the maiden’s fragrant, fairskinned neck (1ὔodmon ἐύxroon aὐxέna)’ (133) and ‘did not grow weary with watching the soft-skinned (ἁpalόxroon) neck of the maiden’ (170 – 1). Hero’s throat affords Leander a polysensual or synesthetic pleasure. When he kisses it, it is an 1ὔodmon ἐύxroon aὐxέna, where the alliteration eu-eu joins the enticements of smell and sight, offering both to the readers’ ears; the longer prosodic duration of the second eu, disyllabic, suggests Leander’s lingering pleasure. And as he indulges in a tireless gazing of Hero’s neck, it is ‘soft-skinned’. Touched by his mouth, her throat pleases his eyes and his nose; watched intently, it delivers a velvety feel, which appeals to his – and to the reader’s – imaginary touch. Leander does not just watch, does not just kiss, but smells and watches while he kisses and touches while he watches. As in his moves of seduction, in kissing and gazing he is unrestrained, like many lovers in Nonnus.

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Leander’s main epic paradigm, however, is not a Nonnian lover or fighter but Odysseus, even in the scene of first encounter. When, after kissing Hero’s neck, he speaks at last, his words are so irresistible that Hero definitely capitulates (158–9) and admits to their power (174–5). As Julius Caesar Scalinger had already recognized, the speech is modelled after Odysseus’ to Nausicaa for some of its contents as for its effects.59 Leander compares Hero to goddesses (135–6), calls her parents fortunate (138), himself a suppliant (148) and his words a supplication (139–40). But the two speakers have opposite goals. Odysseus sets out to charm Nausicaa instead of touching her, whereas Leander delivers his speech after touching and kissing Hero, counting on his words to overcome her last show of resistance. Leander’s facility with seductive speech, his knowledge of ‘the paths of devious words’ (175) with which he drives Hero’s heart astray (158–9), contrasts him once again with Clitophon. Both have a helper in Eros, the god ‘full of variegated wiles’ (H&L 198) or the ‘self-taught expert’ (Leucippe and Clitophon 1. 10. 1). Clitophon’s eloquence indeed flows freely when he does not speak to Leucippe directly but to his servant, expatiating on the power of love (1. 16–19). But shortly thereafter, finding himself in front of the girl, he turns pale, blushes, is agitated and at a loss for words (2. 6. 1–2). Though he manages to unbind his tongue and call her ‘mistress’, as per his servant’s instructions (2. 4. 4), it is only with the help of her witty and ironic repartees that the two at last engage in a playful erotic banter (2. 6. 2–3). Conversely, the ‘goad of desire’ is enough to drive Leander twice to speak surefootedly to his girl (134; 194), the second time a ‘much-contrived (polymήxanon) speech’ (202), like many authored by his Homeric model. While Clitophon is faint hearted and gauche, the daring Leander is a trickster of words: ‘a bold sharpe Sophister’, as Marlowe will call him (Hero and Leander 1. 203).60 THE FEARLESS SWIMMER By drawing out Leander’s bravery, the long seduction scene sets the stage for his nocturnal swim. This feat, in turn, further distances him from his main novelistic referent by pushing a positive association between himself and Odysseus.

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The cowardly and clumsy Clitophon is an anti-Odysseus. He lacks the promptitude, determination and courage of Homer’s character when he is required to model those virtues. His servant prepares the terrain for him to enter Leucippe’s bedroom by drugging her guardian just as the Homeric hero drugs the Cyclops, then delivers him with the exhortation that he act as ‘a good Odysseus’ (Leucippe and Clitophon 2. 23. 3). All is ready and the passage is easy. Still, Clitophon ‘trembled a double tremor’ (2. 23. 3), battered by joy and fear, while his epic paradigm, in addition to being the mastermind of the whole plan, brims with courage, uάrso6 (Od. 9. 376 – 7; 381).61 It is Leander who imitates Odysseus’ bravery as he braces himself for a much riskier journey than Clitophon’s. True, he ‘trembled at first’ (H&L 243). ‘But then, screwing up his courage (uάrso6), he spoke to his heart, exhorting it with these words’ (243 – 4), just as Odysseus addresses his own heart twice when caught in the fiercest storm (Od. 5. 298; 407). The courage of Leander’s moves of seduction looks ahead to his courage in crossing the Hellespont. In both circumstances bravery takes the place of a tremor quickly overcome by the thrust of love.62 Musaeus’ character faces tougher conditions than Ovid’s. All in all, Greek readers are likely to have been better acquainted than Roman ones with a topographical reality observed by Strabo (13. 1. 22): that the crossing from Abydos to Sestos is more difficult than the reverse (Byron, the ‘degenerate modern wretch’, swam in the easier direction). This extra-literary fact might have drawn the attention of informed readers to the extent of Leander’s accomplishment. But even those ignorant about the currents of the Hellespont could and can appreciate the emphasis with which the dangers of his journey are conveyed. On his first swim the elements are not friendly to him. The sea is not calm; the moon does not keep him company. He finds no soothing helper in the nocturnal sky but has to brave a threatening, loud-echoing surf. He hears ‘the much-sounding roaring of the furiously dashing waves’ (242) and exhorts himself to disregard those ‘dashing waves’ (248). The opposite conditions of the sea in Ovid and in Musaeus are related to the different circumstances in which Leander finds himself and to different narrative choices. In the Latin text he is remembering his crossing with nostalgia when he cannot swim. His memory of a

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quiet sea bathed in a bright light creates a contrast with the gloomy present, when he hears the deafening noise of the unfriendly waters.63 Musaeus’ character, on the other hand, is about to swim, and the narrative follows his endeavour while also looking ahead to his death. Instead of contrasting the calm sea of an idealized past with the present roughness of the water, Musaeus builds toward the catastrophe throughout the poem with recurring references to wind and waves announcing themselves menacingly until they fill the scene.64 In particular, he bridges Leander’s successful swim to his death by verbal repetitions, looking ahead to the last night with its ‘furious’ (mainomέnh6, 303) and ‘loud-sounding’ (ἠxή, 315) sea, already in his description of the first, when the waves are ‘much sounding’ (polyhxέa, 242) and ‘furious’ (mainomέnvn, 242). Their din is an acoustic foreshadowing of the storm that will drown Leander. In addition to anticipating the catastrophe, these verbal echoes and the lack of contrast between the state of the sea on the first crossing and on the last enhance Leander’s prowess: unlike the character of the Latin epistle according to his self-presentation, Musaeus’ Leander faces a major, epic obstacle already on his first attempt. The absence of the soothing moonlight tightens his association with Odysseus braving his last storm, which begins with Poseidon clouding and darkening the sky (Od. 5. 291 – 4). The parallel is further advanced by a telling detail: the stars of which Leander would have no use are, as we have seen, the same Odysseus watches wakefully during 17 days and nights before the storm breaks out. Not so in Ovid. There the ‘public stars’ he dismisses were women who became famous and immortal thanks to a god’s passion, but whom the aristocratic, Callimachean lover disregards in favour of his unique lady.65 If Musaeus drew his episode from Ovid, he changed the names of the constellations to make them fit the persona of his Leander, who is not a spokesman for Callimachus’ poetics but imitates Odysseus’ feat.66 Another point of contrast between the representations of Leander’s crossing in the two texts is that Musaeus does not cast it as an athletic achievement. Ovid puts a premium on Leander’s swimming skills, pausing to describe the rhythmic movement of his pliant arms, but the Greek poet mentions only his diving, and then

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focuses on the steadiness with which he follows Hero’s lamp. We do not see agile limbs cleaving their way through the deep. This difference might mirror broad cultural trends. While Ovid’s emphasis on Leander’s athleticism matches the Roman taste for swimming as a recreational activity, Musaeus’ lack of interest in it is well attuned to his Greek environment, where swimming was not considered a pleasure.67 But in addition, this poet’s choice not to dwell on Leander’s body cutting the waves reinforces his identification with Odysseus on his most strenuous crossing, for Homer, like Musaeus, does not describe the swimmer’s limbs at work, but only notes his falling into the sea with outstretched arms (Od. 5. 374). With the epic difficulty of the passage there come efforts and tiredness. Ovid’s Leander in one line, and in no time, lays down ‘his fear together with his clothes’ (Her. 18. 57), or so he claims, whereas in Musaeus he rebukes his heart spiritedly over six lines before stripping and diving. In Ovid, to be sure, Leander speaks about the ‘labour’ of his arms and their weariness (Her. 18. 83 – 8; 161 – 5) during the crossing, but always to attest to the energizing power of his love, which instantly restores his strength. There is no mention of exhaustion at arrival. By contrast, Musaeus’ character is a wreck when he comes ashore: ‘much wearied’ (259), ‘panting’ (261), he is led by his beloved to her tower, then her room. These contrasting accounts of Leander’s state tally with the different impetus and speaking voice of the two texts. In Ovid it is Leander who describes his swim as he recollects a wonderful night and builds towards its climax: mention of exhaustion at arrival would be out of place because this would deflate his and the reader’s excited anticipation of the love night. On the other hand, in Musaeus it is not Leander who recounts his crossing, but the outside narrator who reports on Leander’s fatigue at arrival from his external vantage point. But why does he conceive a weary Leander in the first place and underscore his weariness? Indeed, the swimmer is still panting when Hero embraces him on her bed (266 – 7) before offering him rest: ‘Bridegroom, who have toiled much, as no other bridegroom has suffered; bridegroom, who have toiled much, enough now of briny water and the smell of fish from

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the deep-sounding sea. Here, put your tiredness in my lap’ (268 – 71). Her words are all about his exertion. The goal of so much emphasis on tiredness seems to be, once again, to drive home the identification of Leander with his Homeric model. While Leander’s toilsome swimming is strewn with references to the much-suffering Odysseus facing the last attack of Poseidon’s anger, his weariness invokes that suffered by the Homeric hero as he crawls onto the island of the Phaeacians: ‘both his knees and his strong hands were tired’ (Od. 5. 453– 4). Like Leander he is breathless and speechless (456), utterly spent (457). Hero’s repeated greeting, ‘bridegroom, who have toiled much’ (268; 269), cites Odysseus’ description of himself in his prayer to the river when at last he is released from the sea (Od. 5. 449). The magnitude of Leander’s efforts is brought to the fore also by the content of his rebuke to his heart. He urges himself to shed his fears by relying on an argument that Ovid puts into Hero’s mouth when she pleads with Leander to be more daring: ‘There is no reason you should be afraid: Venus herself will support your endeavour and flatten the watery ways, she who is born from the sea’ (Her. 19. 159 – 60). Musaeus’ Leander would not need this reminder, for he agrees with Ovid’s Hero: ‘My heart, do not fear the full-flowing water. There, to love! Why do you worry about the dashing of the waves? Don’t you know that Cypris is born of the sea and rules over the sea and my pangs?’ (H&L 247– 50). Musaeus might have modified Ovid. Alternatively, and more likely, the argument might have been in the original both poets used, though we are in no position to speculate on the context. What strikes a reader who compares the two treatments, however, is that in the Greek poem Leander encourages himself with words which conjure up those used by Hero in the Latin text, words inviting him to swim the rough sea that keeps the two apart. That reader will thus associate the first crossing of Musaeus’ Leander with challenging conditions, and his decision to swim with the courage that the Ovidian Hero would wish her Leander had. A similar reversed use of a motif seems to occur in the description of the wintery gales that are about to kill Leander: ‘And with the beaten sea, already the sailor drew his black ship onto the dry shore,

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avoiding the stormy and treacherous sea’ (H&L 298 – 9). These words faintly resonate with Leander’s observation in Ovid that ‘the sea of Athamas roars with huge waves, and the ships are hardly safe in their harbour’ (Her. 18. 137 – 8). The contexts of the two passages, however, are in stark contrast. Ovid’s character is protesting that no path is left for him: ‘I used to complain that there was no other way for me to come to you, but now I complain that I don’t have that either, on account of the winds’ (Her. 18. 135 – 6). He helplessly contemplates the surge and listens to its roaring, feeling detained, trapped. In Musaeus, on the other hand, mention of the windwhipped sea serves to launch Leander on his last, intrepid swim: ‘But fear of the stormy sea did not stop you, strong-hearted Leander’ (300 – 1). Because the waves are swelling, Ovid’s character for the time being draws back, while, in spite of the swelling waves, Musaeus’ instantly goes forth. The apostrophe that spurs him on builds another bridge with his bold courtship, likewise introduced by an apostrophe (86). One more detail stresses Leander’s daring. In Ovid, on the stormy night in which he writes, one sailor, an audax navita, has braved the sea. There is no such personage in the Greek text; on the contrary, Musaeus takes care to underscore his absence (299). The boldness of the navita is transferred to Leander, whom fearlessness sets in opposition to the sailors seeking shelter from the waves. While in Ovid the only presence in the seething waters is the audacious mariner, in Musaeus it is the swimmer in love. The Greek poet, however, does not cast Leander’s boldness as recklessness. His repeated association with Odysseus rather suggests the opposite: his last swim is an act of courage, as are all of his actions. In the second apostrophe to him, Musaeus calls Leander ‘strong hearted’, kart1rόuym1: an epithet he shares with the greatest heroes, Achilles, Ajax, Heracles, Alexander the Great, and even with a god, Zeus. Virgil had illustrated the destructive power of love with Leander’s deadly swim. Ovid had offered his bravery as model for the miles amoris, but had also intimated that it turned into reckless impatience on that last stormy night. Musaeus’ character, even on that night, is fearlessly heroic, and his death does not punish a defiant audacity but, as we shall see, is willed by fate.68

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LEANDER’S NATIVE LAND One significant feature clashes with Leander’s Odysseus-like persona: he longs for Hero but displays utter indifference for his country and family. While Hero is proud to talk about her pedigree, of Leander’s background we learn nothing. Pushing him away, she warns him: ‘Leave my dress. Avoid the wrath of my wealthy parents’ (124 – 5). And, yielding to his advances, she asks him: ‘Tell me, don’t hide it, your name and your native country. Mine did not escape your notice: my famous name is Hero, my house is a renowned tower, which reaches the sky [. . .] in front of the city of Sestos’ (185– 9). To which he only answers: ‘And if truly you also want to know my name, it is Leander, husband of the beautifully wreathed Hero’ (219– 20). Leander’s silence about his provenance does not prove that he is of no consequence but that he does not care. Hero speaks conceitedly about her status in order to uphold her dignity while she is behaving without dignity: the first time she has just followed Leander to the innermost part of the temple ‘like one unwilling’ (121), rather than, if she were truly unwilling, withstanding his advance; and the second, she has admitted to the irresistible power of his words (174– 5). Hero is keeping up a respectable social facade while her love is shattering her inner respectability. Realizing her predicament, her wooer caresses her expressed pride with Odysseus-like finesse by calling her parents ὄlbioi (138), ‘prosperous’ or ‘fortunate’, echoing Odysseus’ words to Nausicaa (Od. 6. 154) but changing mάkar, ‘blessed’, with which Homer’s character eulogizes the girl’s parents, to an adjective that denotes also high social standing and material wealth. Leander is not indicating that his own origins are obscure by comparison, but he is seeking to be tactful and to please Hero. On the other hand, he does not bother to give social details about himself because he is driven by his seething passion: his identity is already and only as Hero’s mate, no matter where he was born and from whom.69 True, he has mentioned the name of his fatherland earlier (208– 9); not, however, because it has any meaning for him – no flattering label, such as ‘famous’, appears – but only to stress that it is close enough to Hero’s that he can swim there. Love re-christens him, as it does Romeo.70

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Leander’s disregard for his country and status also calls to mind the displeasure of Ovid’s character with his fatherland. The writer of Heroides 18 is unhappy to return to Abydos – an incredible fact, he underlines, drawing attention to his exceptionality. While the typical Greek or Roman person rejoices in returning home, a` la Odysseus, ‘I go back to my native land unwillingly: who could believe this? Unwillingly indeed I now tarry in my city’ (123 – 4). His coldness toward his patria and his correlated desire that the same land should hold both lovers is effectively conveyed by the word order of the two lines that conclude his outburst: ‘May your Sestos take me or may my Abydos take you. Your land is as pleasing to me as mine is to you’, which in Latin reads: vel tua me Sestos, vel te mea sumat Abydos; / tam tua terra mihi, quam tibi nostra placet. Two chiasms (tua me/te mea; tua mihi/tibi nostra) intertwine the two native lands as love joins their two inhabitants: ‘your land is mine and mine is yours’. Just as for Ovid’s Leander the only home is where he can be with Hero, for Musaeus his only epithet, which replaces the expected patronymic, is as her husband. Both would tell their beloved, borrowing from Propertius: ‘You alone are my home [. . .] you alone my parents’ (1. 11. 23).71 But Musaeus’ character goes one step further than Ovid’s in dismissing his native land. Shortly after mentioning Abydos’ proximity to Sestos, he says: ‘May I come to the sweet haven of the fatherland (patrίdo6) across the sea!’ (215). Whose fatherland? Logically it should be Hero’s, where Leander is about to swim, but the lack of possessive adjective opposes this interpretation. Logically the patrί6 should be Hero’s but grammatically it is Leander’s. Since Sestos is not his native land, critics have proposed to emend patrίdo6 to Kύprido6 (‘of Cypris’), based on the common erotic overtones of seafaring imagery: Leander will swim to the haven of Aphrodite.72 But could it not rather be that he conceives of Hero’s land as his own?73 An additional and compelling feature in favour of retaining patrίdo6 and interpreting it as Leander’s ‘adopted’ fatherland is one of the poem’s main subtexts: the portion of the Odyssey in which the protagonist, his heart set on seeing the day of his return, leaves Calypso and reaches Phaeacia.74 Ovid had already exploited Odysseus’ yearning for Ithaca to convey Leander’s amorous longing,

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by imagining the lovesick youth seated on a rock and travelling in his mind to Hero’s shores. But Musaeus thickens the presence of the Homeric subtext with multiple references to it, further reworking the epic as a romantic narrative. Leander is an Odysseus who braves the sea not to return to his native land and possessions but to leave them behind and reach his true home. THE OBSTACLES TO THE COUPLE’S MARRIAGE Hero’s expression of pride in her name and in her parents’ wealth is defensive but grounded in fact. The authorial narrator backs her up, terming her blood ‘nourished by Zeus’ (30), that is, dear to the gods like the stock of Homeric kings.75 She is ‘renowned’ (86).76 And it is her rich and noble family that would oppose the lovers’ union, as she spells out not only when she is still overtly resisting Leander’s advances (‘avoid the wrath of my wealthy parents’, 125) but also after giving in: ‘We cannot come near to holy wedlock, for it was not my parents’ liking’ (179 – 80). Did Musaeus find the prominence of Hero’s family and its function as obstacle in his Hellenistic model? Were they already in the local legend? In both Virgil and Ovid there is only mention of Leander’s parents. This agreement, however, does not prove that they were the original impediments to the marriage, because only in Ovid do they oppose the match. In the Georgics they are the helpless victims of the youth’s passion. In addition, Virgil chooses Leander rather than Hero to exemplify the ruinous force of love; hence it is natural that his family rather than hers should be introduced. The question of the parental obstacle is intertwined with another: was Hero’s priesthood coeval with the legend? If it was, as has been ingeniously argued,77 then it is also probable that her family was cast in the role of opponent. Her rich and powerful father vowed her to the cult of Aphrodite and with it to a secluded and marriage-less life. As she tells Leander in Musaeus, who possibly stays close to the original version: ‘You are not permitted to touch the priestess of Aphrodite’ (126) and marriage ‘was not my parents’ liking’ (180), even before she met Leander (whereas in Ovid the youth’s parents are against a union specifically with Hero). On the other hand, both the

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choice of Hero’s family in the adversarial role and her religious investiture have been explained as an innovation, the latter of which could derive from Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, where the heroine is consecrated to Artemis.78 I think that the first scenario is more likely and that Hero’s office is based in real cult. Scholars have retraced her priesthood back to Aphrodite Euploia (‘the Protector of Sailors’), the dedicatee of several temples on the Hellespont and perhaps also of a lighthouse in Sestos.79 Since the tale of the two lovers is grounded in local realities, it is perfectly conceivable that the cult of the goddess with her helping light was, at some point, grafted onto the love story. Hero then became Aphrodite’s servant to obey her parents’ will: but love struck.80 Ovid, who in the treatment of the legend is overall more original than Musaeus, stripped Hero of her priestly function to turn her into a more natural character, a more modern, ‘bourgeois’ girl;81 and, with the same goal, he chose Leander’s parents as opponents to lower Hero’s status. He took the maiden of the original poem off her pedestal to make her play the elegiac puella, while his Greek successor fittingly left the heroine of his epic narrative enthroned.82 Musaeus, however, is interested in Hero’s priesthood only insofar as it allows him to play up the paradoxical aspects of a virgin serving the goddess of love.83 The complication that her investiture adds to the couple’s predicament is entirely external and easily disposed of. Though before meeting Leander she is happy in her chaste life (31 –6),84 there is no suggestion that she becomes deeply conflicted between love and her vow of virginity. Chariclea, the novelistic priestess of Artemis, fights against her passion, cannot come to terms with it and grows sick as a consequence of her conflicting emotions. In contrast, Hero yields to Leander’s charm visibly, in front of him, even before he achieves his seduction with his Odysseus-like speech, at which point she seems to have forgotten her pledge completely. When earlier she threatens him after he grabs her by her dress, she does remind him of the prohibition attached to her priestly status, though already at this juncture, her first warning concerns her parents’ wrath (125– 6). This sequence might suggest that her dedication to virginity stems from their decision rather than her choice (as Chariclea’s) or at least that she fears their anger first and

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foremost. And in her reply to Leander’s ‘love-breeding words’ (159), which have been largely spent to demonstrate that a virgin priestess of Aphrodite is a contradiction in terms (141 – 7), she makes no reference to her vow. Her only worries are society at large and her family, which she mentions twice (180; 190), the second time damning them (‘my parents’ hateful will’). Her commitment to chastity is not mentioned. It is true that, before replying, Hero appears torn between love and shame. She takes a long time to speak, during which her agitated body language and her blushing suggest that she is struggling with great emotional turbulence (160– 73). But the narrator cuts her struggle short, preventing the reader from interpreting her demeanour as the sign of genuine turmoil: All these announce persuasion, and silence is the promise of a maiden who is persuaded to go to bed. And already the virgin Hero received the sting of love and was warmed in her heart by a sweet fire, and was a-flutter at the beauty of lovely Leander. (164–8)

Musaeus reduces the conflict to a superficial contrast of appearance and reality, explaining Hero’s gestures and silence not as expressions of distress but as the cover of a desire that says ‘no’ meaning ‘yes’.85 Furthermore, it is a desire that monopolizes the narrator’s attention at the expense of acknowledging Hero’s other conflicting emotion, shame, which only reappears in the description of her deportment when she is about to raise her voice (173) and admit to the irresistible seductiveness of Leander’s words. The readiness with which Hero is swept away may surprise readers who remember how she was introduced: as an incarnation of the proud virgin, content in her secluded life, shunning even the company of other women (31 – 5) and dreading love (40). This description is, though, challenged by her forward behaviour as soon as she appears in the temple, where she promenades (55) and even wanders (71), flashing her radiance and showing her rosy face and ankles (62) to all those present.86 Has she no priestly duty to perform? What is she doing in the temple aside from parading her charms? We shall contrast her again with Chariclea, who appears in the shrine of Artemis to conduct the yearly ritual of which she is charged. Musaeus’

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carelessness in drawing such a contradictory characterization of Hero is undeniable, but it intimates that he was not interested in deepening her commitment to virginity and to her priesthood. It will fall to later writers to take her pledge seriously and to develop a dramatic conflict between, on the one hand, duty or a dedication to chastity and, on the other, the demands of eros.87 THE URGENCY OF PASSION By going against a parental decision that forces on her a cultic requirement, Hero breaks the laws of family, society and religion. The transgression is conveyed by the description of the union. It is a nonwedding, filled with negative particles to highlight all the rituals and other social trimmings that are missing: it is a dance-less, song-less, torch-less, family-less ceremony, sponsored not by Hera, the protector of marriage, but by Silence, Darkness and Night (274– 82). Musaeus found a prompt for this ‘wedding’ in an epigram by Antipater of Thessalonica, in the extant evidence the earliest Greek poet to devote his efforts to the legend:88 Always, o stranger, is the water of the Hellespont evil for women. Ask Cleonice of Dyrrachium. She was sailing to Sestos to meet her bridegroom (nymwίon), but in the black ship she met the fate of Helle. Wretched Hero, you lost a husband (ἀnέra), and Deimachos a bride in a few stadia. (AP 9. 215)

Antipater draws a parallel between Hero and Leander and a legitimate couple who were about to be wed when the storm hit. He also calls Hero’s lover ‘husband’, further pushing associations between the affair and a (would-be) lawful marriage. There can hardly be any doubt that Musaeus had this poem in mind, for he uses the same term, nymwίo6, for Leander (268 – 9). Antipater, however, smooths over the illegitimacy of the dalliance, whereas in Musaeus the wedding imagery has the opposite effect: it points up the forbidden and secret quality of the union, sanctified in an oxymoronic ceremony. This non-wedding can be contrasted with the highly musical celebration that crowns the love story of Acontius and Cydippe in a letter of Aristaenetus (fifth or early sixth century), which Musaeus

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almost certainly used.89 Like Leander, Acontius is the object of an empathetic apostrophe that also emphasizes, as in Leander’s case, the youth’s unwillingness to live without the loved maiden as soon as he sees her: ‘So from the moment you were hit, Acontius, loveliest of boys, you were pondering two possibilities, marriage or death’.90 If Musaeus had this letter in mind, he might also have fashioned the secret wedding of Hero and Leander against the background of the public ceremony that unites Acontius and Cydippe: ‘And the girl’s agemates sang the hymenaion [. . .] And when anyone sang off-key, the chorus leader gave her a sharp look and got her back in tune by signaling the rhythm with her hand’. Acontius and Leander are moved to act on their passion by the same impulse, ‘love or die’, but one finds his reward in wedding festivities filled with song, the other in a tryst under the aegis of silence. The night of love disposes of social conventions not only by being deprived of the customary celebrations, but also, which is not often noted,91 by entrusting Hero, the bride, with the active role. She takes all the initiative until the very end, when Leander loosens her girdle. After embracing him and leading him to her bedchamber, ‘she washed all his skin, and anointed his body with oil fragrant with roses, and quenched his sea-breathing smell’ (264– 5) before inviting him to come closer to her. Tennyson’s Hero will imitate these gestures: ‘I have bathed thee with the pleasant myrrh; / Thy locks are dripping balm’ (Hero to Leander). Musaeus’ narrative is redolent of Homeric passages. ‘All his skin’ repeats identically Od. 5. 455, where it is Odysseus who ‘smelled in all his skin’ upon landing on Phaeacia. ‘Smell’, in nominal form, becomes an essential part of the description of Leander. And Hero evokes the Homeric Aphrodite lavishing her care on Hector’s body, which she ‘anointed with divine oil, fragrant with roses’ (Il. 23. 186 – 7). While the reference to the Odyssey promotes the identification of Leander with the exhausted Odysseus who touches soil at last after accomplishing a superhuman crossing, the one to the Iliad associates Hero with the goddess she serves, entrusting her with exceptional reviving powers. The allusion is also an ominous

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foreboding: Leander is already a corpse, which Hero/Aphrodite is preserving from decay.92 It is true that Hero’s initiative is justified by Leander’s Odysseuslike weariness. Though his virility is intact, pace Byron’s witticism, ‘I doubt whether Leander’s conjugal powers must not have been exhausted in his passage to Paradise’,93 he has no energy left when Hero takes him into her arms. Still, a reader whose mind is conditioned by Homeric bathing scenes, in none of which does a lady handle a man’s naked body, 94 will find her initiative remarkably bold. Echoes of those scenes surround her movements with epic formality, no doubt;95 but she employs high epic manners to scrub Leander clean. Her behaviour contrasts her with Ovid’s overtly more modest heroine, who embraces and kisses Leander but gives him clothes, and dries only his hair (Her. 18. 103 – 4).96 To be sure, the massage that Hero performs on Leander in Musaeus is not erotic. She anoints him to wash off the brine and does not rub her own body with scents to arouse him, as Greek and Roman lovers are wont to do. An aphrodisiac toilette would clash with her epic stature. But she does prepare Leander for the act of love, and with her own hands. Her boldness in cleansing his body is matched by the intense eroticism of her last words to him: ‘Put your tiredness [literally ‘your sweat’] in my lap’. The least modest feature of Hero’s conduct is the tone of her voice: not ‘sweet’, as when she responded, melting with desire, to Leander’s speech. Then she had behaved as socially expected of a girl in love: blushing with shame, covering her face, unable to utter a word for the longest time, and finally ‘raising a sweet voice’ (172) while her face was still dripping with emotion and shame. Now her voice is a scream: ‘She cried out man-loving words’, wilήnora6 ἴax1 mύuoy6 (267). Scholars observe that Musaeus here employs a turn of phrase that is not Homeric but is typical of Nonnus: ἰάx1in as a transitive verb with an internal object. In Nonnus, however, the phrase is so common as to be unmarked, whereas Musaeus, as keen as he generally is on repetitions, uses it only this one time.97 The scream erupts from the sustained silence that envelops the scene (261), expressing the urgency and immediacy of a passion that cannot be stifled by protocol. It is a shriek that conjures up Medea’s in Apollonius of Rhodes, when she

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FIGURE 2.1 Pierre-Claude Delorme (1783 –1859), He´ro et Le´andre, Brest, Muse´e des beaux-arts. Credit: q Muse´e des beaux-arts de Brest me´tropole. first catches sight of the Argonauts in her father’s palace: she also ἀnίax1n (3. 253), though without speaking further.98 Medea’s startled cry, a foreboding of her love, becomes with Hero the charged screech of an emotion too powerful to be contained. Several later writers and artists softened the eroticism of this scene. The Romantic painter Pierre-Claude Delorme (Figure 2.1), for

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instance, represents Hero not washing and anointing Leander’s body but pouring oil only over his head – a gesture strongly redolent of baptism or a sanctification ritual. And yet the image is still suggestively sensual, for the couple appear enlaced, Leander naked and Hero wrapped in a revealing veil. Two Renaissance writers, on the other hand, cut out all references to nudity or to erotically charged behaviours. Bernardo Tasso, the father of Torquato and one of the first translators of Musaeus into Italian, changed the bold Hero of the Greek poem into a modestly behaved maiden. She takes care to cover Leander with a cloak (386– 7) and does not handle his body but only dries and anoints his hair (391 – 3).99 And instead of screaming she ‘spoke’, interrupting her words with kisses (399– 400).100 The act of love, which in Musaeus begins with a gesture, the loosening of Hero’s girdle, that unambiguously points to her defloration, is in Tasso literally watered down: ‘He plunged his lips into the fountain of love, until then preserved and kept shut by holy honesty’ (407 –9).101 The Spanish poet Juan Bosca´n drew from Tasso’s version for his even more sanitized rendering of the scene. His Hero cleanses Leander with her own hair and garments, hardly touching him (2192 – 203); she weeps ‘tender and joyous tears’ and speaks ‘sweet words’ (2206). The culminating union consists of more sugary stuff, vaguely defined: ‘endearing sweet things’ (2236). Besides, it is a true marriage celebration (2240 – 2), rather than a screamingly erotic congress that defies society and is denied its rituals.102 LOVE CONQUERS ALL The tragic ending to the affair has invited a reading of the poem as a charter for the affirmation of conservative values. Like the Greek novels, H&L demonstrates that society must approve and sanctify individual desires.103 The protagonists are destroyed by their disobedience and their tragedy contains an implicit lesson: death is meted out to those who put their love above the expectations or pressures of their environment. From an ideologically conservative perspective, the lovers deserve their demise, no matter how much sympathy the poet and the reader feel for them.104

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The narrative, however, contains no indictment of the transgressive dalliance. Musaeus does not point a moralizing finger at the couple, as medieval readers will do, and this in spite of his sententious style, which accommodates generalizing observations on women’s enviousness (37), on the power of beauty, sharper than an arrow, to generate love by slipping through the eyes (92 – 5), on Eros as helper to the man in love (198 – 200), on the true meaning of a maiden’s threats (131 –2) or of her gestures and silence (164 – 5). Given his proclivity to explain and judge, surely Musaeus could have added a damning comment on the lovers’ choice to give in to passion. But he did not. It is true that Leander calls love d1inό6, ‘terrible’ (245), which has been equated to Virgil’s durus amor, ‘harsh love’.105 The Greek epithet, though, is in the voice of the overwhelmed protagonist, not the author. Its use rather conjures up the outcry, d1inὸ6 ῎Erv6, d1inό6, that begins an epigram of Meleager in which the speaker, like Leander, is the god’s prey (AP 5. 176).106 The only expression of disapproval for the behaviour of one of the lovers in Musaeus’ voice occurs when Hero lights the lamp on the stormy night: If only the wretched Hero had stayed far from Leander at the beginning of winter, and had not lighted the short-lived star of their marriage! But longing and fate forced her. Charmed by them, she shone forth the torch of death, and no longer of love. (304–8)

Hero is held responsible for Leander’s death. In the state of our evidence this is an original claim, for Virgil blames the youth’s own uncontainable love, and Ovid similarly intimates that his reckless impatience will kill him. Though Hero kindles her lamp every night (Her. 19. 35 – 6), which he asks her to do (Her. 18. 216), it is his own passion alone that sends him forth. As one scholar notes, while in Musaeus the lovers would have been saved had Hero not held out her light, in Ovid it makes no difference, for Leander has a lamp burning within.107 The torch provides a background, and fears or intimations of its quenching foreshadow the catastrophe;108 but it does not instigate Leander. Nor does Hero’s letter plunge him into the stormy sea. As we have seen, she concludes her writing on a pacified, resigned

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and selfless note of patience, which has invited another critic to speak of ‘self-abnegation’ for her, and yet another to attribute to her the caring affection that Catullus calls bene velle and sets in opposition to the passionate amare.109 In sharp contrast, the character of Musaeus cannot contain her longing and shows forth her beacon. It is her inability to wait that kills Leander. This disturbingly misogynous passage is attuned to a more general characteristic of the epyllion: the much greater sympathy with which Musaeus treats Leander than Hero. He involves the reader in the sad fate of male protagonist from the beginning, by asking a traveller, if he should go to the site, to report about the tower where Hero stood holding her torch, and about the harbour of Abydos, which is ‘still lamenting the death and the love of Leander’ (27). Who, we might ask, is lamenting Hero’s death and her love? When Leander makes his entrance, he is ‘in dire suffering’ (86) and the object of an involved apostrophe; he is ‘in dire suffering’ again when he prays on his last swim (319), and receives another empathetic, and admiring address as he plunges into the sea ‘with a strong heart’ (300 – 1). His death earns him the epithet ‘much suffering’ (330), whereas Hero, who kills herself, simply ‘died’ (342). She is never the recipient of an apostrophe or of labels flattering to her character or sympathetic to her tragedy. Only her beauty is in the spotlight. And, while Leander’s burning desire drives him to accomplish epic deeds, Hero’s kills her lover. The continuity in the narrative between the second apostrophe to Leander the strong hearted, about to dive fearlessly into the seething surge to follow Hero’s lamp (301 – 4), and the reproach levelled at her for kindling it, draws attention to Musaeus’ diverging disposition toward the two: the brave Leander is the victim of Hero’s selfish amorous impatience. But it is one thing to blame Hero’s’ inability to wait, another to decry the lovers’ disobedience. The killing of Leander is not due to their transgression but to Hero’s fault of character. Furthermore, Musaeus softens his condemnation of her gesture by adding ‘fate’ to ‘love’ as the force behind it. The coupling of her passion with the blind design of fate ultimately exculpates Hero by casting her deadly urge to light the lamp as inevitable. In the end the pair do not die

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because Hero follows the call of passion – indeed, how could she have waited? The stars were against it – let alone because both of them defiantly act on their love, but because death was fated. Musaeus spells this out: ‘Eros could not restrain the Fates’ (323).110 One more indication that Musaeus does not condemn this illicit love is the effort he spends to heroicize Leander for all the actions he takes on account of it, from his courtship to his first swim to his last. He makes his appearance as one overcome unexpectedly ‘by inflaming arrows’ (88), against which, as we have seen, he applies no resistance but instantly proceeds to further his desire. The narrative stresses his determination to go ahead but does not post negative comments. Quite the opposite; Leander emerges as the absolute, uncompromising lover against the backdrop of the anonymous admirers of Hero, who both do nothing to assuage their desire and love less than he. Their passivity is associated with lukewarm feelings, while his choice boldly to act belongs with a passion that is stronger than the desire to live. Leander’s courage in wooing Hero and in braving the sea serves a love that ‘conquers all’ (200), both because of its absolute rule and because it overcomes every obstacle. It might be objected that it is anachronistic to apply this romantic conception of love to an ancient Greek text. But Leander’s words, in addition to his behaviour, prove that this is not a valid objection. As he tells Hero: ‘On account of my love for you I shall cross the wild swell of the sea, even if the water should blaze with fire and be inaccessible’ (203–4).111 Leander’s passion renders him fearless. And, I will now add, it is triumphant even over death. The strongest objection to reading the epyllion as a charter of the social order is the glamorization of the lovers’ love in death with which the poem ends: ῥoizhdὸn prokάrhno6 ἀp’ ἠlibάtoy pέs1 pύrgoy. kὰd d’ Ἡrὼ tέunhk1 sὺn ὀllymέnῳ parakoίtῃ. ἀllήlvn d’ ἀpόnanto kaὶ ἐn pymάtῳ p1r ὀlέurῳ. (341–fin.) With a rushing sound, her body fell headlong from the high tower. Hero died with her dead spouse. And they had joy of each other even in the extremity of death.

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Musaeus has been accused of cutting the catastrophe too short. As far as Hero’s suicide goes this is unfair. Though he devotes only three lines to it, he asks us to follow it attentively, to take the time and slow our reading down, for each of the three lines begins with a spondee. This exceptional sequence (two consecutive lines with a spondaic first foot appear elsewhere in the poem but three only here) has the effect of a rallentando, further enhanced by the middle line, which begins not with one but, uniquely in the epyllion, with two spondees.112 Our ears and with them our imagination linger on Hero’s heavy falling, and on the final union that her death achieves.113 The last verse – the poem’s seal – celebrates love’s delight, harking back to an earlier comment on the couple’s romance: ‘But they lived only a short time, and did not for long have joy (ἀpόnanto) of their sleepless, muchwandering marriage’ (291– 2). In life Hero and Leander are unsatisfied lovers. The darkness that enwraps their rendezvous is not ‘a blissful horror’, as for the Wagnerian Isolde, who covets it ecstatically as the ideal habitat of love.114 To the pair of Musaeus night is lack, the negation of the torchlit wedding that would fulfil their desire. Each time Leander leaves, he takes home his unquenched longing: ‘He swam back to the city of Abydos across the sea, un-sated and still smelling of the nocturnal marriage’ (284 – 5) – and, too soon, his permanent hunger for love and lovemaking is frustrated forever. We might expect the poem’s ending to match this portrayal of the couple’s dissatisfaction by a description of their death that would underscore its finality, its power to destroy love together with life.115 But instead, the last line produces an about-turn, highlighted by the repetition of ἀpόnanto (‘they had joy’), which sets in contrast the lovers’ unfulfilled joy in life and its unending prolongation in death. Death extends their togetherness through all eternity, changing a dalliance that was cut off daily by the coming of dawn and finally severed by a storm, into an indestructible bond, no longer subjected to the alternatives of day and night or even to time.116 The commonplace of the lovers’ union in death117 turns the tragic ending of the illegitimate affair into a dreamy vision of everlasting happiness. Later writers and artists have developed the conceit of the lovers’ eternal enjoyment of each other that fills Musaeus’ last line. Here is

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its rendering (turned into English) by the sixteenth-century Italian translator Pietro Ange`li: ‘Thus in the uttermost end of their lives they will both take joy of each other together’.118 Ange`li replaces the aorist of the Greek text with a future, and with this change of tense he unambiguously draws the prospect of unending pleasures for the dead couple. Another sixteenth-century Italian translator, Bernardino Baldi, elaborates on the motif with a freer interpretation: ‘So that not even their dire and unhappy destiny prevented them from enjoying each other’. And in more recent times and in a different medium, the English painter William Etty (Figure 2.2) likewise captures the spirit of Musaeus’ last line by showing Hero’s arms sensually spread around Leander’s face and chest as she meets her own death. Another epigram by Antipater of Thessalonica might have been the inspiration for Musaeus’ finale:

FIGURE 2.2 William Etty, Hero, Having Thrown Herself from the Tower at the Sight of Leander Drowned, Dies (1829), Tate Gallery. Credit: q York Museums Trust (York Art Gallery), UK / Bridgeman Images.

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The Myth of Hero and Leander This is where Leander swam across; this is the strait of the sea that is harsh not only to the lover. This is Hero’s former residence; these are the remains of the tower. This is where that traitor, the lamp, lay. This tomb they both share, and even now they blame that envious wind. (AP 7. 666)

A marked detail that features in both poems is the attack levelled on the material causes of the couple’s death: the lamp, a traitor in Antipater, is, more condemningly, ‘pitiless’ and ‘faithless’ in Musaeus (304); the wind, the target of the lovers’ blame in the epigram, in H&L is an ‘enemy’ and blows ‘harshly’ (13). Another point in common is the emphasis on the pair’s union in death: in Antipater, rendered as their sharing of a tomb, it is further romanticized by Musaeus, wherein they delight in love rather than curse the wind. Hero does rebuke its fury but only in life, when, at the peak of the storm, she ‘hurled chiding words against the savagely hearted wind’ (331) before she discovers Leander’s body and throws herself upon it.119 The reader will attribute the different position of the rebuke to genre, for it is typical of epigrams to imagine the dead still active and angry in their tombs, whereas this conceit would be out of place in a composition in the epic manner. But this generic difference has a thematic consequence: it brings out the complete serenity of Musaeus’ lovers in opposition to the picture drawn by Antipater. By keeping the reproach to the wind separate from their final union, Musaeus keeps the latter free from all memory of trouble. Death, far from punishing the pair for a passion that challenged social norms, puts an end to their worries and eternizes their love.120 A NEOPLATONIC ALLEGORY? Musaeus’ emphasis on the lovers’ bliss in death could corroborate another interpretation of his poem, as a Christian-Neoplatonic journey of the soul from heaven to earth and back to heaven. Indeed, this reading implies a happy ending beyond death: the soul, freed at last from the body, from the sea and the storms of mortal life, has returned to its true, unsullied existence. An allegorical explanation has, in fact, been offered.121 Leander, the soul, would be involved in the adventures described in Plato’s

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Phaedrus as represented in later Neoplatonic and Christian thought. The first section, the lovers’ encounter and their compact, would represent the life of the soul before its embodiment, as it follows a god in a heavenly procession. The second part, Leander’s swim and the ‘wedding’, would signify the soul’s life on earth, where recollection of its god leads it to a mystic union with him. And the third would stand for the soul’s final deliverance from the body ‘and the foreshadowing of its reward in the afterlife in the highest and culminating union with God’.122 Sensual and romantic joy morphs into mystic ecstasy. This interpretation is well-tuned to contemporary reading habits.123 By the end of the fifth century Platonizing allegory had long been applied to poetry, at least since the so-called Middle Platonism of the second century, and the privileged text for its exercise was the Odyssey, which shares much with Musaeus’ poem. Odysseus became the emblem for the soul escaping from the ‘sea of matter’. Though his release occurred not through death but through a successful return, the nostos was converted into a metaphysical journey, and Ithaca became the home of the soul delivered from its bodily fetters. Just as the Odyssey was understood as a Neoplatonic allegory, so could Musaeus’ poem, all the more so because it ends not with a metaphorical death but with a real one. To further encourage an allegorical reading of the epyllion is the attested exploitation of Hero and Leander as religious symbols. An Orphic sect took the couple, together with Jason and Medea, to represent the Orphic Eros.124 The love of Hero and Leander not only offered a paradigm for passionate human affection but also lent itself to be converted into a divine cosmic principle. It is, however, one thing to claim that readers contemporaneous with Musaeus could be inclined to allegorize the poem (as the Orphics allegorized its protagonists); another that its author intended to encode a Neoplatonic allegory into it. One possible objection to the latter is that no clear allegory can be detected in the poem. Creative allegorical writings are generally more explicit than H&L about the message underlying their narrative surface. Sceptical readers contrast Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, where the allegory is transparent.125 The same can be said about Prudentius’ Psychomachy, which dramatizes a battle between virtues and vices for

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the possession of the soul, and about Martianus Capella’s The Wedding of Philology and Mercury. Already in classical Greek literature deliberate allegories come with their explanations: so, for instance, Prodicus’ Heracles at the Crossroads (in Xenophon’s Memorabilia) and, most famously, Plato’s analogy of the cave. This objection, however, is not final. Rhetoricians such as Demetrios (third or second century BC ) consider obscurity as an essential element of allegory.126 In his view, it is advisable for poets to cover their true meaning obliquely so as to inspire awe, for clear statements are more apt to be despised than enigmatic ones. With the support of ancient rhetorical theory, it could be argued that Musaeus fancied a more enigmatic allegory than, say, Prudentius, and challenged the reader initiated into Neoplatonic lore to unearth it.127 The second and the third part of H&L could indeed accommodate a Platonizing message. The soul, guided by the light of truth, is first led to the region above the heavens that symbolizes the Platonic truth (Phaedrus 247c –d), and there it unites with God in an ineffable, mystic marriage – the non-wedding described by alpha privatives and shrouded in silence and darkness. Lastly, the soul strips itself of everything, keeping only its godlike element.128 The charged language that describes the gloom and silence surrounding the wedding ceremony promotes this reading. Musaeus does not write an unmarked phrase such as, ‘there was darkness’, but, rather, ‘Darkness dressed the bride, while Silence made the bed’. Does this wording carry mystical undertones? In particular, does the leading role of darkness suggest that Leander-the soul is taken to Plato’s region of truth above the heavens, which is ‘colourless, shapeless, and invisible’ except to the eyes of the soul (Phaedrus 247c)? Plato’s account means ‘not graspable by the physical senses’, but Neoplatonic commentators took it to mean ‘where night rules’.129 Silence appears already earlier in the wedding scene, when Hero greets Leander with a wordless embrace (261). This episode could support a Platonizing interpretation because in Plato’s version of the ladder of love there is no speaking. While, according to the traditional sequence of love’s steps, sight is followed by hearing and talking, then touching, kissing and finally intercourse, in the Phaedrus, when the beloved returns his love, ‘he desires to be near his

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lover, like him though not as strongly, to see him, touch him, kiss him, lie down by him’ (255e – 256a). Speech belongs in the preliminary stages of a lover’s approaches (255b) but is disposed of when the climax draws near. Could Hero’s emphatically wordless welcoming of Leander and his own silence point to the description of erotic desire in the Phaedrus? One critic who opposes the allegorical reading, however, takes the oxymoronic wedding simply as a rhetorical tour de force, intended to display Musaeus’ virtuosity.130 Furthermore, neither silence nor darkness require a mystical explanation to be understood, but are abstractions for the ‘secret loves’ (1), just as Night ‘preparing the wedding’ (282) refers to its consummation away from the light of day. And neither darkness nor silence are specific to the love night. As we have seen, the former is a leitmotif throughout the poem while the latter makes a sustained appearance in the scene of first encounter, in Leander’s seduction of Hero. Surely it has no mystical meaning there, since speeches crown the episode. As a whole the narrative of the lovers’ meeting and compact sits uncomfortably with an allegorical interpretation. Its advocates quite understandingly also look for Plato and his followers in this section of the epyllion. There are, indeed, many hints that the Phaedrus in particular has been an important source of inspiration, but several instances of apparent Platonic lore might rather come from the novels. The image of Hero flashing radiance from her face (56) has its immediate and closest precedent in Chariton, not in Plato;131 the description of the psychomachy that Leander suffers does not replicate the tensions between the two horses and the charioteer that agitate the Platonic soul but is lifted almost literally from Achilles Tatius; and though Plato expounds the theory of beauty making its way through the eyes into the soul, it is again Achilles Tatius that Musaeus almost plagiarizes in his rendering of this idea.132 This novelist, in turn, plunders Plato at every corner, but he does so playfully, even irreverently, without any mystical rapture. These and more references to the novels earlier in the poem in connection with several of its important motifs – the identity of the lovers, the religious context in which they meet, their beauty, the manner of their falling in love – alert the

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cultivated reader for whom Musaeus writes to the importance of those subtexts. The longest section of the poem cues us to interpret it first and foremost as a novel gone badly, not as a cryptic account of a mystical journey. Connected to the novelistic subtexts is the poem’s emphasis on Leander’s sexual longing rather than spiritual aspirations. If we apply the Platonic drama of the soul to him, in his own soul it is the black horse that wins. In the Phaedrus, when the soul sees ‘a vision that inspires love’, the white horse obeys the charioteer and behaves with restraint, but not so the black steed, which is eager ‘to propose the joy of love’ (253e – 254a) – as does Leander. The radiance of Hero’s beauty does have a parallel in the Phaedrus, but in this highly sexual context, when the black horse dominates, forcing his white mate and the charioteer to ‘do what he orders’: ‘And they come to the beloved and behold his radiance (tὴn ὄcin ἀstrάptoysan)’ (254a). Read against this background, the dazzling light of Hero’s face is no spur to a mystic ascension. Nor is the night of love, in spite of the – Platonizing? – prominence in it of touch and the reduced presence of speech. For, needless to say, in Musaeus’ scene no philosophical horse opposes the sexual union as in Plato (256a6 – 7).133 Finally, the image of love as a mystery or initiation rite (142), though of Platonic origin, is too common to conjure up the philosopher alone. We find it again in the mouth of the worldly characters of Achilles Tatius discussing tactics of seduction (1. 9. 7). A last and perhaps decisive obstacle to reading Hero and Leander as a deliberate Neoplatonic allegory is that Leander, as a male, is ill fit to represent the soul, which in Greek is feminine. To be sure, Neoplatonic philosophers had no compunction in allegorizing Odysseus in this very manner; but their exercise does not prove that the Odyssey was composed to be an allegory of the soul’s journey. One narrative that arguably contains elements of Platonic lore, Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche, entrusts the role of the soul to the sonamed heroine. And Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, which might loosely follow a Platonic script, likewise has the heroine play the part of the soul, while the hero, according to an ancient allegorical reading, represents the masculine ‘mind’.134

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Whatever the case, interpreters of Musaeus closer than us to him in time and cultural environment have not taken H&L to encode Neoplatonic doctrine – or any other philosophical or religious creed. The epyllion did not catch the attention of Byzantine scholars who allegorized other Greek fictional texts, including an erotic novel.135 On the other hand, the tale at large did inspire allegorical interpretations: but of a radically different kind. We shall see this at the beginning of the next chapter.

CHAPTER 3

Lustful Fornicators or Courtly Lovers? The Legend in Medieval European Literature

PART ONE: NEO-LATIN TEXTS

An allegory for love’s dangers: the tale in the mythographic tradition The African mythographer Fulgentius, roughly a contemporary of Musaeus, is the first to read the vicissitudes of Hero and Leander through a Christian lens. He deals with the story twice in his collection of allegorical interpretations of pagan myths, the Mythologiae. His first mention belongs in an introductory and programmatic section in which he advertises his refusal to narrate the stories of love that interested ancient poets and writers of fiction: Do not think that to give impulse to my books are the lamps of the Heroides, or those by which the lust of Sulpicilla or the curiosity of Psyche was exposed, or the one that led the husband of Phaedra forcibly to the underground mound or the one that broke off Leander’s swimming [. . .] We are not concerned with the lamp-girls, Hero and Psyche, who babble poetic trifles, one lamenting that the lamp has died, the other weeping over a lamp because it was lighted, so that Psyche lost from seeing and Hero died from not seeing. (Prologue 598 and 613)1

The common denominator of these ill examples is a lamp, that is, the privy eye that presides over the lascivious poetry of Sulpicia (about AD 90), the aroused gaze of Psyche contemplating the sleeping Cupid,

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Theseus’ descent to the labyrinth with the help of the amorous Ariadne and, in the negative, Leander’s last crossing. Psyche and Hero are lamp-girls – a fanciful conceit that associates the female with a powerful erotic symbol – and the protagonists of frivolous and licentious stories, not worth telling. Instead of producing a narrative, the mythographer intends to unearth the stories’ sense, which has been disfigured by the deceptive poetic embellishments of their telling.2 The meaning he attributes to the myth of Hero and Leander stands opposite to the Neoplatonic message that some modern scholars want to read into Musaeus’ poem. Far from encoding the soul’s journey, the tale sends a warning against indulgence in erotic passion: Love often agrees with danger. While it looks only to the object of its pleasure, it never sees what is useful. Eros is love in Greek, and they called him Leander as if meaning to say lisinandron, that is, the loosening of man. For this loosening generates love. He swims at night, that is, he seeks dangers in the darkness. Hero is also fashioned in the resemblance of love. She carries a lamp: and what else does love do but carry a torch and show the dangerous way to the one longing? The lamp soon goes out, because youthful love does not last long. He swims naked, clearly because love knows how to strip naked those who pursue it and how to throw them in the midst of dangers as into the sea. And when the lamp is quenched, death at sea is managed for both: this clearly means that in both sexes, lust dies together with the warmth of youth. They are carried dead in the sea as in the wetness of frigid old age. For every little spark of hot youth cools off in the torpid lethargy of old age. (3. 4)

Fulgentius’ interpretation is based on Latin material. Though he knew some Greek, as proven by his imaginative etymologies, the one Greek text he regularly references in the original is the Iliad.3 For Hero and Leander his main source might have been a mythographic account that told the tale continuously. He probably used the Heroides as well, since he cites them in the prologue. True to his programme, Fulgentius does not narrate the myth at all. The goal of bringing out its hidden meaning causes him to forgo even the shortest summary of it and to highlight only the facts that provide him with an anchor for his moral allegory: Leander’s

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swimming naked at night (¼ seeking danger and losing his wealth), Hero’s carrying the lamp (¼ love offers perilous directions), the light’s quenching (¼ passion is short-lived), and the double death at sea (¼lust dies in old age). Possibly the mythographer assumed his readers’ knowledge of the storyline, as did Servius a century earlier, but even those ignorant of it would get the message. Two characteristics of the allegory are particularly noteworthy: the emphasis on Leander as lover and the identification of Hero with love itself. The first is consonant with the privilege given to Leander in ancient literature and art at large. This bias also informs an epigram, possibly authored by Fulgentius’ slightly younger compatriot Luxorius, which fails even to mention Hero: ‘The youth cleaved his way with love through the harsh sea; to the harshest death he cleaved his way with love’.4 Fulgentius’ merging of Hero with erotic passion, on the other hand, is more original. To buttress it, he etymologizes her name as a cognate term of Eros. The writer’s contemporaries could quite easily accept the etymology because quantities were no longer heard.5 The long h of Hero sounded like the short 1 of Eros. The identification of Hero with Eros implicitly casts her as the cause of Leander’s demise. It is true that the ‘loosening’ or ‘dissolution’ of manliness that plunges him into love is inscribed in his name (from lύv, ‘dissolve’, and ἀnήr, ‘man’), as if it were his destiny. Whether knowingly or not, Fulgentius turns upside-down the etymology of Leander, a compound of ‘man’ (ἀnήr) and ‘people’ (l1ώ6),6 by denying him virility. His own etymological analysis serves his argument, a core element of which is that for a man to be prey to love is to lose or loosen his manliness. But this very claim evinces the feminine gender of the ruinous passion, furthering its merging with Hero. The woman, identified with love, is the carrier of the torch that leads the dissolute man into disaster, whereby, despoiled of sense and substance, he is stripped naked by the passion to which she leads the way. Hero with her erotic beacon has the same destructive powers as the very goddess of love, who is depicted naked because she sends forth her devotees naked (Mythologiae 2. 1). The parallel between Hero and Venus can be extended. Roses are among the goddess’ attributes because they are short-lived: ‘So lust is pleasant for a moment, but then disappears forever’ (2. 1). Likewise,

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the death of Hero and Leander is an allegory for the fleetingness of love. To make this point Fulgentius has to ignore the couple’s enduring fidelity to each other and, especially, Hero’s suicide, which blatantly clash with his contention that youthful love does not last. The Christian mythographer might have been bothered by Hero’s suicide as suicide, but primarily he disregards it to support his reading of the story as the parable of a young man sliding into passion and ruin to follow the call of woman/love, whose own love, like his, cools quickly. Fulgentius’ interpretation was bound to be influential. In the twelfth century it appears, expanded, in the collection of myths that is conventionally called the Third Vatican Mythographer: The tale of Hero and Leander is also fashioned looking to the nature of this love [the immodest kind]. For Hero means ‘love’ (amor), Leander ‘dissolution of man’ (virorum solutio). The young Leander loved Hero, a girl who lived across the sea. And when at night he swam to her, she stood in front of him on land and lighted a torch for him, so he would not wander astray from her shore. But one night, as a storm rose and the lamp went out, the youth was drowned. When the maiden saw the body cast ashore, she also cast herself into the sea. So Leander, that is, the dissolution of man, through abandoning his manly virtue and indulging in sloth, loves Hero, that is, he falls into love and lust. But whoever is burnt by lust, while he aspires to the object of his ardent love, never sees what is useful. He swims even at night, that is, he throws himself into obscure dangers. Hero lightens a torch for him to prevent him from going astray: what else does love do but bring ardor and show a dangerous road to the one longing? The lamp is suddenly put out because the fire of youthful love does not last long. Finally, he swims even naked, clearly because the attraction of love is wont to strip of their wealth and judgement those who pursue it and to throw them in the midst of dangers as into the sea. And the fact that the extinguishing of the lamp is the cause of death for both, according to Fulgentius clearly means that lust dies in both sexes. Lastly, both die in the sea, that is, they forget the anxiety of lust in old age. For old age, being cold and humid, seems comparable to the sea. The storm in which he died designates the sundering of possessions, the thought of which most often kills the fire of lust. (11. 19)

Even before the author acknowledges his source, his debt to Fulgentius is obvious, starting with the etymologies of the

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protagonists’ names. The later mythographer, who did not know Greek, accepted the etymologies as a fact, even though he could not hear a corroborating resemblance of sound between the names and their allegorical explanation. In Latin amor has no phonetic kinship with ‘Hero’ and virorum solutio has none with ‘Leander’. All the other elements present in Fulgentius appear: the man who is ‘loosened’ falls to lust, which blinds him to what is useful and throws him into danger; the lamp of Hero/love guides his passion on its dangerous way; love strips him naked of all his possessions, material and mental (there is more emphasis on losing judgement than in Fulgentius); and death at sea signifies the cooling-off of lust in old age. The final sentence, which rephrases with a virtuoso (or convoluted) formulation the meaning of Leander’s death in the storm as the loss of his possessions, gives prominence to him rather than to Hero as the victim of love, again following Fulgentius. A more original feature of this text is its narrative impulse. After making his allegorical approach clear by etymologizing the names to demonstrate that the tale is about ‘the nature of [immodest] love’, the author, quite unlike Fulgentius, tells the story from beginning to end. The expansiveness of the account is connected to the mythographer’s project, which is to assemble and relate ancient tales in order not to let them disappear. Two earlier authors share this effort, the so-called First and Second Vatican Mythographers (dates unknown: possibly between the ninth and the eleventh centuries). I cite only the first and longer: Sestos and Abydos were two neighbouring cities, separated by a narrow strait of water that flew between them. The one became famous through Leander, a most handsome lad; the other through Hero, a most beautiful woman. Since they could not come together, love burnt deepest in their hearts. The youth, unable to bear the fire, sought in every way a manner to obtain the maiden. But not having found any access to Hero by land, spurred on at once by his fire and by boldness, he entrusted himself to the sea. Thus swimming he went to the girl every night, while from the tower on the other side the girl endeavoured to hold a lamp that could lead him to her on his nocturnal path. But one night when the wind, blowing more strongly than usual, put out the flame, he wandered without knowing where he was heading, and died swimming. And when the next day Hero saw his body cast ashore by the

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waves, impelled by her grief she fell from the top of the tower. Thus, with the same man she shared earthly pleasure and suffered the destruction of bitter death. (1. 28)

This mythographer narrates rather than analyses the story. The only element of interpretation offered comes in the last sentence, with its slight moralizing slant. The privilege he gives to the simple retelling allows him to include the morally problematic detail of Hero’s suicide without having to provide an explanation.7 In contrast, the Third Vatican Mythographer has the more ambitious goal of combining storytelling with Fulgentian allegorical analysis and moral outlook. The mixing causes Hero’s suicide to appear in the narrative but to lack an interpretation, in accordance with Fulgentius’ account, which does not have one but collapses her demise into Leander’s. The later writer follows the earlier one in assimilating Hero’s suicide to Leander’s natural death: ‘Finally both die in the sea, that is, they forget the anxiety of lust in old age’. But this mythographer’s desire to tell a good story to its end spills over the strictures of Fulgentius’ interpretive grid, causing him to insert into his own account a detail, Hero’s hurling herself into the deep, that serves his allegorical needs only partially. As we shall see, this tension in the same author between the urge to narrate and the imperative of teaching, between a storyteller’s pleasure and a preacher’s moral duty, pervades several medieval treatments of the tale.

The lovers’ death in ‘Cease Your Endless Laments’ The use of the tragic story to illustrate the destructiveness of love reaches further than moralizing allegorical readings. An anonymous poem from eleventh-century northern France, titled Parce continuis (‘Cease Your Endless [Laments]’) after its opening line, exemplifies the dangers of erotic passion first on Leander, then, more extensively, on Orpheus: two lovers who ventured on perilous journeys to satisfy their longing. The account of Leander’s swim and death resonates with Virgil’s: Cruel love (Saevus amor) drives us into the utmost dangers. It shrinks from neither raging fire nor the rough seas of the Bosphorus. Though the boldness (temeritas) of the young man had often conquered the

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buffeting of that passage, he was finally overcome by heavy seas. The maid of Sestos waited for him. In her watch-tower the maid of Sestos perished, while the young man (iuvenis) perished in the deep.8

We are reminded of Virgil by the term iuvenis for Leander in lieu of his name and by the general allusiveness of the narrative, from which Hero’s name is also missing. The obliqueness of the treatment in the medieval poem as in the ancient one proves the enduring popularity of the legend. The later text also demonstrates that Virgil was a familiar source for it alongside Ovid. In fact, additional and broader thematic features conjure up the passage from the Georgics: the emphasis on love’s cruelty (durus amor in Virgil, but saevus amor is also a Virgilian nexus [Bucolics 8. 47]), on Leander’s daring, negatively connoted as temerity, and on the inevitably tragic outcome of passion. Love kills the couple equally but separates them by denying them a common death. To make the first point, Parce glosses over Hero’s suicide and merges the two deaths under the same rubric: love is ruinous; it does not matter whether ruin comes through drowning or through suicide. The dying pair is further united by the phrasing: Sestias in speculis, ponto perit iuvenis (literally, ‘the maid of Sestos [perished] in the tower, in the sea perished the youth’). The third-person singular ‘perished’, appearing as it does only one time for the two lovers, joins their deaths, which are further enlaced by the chiastic word disposition. But in spite of their merging, it must be noted that the deaths occur in different places. In this detail the poem parts company with Virgil’s passage, where Hero dies on Leander’s body. The medieval text’s emphasis on the physical apartness of the lovers in death serves to showcase the difference between love and friendship, which, as we read in the previous stanza, neither kills nor divides its devotees. As illustration for the joy and permanence of friendship the poem offers mythic paradigms of male companions from classical and Biblical lore but also, and more startlingly, Pyramus and Thisbe: vivit adhuc Piramus / Thisbe dilectissimus / et amoris concia / parietis rimula / primum illis cognita, / qua sibi colloquia / dividebant intima. / optimus colloquiis, / sed invidus osculis, / disparabat corpora / paries, spiritibus / solis quidem pervius. (47–58)

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Pyramus still lives today, beloved of Thisbe, and the crack in the wall, first known to them, that was privy to their love. Through it they shared their intimate talk. Excellent for talk, but begrudging kisses, the wall kept their bodies apart, allowing passage only for their souls.

The message is clear: erotic passion brings death, whereas true friendship is deathless and eternizes its protagonists. While the last line of the stanza devoted to Hero and Leander contains perit, the verb that begins the one dedicated to Pyramus and Thisbe is vivit. The author’s immortalizing impetus extends to the fissure in the wall, which, like the pair, lives on. But why would Hero and Leander illustrate deadly love and Pyramus and Thisbe undying friendship? In medieval literature the two couples tend to appear jointly rather than in opposition, for indeed their stories follow a similar plotline: two young persons in love are barred from marriage, decide to meet in secret and die tragically as a consequence of their arrangement. Parce, however, stresses the one feature that markedly distinguishes the two pairs, namely that Pyramus and Thisbe do not consummate their love.9 This is the case in Ovid’s version as well but only accidentally, for the children there do resolve to satisfy their passion but die instead. The medieval poet freezes their story at the time when they converse through the opening in the wall, avoiding mention of their death and of the elopement that causes it. The first omission allows him both to dodge the disturbing issue of their double suicide and to emphasize their eternal life; the second, to spiritualize their relationship. Note how much emphasis is placed on the separation of the two friends’ bodies and on the purely spiritual nature of their companionship: the immortalized crack was perfect for conversation, colloquiis, but an obstacle for kisses, osculis, with the two terms concluding two consecutive lines, in marked contrast. The last words of the following two verses, corpora and spiritibus, reinforce the contrast. The four line endings form a chiastic structure that imprisons the body and its pleasures between the soul and its own joys: colloquiis, osculis, corpora, spiritibus. At the closing of the stanza the two souls fly out through the crack to live forever. The Christian poet could turn this passionate but erotically frustrated relationship into a disembodied communion of spirits, which saved its

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protagonists from death. Not so for Hero and Leander, whose nightly rendezvous stood in the way of a spiritualistic rewriting of their story.

Sympathy drowns the moralist’s voice: Baudri de Bourgueil’s version Another purportedly moralizing treatment of the story in Latin is by Baudri (1045 –1130), abbot of Bourgueil and later archbishop of Dol. But the churchman also saw himself as a reincarnation of Ovid and stood up as his vocal defender, exculpating him (as Ovid exculpated himself) from the charge of corrupting the Roman youth. We do not need Ovid’s songs to discover love, he writes, for the Roman poet relates what has been known for centuries. And love itself is not condemnable because it belongs in our God-given life: ‘Our existence is a crime, if love is a crime. God gave me being and with it he grants me to love’.10 Baudri’s fondness for Ovid, combined with his forgiveness for erotic passion, found an ideal ground for their expression in the tragedy of Hero and Leander, making for an extended and gripping retelling. The narrative, which belongs in a poem recounting classical myths capped with allegories inspired by Fulgentius, in spite of its length is worth having in full: But for the object of its love, unbounded love (amor improbus) avoids everything; but for the object of its love, love does not care for anything. Love does not care for anything but for what it desires; but for the object of its love, love does not care for anything. With all her passion did Hero love Leander, and he loved her as much or more. Compelled by love, Leander crossed the sea, and at night he swims (nocte natat) naked, hit by harsh love (amore gravi). But to prevent him from fearing the nocturnal darkness and from wandering in the watery expanse, the maiden with a kindled torch shows the light and marks the path for Leander when he comes. Thus the youth, often reaching the desired shore, reaches also the desired congress. And refreshed a little by the love of the longed-for girl, the next day the youth comes back to his home, swimming. Deep love was able to lighten hard labours (duros labores), for there is nothing that deep love cannot overcome. In this way does the man mad with love spend much time, devoured by the insatiable Furies. It once happened that the hastening youth crossing the water went astray and disappeared in the middle of the sea. Hero, coming earlier than usual, in more haste, with a lighted lamp helped the youth, but Leander, more slow than usual, delayed his coming, and was lazier than

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usual at crossing the sea. While she was waiting, what anxious thought didn’t the maiden have, what did she not turn over in her worried heart? The wretched girl, Hero, what didn’t she imagine? For is there anything that a woman’s heart does not always fear? Because love is never safe and a woman is never safe in it, a girlfriend begins to mistrust even her lover. She imagined that her Leander, the prey of another love, had broken the troth. This was no small trouble for the heart of a lover, the greatest torment for the hearts of girls! But at times she thinks he has died, drowned, and this was the second fear the maiden felt. And again she thought she had been harshly rejected, and this blow hit her more harshly. The maiden put out the light and went back home, and no longer waits for him, who was hastening to come. It was night: darkness without stars or moon, caused by windy and rainy weather. And already, Leander, you were wandering in the middle of the waves, when harsh fortune fell on you. You see the light go out, wretched youth, and the unusual thing fills you with anxiety and fear. For if you could see the flame rekindled, you would infer that the winds extinguished the light. But now, since no hand or chance was bringing it back, you are compelled to be in doubt, you are compelled to fear. But you cannot decide what you should fear especially, for more than your life it is the unusual event that makes you fearful. You fear that the wet South Wind thrust the lamp to the ground, or that it disappeared in a swollen whirlwind, or that her clever mother found out, chided her and dragged her to her bed, or that, alone as she was, a lover or a violent man had the better of her or with prayers persuaded her to sin. He has many things to fear who has many to suspect, but the sea is no place to think. It is not certain, though, whether he wandered in the middle of the waves and, adrift, went under and died, or whether he lost his strength from the extreme anxiety of his heart, fearing more than he should. But whatever it was, he lost his strength in the middle of the waves, but love brought his body to the shore. To the accustomed shore there came the wretched body, which caused tears and death to Hero. The dead came on a straight path: alive, he had never come on a straighter one. When Hero heard voices cry, she rushed and threw herself on his sundered limbs. She pours tears over the youth and dries him with her hair. He feels neither, benefits from neither. After he gave no response, after the bones did not recover their warmth and all hope was gone, Hero embraced the wretched Leander as strong as she could, squeezing his known limbs in her arms: ‘Dear Leander’, she says, ‘I, your Hero, am the cause of your death, I wretched, too. But may at least be granted that I who am yours be never severed from you, and the sea that was your death, let it be mine! I rejoice if I go under the same wave with you, I the cause of your death, you the cause

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of mine. It is clear: a false imagination deceived me. I had fears about you, but was more unfaithful to you. Farewell, dear friend, farewell, dear friend! About to die I offer you this last farewell. Winds, I beg you, join our breaths! And you, sea, receive our two bodies together’. So she said, and having squeezed the body after a thousand kisses, the maiden at once threw herself into the sea. This was the death, if we believe the tale, which destroyed them both, punishing those who love unwisely. This impossible story, which the wisdom of Greece invented, takes you, who read it, toward a different explanation. Through the terms that resonate with his name, ‘Leander’ means ‘dissolved man’ (resolutus homo), or the power that dissolves men who are not firm. And a dissolved man suddenly agrees to his passion and swims in the world as in the sea. For, after fiery love loosens his limbs, it drags the wretched (miserum), driven about by the waves ( fluctivagum), in the sea, at night . . .11

Though based on Ovid, Baudri’s narrative is strikingly original. To begin with, it faults Leander with loitering and Hero with putting out the lamp because of jealousy, thus unwittingly causing his death.12 The French poet found the seeds for both innovations in his Latin source, where Hero complains about Leander’s sluggishness and suffers a paroxysm of jealousy. In the Heroides, however, Leander is about to shake off whatever hesitation he might have and to swim resolutely to his death, while Hero ends up discarding her fear of a rival and blaming Leander’s absence on the elements alone. By contrast, in the medieval poem laziness truly delays him while fear of betrayal takes definitive possession of her, causing her to stop waiting and to quench her guiding light. Another original twist is the attribution to Leander of a similar, though lesser, fear. Ovid makes him something of a macho, who prides himself on his athleticism and has no doubt that his Hero loves him. Jealously is a girl’s weakness, not a man’s. The famous dictum ‘who could ever love and be tranquil?’ applies to everyone, but it is in Hero’s mouth (Her. 19. 109). To be sure, the different disposition of the two is related to their different situations, for Leander controls the going whereas Hero can only wait; hence she is naturally more prone than he to a lover’s fears of betrayal. But he could have felt apprehensive that in his absence another had taken his place. This is exactly how he feels in Baudri’s poem. Why did the lamp go out?

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Of the several options, the appearance of a rival who took Hero by force or by persuasion is mentioned last, possibly because it is Leander’s strongest worry. Baudri lessens the emotional and psychological gap between the youth and the maiden and highlights the identity of their passion with its main attendant fear. Of course, as a woman, Hero is more obsessed with betrayal and acts on her worry; but jealousy is not her prerogative. Though it is Hero’s mistrustful impatience that kills Leander, Baudri does not point a reproachful finger at her but follows the movements of her heart, very much as does Ovid. Her gesture of quenching the lamp does not prompt a moralizing comment in a misogynous vein. It simply causes the poet’s focus to switch instantly from her actions to Leander’s. The absence of a moral judgement at this juncture is consonant with the overall spirit of the narrative, which is far more sympathetic than sermonizing. It is true that the tale is one of several illustrating the vices of various passions: of the flesh (the Chimera), incestuous love (Perdix) and hunting (Actaeon). But the language Baudri uses in the introduction to Leander’s story in order to convey the message, ‘love carries danger’, conjures up Virgil, not Fulgentius. There can hardly be any doubt that Baudri has Virgil’s allusive mention of Leander’s love and death in mind, for his own Leander nocte natat (‘swims at night’), exactly like Virgil’s character (Georgics 3. 260), whereas Fulgentius, though he, too, might have known the passage from the Georgics, writes natat nocte. To be sure, nocte natat fits the meter while the reverse would not; but the surrounding lines confirm Baudri’s Virgilian inspiration. He expounds on the single-mindedness of love, its harshness (amore gravi) and its invincible power by hinting in the opening verse at the famous Virgilian dictum labor omnia vicit / improbus (‘unrelenting labour conquered everything’, Georgics 1. 145– 6). Love is more goaloriented and compelling than the most determined toil: not only does it overcome everything to reach its object, but it also lightens labor itself, even the hardest (1155 – 6). The engagement with Virgil that begins Baudri’s account sets the tone, which is tragic and empathetic rather than cold and damning. The one moralistic pronouncement in the narrative section targets the madness of love and its insatiability (1157 – 8). But the warning

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takes up only two lines, after which the telling resumes, exuberantly, expressing increasing compassion for the lovers. We feel a surge of sympathy in the author when he magnifies Leander’s last swim by introducing it with ‘it was night’. The phrase is also used by Ovid, where it frames Leander’s reminiscing of his first, blissful crossing. By reusing it to launch the tragic sequel, Baudri charges his account with epic pathos. And, by addressing Leander directly, he makes us sense his emotional participation in the lover’s predicament, as does Musaeus, who also combines an empathetic apostrophe with the epic formula ‘it was night’ in the narrative of Leander’s last swim (H&L 300– 1 and 309). The similarity is coincidental, for Baudri could not have known Musaeus (the epyllion did not circulate in France at the time and Baudri, in any case, did not read Greek). Two like-minded poets resort to the same stylistic ploys to express their equal involvement in the fate of the star-crossed lover. Baudri’s participation, however, reaches further than Musaeus’. Going against tradition, he sympathizes with Hero as much as with Leander. Not only does he spare her a condemnation of her jealousy, he also gives her the more ‘melodramatic’ role, having her step onto the stage and speak at the point of death; he only summarizes Leander’s fears. Her suicide, which traditionally receives little attention, is the narrative’s centrepiece. Baudri is not embarrassed by Hero’s gesture but prepares for it in grand style, by having her utter words that idealize its purport. The treatment of her suicide is not moralistic but courtly. She interlocks the two deaths by turning the fantasy of Ovid’s Leander, ‘and, you will say, I am the cause of his death’ (Her. 18. 200), into a reciprocal nexus: ‘I the cause of your death, you the cause of mine’; and she plays up the motif ‘forever together in death’, her joy in ending her life to be reunited with her love in the deep: ‘and the sea that was your death, let it be mine! I rejoice if I go under the same wave with you!’ We almost hear a ¨ lderlin’s splendid monologue of Hero, in which she forerunner of Ho screws up her courage to jump from her tower into the water: ‘Up then! Hero! Leave weeping behind! Thank you, gods! Hero’s courage awakens. There, to the sea! To the sea!’13 And, to conclude his narrative, Baudri chooses the courtly picture of two lovers embracing in death, like Tristan and Isolde.14

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The moral capping does little to dispel the intense pathos of the account.15 The very shortness of the Fulgentian section compared to the narrative betrays Baudri’s priorities. True, the poem breaks off, and elements of the mythographer’s allegory that are missing might have been included. But even so, one critic can say with confidence, ‘only after the long “digression” of lines 1143 – 1236, does Baudri rejoin the text of Fulgentius’.16 The poet also distances himself from the allegorist, as his own narrative proceeds, by lifting fewer and fewer words from him.17 The section on Hero and Leander has only faint correspondences with the mythographer’s account: nocte, ‘at night’, natat, ‘he swims’, amor and mare. These are insignificant, highfrequency terms (and nocte natat, as I have suggested, comes rather from Virgil). The most marked verbal coincidence with Fulgentius is found in the explanation of Leander’s name – except that the poet takes care to rephrase the mythographer! His solutionem virorum or solutio viri (‘dissolution of men’, ‘dissolution of man’) becomes resolutus homo (‘dissolved man’). Baudri finds his own wording even when he borrows a pointed argument from Fulgentius. He also colours the moralizing with emotional values by calling love ‘fiery’ and Leander or any lover ‘wretched’, miserum, choosing the same adjective that Virgil uses in his empathetic account of Leander’s death (miseri [. . .] parentes). Another added epithet for the unfortunate swimmer is fluctivagum: Leander is ‘driven about by the waves’. The motif of wandering, which is not in Fulgentius and makes only a brief appearance in the First Vatican Mythographer, becomes central in Baudri’s version. Wandering frames the narrative of Leander’s death thrice: ‘It happened that the hastening youth crossing the water went astray (errans) and disappeared in the middle of the sea’; ‘And already, Leander, you were wandering (eras [. . . ] errans) in the middle of the waves, when harsh fortune fell on you’; ‘It is not certain whether he [. . .] wandered (ne erraverit) [. . .] and, adrift (errore viae), went under and died’. The motif reappears expanded in the explication, not only in the qualifier fluctivagum but also in the statement that those who yield to love ‘swim in the world as in the sea’, that is, they are morally astray. This unparalleled emphasis on the lover losing his way seems to have a Christian underpinning: as a sinner Leander wanders but,

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when he dies and sins no more, his body reaches the shore ‘on a straight path: alive, he had never come on a straighter one’. If the Christian ideal of the straight path is behind this conceit, here it is the moralist who speaks; but to present a macabre picture rather than to issue an edifying lesson.18 There is a shade of chilling, black irony in the fate of a swimmer who dies wandering in the waves, but whose dead body the same waves no longer drive about but carry unerringly ashore.

Where is Hero? Marcus Valerius’ Song of Apollo There is not a single Christian theme or even overtone in the take on the story by Marcus Valerius. This twelfth-century poet might have been, like Baudri, from northern France and might have known his version,19 but, for his own, he borrows first and foremost from classical Latin authors, especially the Ovid of Heroides 18. In Valerius’ poem it is Apollo who, donning some pastoral gear, sings of this tragic love to please a nymph: With no further ado he recalls in a plaintive tune the maiden of Sestos and tells of the waves crossed by Leander’s fire. But the path, lad, does not bend for you. The sea, broken, weeps, the rocks call you with a din, the shores weep for you. Where do you hurry, alas? You are not going to bear up with the swollen storms. Where do you hurry? Alas, barely is the shore enough for such big waves. Ah, you will be much to be lamented if, by chance returning after the consummation of your love, you will be drowned. But grief destroys your wishes and the sea tosses nearer and the winds conspire to give you a cruel death. And, already wrecked by falling backwards as he swam, he lost strength and his laments died in the deaf storm. (Carmen Apollinis 56–67)

Valerius’ verses read almost like a cento of phrases from Virgil and Ovid. Rather than listing the echoes,20 I will dwell on a thematic feature that contrasts this version with Baudri’s: the absolute dominance of Leander. Apollo begins his lachrymose song with Hero, perhaps because his female dedicatee is likely to identify with her, but fails to give even her name and leaves her behind after just one line to switch to Leander, whom he mentions by name and whose last swim he follows until the catastrophe. Piled-up apostrophes, the elements’ participation in his doomed attempt

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and direct questions arouse pity for the lad rushing to his death and then dying. Meanwhile, where is Hero? We forget her own impending death. Valerius’ silence spells out his distance from early medieval authors and his subservience to classical Latin ones. The only Roman poets to mention Hero’s suicide are Virgil, Sidonius Apollinaris and Ausonius, the first two only allusively or vaguely. By contrast, her death attracted medieval writers. It features together with Leander’s in the mythographic tradition and in Parce continuis (though not as suicide); it is the pie`ce de re´sistance in Baudri’s account; and, as we shall see in the coming sections, it later captured the fancy of authors in the vernaculars, especially the poet of Ovide moralise´ and Christine de Pizan. Those writers, whose imagination was fed by courtly love poetry and romance, were drawn to Hero’s suicide because it brought about the lovers’ indissoluble union. Valerius, in the spirit of his Roman sources, has none of this. The emphasis on Leander’s death rather than on his successful crossing, is, however, not Roman, and the sympathy that pervades the narrative of his tragedy finds its closest parallel in Baudri. Classical Latin authors allude to Leander’s death more often than to Hero’s, but, as we have noted, they do not dwell on it but, rather, on his swimming. The first extended account of his drowning in Latin is by Baudri, where, as in Valerius, the wretched swimmer becomes the addressee of a string of emotive apostrophes. It is possible that Valerius imitated the earlier poet in the movement of his own narrative, which also switches from the second to the third person simultaneously with Leander’s demise. Valerius inherited the bias in favour of Leander from classical Latin authors, but his choice of subject, death, and the pathos with which he treats it, declares him closer to his own times and cultural environment. PART TWO: FRENCH LITERATURE

Hero and Leander, courtly lovers The tale entered the French vernacular early. In extant literature its first significant appearance is in the Roman de Troie of Benoıˆt de Sainte-Maure (c.1160), where the image of Leander is used to paint

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the impatience and recklessness of an Achilles mad with love for Polyxena. He is about to go to the temple of Apollo, where Hecuba has promised to give him her daughter in marriage, while in fact she has arranged to have him ambushed and killed by Paris and his knights. The besotted lover cannot wait: But he is so occupied with his love that he thinks he won’t be able to arrive on time. The evening, the moment to leave, is too slow to his liking. He waits for it, yearns for it. He is even more enamored than before. Love has driven him out of his senses. He is indifferent to all his surroundings. He does not fear death, does not think of it. Such are the effects of love, which dispels all fears. Just as Leander, the one who drowned in the Hellespont, loved his friend Hero to the point that he threw himself into the sea, in the darkness of night, without even the smallest vessel and without fearing the dangers, so does Achilles: he takes no precautions.21

This summary account of the legend implies that Benoıˆt could assume knowledge of its essentials. He chose his example carefully, selecting those features of Leander’s story that best fitted the context. One is the blackness of the sky, which Benoıˆt underscores because the coming of darkness sets off Achilles’ adventure as it does Leander’s. Like the character of Musaeus, Achilles is impatient to see the night. The example also matches his predicament precisely because both heroes venture out on a perilous journey to satisfy an ill-starred passion. Other characters mad with love (Narcissus, 17702–14, Salomon, David and Samson, 18045–6) provide Benoıˆt with paradigms for Achilles, but Leander is the most apt parallel for a lover spurred by his longing on an uncertain nocturnal passage, ignoring its dangers and meeting with death. Achilles’ first journey is like Leander’s last. The reference to the mythic lover who swims to his tragic demise – in the narrative sequence drowning even before plunging into the sea – foreshadows Achilles’ failure to reach the object of his desire: a desire that fed on a fantasy and was doomed from the outset to remain unfulfilled.22 Leander reappears in a prose version of the Roman, where he dons the courtly lover. We have already noted courtly overtones in Baudri’s narrative, namely in Hero’s ecstatic wish to be reunited with her lover in death and in the couple’s final embrace. Other elements of the story lent themselves to a courtly reading: the unbreakable

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attachment of the pair to each other, Leander’s courage, the well-kept secrecy of the affair and the lovers’ forced separation. Hero and Leander appealed to at least two troubadours, Raimon Jordan and Arnaud de Mareuil, as models for a lover’s passionate and trustworthy commitment to his lady.23 The fifth prose-rendering of the Roman de Troie (called also Prose 5) likewise exploits the tale’s courtly potential. This narrative, dated to the early fourteenth century, inserts into the account of the Trojan War a sequence of letters written by women whose husbands or lovers are fighting. The epistles, or Epistres des dames de Gre`ce, are the first translation of the Heroides into French.24 Two of the double letters, those of Leander and Hero and of Paris and Helen, are included. The enlisting of male characters for the Trojan War forces changes on the epistles’ contents.25 Because Leander has to die at Troy, the author tries to eliminate the recurring intimations of his drowning to come.26 His relocation also increases the distance between the lovers; hence references to his ability to see Hero’s shore are replaced by his hope to see ships coming from her country (13. 4). A central element of the tale, the lamp, is also disposed of, for it would suggest the lovers’ proximity.27 The greater distance also explains the narrative’s awkward inconsistencies regarding Leander’s means of transportation. His swimming across is a thing of the past. Though his three recent attempts, as described by Ovid, are there, Leander’s goal is not to swim all the way to Hero but to reach a boat that could take him to her! (13. 4). She reminds him that he owns a good boat and suggests that he equips it with many oars (14. 12). He agrees he has a vessel (13. 12), but also adds that he will swim day and night (13. 9), which would be required to cover the greater distance, making the endeavour ridiculously unrealistic. A main thematic thrust of the letters, especially of Leander’s, is the secrecy of the affair.28 The motif is explicit in Ovid but acquires a far greater, courtly prominence in the vulgarizer. As in the Latin original, Leander does not board the one boat that braves the sea because he would be discovered, though not only by his countrymen but also by the army at Troy, another detail tailored to reference the setting of his writing (13. 3). But in the same context he is more insistent than Ovid’s character on the ‘hidden love’, ‘which we have kept hidden so long’,

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expressing his fear that their parents might find out. In his reminiscence of the first night of love he stresses that at dawn they went back ‘secretly’ from their blissful pastimes, and that Hero returned to her dwelling ‘so secretly that no one was aware’, for ‘our pleasure was the greater the more hidden it was’ (13. 7). The author’s obsession with the motif might have pushed his misreading of caelo, the dative of ‘sky’ (Her. 18. 168), as ‘I conceal’ (Je celle, 13. 9).29 Yet more emphasis on secrecy seals Leander’s epistle (13. 12): may Hero keep it ‘in secret, well-guarded’! A second keynote is another staple of courtly lyric, amour de loin (‘love from afar’). Here the motif profits from the couple’s increased distance, which causes Leander to say, ‘the farther you are, the more closely does the heat of love warm me’ (13. 10), and Hero to reciprocate, in perfect unison, ‘the farther I am from these things [everything we could do together], the more closely does the love between you and me warm me’ (14. 3). The author of the Epistres, however, does not treat the legend along unambiguously courtly lines, for he lends Hero words that condemn the affair. The fantasy of meeting Leander halfway in the sea to kiss, which animates Ovid’s character, ends for her medieval reincarnation with this sobering comment: ‘But it would be shameful for me and for you, and we would make the fury and the immoderate heat (la fureur et l’outrageuse ardeur) of our love manifest’ (14. 11). This attack on erotic passion and its display finds a close parallel in the reading of the story offered by the introductions (accessus) to the Heroides that appeared in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and informed the school teaching of Ovid’s letters.30 According to those explanations, Ovid’s purpose was to illustrate different types of love and encourage readers to embrace the ‘licit’ kind (embodied by Penelope, the writer of the first epistle) and avoid the others: ‘illicit’, ‘furious’, ‘foolish’.31 Hero and Leander embody foolish love (stultus amor): ‘Leander was a youth who lived in Abydos and loved a girl by the name of Hero, from Sestos. Inflamed with an excessive love for her, he crossed the sea between the two cities. And so he made his way to her, with night always guiding him. But when he was kept from his attempt by the roughness of the sea for a week, he writes this letter in which he explains the reason he has been away from her so

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long and he laments. His grief causes him to reminisce about the first night they came together. With this example the author admonishes those who are engaged in foolish love, because Leander, for the sake of one girl, when one night he wished to make the crossing and the torch went out, died buried by the waves’. So reads the introduction to Heroides 18.32 And that attached to Hero’s epistle: ‘[She] writes this letter to Leander wishing to urge him to come quickly. With this the author corrects those who love foolishly, showing that he drowned for a foolish love’. These introductions sound familiar moralizing notes. The first abruptly interrupts the summary of the epistle just when it is reaching a romantic peak, Leander’s reminiscence, and in its place the preacher plugs in the pedestrian warning. Hero’s backpedaling from her fantasy in the Epistres resonates with this deflating piece of advice. The Troy prose narrative recasts the stultus amor of the two lovers as a ‘furious love’, but the difference is only one of terminology. Furious or foolish, it is an immoderate flame as much as a courtly dalliance. The two sets of texts also share a slightly misogynous outlook. The accessus attached to Hero’s letter is far shorter than the one explicating Leander’s, and her role is not to help his crossing but to put pressure on him. It is the night that guides his journey while her light makes an appearance only when it goes out. Furthermore, the second accessus disregards the pleas for caution that end Hero’s writing in Ovid and bluntly faults her with causing Leander’s swim and death. Misogyny is as palpable in the prose romance, where it falls on the woman both to indulge in an erotic fantasy and to direct the reader’s attention to its intemperance. The couple share in a furious love; but it is in the voice of Hero that the writer condemns its fury. As we shall see presently, other French medieval authors were biased against her, and more strongly.

Ovid moralized: mixed tones and misogyny Like the Epistres, the Ovide moralise´ (c.1320) offers an interpretation of the tale that combines courtly motifs with moralistic pronouncements.33 This adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses also conjures up Baudri’s poem both in its content, for it reads ancient

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fables through the lens of Fulgentius, and in the joy of storytelling that pervades it. The insertion of the tale of Hero and Leander in particular seems motivated primarily by a narrative itch: ‘I want to tell another story to include more material’ (4. 3154 – 5).34 The two goals of narration and of moralization make for a text with two voices.35 The storyteller’s voice is the one we hear for the longer number of lines (430 versus the 244 of the explication). It delivers an account that contains almost no moral judgement but instead is filled with sympathy for the lovers. One critic calls it un conte courtois.36 Leander is, indeed, introduced as a noble youth: savvy, well-mannered (4. 3160) and careful to guard the affair’s secrecy (3178–81), which is a thematic core of this narrative as of the Epistres (see also 3201–5). Another feature shared by both texts is the emphasis on the long duration of the dalliance (Epistres 13. 3; Ovid moralized 3201). This detail, which is absent from Ovid and clashes with Musaeus’ description of the tryst as ‘short-lived’, highlights again the courtliness of a relationship that has endured against all odds and obstacles. To emphasize the lovers’ lasting fidelity, the poet has made the meteorological barrier more relentless than it is in Ovid; for there the storm has been raging for seven days, while in the French text ‘it has lasted long, as the letter says’ (3221). The author cites his source but leaves the temporal notation vague, foregrounding the extended time of the separation.37 The challenge these courtly lovers have been facing is thus enhanced. The second and moralizing voice can be heard only once in the narrative section, in this comment on Leander’s death: ‘The mad one ( folz) jumped into the sea. He was mad ( folz) for loving too much’ (4. 3322 – 3). Folz resonates with the amor furiosus of the introductions to the Heroides. But even in this context the author pays compliments to the drowned youth, ‘so brave and sensible’ (3328). This is the last image of Leander, the one the reader will remember: a deserving man, whom love and the sea dealt violently. And his end inspires the poet with compassion: ‘Never was a death so painful seen by a maiden’ (3547 – 8). Hero’s own death likewise rouses the poet’s sympathy. She kisses and embraces her dear one tightly, dying ‘in his arms’ (4. 3575 –8) to be reunited with him: ‘Neither in death nor in life was their love ever sundered’ (3582 – 3). Like a courtly couple, Hero and Leander are

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forever locked in an embrace. The image again calls to mind Baudri’s empathetic narrative of Hero’s suicide, but features the added comment on the pair’s everlasting love. In spite of the pathos with which Hero’s death is treated, however, Leander is the nobler figure. Her character is not showered with compliments like his (see also 4. 3454), and, except for her suicide, her performance does not put her in the best light. She is more selfish and demanding than in Ovid, more impatient. Gone are the exhortations to caution that conclude the Latin letter; gone is that final note of self-abnegation. Her last words are a wish that the gods spare Leander (3539 – 41): on his journey to her, that is. Furthermore, Hero’s egotistic, erotically driven protestations are pitched against Leander’s demise. The poem turns the two Heroides into a continuous narrative detailing the lovers’ grief and actions serially, in the order of the two letters: first Leander is on stage, then Hero. As a result, when she enters he is already dead. Although in real-time her performance is supposed to take place simultaneously with his, the poet makes no effort to convey their contemporaneousness. When he switches to her he does not say, ‘meanwhile Hero’, but simply ‘Hero the beautiful was in her tower’ (4. 3330).38 The sequence makes for tragic irony since the reader knows that Hero’s expressions of frustration with waiting and of the fears of betrayal with which she fills a large part of her monologue are empty: Leander already lies dead near her tower. But the organization of the narrative has also the effect of contrasting the ‘brave and sensible’ Leander, whom love has destroyed, with the insatiable Hero, who insistently asks of him to come – as he has just done, without needing her prompt and at the cost of his life. Hero is also less modest than in Ovid. She has her erotic dream ‘all the time’ (4. 3481). This is only implied in her Heroides, where she uses the present tense for her recurrent dream but without stating that she has it always. More strikingly, in Ovid moralized she fantasizes not just about meeting Leander half way but also about coming to the shore together so they can take their pleasure, which in mid-sea would remain unfulfilled (3507 – 11). Hero’s erotic proclivities match her allegorical meaning as the igniter of passion. She is the main target of the moral

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condemnation.39 After etymologizing Leander a` la Fulgentius as ‘dissolution of man’ and charging him with having his heart set on ‘mad love, mad burning’ and a lustful passion (4. 3590 – 3), the poet identifies lust itself with Hero, whose native town, Sestos, embodies sexual desire because of both its location, by the erotically charged sea, and its very name, which in French is almost identical with sex (sexe): ‘All female lust is born in Sexte, the woman’s organ. Hero holds the torch that burns, with which she sets her lover on fire, for love burns and inflames a heart that yields to it’ (3597 – 602). It is Hero’s lamp that urges Leander to face the dangers of the deep, from which love itself is named in a remarkable alliterative line that binds the hostile element and the dissolute passion together in a pseudoetymology: ‘De mer amere ont amours non’ (‘love takes its name from the bitter sea’, 3610).40 This misogynous outlook, which makes Leander the victim of Hero the kindler of lust, is Christian. It is true that already in Musaeus (whose treatment of the legend in my view is not Christian) Hero’s lamp inflames Leander on his first swim. But the Greek poet issues no moral judgement. It is also true that he charges Hero with letting out the call of desire when she lights the lamp on the stormy night, while she should have waited; but even in that circumstance he ultimately attributes her untimely gesture to unconquerable fate.41 Furthermore, he blames her for her impatience, not for showing Leander the dangerous way to passion. The seeds of the misogynous reading of Ovid moralized are rather in Fulgentius. The African mythographer analyses Hero as Eros. For the French poet she likewise embodies lust but holds out her torch more explicitly, making the physical gesture of inflaming Leander. She also has her eyes fixed on him: ‘Often he thought he saw the burning firebrand that his sweetheart, looking at him, kept on her tower by the window’ (4. 3237–40). In Ovid’s text it is only Leander’s gaze that ‘sees or thinks it sees’ the lamp (Her. 18. 32), but in the vulgarizer Hero’s eyes add to the lure of her beacon – or rather of her ‘blazing fire’, brandon ardant. Her torch, which in Fulgentius is only a light showing the way to her lover, contains and delivers much heat, the heat of carnal passion. The poet keeps this message in mind in the narrative section where the torch, though it fulfils its guiding function, is

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repeatedly a burning firebrand or lantern (see also 3196; 3467). The added qualifier prepares the reader for the moral explication to come. The author’s misogyny reaches further. The quenching of the lamp seems to have two meanings, one specific to Leander and one to Hero. Though it represents the dying of passion in both lovers, along Fulgentius’ lines, the reason for its cooling is extreme poverty for Leander and greed for Hero. Leander is naked and swims in the storm from which the wind rises and puts out the lamp of Hero’s passion, because love has reduced him to such a bad state that she hates the man she used to love.42 Hers is the deceitful attachment of those who want to possess their lover’s substance: when he is stripped of everything and they cannot get more, they stop loving (4. 3638 – 41). On the other hand, Leander’s passion dies because a poor man has no leisure to indulge in it, and even if he should want to, he cannot afford it (3652 –60). So, Leander is cast in the role of the victim, Hero of the culprit. This matches the unparalleled emphasis on the hotness of her torch. In the Heroides the heat is in Leander, who has a lamp within himself, but in their French adaptation it is in the lustful flame of Woman. Hero’s lamp, though, has another, positive meaning. Ovid moralized offers a second explanation of the tale, as an allegory about the guiding power of the Christian faith. Hero represents divine wisdom, Leander the human race, Sestos Paradise, Abydos the world. The sea is our mortal life, through which divine wisdom guides us ‘if we follow the straight path that its light shows to us’ (4. 3681–2). The lamp is ‘the brightness that illuminates every human in this bitter sea’ (3685–6), but Leander is not able to follow that beacon unerringly because the ‘storm of sin’, the devil’s temptation, blinds him (3704–8). He thus loses the ‘straight path’ (3717) and dies, but divine wisdom comes down from Heaven and incarnates to save him. This allegory is anticipated in the narrative section by scattered references to the unfailing aim of Leander’s swimming: Hero’s lamp ‘teaches him the straight way’ and orients him ‘straightly’ (4. 3195–7); every night she holds out her torch ‘to show him the straight way’ (3468), but in the end the wind puts out the light, causing him to drown because he loses ‘its guide, which showed him the straight way’ (3475–6). These insisting reminders of the unerring path, like those of

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the burning lamp, alert the readers to the upcoming explanation or at least connect narrative section and allegory. And so does the description of another unerring journey, which ends the narrative and the lovers’ lives: ‘Then the lovers arrived to the haven of Sestos, straightly, out of the dangerous sea’ (3584–6). We are sent back to Baudri’s Leander, who, dead, reaches the shore of Sestos as directly as he had never done while alive. But the Christian message, unclear there, is transparent here: at last man has escaped from the perilous wandering of mortal life and attained Heaven. He has accomplished his union with Christ, who went down to rescue him and bring him to the ‘haven of salvation, full of lasting pleasures’ (3730–1). Hero’s suicide, conveniently bypassed in the first, Fulgentian, allegory, in the second signifies God’s sacrifice on behalf of the human race.43

Another misogynous voice? Guillaume de Machaut Misogynous commonplaces appear also in Guillaume de Machaut’s two references to the tale. He knew it from Ovid moralized, his main source for classical mythology,44 and narrates it the first time in the Judgment of the King of Navarre, a love debate poem that features Guillaume, a persona of the author himself, as main protagonist. Charged with having blamed women for suffering less from love than men in a previous poem, he fends off the attacks coming from a court of allegorical ladies at the service of his accuser. Among them is Sufficiency, who brings in Hero to make a case for women. The tale follows, not surprisingly, that of Pyramus and Thisbe; but unlike the latter, it is narrated at length (3221 – 99). Evidently Machaut counted on his readership’s ignorance of the story’s particulars. Though it had made several appearances in the French vernacular, only Ovid moralized had told it extensively from beginning to end; and given the chronological proximity of this work to his (the Judgment was completed probably right after the plague of 1349), Machaut could assume that only a few had read a full version of the tale.45 The narrative borrows much from Ovid moralized: sequence, motifs, conceits, turns of phrase and even phonetic effects. The secrecy of the affair has the same great prominence (3227 – 33); Hero holds her ‘burning candle’ (3246; 3286);46 dying, she embraces Leander ‘tightly’ (estroitement, 3294; see Ovid moralized 4. 3577,

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estroit), though she hurls herself into the sea from her tower rather than from the beach;47 and her death illustrates the intensity of her love, in the same tone and almost the same words: compare, ‘[Hero] de deuil fu noı¨e en mer / [. . . ] pour amer’ (‘Hero was drowned in the sea from grief [. . .] for love’s sake’, 3297 – 8) and, in Ovid moralized, ‘de dolour et des flots noı¨e. / Bien lui moustra signe d’amer, / Quant pour lui vault mourir en mer’ (‘drowned by sorrow and the waves. She gave him a good sign of her love, wanting to die in the sea for him’, 4. 3579 – 81). Machaut plays a virtuoso game with his predecessor, exploiting, like him, the consonance of mer (‘sea’) and amer (‘to love’) but flipping the order in which the two terms appear. Machaut’s imitation of Ovid moralized is also ideological. Though the speaker does not draw Christian lessons from the story (they would not fit the context), he echoes the misogyny of the earlier text in a few but telling details. Hero is as forthcoming as in Ovid moralized: just as there she watches Leander while she extends her inflaming firebrand, in the Judgment she ‘summons’ him on the stormy night; and at this sight ‘the miserable man’ does not know what to do (3258 – 60). Hero’s call is the lure of beauty that she proffers by showing herself at the window, as it were, to the destruction of her wretched lover. And his death inspires the exact same admiring comment on his character as in the earlier text: ‘Surely, this was a great loss, for he was a very valiant and wise man (3269 – 70; see Ovid moralized 4. 3327 –8). There is more. When, after Leander’s demise, Hero makes her entrance, she is not only frustrated and upset with his delay, as in Ovid moralized, but also angry: ‘Her grief and anger (ire) were so great that she could find no comfort’ (3272 – 3). This picture of a wrathful Hero, which condenses her long complaint in Ovid moralized (and in the original Ovid), is all the more unflattering to her because of the contrast it builds with the virtuous Leander, whose loss we have just been made to feel and regret. The undercurrent of misogyny that runs through the text intensifies when the speaking voice shifts from Lady Sufficiency to Guillaume himself. Sufficiency, we shall recall, tells the story to prove that women are capable of suffering from love as much or rather more than men. Guillaume fires back that,

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When Love so tightly snared Leander, who would swim across the sea, without boat or oar, at midnight or thereabouts, that foolish man who made the terrible mistake of crossing the sea for the sake of love, he did more and suffered worse than Hero, who offered herself to death, if one considers the great perils which destroyed him in the end; for the sake of her love he did more than Hero, notwithstanding both death and lamenting. (3325–36)

Guillaume drives to extremes the privilege granted to Leander over Hero since antiquity, vocally dismissing the courage and the passionate purport of her gesture. He buttresses his claim with pettifogging arguments, which could be summarized as: ‘the cause has greater force [. . .] than its effects’.48 Thus, he who does a good deed is more deserving than its dedicatee; he who bestows advances more than (s)he who gives back (3337 – 42). Hero died in return; hence she suffered less! Never mind that she took her own life whereas Leander was killed accidentally. Shall we take Guillaume’s reasoning to reflect an authorial bias in favour of Leander? Considering that the character Guillaume is not ipso facto identical with the author Machaut, we should be cautious.49 However, we are cued to give a tentatively positive answer by the sympathy and admiration that Sufficiency, in addition to Guillaume, expresses for Leander in her eulogy of Hero. Why does Hero’s defender take care to call Leander ‘miserable’, ‘valiant’ and ‘wise’? Who speaks these words, Sufficiency or Machaut, following in the footsteps of the misogynous Ovid moralized? The tale’s exemplary force is exploited again in Machaut’s most famous work, The Book of the True Poem (c.1365), a possibly autobiographical account of the love that bound the aging Guillaume to a very young admirer of his, whom he calls ‘All-Beautiful’, also a poetess and his apprentice in the art.50 The long verse narrative weaves together poems and letters (in prose) that the two allegedly exchanged all along their affair, which begins as an amour de loin in the strictest sense:51 the two fall in love without having even seen each other and for a long time they are prevented from meeting by Guillaume’s ill health and by the unsafe conditions of the roads in a country infested by war. During all this time and in the protracted intervals between their rare rendezvous, messengers travel back and forth, carrying letters

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and poems. Guillaume and All-Beautiful are caught in a Hero-andLeander predicament in the most literal sense. Not just because their dalliance is and will remain secret, but also because they must cope with geographical distance and travel hazards. And in fact Leander here makes his appearance in a context of frustration with the impossibility of travel. Driven by his passion, Guillaume thinks of a way to see his lady: ‘Desire, who sleepless ever wakes, who never in my heart takes a rest, came to tell and remind me that I had not done what I should; and that he would not let me go on, but rather would make me suffer so much I might not bear up if I didn’t find some road or path that would lead me to see my beloved’. From this description of the impelling or propelling force of desire to the evocation of Leander it is only a short and natural step: ‘Love so mastered Leander he swam across a channel to see his lady and beloved. In the end he lost his life, being drowned and killed, and that’s still a pity’.52 Leander represents not pure or good love,53 but sexual passion and its goading. Following his example, Guillaume might travel to his AllBeautiful against all odds – and die.54 But it is not All-Beautiful that calls him. She does not hold out her torch, as it were, like Hero in Ovid moralized (or in Machaut’s own Judgment); she does not vent her jealousy like Hero there and in Ovid’s epistle, but, concerned about Guillaume’s spiritual and physical wellbeing, she swears to the constancy of her affection even if he should delay a long time.55 She rather impersonates the character who cautions Leander at the end of Heroides 19: ‘Although I desire to see you more than anything else on earth, I pray you do not set out at all to come here if your body isn’t up to it, for the roads aren’t safe. And I would never again have any pleasure or joy if you started out on the road and misfortune befell you’.56 By rebuffing the Leander-like ardor of her lover, All-Beautiful underscores the negativity of the mythic example57 and of the passion, erotic desire, that it embodies. And yet, even as a negative model, Leander still holds the floor: it is he who desires Hero and dies because of his passion. Her death is not in the picture. True, this could be because it is the lover barred from journeying who is invoking the mythic paradigm. Since Hero does not do the travelling but waits, her death goes unmentioned.

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This explanation, however, is unsatisfactory because, in the case of other lovers he lists in this context, Guillaume touches on the tragedy that befell both members of the couple, regardless of each individual’s role in the affair.58 Rather, it seems that the poet is once again giving prominence to Leander’s gesture to the point of completely erasing Hero’s. This is further demonstrated by the accompanying illumination, which was supervised by Machaut himself and shows Leander almost drowned and Hero in her tower.59 To my knowledge, this is the first time in iconographical representations of the tale that the tragic ending is depicted rather than Leander’s fortunate crossing, as was the case in the ancient world. The choice of subject fits Machaut’s emphasis on Leander’s death. It must also have appealed to his readers’ sensibility, for, as I have suggested, extended accounts of the lovers’ demise feature in medieval authors, whereas Leander’s successful swimming recedes into the background. The illustration on Machaut’s manuscript reflects this state of affairs. Except in one, revealing detail: Hero is not shown as she commits suicide but as she watches the drowning Leander from her tower. The goal or at least the effect of the illumination is to freeze the story at the moment in which the wretched Leander is not yet dead but is dying, which adds pathos to his predicament. A coat of waves covers his body while his face looks up to Hero, who has her eyes on the scene but does not prepare to join him or even show despair in her gestures. Her arms hang down, expressionless. As we shall see in the next section, a female successor of Machaut corrected this unfavourable treatment of Hero both verbally and visually.

From love’s sorrows to women’s fidelity: Hero and Leander in the works of Christine de Pizan Christine de Pizan (1364 – 1430) knew the story of Hero and Leander from vernacular texts and from Ovid.60 She might have been drawn to it by its exemplarity, which was commonplace in French literature at the time. Further exploitations of the legend are in Jean Froissart, Evrart de Conty and Jacques Legrand.61 Yet, the tale must have appealed to Christine beyond its standard paradigmatic function, for she engages with it more frequently and with greater verve than her

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contemporaries. The fate of the wretched pair seems to have resonated with her own personal tragedy.62 Christine’s husband, whom she loved dearly, died at a young age and left her an even younger widow (of 25 years). In her verse autobiography Fortune’s Mutation (Le livre de la mutacion de fortune, c.1400), she describes this event as a shipwreck and his death as drowning. Her married life was one of unclouded joy (980), until Fortune put wife and husband on a ship. For several days the two sail without trouble under the husband’s expert control of the vessel, but suddenly a storm breaks out, the wind has the better of his steering and he falls into the sea (1247 – 8).63 On learning this, she almost throws herself overboard (1254 – 5) but is stopped by her servant. Her mythic paradigm is Alcyone when she drowns to follow her own husband, ‘whom she was wont to love so much’ (1259): naturally, for both women are married.64 But Hero’s suicide must have touched Christine personally as well because her husband was also her lover, her golden ring the sign of the fine amour (917), the ‘courtly’ love that bound them. She calls him ‘a handsome and pleasant lad’ (925), ‘handsome in body and face’ (937 – 8), her irreplaceable ami (‘lover’, 1273 – 4) whose death, she adds elsewhere, has severed her from all joy (The Debate of Two Lovers 145 – 56).65 In addition to speaking to Christine’s life experience, the tragic tale was a perfect fit for the trope, dear to her, of the sea of passion. In her best-known work, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), she warns her female readers: ‘However, these sad examples [of heroines who died from love] [. . .] are not intended to encourage women to launch themselves on the perilous and treacherous sea of passionate love’ (2. 60).66 Christine has the tale of Hero and Leander fresh in mind when she issues this caveat, for she has just narrated it to prove women’s fidelity (2. 58). The tempest of love killed Hero. And the sea, the real sea, has made many lovers its victims, as Christine reminds her readers in a poem: ‘Of those whom Love conquers many have died from it in the deep’.67 We cannot but think of Leander’s deadly swim. Christine narrates the story four times, each time with a different spin. In an early ballad it illustrates love’s perils:

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When Leander crossed the salty sea Not by ship, not sailing on a boat, But swimming, at night, secretly, He undertook the dangerous crossing For the beautiful Hero of the shining face, Who lived in the castle of Abydos [sic ], On the other side, pretty close to the shores. Behold how love gives orders to lovers! This sea strait, which Helle named, The valiant, highborn youth often crossed To see his lady, so that their love Might be secret, to which his heart was pledged. But Fortune, who has dealt many injuries, And who gives plenty of sorrows to many good folks, Caused too violent a tempest in the sea. Behold how love gives orders to lovers! In that sea, which was deep and vast, Leander died. It was a pity. His fair lady was so pained by this, That she sprung into the sea without looking further. So they died of one heart. I stop my lesson, but you, consider! You all, lovers seized with the fury of love, Behold how love gives orders to lovers! But I doubt that the habit is gone, That no one at all loves in this way. Great love turns the wisest into a fool. Behold how love gives orders to lovers!68

This poem, like many of Christine’s earlier ones, bears the marks of her own suffering and loss. Her take on the legend is empathetic. Note the blame she hurls on harsh Fortune. Note also the compliments she pays to Leander, in the spirit of Ovid moralized, which might have been her main source. And note again the courtly image of the two lovers dying ‘of one heart’, and the emphatic appreciation, also courtly, for Leander’s care to keep their trysts secret. But alongside her sympathy Christine sounds the lesson, familiar since Virgil, that passionate love is dangerous.69 I compare her message to Virgil’s because there is no hint of a Christian moral stance in her poem, in spite of the

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correspondence in some of its details with Ovid moralized. Christine warns her readers not against the sin of the flesh, the luxure of Ovid moralized, but against the compulsion of passionate love and its inevitably tragic outcome. As one critic puts it, Hero and Leander are paradigmatic of ‘the sad predictability of most love affairs’.70 The tale provides Christine with evidence for love’s destructiveness again in the Epistle of Othea, a letter written to a 15-year-old Hector by the made-up goddess featured in the title. The work contains myths summarized in a few verses (‘text’), then explained to give ethical advice (‘gloss’), and finally allegorized as illustrations of virtues, vices or religious truths and commandments (‘allegory’).71 The real addressees are the young knights (starting with the author’s son Jean, who was 15), to whom Christine offers both terrestrial and spiritual guidance. But even though her goal is instruction, she sometimes cannot help narrating the tale at length, when it is moving and dramatic.72 She expatiates on Pyramus and Thisbe, Hero and Leander, and Orpheus and Eurydice, for ‘love is a subject matter more pleasant to hear than any other’.73 The charm of those stories incites their telling beyond the moral lesson they supposedly convey. Text: Do not hold your pleasure so dear, that you place at too (trop) great a risk your life, which you should love. Driven by his pleasure, Leander died at sea. Gloss: Leander was a young man who loved the beautiful Hero too much (trop), with a great love. Since there was a sea strait between the residences of the two lovers, Leander swam to cross it at night, many times, to see his lady who had her castle near the shore, so that their love might stay hidden. But one time a violent storm rose and lasted many days in the sea, depriving the lovers of their joy. One night Leander, compelled by excessive (trop grant) desire, went into the sea during the storm, and was carried so far by the dangerous waves that he died pitifully. Hero on the other side was much worried about her friend, and when she saw the body floating to the shore, she was gripped by an extraordinary pain (trop merveilleuse douleur) and threw herself into the sea. Embracing the body, she died and was drowned. For this reason, Othea tells the good knight that he should not love his pleasure so much as to stake his life too much (trop) on it. And a wise man says this: ‘I am surprised to see that people bear up with so many perils for the pleasure of the body and pay so little attention to the soul, which is eternal’.74

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Christine enjoys lingering in her narration and scatters it with courtly motifs: the secrecy surrounding the affair, the final embrace of the lovers. But she strikes sterner notes than in the ballad. The letter’s gist is more judgemental, much in the tone of Ovid moralized, which is its primary source.75 A keyword is the adverb ‘too much’ (trop), which recurs four times: once to comment on Hero’s excessive grief, the others on Leander’s excessive indulgence in love and his taking excessive risks for it.76 Another moralizing feature, which bears a Christian underpinning absent from the ballad, is the identification of love with ‘pleasure’ ( plaisance, delit): bodily pleasure, that is, to which the wise man who speaks the last line of the gloss contrasts the eternal life of the soul, regretfully ignored by Leander. He dies ‘driven by his pleasure’ and ‘compelled by excessive desire’, whereas the ballad blames his death primarily on cruel Fortune. The more severe take on the story in the Epistle is in keeping with a core message of this work: though the young knight should not steer clear of love altogether, he should embrace it in moderation, without letting it interfere with his commitment to arms.77 Leander was too single-minded. The tragedy appeals to Christine once again in the Debate of Two Lovers (also written around 1400), which belongs in the medieval love debate tradition and in particular harks back to Machaut. As we have seen, the Judgment of the King of Navarre exploits Hero and Leander to decide whether women or men suffer more in love. Perhaps this text inspired Christine to include the example in her own debate, though her fondness for the tale might have worked it into her poem independently. The bone of contention is not, as in Machaut, whether female or male lovers suffer more intensely, but whether love brings more joy or more sorrow. The contenders are a young squire, love’s defender, and an older, disenchanted knight, its prosecutor. It is the knight who mentions Leander when he expounds on the pains of love: Leander also perished piteously at sea, in order to protect from shame the beautiful Hero, who wanted to claim him as her own; in the dark of night the unfortunate lover undertook this adventure, to cross the sea in nothing but his shirt, until one time, by great misfortune, he drowned there in stormy weather. Behold, behold how they are treated, the unfortunate lovers, who are taken and attended by Love! (681–90)78

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The most noticeable feature of this account is the dominance of Leander. Hero’s death is not even alluded to. The imbalance is in character: though in some cases the knight mentions the demise of both members of a couple (for instance Pyramus and Thisbe or Tristan and Isolde), he never singles out the woman as the victim while he does the man, and repeatedly (in addition to Leander, he cites Achilles, Paris, Aesacus and Iphis). In other words, the prominence of Leander in these verses does not imply that their author went along with the tradition of privileging him over Hero. In Christine’s works the choice of lover rather serves narrative or argumentative needs. Leander is also the main protagonist of the ballad because he is more fit than Hero to illustrate the dangerous actions prompted by love. With an eye to the young knights to whom she addresses her Epistle, Christine also gives Leander first place in this work, mentioning only him in the poetic text and in the closing paragraph of the gloss, where she warns them against the dangers of excessive love again. And yet, in the same passage the emphasis on Hero’s despair, suicide and embrace of her lover betrays Christine’s sympathy for the woman. In fact, the painted image that accompanies the account and its explication in the Epistle gives prominence to Hero. In at least two manuscripts, a vividly coloured illumination featuring Leander dead in the sea and Hero leaping from her tower and about to embrace him complements the text. 79 The woman’s plunge is forefront. In particular, in the artistically illuminated manuscript of Christine’s works at the British Museum (Harley 4431), which was supervised by the writer herself, Hero dominates the visual field (Figure 3.1). Her dress, painted in a deep and bright blue, catches the eye, and her falling body fills a large part of the image as it meets and embraces the dead Leander, who is smaller and colourless. Christine seems to engage polemically with the illumination illustrating the death of Leander – his alone – in Machaut’s Book of the True Poem. She might also be responding to the exclusive privilege given to the young man by Jean Froissart, whose account stops with the death of ‘the valiant knight’ (Le joli Buisson de Jonece 3192 – 207). By contrast, the image embellishing Christine’s Epistle illustrates Hero’s death, and hers alone. She is not inactively watching Leander from the upper-right

FIGURE 3.1 Epıˆtre Othe´a, illumination from the Harley Manuscript 4431, The British Library, Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts. Open access (www.bl.uk).

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corner of the picture, as in the manuscript of the Book of the True Poem, but she occupies its centre as she throws herself onto his body. Hero becomes the exalted protagonist in Christine’s last retelling of the story in the Book of the City of Ladies. She is introduced to demonstrate that it is not true, as Ovid and others contend, that women are unfaithful in love. To expose this prejudice, Christine adduces the deaths from love of several female characters of classical and medieval literature, among whom figures Hero (2. 58). The account is packed with familiar courtly themes: Leander’s care to keep the affair secret, the long duration of the tryst, which appears also in Ovid moralized and in the Epistres but is extended further (for ‘a number of years’), the ‘endless delay’ to the lovers’ meeting, caused by the storm, and their final embrace, when the ‘poor’ Hero, who has wept all night, hurls herself into the deep and ‘died from loving too much, since she drowned with her arms wrapped round Leander’s dead body’.80 Christine also idealizes the love affair by avoiding words such as ‘lust’ or even ‘pleasure’. While in the Epistle Leander is prey to bodily passion, in the City of Ladies the eroticism of the pair’s union is suggested only discreetly, in the ‘desire’ that urges the youth to brave the storm. In this detail Christine’s account disagrees with the mixed message of Ovid moralized and is rather closer to the take on the story by Jacques Legrand, an Augustinian preacher and slightly her junior. In Archiloge Sophie. Livre de bonnes meurs (published before 1478), he offers mythic examples that one can use to illustrate a list of virtues, vices and passions. The catalogue contains ‘lust’, ‘love’, ‘foolish love’ and ‘friendship’. Hero and Leander exemplify not lust, not even foolish love (as in the introductions to the Heroides), but love. The short narrative Legrand devotes to them is free of moral stigma: Leander was a handsome young man and loved Hero, a very beautiful maiden. But the sea was between them, and for this reason Leander at night stripped and swam to cross the sea, while Hero, to make light for him, held out a torch from the summit of a tower; but eventually Leander was drowned in a storm. And on that night Hero had dreamt that she saw a dead dolphin. She came early to the harbour, and seeing the body of her friend floating, she jumped into the sea and died with him.81

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The author of the Book of the City of Ladies would approve this choice of Hero and Leander to exemplify love rather than purely carnal passion. But she herself goes further than just pruning lascivious elements from their dalliance: she devotes much effort to exculpate Hero completely by disambiguating Ovid’s characterization of her. This is true already for her earlier works, where there is not even the slightest intimation of Hero’s culpability. She is ‘worried’ (in the Epistle), not impatient like her counterpart in Ovid moralized and in the Judgment of the King of Navarre; not angry, as in the latter poem. Nor does she draw Leander to his death, as in both texts. In Christine’s ballad and her Epistle Leander swims spurred on by his own – excessive – desire. Likewise, in the City of Ladies it is his inability to endure the never-ending separation that urges him on: Leander could no longer contain his desire to see Hero, for he had seen her torch at the window and had taken this as a sign that she wanted him to come to her [emphasis mine]. But, alas, the wretched girl was simply afraid that he might try to come over and would gladly have done everything in her power to stop him from putting himself at such risk. She had only lit the torch in case he decided to try and see her after all.

Christine contests both the identification of Hero’s torch with the ‘burning firebrand of lust’ in Ovid moralized and Machaut’s claim that Hero ‘summoned’ Leander on the stormy night. She might also be responding to the version of the tale in Evrart de Conty’s Le livre des echecs amoureux moralise´s (before 1405), where Diana, upholding Virginity, presents a young man with the tragic love story to dissuade him from entering the Garden of Pleasure. True, in this text the deaths of Hero and Leander are taken together to teach the (trite) lesson that ‘such foolish loves often end in bitter sorrow and some painful misfortune’.82 The two are joined in a striking chiasm that interweaves their deaths: ‘And so she died for the love of him, who also for his love was dead and perished’ (ainsy moru celle pour l’amour de cely qui pour s’amour aussi estoit mors et perilz). But Hero seems to be more enmeshed in that foolish love. Leander meets only with praise: for his ‘bravery’, for ‘wisely’ keeping his love hidden under the cover of night, taking example from the owl that shuns the light of day.83 Conversely, Hero is filled with fury (esragie) when she kills herself and with burning passion while she waits for her lover. Only she, not

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Leander, is driven by desire; and she broadcasts it, as it were: ‘The young maiden, who desired him much (qui moult le desiroit), held a lamp and gave him light from a high window where she had climbed, on a high tower, to direct him better in what he had to do, and so with joy she received her friend’. Though it does not merge with desire as in Ovid moralized, Hero’s torch is mentioned together with it as its expression and its attendant. Christine offers a radically different picture of Hero. In addition to opposing her identification or privileged association with erotic longing, she wipes away even the egotistic protestations that fill the beginning of her letter in Ovid. Gone is her impatience and even her frustration over Leander’s absence; gone is her jealousy, which is prominent in the original Ovid and even more in its medieval moralized version.84 Only the plea for caution that ends her Heroides is retained – and enhanced: she would have done anything she could to stop Leander! Christine’s answer to the question, ‘was Hero’s lamp responsible for Leander’s death?’ is incontrovertibly negative. It is he who took the light to mean what his desire dictated to him, whereas her intention in kindling her torch was to help him, should he – God forbid! – make a rush attempt. As if to hammer into the reader’s head that Hero did not hold out her lamp to lure Leander, Christine adds a curious and original detail: that her light was meant to guide him only ‘during the dark winter months’. Hero does not show up at her window night after night to inflame her lover with her feminine charm. She is fully cleared of the misogynous charges laid against her in French literature.85 Consonant with the project of rehabilitating Hero are the expressions of sympathy that Christine lavishes on her. Perhaps for the first time in the reception of the legend, it is especially Hero’s fate that touches the writer. Leander, to be sure, earns her admiration for his courage and chivalry. Not only does he risk his life to ‘protect Hero’s good name’ by keeping the affair secret, he also prefers to expose himself to dangers than to appear disloyal: ‘He thought he would be guilty of faithlessness if he didn’t go’. But Christine does not feel for him as much as for Hero. Only she is ‘wretched’ (lasse) and ‘poor’ ( povre). And the narrative ends with her loving embrace in death. This is the case also in Baudri and Ovid moralized; but in those

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accounts, especially in the second, the sobering moral lesson that caps the romantic picture shakes the readers out of their reverie. By contrast, in the City of Ladies the closing description of Hero ‘drowned with her arms wrapped round Leander’s dead body’ lingers unchecked in the reader’s mind. So far so good: Hero is rescued from misogynous prejudice and elected to illustrate women’s uncompromising fidelity in love. But the story does not end here. There is a hint, if only a hint, that her love was excessive like Leander’s. Just as he swims to his death because he ‘could no longer contain his desire’, she dies ‘from loving too much’ (trop). The judgemental ‘too much’, the leitmotif the Epistle of Othea, leaves its imprint in the last sentence devoted to Hero. In addition, Hero is no model to follow. After producing further examples of women who died for love, Christine issues her warning against plunging into the sea of passion (2. 60, above); and continues: ‘Such liaisons always have a tragic ending and the woman invariably loses out in terms of her health, status, reputation and, most important of all, her soul’. We are pulled up short: Hero’s romantic involvement and sacrifice should not be imitated. The moral message might explain the choice of examples. In addition to Hero, the women faithful in love include Dido, Medea and Thisbe; two characters from Boccaccio’s Decameron, Ghismonda and Lisabetta, passionately involved in secret affairs; the dame of Fayel and the chatelaine of Vergi, heroines of French romances likewise entangled in extramarital loves; Isolde and Deianira. There are no proper wives. True, Dido, Medea and Deianira are married. But the instability of their marriages allows Christine to ignore them and to turn the couples into pairs of lovers. Deianira is the one ‘who loved Hercules’ (2. 60), while Dido received from Aeneas the pledge that ‘he would marry no other woman but her and would love her forever. None the less, he still abandoned her’ (2. 55). There is no mention of their wedding. (Christine could easily disregard it because in Virgil it is celebrated so hastily that Aeneas can claim he did not marry Dido.) As to Medea, ‘Jason promised to take no other woman but her for his wife, swearing that he would love her for evermore. However, Jason broke his word. After everything had gone just as he had planned, he left Medea for another woman’

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(2. 56). As in the presentation of Dido’s liaison, marriage remains in the future, in a promise that never materializes. Why does Christine gloss over the marital status of these couples? And why does she not narrate stories of loving wives who killed themselves when their husbands died, such as Laodamia, Evadne (known to Christine from Virgil’s fields of mourning in Aeneid 6) and above all Alcyone, her own dear existential reference in Fortune’s Mutation? Would not these suicides for love serve her as well as Hero and Thisbe to prove women’s unflinching fidelity? Rather than by the intensity of the attachment, the choice of examples seems dictated by the double purpose they fulfil: to dispel misogynous lore but also to warn women against the destructiveness of extramarital affairs. The spirited ending of the book repeats the warning, making it clear that the passion women should avoid is unmarried love: ‘Drive back these treacherous liars who use nothing but tricks and honeyed words to steal from you that which you should keep safe above else: your chastity and glorious good name. Oh my ladies, fly, fly from the passionate love with which they try to tempt you!’ (3. 19). The paradigms of fidelity mentioned turn out to be also cautionary examples:86 those women were loyal, but should not have indulged in an affair to begin with. Hero’s kind of passion can and must be avoided. She was not fated to love and die, as Musaeus said, but chose to yield to love and died from her choice. PART THREE: GERMANY AND THE LOW COUNTRIES

A popular novella There is less evidence for the diffusion of the legend in Germany than in France, but this should not deceive us: it was well-known.87 Its plotline underlies a twelfth-century edifying story of miracles and contrition. The text is in Latin, but it fully belongs in a German context because its author spends many words to locate the story in Lindau on Lake Constance.88 A monk there has an affair with a nun. Each night she places a candle at her window to guide him on his way across a bridge, but one night he finds its door closed and has to swim. A wind blows out the candle and he drowns. Before and during the crossing, though, he had sung the praise of the Virgin Mary,

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whom he had worshipped all his life. His devotion leaves an imprint on his tongue: Ave Maria gratia plena. The congregation marvels at the sight, but at learning about his love affair it hesitates to bury him in the convent and sends for the bishop of Constance to issue a verdict. He, in turn, asks for a second proof of the Virgin’s grace. It is given: salvatus est appears on the monk’s tongue! So he is buried in the church. And the nun ‘ended her life in great penitence’. Suicide is replaced by lifelong remorse, pagan tragedy by Christian salvation. But to appreciate the remake, its readers (possibly monks, if the author was one) had to be familiar with the legend. An anonymous verse narrative in Middle High German is further evidence for the tale’s popularity in the region. The poem’s stark message is spelled out at the outset: ‘O Love, your sweet beginning bestows many a bitter end to him who experiences the pleasure of love and at last finds a sting concealed in such bliss’.89 The author does not mention his sources, but repeatedly states that he has ‘read’ and ‘heard’ about the two lovers (85; 35; 98), confirming that the tale was common currency and circulated also in oral form. He seeks to give a strong folktale hue to his own narration by omitting not only literary precedents but also place names, and by introducing it with the fairytale-like formula, ‘there was’: ‘There was a young man, extremely handsome, who had been raised across the sea’ (16 – 7); ‘There was, they say, a castle [. . .] and not far [. . .] was the city’ (35 – 8). The author, however, was clearly acquainted at least with the content of the two Heroides. Whether he drew from them directly or from a translation, their imprint is unmistakable.90 It surfaces most patently in the insertion of two letters the lovers exchange when the swelling sea is keeping them apart. But the poet reworks the material of the Latin epistles into his continuous narrative with originality, selecting only sections of them for his own letters while distributing other parts in the framing account. The most striking feature of the adaptation is the reversed order in which the epistles appear: Hero’s is first. She writes because ‘she thought that he did not want to come anymore’ (114). Her letter is devoted primarily to expressing her frustration with his failure to visit her. It begins with an outright accusation: ‘My heart is painfully tormented with longing, my darling, because of your fault’ (120– 1, my

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emphasis); and ends with a demand: ‘I will never write to you again. Now my request is that you come’ (204 – 5). The poet modifies the gist of Heroides 19, which starts with an outburst of impatience but concludes on a strong note of caution, by leaving out the latter movement and replacing it with a firm summons for Leander’s presence. Hero’s letter is not meant to soothe him in her absence, to keep him company. Her threat, ‘I will never write to you again’, also rings tragically true: Leander is going to die at the end of the same day in which she sends for him. The poet’s message is clear: Hero is to blame for Leander’s swim and death. This is why her epistle comes first. He will read it and honour her commanding request. But, curiously, instead of diving instantly Leander first replies. This sequence has puzzled readers: what is the point of writing, if he is set on going? The insertion of the letter has appeared clumsy to some, a poetically unmotivated gesture of allegiance to the Heroides.91 But it is not so: writing has the power of making Leander’s separation from Hero even more painful for him, since the core of his epistle is a detailed reminiscence of the first and quiet night in which he swam to his love. His prolonged indulgence in that blissful memory fills him with unbearable pleasure and sharpens his longing, setting him off on his doomed journey.92 Leander ends his letter by detailing his intention to leave instantly, which is left vague in Ovid: ‘Do still expect me tonight. I am coming, absolutely’ (290 – 1); and there he goes. His last swim and his death inspire a long narrative interspersed with moralistic pronouncements about the destructiveness of love, the main focus of which is the poor swimmer’s ever-worsening predicament. We hear his voice invoking Hero and lamenting his misery, right up to the moment when he drowns (373 – 87). By contrast, we do not hear Hero when it is her turn to die. Her death is only summarily narrated (399 – 406).93 Though Hero’s death is given scant attention, readers acquainted with the legend will mark it because in this version it is not suicide: ‘Wailing she instantly sank to the ground and her life slipped away steadily, so that she, too, lay dead’. This is the first time in retellings of the legend that Hero does not kill herself. The poet of Parce continuis might have conceived her death along similar lines (‘up in

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her tower’) but he leaves its manner unspecified. By attributing it to natural causes, the German poet fits it unproblematically into the strongly Christian frame of his narrative.94 The poem mixes a meditation on love’s pains overriding its shortlived sweetness, a` la Plaisir d’amour, with an attempt to christianize the story. There are no pagan gods in this version. Typically, medieval treatments keep at least some of the tale’s pagan apparel, but this author is careful to avoid every reference to it. Leander’s reminiscence, in spite of its wealth of detail, skips over his address to the Moon goddess that fills Ovid’s page. The only mention of a pagan deity is ‘the god of love’ (274): a nameless, pale figure, unlikely to conjure up the mischievous winged child. By contrast, God makes nine appearances. He is to be thanked even for Hero’s physical endowments, a gift of ‘his majesty’ (68 – 9). The two letters open with, ‘May God bless you’ (119; 221), and Leander’s last words before he dies are not for Hero but for Him: ‘O gracious God in the kingdom of heaven, who has never withdrawn his help from those who believe in Him, let it be your command and receive my poor soul!’ (382 – 6). The dying Leander has on his lips the hope of salvation rather than Hero’s name. And note that Leander says: ‘receive my soul’ (enpfaˆch die seˆle mıˆn). This separation of soul and body, completely alien to classical versions of the legend, is a hallmark of the German poem.95 Leander had given voice to his preoccupation with the state of his soul right before swimming: ‘Do still expect me tonight. I am coming, absolutely. But if I will fail and die, may my soul truly be entrusted to your care’ (290 –4). We shall compare the corresponding sequence in Ovid, when Leander, likewise anticipating his death, wishes for his body to be lamented by Hero, not for his soul to be tended by her. In the German poem his swim is framed at both ends by expressions of a major Christian concern. We find another instance of it at yet another marked juncture, in the closing of the narrative, and in the author’s voice, hoping that God will heal the lovers’ souls (428– 30).96 The Christian refashioning of the tale, and in particular the erasure of pagan deities from it, might not only be in line with the poet’s belief but also meant to capture the attention of a literarily unsophisticated audience. Even within medieval rewritings, the

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German novella stands out for its total avoidance of mythological references. The readers this author has in mind do not know or care about ancient mythology but seem to relate only to their contemporary culture, and not only in its Christian modulations, but also in its mundane pursuits. This becomes apparent from the glaring anachronisms scattered in the narrative of Leander’s distractions, which include falconry (132), the free roaming of a knight (136), chess and board games (140), all popular pastimes among the European nobility.97 And, predictably, Hero lives not in a tower but in a castle (burg: 36; 46).98 With the help of folktale resonances and the removal of the original setting and cultural environment, the tale could reach to a broader audience than just literati.

A hymn to fidelity: the version of the Dutch poet Dirc Potter Perhaps even more redolent of fairytales is the beginning of the story in the verse narrative by Dirc Potter (1411), a high officer and a diplomat at the court of Holland: ‘Beforetime, in days of yore’ (The Course of Love 2. 119).99 But the Dutch poet is careful to place the action in its classical location: ‘On the sea of the Hellespont there lived a king of Abydos. Across the sea, on the other side, lived the king of Sestos’ (120 –3). Unlike the Middle High German novella, this recounting does not bury its literary roots either; on the contrary, it acknowledges Ovid as its source (204).100 And again unlike the novella, it features the pagan gods (341; 364; 403) and calls one of them, Venus, by name (403), but it never mentions the Christian God. Its moral outlook is not strictly Christian.101 Though the story meets with the poet’s frowning because it ends with two deaths (403 – 13), the core of the account is devoted to the fidelity of the couple, an extended illustration of an almost legitimate passion. The narrative belongs in an ars amandi aiming to classify the kinds of love.102 The Heroides provide Potter with examples, but he also adopts the classification offered in the medieval introductions to the epistles, as ‘licit’, ‘illicit’ and ‘foolish’ love, to which he adds ‘good’.103 The attachment between Hero and Leander is not foolish, as in those introductions and in the Epistres des dames de Gre`ce or in Ovid moralized, but good: it is a passion that binds two unmarried

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people whose intimacy develops up to the fourth of the five traditional steps – visus, allocutio, tactus, osculum – but stops short of the fifth, factum, which is reserved for ‘licit’, that is, married love.104 Hero and Leander, though, did not abstain from factum. To work around this obstacle, Potter leaves the sexual aspects of the dalliance so vague as to suggest that it did stop with tactus and osculum. Hero does for Leander ‘all she could do with honour’ (171 – 2). She mentions their warming embraces and his lovely mouth, but not ‘many other things, which a modest tongue must not say’ (Her. 19. 63). Gone are the suggestive aposiopeses of Ovid’s characters and the eroticism of Hero’s dream, which Potter fills not with those many other things, but, more innocently or nebulously, with Leander’s company, manner unspecified: ‘It seems to me then that you are with me’ (305). Doing what? Holding hands and whispering endearments? Potter had a positive reason to choose Hero and Leander as illustration of ‘good love’: their unbreakable devotion to each other, which is the keynote of the poem. The motif is far from original. In addition to being a staple of courtly readings, it appears in the Middle High German novella, where Hero’s death incites the poet to praise ‘fidelity, among the rarities on earth in our times’ (408– 10). Potter, however, hammers the lovers’ mutual loyalty into our minds with unprecedented relentlessness: Leander loves Hero in ‘full faithfulness’ (166); she calls him ‘faithful’ (238); and the whole story is taken to be a lesson in fidelity to a hyperbolic degree: ‘Here faith proved itself faithful’ (397), a phrase that in the original sounds even more emphatic because ‘faith’ and ‘faithful’ ring identical and are placed side by side (Hier liet truwe truwe bliken). Further to push the point, Potter dismisses the paroxysm of jealousy of the Ovidian Hero. After speculating that the bad state of Leander’s father might be what keeps him from her, Hero adds: ‘Or new love? That I do not believe’ (250). She rejects the fears of her Latin model without giving them one single thought, and by alluding to them she draws attention to her own unshakable confidence in Leander’s loyalty and their enduring love. To make sure that even the densest reader does not miss the message, she spells it out: ‘The steady, unfeigned troth and solid faith, which I accord you and you accord me, remains steadfast without condition, without ever breaking’ (251 –5).

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Hero’s unwavering trust in Leander is not the only feature that distinguishes her from Ovid’s character. She is also keener on his safety. Though her writing is driven by her desire to see her love (it is her habit to send him a note each time she thinks he is loitering and should come), she sets out to pen her letter only when ‘the water grew mild and the weather calmed with the wind’ (197 – 8), that is, when Leander should not be at risk. And even so, she ends with a plea for caution that inflates her corresponding exhortations in Ovid, urging Leander over 15 lines (313– 27) not to leave until the sea is perfectly still, and reassuring him of her patience: no matter how hard it is for her, ‘I should rather wait another year, than let as much as a hair go amiss with you’. Hero as a model of bene velle, not just of amor: her characterization contrasts Potter’s poem with the German novella, where she is jealous and impatient, and Leander dies because she summons him. In the Dutch narrative, on the other hand, she feels no jealousy, is disposed to wait, and Leander is already dead when she writes. With a stroke of originality, Potter’s poem reduces the letters to one, Hero’s. Leander is the first to appear in the sequence according to the order of Ovid’s epistles, but he swims rather than writes, and drowns. Hero’s expressed fears for him (320– 5), in addition to building tragic irony,105 rouse the reader’s sympathy for her faith in Leander and for her selfless, yet pointless, efforts to caution him. As the poet takes care to make explicit, her letter never reaches him (338). Had it reached him, perhaps he would have been saved. Potter’s sympathy for Hero goes further: again in sharp contrast to the German poem, his own gives the woman the stage. Leander makes his entrance first but disappears quickly. We do not hear his voice, both because he does not write and because, even at the point of death, he is not given a chance to express his anguish. Conversely, Hero is granted much direct speech, not only as she pens her letter but also when, about to kill herself, she mourns her Leander (362 – 9; 373– 4). The difference from the German poem, where he cries out as he drowns while she dies without a word, could not be greater.106 The prominence given to Hero brings the Dutch poem closer to the Volkslied Es waren zwei Ko¨nigskinder (already mentioned in Chapter 1). This ballad, which has a strong thematic kinship with the

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ancient legend, might have borrowed elements from the Middle High German poem and might have influenced the Dutch one.107 If true, this cross-fertilization would be further evidence for the popularity of the tale in Germany and the Low Countries. At least in the case of the Dutch narrative, the points of contact with the ballad are striking indeed. In both the poem and several versions of the song, the body of water that divides the lovers is ‘deep’;108 their two families are royals; and the maiden is the undisputed protagonist, her suicide forefront. In the ballad, after her lover’s death she pleads again and again with her mother that she be allowed to go alone to the shore. There she finds the body of her friend and covers it with kisses before drowning herself with it. The sequence is similar in the Dutch poem, where Hero, as if filled with presentiment, goes for a walk with her nurse, and upon seeing Leander’s body sends her away with a pretext, then kisses her beloved over and over and drowns holding him. And whereas in the Middle High German novella public mourning commemorates only Leander’s death, in the Dutch narrative it follows also Hero’s; as in the Volkslied the bell tolls for two deaths. In both poems, however, the tragedy affects the protagonists’ families and the entire community, causing them all to lament publicly. So Dirc Potter: ‘Every man in the palace grieved. The father, too, was in deep mourning’ (344– 5); ‘The mourning which took place there will not be described here: for all can well imagine what mourning transpired in that land’ (391– 4). And so the German author: ‘What lament there was, both public and secret, about him in the morning, no one, it seems to me, could rightly say it in speech or writing’ (390 – 3). This sympathetic collective involvement in the lovers’ doom resonates, in an expanded form, with Virgil’s mention of Leander’s ‘wretched parents’, helpless before their son’s death.109 The participation of the larger community is justified by the high status of the families, Leander’s in the German poem and both in the Dutch one, and sets the two texts in opposition to French courtly treatments of the legend which, in addition to underscoring the secrecy of the affair, stop with mention of the lovers’ private deaths. The German and the Dutch narratives, by contrast, expand on their tragic end to the point that it becomes a matter of public concern.

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PART FOUR: ITALIAN AND IBERIAN LITERATURE

Ovid recreated: Leander and Hero in Boccaccio Some 70 years earlier than Dirc Potter, Giovanni Boccaccio produced the first extended account of the legend in Italian. He made substantial use of it in his early vernacular works: works, that is, the main subject of which is the religion of love as sung in medieval poetry and romance, where exploitations of the tale are commonplace. In his poem Teseida, it serves to identify the Hellespont, which ‘was sweet, then cruel to Leander of Abydos’ (1. 40. 8).110 The myth provides a landmark; it is the highlight of the region through which Theseus travels. The writer further expatiates on the legend in a lengthy gloss, wherein he gives the background to explain why the Hellespont was at first friendly, then harsh to the swimmer, and offers geographical detail, replacing ancient with modern place names (‘the sea strait that some now call of Constantinople’; ‘Abydos, which sailors today call Aveo’). Boccaccio’s emphasis on the location might have resonated with those of his contemporaries who were aware of the ongoing traffic between Italian cities and the Levant. Imagining that some of his readers will recognize the area, he updates the toponyms. This care for geography, however, is exceptional in Boccaccio’s applications of the tale and fits its use in a travel itinerary. By contrast, he makes a gross geographic mistake in his most extensive retelling of the legend, calling both Sestos and Abydos ‘islands’ (perhaps following his compatriot Filippo Ceffi, who makes the same error three times in his translation of Heroides 18 and 19).111 Boccaccio’s narrative is in the Amorosa Visione (1342), an allegorical poem that purports to record a dream in which the narrator sees paintings illustrating Triumphs of various personifications of earthly goods and desires. Hero and Leander belong in Love’s train: In back of him [Achilles] could also be made out Sestos and Abydos, little islands, and the sea which separates them as well. I recalled the time when Helle and her brother fell there from the gilded ram; she gave the narrow sea its name. Swimming there, naked, was Leander, making his way toward her whom he loved so much for her lovely face. Advancing then to the bank, I saw that Hero, in a charming posture, was welcoming him, drying him from his head to his feet; and then I saw

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there the two of them embracing with such great happiness that a like was never seen in anyone else. Then I saw him returning home through his customary maritime path, and on that road his limbs did not seem even to be weary.112

This painting is placed after the image of Achilles tortured with passion for Polyxena. Was Boccaccio inspired to pair the two stories by the Roman de Troie, where Leander serves as a term of comparison for Achilles fretting with desire? Or could the proximity of the legends’ respective settings, Troy and the Hellespont, have suggested to the poet that they be described together?113 If Boccaccio had the episode of the Roman de Troie in mind, he changed the spin of the narrative from tragic to joyful by skipping over the couple’s death. His episode breaks off with the image of an ever-vigorous Leander swimming back and culminates with the lovers’ embrace, the most blissful ever seen. There is not even a hint of the catastrophe to come. In his review of Love’s Triumph, the poet’s choice to erase the story’s ending fits his overall design, which aims to display not exclusively or even primarily the destructiveness of erotic passion, but every facet and effect of it: joy and sensual delight as well as despair and criminal blindness. Several of the featured images, such as the gods in love that open the series, brim with exuberant sensuality. Pictures of happy and of tragic happenings often follow one another, building sharp contrasts of tone and content in the narrative sequences. This is the case with Hero and Leander: the unmatched bliss of their embrace is sandwiched between Achilles’ torment and Scylla’s sordid murder of her father for love of Minos (24. 70–83).114 The happiest embrace ever is Boccaccio’s interpretation of Leander’s hint, in his Heroides, at the couple’s lovemaking on the first night (18. 105 – 10). ‘The rest’ and ‘the joys’ become visible. This is because the triumphs are, in reality, paintings, and as such they must capture love’s gestures concretely. While Ovid communicates the extreme delight of the experience with hyperbole (‘our joys were more countless than seaweed’) leaving the details suggestively unspecified, Boccaccio shows the pair as they remain interlocked and conveys their ecstasy through the viewer’s response to the image. We are challenged to identify the poet’s source and to admire his adaptation of it to a different artistic medium.

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Boccaccio’s treatment of the legend is, indeed, branded by his fondness to rewrite portions of Ovid’s Heroides 18 creatively. Leander’s reminiscence seems to be his favourite part. It underlies another reference to the tale in the Teseida, the subject of which is the rivalry between two Theban prisoners of Theseus, Palemone and Arcita, for the love of the Amazon Emilia, the sister of Theseus’ wife Hippolyta. Arcita escapes and, after him, Palemone, goaded by love and jealousy (5. 9), manages to leave the prison and sets out to reach the grove where abides his rival. On his nocturnal crossing he asks of the Moon goddess: ‘Guide my steps, as you did many times the arms of Leander in the sea’ (5. 32. 1 – 2). Boccaccio was inspired to mention Leander in this scene by Dante’s single allusion to him: The stream kept us only three feet apart, but the Hellespont, where it was crossed by Xerxes (whose fate should be a lesson to the proud), hurling its waves from Sestos and Abydos, was hated by Leander less than I hated this one: it would not open up! (Purgatorio 28. 70 –5)115

Barred by a narrow river from the beautiful Matelda, the poet identifies his thwarted desire with the passion and anger of the mythic swimmer, whom he pictures as the impatient lover cursing the sea in which he is about to die. Readers will recall Leander’s protestations and impending death in Ovid. The frustration of Dante’s longing is enhanced by the evocation of Xerxes’ doomed crossing alongside Leander’s. Two embodiments of an urge both fiery and rebuffed express the poet’s feeling vis-a`-vis the attraction of the Earthly Paradise, of which the woman is the crowning expression: a sensual beauty that fills Dante with intense pleasure but also with a sentiment of precariousness.116 The sight of her reminds him of Persephone because she is virginal and gathers flowers; but instead of dwelling on the young goddess’ playful pastime, he evokes the double loss that it brings: Nel tempo che perdette / la madre lei, ed ella primavera (‘that day her mother lost her and she, in her turn, lost eternal Spring’, 50–1). Furthermore, the woman emanates the dazzling light of Venus falling in love with Adonis (64–6) – that is, about to be bereaved. These two myths convey the impermanence of earthly desires, which the poet experiences with no sense of guilt but above which he will soar.

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It cannot be doubted that Boccaccio is remembering this passage because in his own, as in Dante’s, the reference to Leander follows an evocation of Persephone (Teseida 5. 31).117 But the later poet fits the role of the exemplar to the different context of its appearance. Leander is not the character kept from his love and inveighing against the sea, but the one praying to the Moon goddess in order to obtain her protection throughout his journey. In Dante, Leander is the lover who vents his present frustration in Heroides 18; in Boccaccio, he is the one who, in the same letter, reminisces about his first and happy crossing under the friendly eye of Luna. The subtext is activated earlier in the description of the serene night that surrounds Palemone-Leander (5. 29) and in the two stanzas in which he already entreats the Moon goddess and lauds her beauty (5. 30 – 1), before Leander comes to his lips. Just as the mythic swimmer seeks her guidance to reach his love, so does the walker who imitates him (31. 7 – 8). Dante’s lines in Purgatorio 28 worked as a prompt, but it is the central section of Ovid’s letter that provided the content of the episode. Boccaccio invites us to appreciate his engagement with Ovid’s text around and beyond the allusion, which serves as the decisive cue or, for the distracted reader, as a wake-up call. Boccaccio rewrites Leander’s Heroides again in the romance Filocolo, which tells the story of the contrasted love of Fiore (Filocolo) and Biancifiore and contains six references to the ancient legend.118 In one of them Ovid’s letter offers argumentative material for a funny but philosophically profound love question (4. 65 – 6): if you are due to sleep for a year with your beloved and for another with the most hideous and decrepit woman, what will you choose to do first? The argument in favour of starting with the old hag is that lovemaking with the girl will feel even more delightful following such a hardship. But against this prescription speaks the dictum: you’d better eat your dessert first, for you never know what will be next. Leander is brought in to make a case for both sides. He enjoyed Hero more because of all the hurdles he had to jump to get to her, says one contender. But the other retorts that he would have chosen a smooth ride, if he had had the option. The first speaker alludes to a segment of Leander’s reminiscence:

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The cold waters seemed warm, and the dark and fearful night seemed bright and cheerful day, and labour rest to Leander when he was going to Hero, swimming with the strength of his arms over the salt waves between Sestos and Abydos, because of the delight which he was expecting to have from the one awaiting him.119

The night was in fact black and frightening but it appeared like daylight to the expecting Leander. We catch a clear echo of his description in Ovid’s epistle of the moonlit sea and his effortless swimming. But Boccaccio adjusts the emphasis to fit the argument, recasting Leander’s idealized impressions as the product of the mindconditioning power of an anticipation of happiness untainted by memory.120 The most extensive remake of Heroides 18 occurs shortly before this episode. Early in his journey in search for Biancifiore, Filocolo is kept in Naples for the whole winter by bad weather. His captivity inspires him to identify completely with the character of Heroides 18. Just as Leander stretches his eyes toward the shore of Sestos, Filocolo contemplates the sea, imagining the region where his beloved dwells. He can almost feel the sweetness that the place draws from ‘the light of Biancifiore’s fair eyes’: a romantically charged light, like Hero’s lamp. Then, again, he surveys the stormy sea, hears its loud raging and attacks Neptune, exactly like his model: He would lower his eyes to the salt waves, and see them green and foaming white as they broke with noisy tumult, and likewise the wind [. . .] stirring them up; and he would say to himself in distress: ‘Ah, pitiless force of Neptune, why do you stir your waters and stand in the way of my departure?’ (4. 11)

Filocolo is Leander not just because of the intensity of his love but also because of his actual situation. He has not mentioned his mythic referent yet, but a reader conversant with Ovid’s epistle will have spotted his underlying presence and noticed its relevance before Filocolo spells it out, protesting that Leander, unlike him, had to cross only a small body of water (ibid.). The subtext remains operative throughout the episode, even subsequent to the one explicit mention of Leander. Thus, Filocolo proceeds to remind Neptune of one of his loves, and to beg Aeolus:

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‘allow me to complete the voyage I have started, and once that it is over and I have reached the place I desire and am with my lady, blow all you like! I shall be happy never to leave that place’. Boccaccio echoes yet another segment of Leander’s letter (205– 14). The reader has been taken through key moments of Heroides 18: the picture of Leander longingly staring at the sea, his watching and listening to the swelling waves, his reproachful address to Neptune, his mention of the god’s love and his fantasy of being prevented by bad weather from ever leaving Hero. Ovid’s letter offers Boccaccio a canvas to imagine situations in the Hero-and-Leander mould. But where is Hero’s letter, Heroides 19? There are no recreations of it in Boccaccio’s works, where she features first and foremost as Leander’s beloved, the coveted goal of his crossings. She is centre stage only in two instances, both of which star women as narrators and protagonists. The first, and Boccaccio’s wildest rewriting of the tale, comes from the Comedia delle Ninfe or Ameto (1341). In the hottest hour of the day seven nymphs, whom the shepherd Ameto has met, repair with him to the shade and there decide to tell love stories with him chairing the session. The nymph Mopsa goes first. A devotee of Athena, she nonetheless fell in love with a youth she saw sailing erratically about the shore. He was neither determined to set out nor to land, and went to and fro, unable to control his boat. After pondering for a moment whether or not to throw herself into the sea to reach him, she stepped back and called the youth ashore, promising him the warmest welcome: ‘You will be received by me with an embrace not different from the one the wearied and languid Leander received from his Hero: an embrace of which you have never heard the like’ (18. 21).121 The promised culmination of the two lovers’ encounter, the same moment evoked in the Amorosa Visione with the same emphasis on the unmatched delight of their embrace, should have served to entice the youth into landing. But the nymph’s invitation remains unheeded. What draws him to her at last is a striptease, for she bears first her legs, then her breasts! The woman plays a lustful Hero while the youth plays an anti-Leander role, clumsy as he is at sea and insensitive to the prospect of erotic pleasure that the nymph offers with the support of the mythic example. Mopsa’s impersonation of

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Hero, no matter how suggestive of sensual delight, has no impact on the (uneducated?) youth. Hero appeals also to the protagonist of the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (1344), the most prominent female narrator in Boccaccio’s early works. Her lover Panfilo has left her and fails to return. The abandoned woman is no longer a believer in the religion of love, as are Filocolo, the character Boccaccio in the Amorosa Visione, Palemone or Arcita, but is its guilty and disenchanted victim.122 Her predicament explains the function of the tale of Hero and Leander (as of others) in her narrative, where it serves to illustrate not the joys of love but its tragedy. To incite Fiammetta to yield to her burgeoning passion, Venus, in an epiphany, mentions to her, from among several mythic characters, Leander who succumbed to Cupid (1. 19). The example is aimed to persuade her that love’s fire is not only powerful but also ‘holy’, santo (ibid.); in other words, it should inspire her to convert to the religion of love. The reader, however, knows better than the loveprone woman, for he has Leander’s tragic end vividly in mind. Contrary to what happens in the Amorosa Visione, which erases the tragedy, here it is underscored by two details. First, next to Leander comes a suicide, Dido, and, second, the youth Leander is not the athletic figure of Ovid (as in the Amorosa Visione) but is Virgil’s victim of durus amor. The reference becomes transparent from the immediate sequel, a demonstration of love’s tyranny over the entire animal kingdom that harks back to Virgil, where it contains the allusion to Leander’s love and death (ibid.).123 To the reader aware of Boccaccio’s Virgilian inspiration the example portends disaster and should caution the heroine. Venus urges her to experience the delights of her gifts (1. 21), but the paradigms she offers, among which are also Helen, Clytemnestra, Ariadne, Scylla and Venus’ own much-bemourned Adonis, are not untainted illustrations of love’s bliss.124 Because she yields to Venus’ enticement, in spite of it being strewn with signs of love’s undoing, Fiammetta soon finds herself in need of mythic precedents to try to come to terms with her lover’s absence. Wondering why he is not coming, she finds excuses for him, among which that he has perished at sea: only death could keep him from

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her, just as ‘for no other reason Hero lost Leander’ (4. 53).125 Fiammetta is not yet in a state of utter despair; she can cast her Panfilo in the role of a courtly Leander who took great risks to see her and died in the process. But a few months and four chapters later a more hopeless parallel comes to her mind: not between her lover and Leander braving the elements to be with her even at the cost of his life, but between herself and Hero weeping over Leander’s body.126 Forlorn and gnawed by jealousy, Fiammetta has only one consolation: to compare herself with legendary women unhappy in their love. Hero’s tragedy is the one that touches her the most: I imagine the melancholy of that doleful Hero of Sestos, and I seem to see her descending from the high tower to the seashore where she used to welcome her weary Leander with open arms; and here I seem to perceive her weeping grievously while looking at her dead lover pushed ashore by a dolphin and lying naked on the sand; and then with her gown she wipes the salty water from his dead face and drenches it with innumerable tears. Oh, what deep compassion binds me mentally to this lady! To be truthful, I felt for her so much more deeply than for any of the ladies already mentioned that sometimes I forgot my own grief and wept for her. And ultimately I do not find any other mode of consolation for her but one of these two: to die or to forget him, as we do with other dead people. (8. 145)

The pathos of the narrative conveys Fiammetta’s involvement in Hero’s fate. The unhappy woman is visualizing the scene of Hero’s distress, following her as she comes down from her tower and performs her mournful ritual. The special sympathy Fiammetta feels for this particular character finally expresses itself when she asserts that Hero’s misfortunes, and hers alone, had the power to distract her from her own. And yet Hero had two remedies: death or forgetting the dead. Not so the narrator. A leitmotif in Fiammetta’s comparative exercise is to conclude that her lot is far worse: ‘In my opinion, after weighing carefully all aspects of other people’s anguish, I judge my own misery to be much greater than that of everyone else’ (8. 142). This self-indulgent pose is not her prerogative; Filocolo dons it too, exploiting Leander as Fiammetta does Hero when he explains his predicament to his friends, claiming that they must know the force of love, if not from experience, at least

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from myth, from the figures of Helen, Dido and the sventurato Leandro, who risked his life to attain his desire (3. 67). But his own love beats these; unlike them his is right here to show: ‘If you don’t find these cases believable because of the long time that has intervened, look at me: the power of love is even stronger in me!’ (ibid.). Filocolo turns around the canonical paradigmatic function of myth, putting forward his love as the touchstone for mythic loves, which it surpasses in intensity. To both Filocolo and Fiammetta we shall contrast the restraint of Petrarch’s protagonist in the Triumphi, who also relates the tale of Hero and Leander to his own predicament as lover. As in the Amorosa Visione, his point of inspiration, the couple features in the Triumph of Love (3. 21). But while Boccaccio’s narrator does not draw a lesson in moderation from watching the scene, Petrarch’s takes those examples of great men and gods conquered by Eros not just as an illustration of love’s destructiveness127 but also as a consolation for his own distress. If both Apollo and ‘the youth of Abydos’ (along with others) had to suffer love, so too must he accept his condition (Triumphus pudicitie 1 – 14). Petrarch’s narrator speaks the sobering language of Greek tragic choruses: you are not the first. Filocolo and Fiammetta are not the first either (for Fiammetta, see 8. 142). But they claim they surpass their models in love’s miseries and strength.128 An important difference between the two, however, is that Filocolo’s claim is backed by other voices, whereas Fiammetta’s is not. As if he had heard the protagonist’s own argument, a fellow Filocolo meets en route states that his passion makes the stories of Medea, Dido, Deianira, Phyllis and Leander credible (4. 83). And when he faces great dangers in order to enter the tower in which Biancifiore is kept prisoner, the narrator, not he, maintains that no lover, including Leander, ever risked as much: ‘O love, enemy of the timid, how marvelous is your power, and how fiery were your flames in the breast of Filocolo! What terrifying road was ever taken on your behalf comparable to that which Filocolo dared undertake? The sea was not hostile to Leander . . .’ (4. 108). In contrast, Fiammetta’s protestations hang alone, both by virtue of her first-person narrative and because no internal character supports them.

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Far from working as a consolation in the Greek and Roman sense of making her realize that she is like many others, Fiammetta’s review of unhappy lovers serves to bolster ‘her pride in her tragic pose’, as one critic puts it, her sentiment of being so badly treated by love that she will acquire glory from her condition and become exemplary.129 She herself learns nothing from the mythic examples, yet she postures like an example, the ultimate example, for the women who will read her story, of love’s misery. She was not cautioned by myth. They should be cautioned by her mythicized persona. Most of the heroines of the love stories Fiammetta reviews died quickly, which, she claims, is better than to keep on living a life of suffering. Hero had this option and the additional possibility of forgetting the dead. Fiammetta, on the other hand, proceeds to say that she cannot wish her lover dead, and if he should be, she would not be able to forget him, but that she too would die. Furthermore, as long as she imagines him alive, she cannot die because she still nurtures hope; but since her hope does not materialize, her life is utterly miserable. Fiammetta’s reasoning is flawed. When she exclaims that she would die if Panfilo should be dead, does she not realize that this is exactly what happened to Hero? She passes over her suicide, mentioning it only vaguely and as one of the alternatives she had at her disposal to end her despair (‘either to die or to forget, as with dead people’) but not the one she actively chose. The account ends with her tears poured over Leander’s body rather than with her death. This comes somewhat as a surprise, since Fiammetta has just detailed the suicides of Pyramus and Thisbe and of Dido (8. 144). Reticence concerning Hero’s death is shared by all of Boccaccio’s references to the legend. The closest match for Fiammetta’s narrative is in the Teseida, which recounts Leander’s drowning but not Hero’s suicide: ‘And already Leander had been picked up by Hero on the beach of Sestos. A dolphin had pushed him gently there, his sad face filled with bitter tears and miserable, mourned by her with many sighs’ (6. 62). Boccaccio adds a gloss: ‘It is true that, after he [Leander] drowned, the dolphins pushed him, dead as he was, to the shore of Sestos, where his lady Hero, after much weeping, buried him’. In this context and in the others in which Leander is centre stage Boccaccio’s

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failure to mention Hero’s death is relatively unmarked. But the readers of the Elegia will infallibly notice this omission, especially because Fiammetta strenuously makes the point that she herself will die if her lover should be dead. Why then does she gloss over Hero’s suicide? There seems to be two main reasons for this: one is the writer’s, the other Fiammetta’s own. Boccaccio tends to give Leander the floor. This is natural when he serves as a term of comparison for a lover barred from reaching his beloved or facing dangerous travel to be with her, as is Filocolo (see also 3. 67; 4. 108). Context requires Leander’s presence rather than Hero’s. But why does she not appear among the mythic figures who provide exemplars of love’s fire, even when those include only women? Why are Helen, Medea, Dido, Deianira and Phyllis there, but followed by Leander rather than Hero (Filocolo 3. 67; 4. 83)? More striking still, why does Venus, a female, choose Leander in order to encourage Fiammetta, a female, to love? His preeminence suggests that for Boccaccio the tale is about the lover Leander, who took every risk and died, and his beloved Hero, whose own tragic death is ignored so as not to overshadow his. This bias separates Boccaccio from several medieval writers who found Hero’s suicide arresting. Among them is also his friend Petrarch, for whom it is a mark of fortitude (Variae XXXII). Boccaccio’s bias is active even in Fiammetta’s self-comparison with Hero. Through the latter’s caring gestures and weeping eyes we are given to see Leander, first alive and ‘weary’ ( faticato), a detail that calls for sympathy, then dead, naked and wet. But the vagueness with which Fiammetta alludes to Hero’s death is also wilful and selfserving, aimed to buttress her claim that she has no competition in misery. In her review of Pyramus and Thisbe and of Dido she does mention their suicide because she finds consolation in it. Thisbe with her Pyramus might have been blessed with each other’s company after death: ‘Oh happy were their souls, if one can love in the other world as in this one! No pain inflicted there can compare to the pleasure of their eternal companionship!’ (8. 144). And Fiammetta would have been better off if she could have imitated Dido, killing herself as soon as Panfilo left (8. 144 –5). Because with Hero love’s

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grief reaches its climax, the narrator erases her suicide so that she can keep the first prize in sorrow. Tentatively, I would like to suggest an additional reason for the obliteration: Boccaccio might be christianizing Hero’s image. Two details combined suggest this possibility: her care of Leander’s dead body and the dolphin that conveys it to shore. They both appear in the Teseida as in the Elegia, the first inspired by Leander’s fantasy in Ovid about the weeping Hero’s finding of his body washed ashore (Her. 18. 197 – 200), while the second seems to be a projection of her dream of the dead dolphin prefiguring his death, and of his claim: ‘Already the curvy dolphins know our love, and I don’t think I am a stranger to the fishes’ (Her. 18. 131 –2). From Leander’s swimming companion, the animal traditionally sympathetic to humans becomes his transporter, and from the signifier of death, the helper of the dead. Alternatively or in addition, Boccaccio found the caring dolphin ready-made in the prologue to the translation of Heroides 18 by Filippo Ceffi: [Leander] ‘was thrown by a dolphin to his lover’s shore, all naked’.130 Dolphins could easily fit into a legend centred on swimming and dying as a consequence. Leander cleaves the waves in their company in Ovid’s epistle as also in iconographical representations. Furthermore, the dolphin was intimate with Eros, who is often pictured riding the mammal;131 and it acts as guide and transporter in several Greek stories in which, driven by benevolence and a sense of justice, it saves deserving humans from death or their bodies from decay. The most famous of these tales is that concerning the musician Arion in Herodotus; dolphins also brought Hesiod’s murdered body ashore and were held responsible for carrying the souls of the dead to the Isles of the Blessed.132 By the time of Boccaccio, however, the dolphin had long been a powerful Christian symbol. It features prominently in Christian art as an aspect of Christ himself and was entrusted with transporting the souls of the faithful to his side after death. Just like Hesiod’s body, that of S. Lucian of Antioch was pushed ashore by a dolphin (and his soul carried upwards?). Quite possibly Boccaccio’s medieval readers related the dolphin to Christian belief more immediately than to classical lore. The picture of Hero receiving Leander’s body from the

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fins of a dolphin, as it were, must have struck a Christian chord with them. So, indeed, Hero’s care of the dead body would have resonated. In the Teseida, her services go so far that she even gives it burial. Her ritual preoccupations associate her with pious women religiously tending the dead. For a moment, the Christian reader would forget that she is the protagonist of an illicit love affair, who willingly drowns with the corpse of her companion in sin.

Hero’s quandary and the couple’s final dwelling: two inventions of Giovanni Girolamo Nadal In sharp contrast to Boccaccio, the Venetian poet Giovanni Girolamo Nadal gives ample space to Hero’s death. He is the author of the Leandreride (1380), an extensive verse narrative in four books and 71 cantos dedicated to the legend. The title, though not pleasing to the ear, imaginatively conflates the two lovers. Their agglutination is more than just titular. Again, unlike Boccaccio, whose treatment of the tale he knew,133 Nadal devotes equal effort to the passion and actions of each protagonist, ending his account with their immortal union. The poem bears traces of its Venetian provenance. A contemporary event in which the city was involved makes its way into the narrative: the so-called War of Chioggia between Venice and Genoa for supremacy in the Levant and, in particular, for control over the island of Tenedos, which is not far from the Hellespont. In addition to scattering war imagery throughout the poem,134 Nadal demonstrates awareness of current realities in that he pays special attention to geography. For the first time since Strabo, the configuration of the setting is mapped with precision. Boccaccio in the Teseida identifies ancient place names with modern ones but does not describe the region; and, in another context, he mistakes Sestos and Abydos for islands, whereas Nadal takes care to explain (1. 2. 28 – 35) that the two cities sit on the opposite sides of the Hellespont in a spot where the sea widens past a seven-stadia strait (about half a mile). Such topographical accuracy at the outset of his narrative suggests that he anticipated a significant number of readers to know the area at least from maps or hearsay.

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Care for geographic precision, however, quickly yields to the pleasure of storytelling: the rest of the canto (37 lines) is devoted to the myth of Helle, which Nadal knew from Ovid. The Leandreride is, indeed, heavily indebted to Ovid’s poetry, as the author openly acknowledges.135 Hero and Leander seem to have processed the teachings of the Art of Love, since they behave not only according to a romantic script but also to the more cynical guidelines of that treatise. Leander is taught its essentials: praise Hero’s beauty and become brave! (1. 7. 55 – 9). Women take a long time to surrender, so go slowly! (1. 10. 34 – 48). He dutifully follows these instructions. Only Leander falls in love at first sight, for Cupid wounds him with a golden arrow but Hero with one of lead (1. 5). This allows for a sustained courtship through the medium recommended by the Art of Love: letters, to which the wooed maiden responds as the same essay prescribes, taking a long time before she resolves to read the first message and writing a rejection in return. But this does not discourage her suitor, again as per Ovid’s essay (2. 10 – 12; compare especially Art of Love 3. 469 – 86). After Hero confesses her own passion to him, his daring climbs to the heights of Ovid’s militia amoris: ‘There is nothing a lover minds, the apt soldier in love’s war’ (2. 26. 65 – 6).136 And he ends up embodying his namesake in the Latin treatise: ‘More than once, to show his desire to go to her, though he could stay, he made the dangerous and cruel journey’ (3. 7. 76 – 8). We unerringly hear: ‘Often you could have been without your girl, Leander. But you swam, so that she’d know your feelings’ (Art of Love 2. 249– 50). Not surprisingly, the two Heroides penned by Leander and Hero are Nadal’s main source of inspiration. The narrative of Helle’s misfortune, which prolongs the description of the story’s site, instantly conjures up the imbrication of the two myths in Ovid’s epistles. Nadal himself is so lucidly aware of the heaviness of his debt (or so painfully grappling with the anxiety of influence) as to imagine that a chorus of poets laureate, including Ovid and led by Dante, appears before him to demand that he stop from almost plagiarizing his model. At the end of Book 3 he had promised that he would detail the content of the letters that the lovers exchanged during the storm (that is, the two Heroides). This prospect incenses

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Dante and the other poets, for the work is familiar to all: ‘The book is famous, not foreign or unknown’ (4. 3. 17 – 27). Dante’s censure is likely to echo actual observations addressed to Nadal about the inappropriateness of imitating so closely, to the point of producing an almost word-by-word translation, a text that was well-known and inimitable.137 Urged to sing something new (4. 9. 5 – 9), he sets out to narrate the catastrophe, which is not in Ovid. Though he still draws from his Latin model, it is no longer from the Heroides but from the rest of his love poetry and the Metamorphoses, episodes of which he adjusts to fit his tale rather than just reusing them in the same contexts.138 Nadal, however, is more original than Dante’s fustigation of him would suggest. One important ingredient of his poem is his own invention: Hero’s quandary. In his account both protagonists are initially impervious to love. Leander feels superior to Cupid, a` la Hippolytus, and Hero has vowed herself to virginity and beseeched her father, of whom many suitors have asked for her hand, to let her serve Diana (1. 4). As love makes its way into her heart, she falls prey to a dilemma that intensifies along with her passion. When Leander’s nurse approaches her for the first time, trying to win her over to the cause of marriage, Hero indignantly rejects her sweet talk, protesting that she is firm in her vow (2. 4. 43 – 57); but love is already calling her, for at the coming of night she feels conflicted between its attractions and her pledge (2. 6). Her struggle is ‘vain’ (2. 6. 40); the outcome predictable. As she reads Leander’s first letter, she is already burning with love and wavering between joy and fear (2. 9. 19 – 20). Soon she lies in bed, ‘breathless from the combat of love’ (2. 15. 31) and wishing for his nurse to return. Then she dreams that he is wrestling with the sea to come to her, while Venus, in the same dream, reproaches her for her coldness and asks Cupid to wound her. He shoots his golden arrow, which sinks deep into her heart (2. 15. 86). When she awakens, Hero is torn between love and chastity and gives voice to her qualm: ‘Will you obey your vow or the shafts of Love, who goads you overmuch?’ (2. 16. 11 – 12). She continues in this vein, battered by conflicting emotions, until she confesses her passion to her nurse (2. 16 – 17). The avowal determines her to submit to love. It now falls to her nurse to remind Hero of her

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commitment to chastity, but without success (2. 17. 56 – 66). Even fear of Diana’s ire (2. 22. 26 – 36) does not deter her. Hero’s vow sends us back to Musaeus, where she is likewise bound to virginity. Was Nadal inspired by the Greek poet? Though Ovid is his model, we cannot exclude that he knew Musaeus (in Venice at the end of the fourteenth century this would not be impossible).139 In fact, a detail in Hero’s self-presentation recalls Musaeus’ introduction of her: her ancestors ‘were near to Jove and his lineage’ (2. 7. 36; see H&L 30). This correspondence could, however, be coincidental, for the trope is commonplace. The same holds true for the transformation of the lovers into stars that ends their story. Though the episode resonates with Musaeus’ wish that Zeus had turned Hero’s lamp into a star,140 astral apotheosis is so recurrent in classical mythology that the parallel could be another coincidence. And again, the extensive narrative of the lovers’ first encounter does not have to come from Musaeus. It differs from the Greek account in at least two important points: Hero enters the stage as the priestess of Diana rather than of Aphrodite, and the ceremony during which the protagonists meet is to honour not Aphrodite and Adonis but the Greek victory against Xerxes. Since festivals in classical literature were canonical places to find lovers, Nadal could have come up with the idea independently, perhaps following once again Ovid’s prescriptions in the Art of Love (‘where to find a girl’). Regardless of whether or not Nadal borrowed the vow of chastity from Musaeus, he endowed it with greater significance than it has in the Greek text, which, as we have seen, leaves the motivation of the pledge vague (Did Hero choose her status or was it forced on her by her parents?) and exploits her priestly investiture not to develop a psychological conflict but to enable the shrewd Leander to shatter her commitment to virginity by stressing the paradox of a virgin priestess of Aphrodite.141 Nadal’s Hero, in contrast, is the virgin priestess of the virgin goddess, Diana, and she herself chooses to dedicate her life to virginity and to the goddess. Her resolve makes for a stronger barrier to the pursuit of love than it does, in Musaeus, the joint presence of a superficial pledge and an underdeveloped parental opposition. Admittedly Nadal could have done more with Hero’s quandary. Nonetheless, its inclusion is a

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major addition to the history of the legend’s reception, and one that will prove fruitful.142 Consistent with the importance of Hero’s vow as obstacle to her love, is Nadal’s choice to dispose of parental opposition altogether. The two families are of equal nobility (2. 7 – 8). If marriage is not an option, this is because Hero, once she drops her commitment to virginity, could not possibly ask her father to let her take a husband, since she had persuaded him to allow her to remain a virgin for life (2. 19. 25 – 36). In other words, it is her pledge rather than her father’s hostility to the match that forces her into a secret affair.143 Hero’s vow provides yet another obstacle to the lovers by rousing Diana’s wrath when she breaks it. The goddess launches her revenge in grand style: she enlists Juno, Neptune and Aeolus (4. 10), who join forces to ruffle the sea where Leander soon drowns. The attribution of the couple’s demise to the fury of a goddess is yet another original addition, which demonstrates the poet’s familiarity and engagement with Ovid as well as with ancient epic and tragedy. Nadal musters a large sample of classical myths and texts for his ambitious work. The moral outlook of the Leandreride is also classical. Its author borrows from Ovid but disregards medieval moralizations of his poetry. In addition to the angry goddess, fortune is responsible for the tragedy, in the spirit of Musaeus. Nadal showers reproaches on that blind force in his own voice rather than putting them in the mouths of the interested parties. Blaming one’s own unhappiness in love on fortune is commonplace in medieval literature, where lovers appeal both to that power and to the tyranny of their deified passion in order to clear themselves of moral responsibility. But from a Christian perspective, they are not exculpated, for they had the choice to avoid the lashes of fortune by resisting the enticements of love.144 Nadal, however, makes it plain that he thinks fortune is the culprit by simply saying so in his authorial voice. That wicked force has been kind enough to let the lovers be happy for two seasons; but it is in its nature to strike (4. 15. 19 – 27). As Leander is about to plunge into the stormy sea, Nadal embarks on a meditation about the vulnerability of human things to that inscrutable agent. We cannot fight it (4. 9. 56). Just as a woman is suddenly bitten by a snake while she is gathering flowers, so fortune attacks us

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unexpectedly (4. 9. 61 – 69). This gnomic observation launches the poet on a spirited and empathetic address to Leander: ‘Goodly Leander, who are leaving so happily, how hostile a fortune is going to disrupt you, how many troubles are gathering against you!’ (4. 9. 71 – 3). And again: ‘Greathearted youth, so full of confidence in yourself, of high ambition, strong and brave! Not you, not others, when the gods are fierce, can oppose bitter fortune, which always follows our short-lived steps’ (4. 11. 34 – 9). So much sympathy and admiration for Leander sounds familiar. So does Nadal’s bias in his favour. When it is Hero’s turn to die, he does not address her with a heartfelt apostrophe or inveigh against cruel fortune. Still, this force is behind the overall design, as it is with all human things (4. 17. 28 – 9). The protagonists are not at fault. Unlike several medieval authors, Nadal does not stigmatize the lovers’ passion as an act of folly or otherwise a moral flaw, but justifies it as willed by the goddess of love herself. Venus’ words of absolution toward the end of the poem have the force of a seal: if the pair offended Diana, ‘they are not guilty; rather, it was my fire’ (4. 18. 72). The fault Nadal imputes to them (or more precisely to Leander) is not to have indulged in love but, again along GrecoRoman lines of thinking, to have denied Cupid’s power (1. 4. 23 – 39; 1. 7. 47 – 9).145 The treatment of the lovers’ demise, however, shows a less clearcut moral stance.146 Hero hesitates to kill herself. She spends many words invoking and contemplating death, realizing that she has to take her own life to end it, for death is not accustomed to help those in need (4. 16. 1 – 24). Nadal’s effort to justify her suicide suggests that it was an issue for him. Yet it has the power of reuniting the lovers, on whose grave, displayed in a public ceremony, is inscribed: Amor [. . .] condusse insieme loro a morte dura / e morti stano insieme cum’ fer vivi (‘Love led them together to a harsh death, and dead they are together as when they were alive’, 4. 17. 67 – fin.). Like Paolo and Francesca, whom Amor condusse [. . .] ad una morte,147 Hero and Leander will never be severed from each other in the afterlife but, as his shade tells her in a dream, they will be ‘together, always of one heart, there under, showing how great a love possesses us up here’ (4. 13. 50 – 1). This reads like a celebration of love in death.

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Nonetheless, the Dantesque resonance, as well as the emphasis on the lovers’ morte dura, darkens the spirit of their indissoluble union in death. A death, moreover, which takes them down to the blackness of Orcus (4. 19. 4– 5), the dwelling of the condemned (4. 19. 22 – 4). The ghost of Leander had already suggested the pagan Hell as the pair’s final destination. He had asked Hero in her dream to put him in a tomb, so that he could go a le ombre grandi (‘to the great shades’, 4. 13. 47– 8), where she would reach him. The ‘great shades’ are Virgil’s umbrae residing in the fields of mourning (Aeneid 6. 452).148 Nadal is the first author to draw attention to the couple’s final dwelling.149 Greek and Latin writers do not even locate it until Ausonius, who was inspired by Virgil’s fields of mourning. Though Hero and Leander are not among their residents, the durus amor that sends desperate lovers there (Aeneid 6. 441) is the same durus amor that compels Leander to brave the stormy sea (Georgics 3. 259). This loaded correspondence might have been one factor that pushed Ausonius to include Hero among the dwellers of the ‘Aerian fields, described by Virgil’s muse, where a grove of myrtles shades those who lost their minds to love’ (Cupid Crucified 1– 2). Nadal likewise assigns the pair to the dark regions. But the reader soon discovers that this is not the endpoint of their journey. It terminates in the heavens, where they will reside forever as shining stars in the palace of Venus, thanks to her intercession with Jove (4. 19. 52 – 3). With their brightness comes their happiness: ‘Both lights spark more than embers, and both together rejoice that no more mortal life is left to them’ (4. 19. 55 –7). This change in the lovers’ dwelling, from the gloomy underworld to the luminous heavens, suggests a slight indecision in the poet’s mind between endorsement of the widespread censure of their passion and a desire to declare them innocent. He does forgive them and even makes them immortal, changing their nature from shades of humans to celestial bodies sparkling with felicity. A felicity, though, that does not come from the love that bound them but from having transcended the human life that caused it. Their union in the underworld demonstrated their undying passion but did not give them joy. We imagine them, the victims of a morte dura, to be beset by cares as are the suicides for love in Virgil’s Aeneid (6. 444).150

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In contrast, as fulgent stars Hero and Leander radiate joy: but a joy that bears no residue of their humanness.

They wanted to marry but lived in sin: the tale according to Joan Roic de Corella Nadal’s poem was known to Joan Roic de Corella, a late fifteenthcentury Valencian master of theology and the first author in the Iberian Peninsula to devote a full and self-standing narrative to the loves of Hero and Leander. His account, The Story of Leander and Hero (La istoria de Leander y Hero), is in prose but interspersed with short poems to mark moments of intense pathos. Though it primarily draws from Ovid, in the characterization of the two lovers it parts company with its Latin model as well as with Ovid moralized, another of its main sources. As in the French poem, after recounting Leander’s death the narrative switches to the worried Hero, fostering dramatic irony. Hero, however, behaves quite differently. In Ovid moralized she makes her entrance to protest that Leander should come and she continues in this vein. The text enhances her selfish intolerance of Leander’s absence while it drops the movement toward caution that closes her epistle in Ovid. Corella’s Hero is all caution. Her dominant fear is that Leander might attempt the crossing. She spells this out by endorsing and amplifying the plea for prudence that ends Heroides 19 (‘avoid dangers, for you have two lives in your charge’; ‘sailors swim only if they are shipwrecked’151) and by correcting sections of the two letters that urge or put forward Leander’s audacity, making them convey the opposite message: be careful and stay on shore! Her frustration with his failure to come when the sea apparently allowed it (Her. 19. 72 – 4) turns into an exhortation to wait until the sea, which was quieter, allows the crossing again: ‘This sea, which is now making such a commotion, just a few days ago was as smooth as oil, and it will not be long before it becomes just as calm again’ (14).152 And the ominousness of Leander’s stated wish that Daedalus would give him wings (Her. 18. 49) is explicated in order to thwart the wish: ‘If [. . .] using the device of Daedalus [. . .] you could make your voyage through the air’ – but no, don’t! ‘I recall that the son of Daedalus, flying unwisely, left in the sea both his feathers and his life’ (14).

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Corella echoes and adjusts stretches of the two epistles in order to clear Hero of the erotic impatience that we find in misogynous narratives such as those of Ovid moralized and Machaut. The misogyny that surfaces in French medieval readings of the tale is generally not shared by their Iberian counterparts. The Castilian king Alfonso X (‘the Wise’) attributes the quenching of Hero’s lamp to her exhaustion brought on by Leander’s slow coming: It happened one night that Leander was very late (tardo´ mucho) and Hero fell asleep. The light in the tower faded so much that when Leander was in the deep he did not see it. He lost the direction of the tower and wandered in the sea so much that the waves rose and killed him. He died there.153

As in Baudri, Leander’s loitering is the reason Hero’s torch goes out. In the Spanish account she does not even actively quench it on account of jealousy, but falls victim to weariness because of her long wait. Leander’s belatedness rather than the storm is responsible for his death, since the sea rises during his crossing, while he is foundering, adrift for lack of light. Had he swum promptly, he would not have lost his way. Even more flattering to Hero are the introductions to a couple of fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century translations of the two Heroides into Catalan and Castilian. These stand out from the typical medieval accessus for their use of Hero’s letter as a proof of her loyalty. Her writing is meant to urge Leander to persevere and love only her, and ‘the intention of the author is to praise her fidelity’.154 Her exhortations and fears of betrayal are expressions of faithfulness rather than of impatient desire. Corella, though, clears Hero not just of amorous impatience but of erotic urges altogether. She expresses the same fantasy that titillates her mind in Ovid’s letter and in its French retelling, of meeting Leander halfway, but with an intriguing difference: while in Ovid she imagines kissing her lover at sea and in the French poem, more lasciviously, she fancies returning to shore together with him to take their pleasure comfortably on dry land, in the Valencian narrative ‘she wished to swim across to the island of Abydos, or to meet Leander part way’ (14). This Hero remains vague about her desires; she does not indulge in savouring the idea of a love congress.

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Nor does she have erotic dreams in which she sees Leander ‘warming your breast clasped to mine and many other things, which a modest tongue must not say’ (Her. 19. 62 – 4). Through Corella’s pen Hero becomes truly modest: she does not say without saying. The lovers’ encounters are also modest, that is, they are not narrated at all. Corella turns Leander’s reminiscence in his Heroides into the account of his nightly crossing for an entire summer, during which he feels as athletic a swimmer as in Ovid, ‘surpassing the fish’, and propelled as strongly by love: ‘The ship of his body roved through the waters: for Hero, who was the wind behind him [. . .] like a loadstone pulled him onwards’ (10). Like his Latin model, Leander is known to the sea creatures, accustomed to the watery path and lightened by the power of love, ‘by the wings of eager expectations’ (ibid.) – expectations, however, that in the narrative never become reality. Ovid teases the reader’s desire by dwelling at length on Leander’s forward-looking movement in the sea; but that movement has a destination and a climax: the innumerable kisses and ‘the rest’. Corella has none of this. His Leander seems to live permanently with the fish, swimming to Hero’s arms but never resting in them (ibid.). We shall contrast Nadal’s poem which details the lovers’ pleasures on their first night. Like Corella, the Venetian author adjusts Leander’s reminiscence to the linear impulse of his narrative, while staying closer to Ovid in describing with relish the lovers’ embraces and insatiable kisses (Leandreride 3. 2. 92 – 107). He also fills the suggestive ellipsis in the Latin account of the climax with love’s gestures and skirmishes, to which he devotes an entire canto (3. 3). Leander’s sexual eagerness makes for pornographic snapshots: ‘Let me put my hand here, on your breast, and let me touch and see those apples born in the garden of love!’ (3. 3. 40 – 2); ‘Leander’s mind was satiated by two small, white and soft apples, which he handled with delight’ (3. 3. 46 – 8). Hero lets them be handled, and after opposing Leander’s approaches with just enough resistance to appear respectable, she proceeds to undress herself, quickly (3. 3. 83). And to bed they go. These opposite treatments of the lovers’ desire are matched by an equally marked difference in the way their bodies are displayed.

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In Nadal, as in Ovid, Leander is naked when he swims (3. 1. 52; 4. 9. 46). In Corella he also strips, but to change into a shirt that Hero has sewn for him.155 He even wears a belt holding ‘an elegant poniard, for he could carry no other arms while swimming’ (12). Later it becomes clear that the inclusion of this accessory is driven by the necessity of the plot, for it allows Hero to die by the sword (18) and Corella to link her suicide to Thisbe’s.156 But in the present of its appearance the poniard has the effect of endowing Leander with dignity. The naked swimmer of Ovid is turned into a properly attired knight. Turning to Hero, Nadal provides her with palpable physical concreteness. She attracts Leander with the comeliness of her curly and golden hair, her dazzling eyes, her face, neck, hands and the even greater beauty he assumes to be stored in her invisible parts (1. 4. 71 – 7). In contrast, Corella’s Hero is bodiless. Leander is drawn to her ‘noble and refined countenance’ (2): no detail given. While the readers of Nadal can imagine the whiteness of Hero’s breasts and their softness, those of Corella do not even learn about the colour of her hair. Hero’s unexposed beauty inspires not an erotic itch but proper marital feelings. As soon as Leander sees her he wants to tie the knot, and he approaches her nurse with this intent: ‘I desire [. . .] as both captive and husband, to spend my life in the arms of the one you watch over’ (2). Read against the tradition of the tale, this image of a marriage-oriented Leander, respectful of protocol and proprieties, is startling. In the transmitted myth he knows he cannot marry Hero and does not even consider confronting either his family or hers, but instantly embarks on an affair. It is true that Antipater of Thessalonica almost legitimizes it, though only by association, by pairing Leander’s drowning with the shipwreck of a bride (AP 9. 215). And it is true that Musaeus in Antipater’s footsteps has Leander call himself ‘Hero’s husband’ (220) and describes a wedding night. However, it is a marriage shrouded in secrecy, silence and darkness; a paradox, which launches the poet on a virtuoso tour de force that hinges on the ideological incompatibility between the term ‘wedding’ and the features that define this particular one.157 And what kind of suitor is Leander? One who boldly acts on his desire, which compels him to touch and kiss Hero and to declare his love to

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her face rather than inquiring about her ‘with [. . .] great discretion’ (The Story of Leander and Hero 2). As to medieval authors, they generally do not attribute to the couple marital intentions or disguise their union as wedlock; they either brand it as lascivious or idealize it for its courtly purport. One exception is Nadal, from whom Corella might also have drawn inspiration in this regard. But the different development of the motif of marriage in the two poets evinces a different moral outlook on the love affair. Nadal’s Leander is not the marrying kind. In his first letter to Hero he appeals to the power of erotic passion, which he illustrates with familiar examples of its divine victims, including the adulterous Mars and Venus (2. 1. 10– 11). He pledges an honest love, but in the courtly or stil novo mould: a love ‘that always had your virtue at heart. Therefore, please bend to accept my just prayers and step down from your haughtiness’ (2. 1. 24 – 7). He asks Hero leave to become her servant (2. 1. 30) in the tradition of medieval love poetry. It is his nurse who interprets his act as a proper wooing. She tells Hero that her task is to persuade her to ‘honest and holy wedlock’ (2. 8. 4 – 9; 43– 4), and, with this goal in mind, she dwells at length on the nobility of Leander’s family. Her gesture aims to inspire respect and benevolence in the young woman (2. 8. 45) so as to dispose her more favourably toward reading Leander’s letter, which, nonetheless, does not contain any marriage proposal. The very fact that epistolary exchanges play a key role in the lovers’ coming together places their dealings at the antipodes of ‘honest and holy wedlock.’ A mind conditioned by Ovid and his medieval imitators will take love letters as the material of illicit covenants, not the path to marriage contracts. There are no love letters in Corella’s narrative. Leander does not approach Hero with daring words in writing but, filled with concern for her reputation and ‘displaying an honest fear’ on his face, he makes his request to her nurse in person. She, in turn, instructs him to declare his intention to Hero’s family (3). The typical assistant to clandestine lovers in Latin poetry becomes the adviser for appropriate conduct. Hero, too, desires Leander as husband (4) and repeats this to her nurse when the old woman, faced with the rejection of Leander by Hero’s father, tries to deter her by suggesting that she pick a more

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acceptable suitor (8). Again, the nurse stands for honour and respectability. She is a duenna rather than the go-between of elegiac poetry. If she ends up arranging for the affair, it is only after trying to dissuade Hero from it with countless ‘honourable speeches’, and because she is conquered by affection for her charge (9). The corresponding sequence in Nadal runs differently. Hero plays a more decisive role in activating the affair, for she boldly argues that her love is honest and pure, even though she is not set on marriage (2. 18. 64 – 6; 2. 19. 25 – 38). And she cannot marry Leander, not because her father has someone else in mind, as in Corella (5), but because she has vowed herself to virginity. By preferring the familial obstacle, the Valencian writer both disposes of the problematic ethical issues raised by Hero’s betrayal of the vow and arouses the reader’s sympathy for the unfortunate couple: the victim of a stern father, aptly named Austerus, who chooses a rich but odious husband, aptly named Exosus (Hateful), for his daughter. Corella’s moralized version of the legend features two lovers forced to meet in secret by cruel family opposition, yet keenly desirous of a sanctified union, who are joined in their hearts rather than in their bodies: even unto death. The first description of the lovers’ union occurs when Leander is dead.158 He reaches port at last but already a corpse, the final syllable of Hero’s name having died on his lips with him (13). This detail further moralizes the tale in that it associates Leander with a mythic husband, Ceyx, uttering the name of his beloved wife Alcyone as he is meeting his death in the deep (Ovid Met. 11. 562 – 7). After seeing the body of her beloved, in Corella, Hero rushes forth and throws herself on top of it (17). Nadal’s Hero might be the model, but she is the more sensual even in this extreme moment. ‘She kissed [Leander’s] face, hands and arms, bitterly enjoying only the feel of his body’ (4. 16. 49 – 51), while the same character in Corella experiences no such tactile pleasure and kisses only Leander’s lips (17), weeping and lamenting so much that her eyes dry out and her voice is gone: ‘Forgive me if I do not solemnize your funeral at more length, for my mouth lacks the voice and my eyes the water and blood that I would need to lament your death for any longer’ (18). Hero is saying that she has no wherewithal

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for an adequate ritual. But her suicide will remedy this: ‘If I expire thus, dying, I will not be able to warm or anoint your body [. . .]: it will be better if, dying for you and on you, bathing and warming your cold body with my blood, I anoint you for burial’ (18). Hero’s reasoning moralizes even her self-inflicted death by making it the precondition for a Christian funeral. Corella has her die by the sword not only to connect her story with Thisbe’s, but also to transform her mortal sin into a pious and almost redeeming act. Had she died naturally or without bleeding, she would not have been able to care for Leander’s body. Hero goes further in her Christian care of the corpse. She arranges to have it wrapped together with hers in one shroud and the two buried in one tomb (18). Their bodily union at last will be accomplished there. She had already imagined it when, seeing a shade of Leander, she had asked him to repose in her body until his own would arrive and she would bury it, And then, along with mine, your spirit will descend to the realm of Pluto, so that one prison, one punishment, one set of chains may bind together after death two souls, which a single love has united in life, and the dead bodies, embracing each other, will be in a single grave, and we, living in pain, may be punished together. (16)

The model for this fantasy is again in Nadal, where the shade of Leander in a dream tells Hero that after death they will meet among the ombre grandi and will be ‘together, always of one heart, there under, showing how great a love possesses us up here’ (4. 13. 49 – 51, above). In both narratives the couple will descend to Pluto’s realm and there they will never be parted. Nadal, though, does not imagine the lovers’ union after death to be one of eternal punishment but rescues them from the kingdom of the condemned and turns them into stars. Corella does not conceive any such transfer to heaven. The two, forever shut in a ‘narrow grave’, a suffocating setting where their bodies become one, will not enjoy their final union but will ‘crumble to one dust’ (18).159 No matter how much he strives to attribute marital feelings to the pair, Corella cannot forgive them for having indulged in love when wedlock turned out to be impossible. They should have abstained.

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The narrator spells this out at the very moment in which the affair is set underway: How much better for Hero to have suffered any sorrow or woe rather than make a furtive marriage with Leander! And if she had died resisting sin, her death would have been eternal life, worthy of praise, and now she would not be in Hell, feeling the ineffable woe that the desperate feel there for all eternity. (9)

Admittedly we sense a slight misogynous bias here, for why does Corella single Hero out? Leander gets his share of blame, to be sure, but in his case the attack is aimed not specifically at him but at all ‘those who love uncontrollably’ and have no fear ‘of living and dying in sin’ (12). Nevertheless, the main point of all this preaching is not to fault the woman but the illicit liaison. Corella is not unsympathetic to the couple, on the contrary. He concludes with the moving image of Hero dying in Leander’s arms and scatters his narrative with apostrophes to pitiless fortune or fate, just as Nadal does. This blind power is behind Leander’s noticing of Hero’s beauty: ‘Thus it was decreed by cruel fortune’ (iniqua fortuna, 2). But fortune or fate is not responsible for the lovers’ tragedy. While for Nadal the pair could not have resisted love and are forgiven by the goddess of love herself, for the Valencian master of theology and strict Christian their tragedy is caused by their wrong choice, which also condemns them in perpetuity. Because they willingly lived in sin, they suffered a violent death and will spend all eternity in Hell.

Coda: The popularity of the tale in England One area of Western Europe has been conspicuously absent from this discussion: Britain. The reason is that no extended treatment of the legend is attested for the British Isles earlier than Marlowe’s brilliant poem. The most detailed English account prior to Marlowe’s might be that in the Third Vatican Mythographer, which is of English provenance and has been specifically attributed to Alexander Neckar or Alberic of London.160 Otherwise, thin pickings: two explicit references and a few brief allusions. The nature of the evidence, however, suggests that the tale was not as little-known in Britain as the numbers might indicate; quite the opposite.

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Hero and Leander feature in the Index exemplorum, a medieval handbook of tales, as well as in the catalogue of romances in the department of manuscripts in the British Museum, there listed among ‘Exempla and moralized tales’.161 This points to the affair’s exploitation for cautionary purposes in preaching as in literature, which finds confirmation in the allegorical reading of the couple’s passion and death in the Third Vatican Mythographer. But alongside meeting with this familiar moralizing treatment, the legend seems to have fed into the conception and narrative movement of several Scottish ballads that recount a similar story of a lover swimming to his beloved and drowning, the prettiest of which is Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow. These songs are variations on the Hero-andLeander theme and might even be directly linked to Ovid’s letters.162 Two of the allusions to the tale further suggest its relatively large diffusion in Britain. One is a Latin epigram by Peter of Blois, which he most probably wrote as archdeacon of Bath (1182 – 1200). His frequent travels in this capacity exposed him to Leander-like dangers: ‘Thus at night Leander is used to cross over to Hero; if I will cross so often, I will be Leander (Sic solet in sero transire Leander ad Hero; / Si sic transiero sepe, Leander ero). If the dangerous waters snatch me who cannot swim, I will miss the light of the Thames a little’.163 To appreciate Peter’s epigrammatic wit, his readers must know the story, for the poet does not detail it and plays with it at several levels. First, he reverses its sequence: while Leander drowns because the light goes out, Peter will fail to see the light because he drowns. Second, he casts himself as a Leander who cannot swim. And, third, he applies virtuosity in exploiting Hero’s name for rhyming purposes: in sero (‘at night’), ad Hero (‘to Hero’), transiero (‘I will cross), ero (‘I will be’), topped by the identical rhyme of Hero and ero (needless to say, the ‘h’ in Hero is mute) at the two lines’ endings.164 A similar playfulness marks a reference by Alexander Neckar (1157 – 1217). If he is also the author of the Third Vatican Mythographer, he treats the story with a much lighter touch in these two lines: ‘Who but wine will give deep slumber to Hero? Who to Alexander, or to the sorrowing Leander?’ (In Praise of Wine).165 The mythic lovers are chosen primarily because their names rhyme, Hero’s with mero (‘wine’), Leander’s with the author’s own. At the

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same time, the qualifier ‘sorrowing’ for Leander assumes that Neckar anticipated that his reader would be familiar with the story, possibly in Ovid’s version, where Leander says that he has been sad and sleepless for seven nights (Her. 18. 27 – 9). In this epigrammatic refashioning the lovelorn insomniac of elegy will sleep soundly in Bacchus’ embrace. The popularity of the legend166 will further increase in Britain as in the rest of Western Europe with the dissemination of Musaeus’ poem, which will give an extraordinary impulse to the literary journey of the two lovers.

CHAPTER 4

The Tale as Musaeus Told it: Hero and Leander in Medieval Greek Literature and the Diffusion of Musaeus’ Poem in Europe

MUSAEUS’ FAME IN THE BYZANTINE PERIOD The story of Hero and Leander continued to be known in the Greekspeaking world. Soon after Musaeus, Leander is elected as the model lover by the epigrammatist Paul the Silentiary in a witty exchange with his friend and fellow poet Agathias (AP 5. 292 and 293). The latter complains that he misses both his companion and his girlfriend but that his intellectual pursuits detain him: ‘Two loves are spread round about me: I long to see you, my blessed friend, and to see the sweet heifer, the thought of whom consumes me with a low fire. But study of the law keeps me far from that slender fawn’ (AP 5. 292. 9– 14). Paul fires back, contrasting his friend’s lukewarm feelings and Leander’s true passion: What love is that, when a narrow strait can separate your body and keep it far from your girl? Leander showed the power of love by swimming, heedless of night and waves. And you, friend, can even take a boat. But you are spending time with Athena and reject Cypris. (AP 5. 293. 5–10)

The epigrammatist exploits Leander as illustration of love’s compulsion. This is unprecedented in a Greek text and rather conjures up his

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role in Latin poetry. The correspondence, though, does not mean that Paul was inspired by Roman authors, for he could easily have drawn Leander’s exemplarity from Musaeus, who has him say: ‘Maiden, for love of you I will cross even the wild expanse of the sea’ (H&L 203). In any case, Paul assumes that his readers, like himself, are acquainted with Leander’s paradigmatic role and with his story, as we gather from the allusiveness of the reference – only to Leander’s nightly swimming – and its playfulness. Agathias is even more oblique than his friend in his own engagement with the legend: ‘May you never wear a snuff, lamp, or rouse the rain, lest you stop my bridegroom (nymwίon) from coming. You always begrudge Cypris, for when Hero was joined to Leander . . . My heart, leave the rest!’ (AP 5. 263. 1– 4). The poem reworks the epigrammatic commonplace of the lamp as erotic symbol by merging it with Hero’s torch. The association of the two lights, however, remains implicit. Agathias feeds his readers little detail – only the lovers’ names and their union – and expects them to supply the rest of the story, including the tragic ending. The self-censoring speaker draws attention to it but with an aposiopesis, which relies for its effectiveness on the reader’s familiarity with the tale. Should I say ‘with the tale’ or also, or rather especially, with Musaeus’ version of the tale? The two epigrams do not provide a definitive answer, although the second might suggest that H&L was on the poet’s mind. This is indicated not so much by the subject matter, the lamp, which is a chief protagonist in the epyllion but was also known from material objects and (in the surviving evidence) from one of Antipater’s poems on the legend (AP 7. 666), as by the word nymwίo6 for the speaker’s lover, the same word that Hero employs for her ‘bridegroom’ when she welcomes Leander on their first night (H&L 268). The term, though, appears also in the other epigram by Antipater on the two lovers, ‘The water of the Hellespont is always evil for women’ (AP 9. 215), so we cannot draw firm conclusions about the extent of Musaeus’ impact from Agathias’ use of this one word. But other testimonies do demonstrate that H&L was instantly influential. Instantly influential is no exaggeration: the first author to parade knowledge of Musaeus’ epyllion is his contemporary Colluthus in the

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Rape of Helen, another short epic, and one filled with echoes of H&L. The allusions, or rather outright borrowings, are concentrated in the section in which Helen welcomes Paris to her house, and are drawn from the corresponding episode in Musaeus, Hero’s welcoming of Leander on their rendezvous, and, much more heavily, from the narrative of the lovers’ first encounter and of Leander’s seduction of Hero.1 The disproportion subtly plays with the unusual quality of Helen’s reception of Paris: the two are already in love, for so has Aphrodite arranged, but they have not seen each other yet. When they meet they also discover each other’s beauty, a discovery that Colluthus enhances by peppering his account with language from the scene of first encounter in Musaeus. More evidence for the reputation of H&L is traceable to an anonymous rhetorical treatise, On the Figures of Speech. To illustrate a commonplace of ‘ancient poetics’ (poihtikoῦ ἀrxikoῦ), namely the poet’s claim that he speaks on behalf of the Muses, the rhetorician cites these incipits: ‘Sing about the wrath’, ‘Muses of Pieria’, ‘Let us commence with the Muses of Helicon’, ‘Tell me, goddess, of the lamp, witness of secret loves’, and ‘Let us begin from Zeus’.2 Musaeus is in the elevated company of the Iliad, the Works and Days, the Theogony and Aratus’ Phaenomena. He is already a classic, a representative of the ancient way like the other poets, and, like them, he is, supposedly, known to the intended readers of this essay as its author does not feel constrained to identify any of the quoted poets by name, but anticipates all the lines to be equally recognizable. The instant success of H&L is also reflected in its role as a literary prompt. It kindled writerly interest in a legend that before Musaeus seems to have been the province of Roman authors. From what we can glean, the lost Hellenistic poem(s) inspired retellings in Latin but hardly reverberated in Greece until Musaeus, and this is a central reason some scholars suppose that the work known to Ovid and other Augustan poets dates to the first century BC (rather than to the third) and was written by a Greek e´migre´ to Rome.3 The only treatments of the legend in Greek attested before Musaeus are the two poems by Antipater of Thessalonica, who – tellingly? – lived not in Greece but in Rome under the patronage of Lucius Calpurnius Piso. His epigrams further bear out the legend’s appeal among Roman literati, by their

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allusiveness and, in the case of the one about the shipwrecked Cleonice (AP 9. 215), by the playful engagement with the story, on which it effects witty reversals: it is a woman who does the crossing, and this in order to reach a young man who lives in Sestos.4 Antipater’s treatments might have resonated with the Roman literary scene, if, as is possible, Ovid alludes to one of them.5 In the imperial period Latin authors continued to be occupied with the legend, whereas in the Greek world it is documented only in material objects. Though pantomime must have boosted its popularity, as a theme of literature only Musaeus, as it seems, took it up.6 After him several Greek poets and critics engaged with the story. A great number of allusions to Musaeus by early Byzantine authors is further proof that H&L was held in high esteem among the cultured, both writers and readers. The allusions are roughly of two kinds: they appear in contexts that are either kindred, or not, to the erotic subject matter of Musaeus’ poem. To the first belong the references in Colluthus’ Rape of Helen and in another, anonymous poem which describes the welcoming of a lover: the spring Arethusa receiving the river Alpheus after his long underwater journey (AP 9. 362). It is not surprising that the myth of Alpheus crossing the sea from Greece to Sicily for love could arouse the memory of another love-spurred swimmer – that Leander’s feat could offer a human parallel to that of the divine river. But to this poet the myth of Alpheus evoked not the legend of Leander but, specifically, the letter from Musaeus’ narrative. His own is so thickly textured with phrases from H&L that episode in the Arethusa takes cleanses him of

some have attributed it to Musaeus himself.7 The foreground is Hero’s warm reception of Leander: her nymwίo6, ‘a wet spouse’, ‘tired’ and ‘panting’, the sea brine, surrounds him with her arms and lays

him on her bosom, lulling him to rest. One act, though, is missing from the sequence lifted from H&L: anointing. This absence is a careful adjustment, geared to match the aquatic nature of Arethusa and her lover. How could a spring lubricate a river? Familiarity with Musaeus among educated readers is demonstrated even more compellingly by the second kind of borrowing, which is confined to contexts thematically unrelated to the love story. H&L provided a stylistic storeroom as well as thematic stimulation. This is

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true for the two epigrammatists who deal with the legend: Paul the Silentiary and Agathias. Both also exploit Musaeus’ language in thematic frames as varied as a poetic celebration of the church of Hagia Sophia or the history of the war between Byzantium and the Huns. Listing the numerous echoes would be tedious.8 I will limit myself to two instances that are not just mechanical borrowings but raise larger cultural issues which impact the reception of the tale in the Greek East. In an epigram by Agathias, a girl bemoans the better lot of young men, who are supplied with friends in whom to confide (AP 5. 297). The phrasing, ἠiuέoi6 [. . .] toῖ6 [. . .] parέasin ὁmήlik16 (‘there are agemates for young men’), conjures up Hero’s complaint about her own isolation word by word, oὐdέ [. . .] ὁmήlik16, oὐdὲ xor1ῖai ἠiuέvn parέasin (‘there are no age-mates for me, no dances with young men’, H&L 191 – 2). The girl in Agathias’ poem turns Hero’s negative statement into the positive attribution of company to males, and elaborates: they have distractions and can walk in the streets, whereas maidens are kept in their chambers. This development triggers an interesting and vexed question: did Agathias know Ovid? Did he have Ovid’s Hero in mind in addition to Musaeus’? Though the expansion does not read like a translation of the corresponding section from Heroides 19 (the only tenuous verbal parallel is ‘tender-hearted girls’ in line 2; see Her. 19. 7), the idea is there. True, it is a commonplace, which appears most famously in Medea’s speech about the freedom of men in contrast to the secluded life of women. But the adage is also in Ovid’s letter (9 – 16). Since scholars are now more open than in the past to the possibility that Agathias and other Greek poets of the period knew Latin authors,9 I would not exclude the hypothesis that in this epigram the memory of Hero’s words blaming her confinement in Musaeus converged with or prompted the recollection of her more extensive but thematically similar complaint in Ovid’s epistle. The second text is by the same author, but comes from his historical work. Agathias is narrating the death en masse of the Huns: ‘[they] were sinking quickly to the bottom and were dying, filled with worthless drink’.10 ‘With worthless drink’ (ἀxrήstoy potoῦ) is identical with a detail in Musaeus’ account of Leander’s predicament

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on his last swim (328: potὸn ἀxrήiston). Why did his death in particular come to the historian’s mind? The most obvious reason is its manner: drowning. But I think there is more involved. The hostilities are happening very close to the site of the love story. Agathias narrates how the Huns have retreated from Melantias, which is in the area of the Bosphorus, and how they have besieged the Chersonese and attacked the wall across its isthmus before building vessels of reeds and taking to the sea. Places, as is well known, are a kindling of memory.11 Could it then be the location of the historical event that called the legendary one to the writer’s mind? If so, the passage illustrates the strong connection local authors and readers felt between the tale and its geographic setting.12 Think romantic tragedy in the Hellespont: you will think Hero and Leander. Or, more accurately: you will think Musaeus. This qualification is necessary once again in light of Agathias’ assertion, in the same historical work, that Musaeus’ poem boosted the reputation of its setting. The writer is mapping the Chersonese with great precision. He gives measurements and mentions the cities that dot it: Aphrodisias, Thescos, Ciberis, And very far from them, on the strait itself, where the coastline bends, is the city of Sestos, made famous and notable in poetry, for no other reason, I think, than the lamp of that Hero of Sestos (Shstiάdo6) and the love and the death (ἔrvti kaὶ uanάtῳ) of Leander. (5. 12. 2)

The historian’s argument sounds familiar. As we have seen, the contention that the love story was the region’s claim to fame pervades ancient sources and is behind the choice of Hero and Leander as emblems of Sestos and Abydos on local coins. The argument sounds familiar indeed, except that in one meaningful detail Agathias is original: he does not say that Sestos’ renown is owing to the legend but to poetry. There can be no doubt that he is thinking specifically of H&L, for his phrasing conjures up Musaeus’ address to an imaginary traveller to the region: ‘If you should go there, tell me about a tower, where then Hero of Sestos (Shstiά6) stood, holding a lamp [. . .] Tell me of the strait, in ancient Abydos, that echoes with the sound of the sea and still laments the death and the love (mόron kaὶ ἔrvta) of Leander’ (23 – 7). Shstiά6 for Hero

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appears in both texts, and so does, more pointedly, ‘the love and the death of Leander’, though the historian replaces the rarer and rather poetic mόro6 with the more standard uάnato6. The prominence Agathias gives to Hero’s lamp also resonates with its central role in the epyllion.13 Musaeus identifies Sestos and Abydos by the material setting – the tower, the strait – of the legend, but after him, the two cities are identified by reference to his poem. Musaeus’ appeal in the Greek-speaking world surfaces again in a Homeric cento (AP 9. 381, attributed to Leon the Philosopher and possibly dating to the ninth century) on the two lovers, which recycles phrases from his epyllion alongside Homeric verses. Thus, the line describing Hero who ‘was making a beautiful light, holding a golden lamp’ layers an expression found in Musaeus (lύxnon ἔxoysa, ‘holding a lamp’, 25) onto the fuller Homeric borrowing (Od. 19. 34: xrύs1on lύxnon ἔxoysa wάo6 p1rikallὲ6 ἐpoί1i, ‘holding a lamp, she made a beautiful light’); and so do two more lines.14 Reuse of H&L in a poem on the same subject is not surprising, but it is still an indication of the high regard in which the author of the cento held the epyllion, which he deemed worthy of using to ‘coat’ Homeric verses and quite possibly knew by heart as he did Homer.15 He could also assume that at least some of his readers would be in a position to appreciate his virtuosity in thickening the cento’s literary texture by adding recherche´ borrowings from Musaeus to the more expected Homeric lines.16 Some 300 years later the author of H&L is mentioned by name for the first time in any literature, by the Byzantine poet and grammarian Joannes Tzetzes (twelfth century) in his Chiliades (‘Thousands’), a miscellaneous collection of mythological, literary, theological and historical information, buttressed by frequent references to Greek authors. Musaeus is one of them. Tzetzes cites his poem approvingly (for his treatment of the myth of Heracles and Omphale or for the vexed issue of the Graces’ number) or critically (for mistaking mythic characters), but every time he specifies its title and its author.17 Musaeus was fashionable not only among Byzantine scholars and poets. His epyllion also infiltrated the vernacular Greek epic Digenis Akritis (early twelfth century) with a multifarious sample of ideas and

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words. The tales of Digenis and of Hero and Leander are among the four legendary cycles shared by oral poetry in the Balkans (the others are ‘The Bridge of Arta’ and ‘The Dead Brother’).18 Perhaps this parallel fortune of the two stories was one factor that drove elements of the Hero and Leander theme into the epic. The very name, ‘Leander’, has made its way into the poem, where it belongs to one of the guerrillas whom Digenis fights (G 6. 549).19 Is the rebel’s name a tribute to Musaeus (or to the legend at large) or is the identity a mere coincidence? Heros and Leanders are documented in real life earlier than the tale is even attested, already in the fifth and the fourth centuries BC , though the evidence increases in later periods.20 It is tempting to speculate that the spreading of the legend helped spread the names; for instance, that it inspired Paul the Silentiary to choose ‘Leander’ in this epigram: ‘Kissing Hippomenes, I fixed my mind on Leander; clinging to Leander’s lips, I carry in my heart the image of Xanthos’ (AP 5. 232. 1– 3). Given this poem’s erotic content and its author’s liking for Leander’s story, the name might indeed have been suggested by the legendary lover. But in the case of Digenis we must be more sceptical because the virility encapsulated in Leander’s name, which contains ἀnήr, ‘man’, suffices to make it a good fit for a warrior. Yet, we cannot exclude the possibility that the poet of Digenis thought of Musaeus’ character. Abydos appears on the epic’s map (2. 77) and the borrowings from the epyllion are numerous. Whatever the case with the guerrilla’s name, it is not in contexts of war but of love that Musaeus’ poem left its imprint on the epic, which is as much a story of romantic attachments as of martial feats. Both Digenis and his father take momentous steps to satisfy their passion: the father, an emir, kidnaps the woman he loves and ends up converting to Christianity and leaving his family behind to marry her, and Digenis, ‘of two races’ because he descends from an Arab and a Greek, follows his father’s example by abducting the woman he covets, though with her agreement, and, after killing single-handedly many men sent against him by her angry father, obtains her in marriage. He departs to live with his bride at the frontiers of the empire, where he valiantly fights Arabs and is just as occupied with love.

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The prominence of amatory themes explains the epic’s heavy borrowings from the Greek novels, especially Achilles Tatius’. Digenis has indeed been labelled ‘a proto-romance’.21 But this love story ends not happily as in a novelistic mould but with the protagonist’s premature death from sickness and his wife’s lying over his dying body. This tragic finale, combined with the romantic subject matter, might have invited the mining of verses and phrases from H&L. Musaeus’ description of Hero’s rosy cheeks reappears, but is applied to Digenis’ father (1. 36); Leander’s first response to Hero’s sight, ‘you did not wish to live’, is recycled for Digenis’ future wife: ‘When she saw the young man [. . .] she did not wish to live in the world’ (4. 273 – 4). The love pains she suffers prompt the same comment as those of Leander, and in almost the same words: ‘Beauty wounds deeper than an arrow, and penetrates the soul through the eyes themselves’ (4. 276 – 7). Leander’s compliment to Hero, ‘blessed is your mother’, reappears in the mouth of the Amazon Maximou admiring the bravery of Digenis, her former enemy: ‘Blessed is your father, and the mother who bore you, and the breasts’ (6. 668 – 9).22 A common denominator of these reuses of Musaeus is that they feature in contexts that reverse the original in gender roles. Hero’s beauty is transferred to a man, love’s effects on Leander to a woman, and his words in praise of Hero’s parents to another woman. These manipulations rely for their effectiveness on readers equipped with a word-by-word knowledge of the epyllion and are as playful and subtle as those in the almost contemporary novels to which I now turn. THE NOVELISTIC MUSAEUS The four so-called Byzantine novels, all except one in verse, were composed in the twelfth century. Following in the footsteps of their ancient Greek ancestors, they narrate stories of love and adventure crowned with a happy ending.23 There is some indication that Musaeus’ poem appealed to the later romancers as an older and famous text, as such apt to give the emerging genre a prestigious imprimatur. H&L is among the classical works they cite or allude to in an effort to promote their own writings and to place them in the

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Greek tradition. As one instance clearly shows, the Byzantine romancers paired Musaeus specifically with the Greek novels, which, not surprisingly, they plundered unabashedly for their own. The pairing is not wide of the mark because the epyllion is rich in novelistic motifs in the scene of first encounter that constitutes its longest portion.24 One motif in particular seems to have resonated with the later romancers: Hero’s confinement. In the novels of Nicetas Eugenianos, Drosilla and Charicles, and of his older friend Theodore Prodromos, Rhodantes and Dosicles, maidens live in seclusion. In Nicetas Calligone, the beloved of Cleandros, is kept hidden in the innermost recesses of her chamber (2. 61 – 2). He hears about her beauty; but only after much effort does he see her, as she leans casually out of a window. The novelist harks back to the story of Calligone in Achilles Tatius, in which a young man kidnaps her, thinking she is the woman he loves from having heard about her beauty without having ever seen her. But Nicetas puts forward the woman’s confinement as the reason her lover-to-be becomes enamored with her just from hearsay. Theodore likewise locks up the heroine of his romance: ‘Straton, her father whom I have just mentioned, enclosed her in a little tower, so that she should remain difficult for men to see, and he did not think right for her to go out of her prison’ (2. 175 –8).25 We cannot miss it: behind Straton are Hero’s parents and their ‘hateful will’, the cause of her own confinement. Further indication that Theodore had Musaeus in mind is the couple’s residence: Abydos. Perhaps encouraged by Theodore’s allusions to the legend, Nicetas goes much further in his own engagement with Musaeus’ poem.26 There are three significant references to it in his novel, each in a different mould: one is a patchwork of literal echoes composing a song that shares only its erotic content with Musaeus; another is a retelling of the lovers’ death; and the third, an allusion to a signature motif of the epyllion, Hero’s status as bride by night, virgin by day (H&L 287). Charicles is presenting his friend Cleandros with a faithful recording of the love songs that were played at the festival of Dionysus where he met Drosilla. These are excerpts from one of them:

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Oh how mistaken the old story is. It says the Graces are three, but your one eye, girl, boasts of countless graces [. . .] Fear Cypris [. . .] I have learned that a girl’s threats are often, in fact, announcers of Cypris the disturber, and that her shifting gestures and silence are often a wonderful promise in return [. . .] Your aversion [. . .] would move even a rock to suffer [. . .] For you I will pass over huge swells of seas and I will go through fire. (3. 217–37)27

Musaeus is a storehouse of ideas and words for this song. The sections I have quoted read almost like a cento of H&L. All the borrowings, both stylistic and thematic, can be traced to the long scene of first encounter and seduction, the most novelistic. The first echo, of the lines contesting the traditional number of the Graces, parallels a passage in Tzetzes mentioned above (Chiliades 10. 337. 511– 15). The correspondence might suggest that those lines had special currency among twelfth-century Byzantine literati. The majority of Nicetas’ borrowings appear in contexts that parallel those in Musaeus: when the seducer praises the girl’s eyes filled with Graces, warns her to fear Aphrodite, interprets her threats and silence to mean consent, or swears that he would cross the sea for her. One instance distorts the original: the irresistible effects of Leander’s speech on Hero (‘Your words would move even a stone’) are transferred to the girl’s cruel rejection of her suitor. In order to appreciate this deviation and more generally the dense concentration of references and citations, Nicetas’ readers would be required to know their Musaeus by heart. This novelist is also one of the two Byzantine authors who devotes a leisurely narrative to the tale. Perhaps because familiarity with it was so widely assumed, writers did not choose to tell the story from beginning to end but to make only elliptical references to it. This is true also for the one account prior to Nicetas’, the Homeric cento. The names of the protagonists are missing (they figure in the title, ‘on Leander and Hero’, that was added by a later scribe): she is a ‘virgin’, he is ‘that wretched one’ or ‘the young man’; and the essentials of the legend, though they appear (except for the lovers’ death), can be followed only by someone who already knows them. This shared allusiveness distinguishes the Byzantine reception of the legend from its Western counterpart. Though in medieval Europe

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elliptical treatments do exist, the story is also told and retold, in many languages and often at length. This does not mean that it was not popular, on the contrary. But the great number of full accounts seems to suggest that they did not cross cultural and linguistic boundaries: a French writer could count on readers of his vernacular not to know a Latin version (or even a version in his own vernacular, as in the case of Guillaume de Machaut), an Italian on his not to know a French version, and so on. The leisurely retellings also imply that writers could hope not to bore their readers, that is, they could hope that at least a number of them did not know the story’s particulars. In contrast, its laconic treatment in the Greek East indicates that authors sought to please their readers not by detailing to them a good story they supposedly did not know in full, but, on the contrary, by challenging their memory of it, and specifically of Musaeus’ verses. Nicetas’ narrative is no exception. It does not cover the whole story but focuses on the lovers’ death: Leander, the unhappy one, who loved Hero long ago, alas, was found dead, strangled by the sea, alas, for the light was put out by the winds. Abydos knows this and the city of Sestos. But though he found a tomb in the sea, he had his beloved as his tomb companion, who threw herself from the wall into the water. For whom Love joined together in one yoke he also led to a common tomb. Unhappy was that end of their lives, but how blessed it seemed in another way! For two like souls had one tomb, two bodies had one love, one thought. Oh wind that put out two rays. The lamp died out and with it the love. Oh wind that cast two stars, Hero and Leander, into the depths of the sea! (Drosilla and Charicles 6. 473–89)

This narrative’s emphasis on death fits into the author’s cultural environment. While Roman sources tend to privilege Leander’s successful swim,28 Greek authors concentrate also or preferably on the lovers’ demise. Their death might have been already central in the lost Hellenistic poems if their remnants concern the stormy night.29 It is the focus of Antipater’s epigrams (AP 7. 666 and 9. 215), one of which dwells on the lovers’ tomb, its site and, the culprits of the tragedy, the winds and sea, while the other on the drowning. Musaeus devotes greater efforts to the scene of first encounter, but he also narrates the episode leading to the lovers’ death (especially

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Leander’s) from beginning to end. Other Greek-speaking authors allude to the catastrophe: so Agathias in the lamp poem and again in his History (‘the love and the death of Leander’, 5. 12. 2, above). Exceptions are Paul the Silentiary, for obvious reasons of context (an intimation of Leander’s drowning would not encourage his friend to cross the sea and visit his girl!), and the Homeric cento concerned with the legend, perhaps because its poet could not find appropriate Homeric lines to match. Following Greek authors, Nicetas favours the lovers’ death. Or rather, he gives it the entire floor. His choice agrees with his cultural filiation but seems awkward in view of the purpose of the narrative, to attract a woman. The speaker, one Callidemus, attempts to seduce Drosilla, the heroine, by presenting her with examples of passionate love. Why would he focus exclusively on the tragic ending rather than drawing also, if not only, the happy picture of the lovers’ nightly meetings? Nicetas provides a clue: Callidemus is clumsy; he does not know what he is doing. This is clear from the other examples he picks, which include Arsace longing for Theagenes and Achaimenes for Chariclea (in Heliodorus’ novel). The speaker instantly realizes that those lovers, because they are ‘unchaste’, are not appropriate (6. 389 – 91). But they do him an even greater disservice, for their passion is not only immoral but, more ominously for the poor Callidemus, unrequited. Does he realize it? Does he know his literature well enough? A more auspicious example Callidemus introduces is the love of Daphnis and Chloe (6. 440– 51), which is perfectly mutual. But the choice is gauche in another way: quite unlike the speaker’s passion for Drosilla, the affection between Longus’ protagonists develops gradually. Lastly, Callidemus elaborates at great length on yet another unrequited love, Polyphemus’ for Galatea (503 – 33). From the vantage point of Nicetas this string of lovers serves the literary goal of setting classic precedents – Theocritus, the ancient novels, Musaeus – for his novel; but the selection of examples turns the speaker into a laughing stock, branding him as a rustic who does not know what use to make of literature to approach a girl.30 We shall contrast him with Clitophon, the urban hero of Achilles Tatius’ novel, who apparently succeeds in enticing Leucippe by a rhetorical

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exploit filled with botanical, zoological and mythological lore illustrating the power of Eros (1. 16 – 19).31 Just as he chooses the wrong loves, Callidemus picks a wrong episode: the death of two lovers. He seems to realize his faux pas because, after starting on a gloomy note (‘Leander, the unhappy one, was found dead’), he embarks on a meditation about the true nature of this death: tragic or blissful?32 He presses the latter possibility by insisting on the union the lovers enjoy in their tomb but, in spite of his efforts at doctoring their death, in the end he cannot settle on their happiness and concludes with a lament that matches the funereal beginning (‘Oh wind that put out two rays. The lamp died out and with it the love. Oh wind that cast two stars, Hero and Leander, into the depths of the sea’). Far from producing an ecstatic vision of love in death, his musing is a dubitative and uninspired rumination on the motif. Callidemus’ clumsiness in exploiting the example of Leander reaches further. He continues: The pain of memory penetrates deep within my body; my breast burns with the fire of passion. This, then, was Leander’s fate. But wretched me, I am not fighting by night or sailing on the sea, yet I am in danger of being drowned, dearest, by the storm of desire that’s taken hold of me, unless you first give me your beloved right hand. (6. 490–6)

The speaker contrasts the storm that killed Leander and the one that risks killing him. He is drowning not in the deep but in his unbearable passion, that is: he is all absorbed in his agony rather than ready to declare and prove the force of his feelings by imitating the fearless Leander. The mythic lover fought the waves, but Callidemus is no fighter! Here the novelist plays yet another trick at the expense of his character by manipulating the tradition, documented also in Byzantine literature in the poem by Paul the Silentiary, of electing Leander as exemplary lover for his courage. As we shall see presently, the trend appears in another Greek romance. It also surfaces in Nicetas’ own, in the song. The inept Callidemus, though, uses Leander not to copy his romantic bravery but to stress his own miserable condition. In other words, he underscores his self-pity and self-centredness against the background of Leander’s passionate

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self-abnegation. Unlike the singer who plagiarizes Musaeus in the same novel, Callidemus does not tell his girl, ‘for you I would brave the sea’ but, ‘I am drowning! Help me out of the storm!’ Nicetas further demonstrates his creative engagement with Musaeus in the very last lines of his novel. The couple wed, and: ‘The girl who was still a virgin in the evening was a woman when she rose at dawn from her bed (ἐn ἑspέrᾳ mέnoysa paruέno6 kόrh / gynὴ prὸ6 ὄruron ἐjanέsth tῆ6 klίnh6)’. This image, which closely parallels the description of Hero’s ambivalent marital status in Musaeus,33 is likely to be a conscious echo of his words, for all the components of the contrast – day, night, virgin, woman – appear, tightly packed, in two lines. But in Musaeus the contrast operates in reverse: Hero is a wife in the evening and a virgin in the daytime, and her dual status is owing to the impossibility for her to wed. In the novel the verses that capture the paradoxical condition deriving from involvement in a secret nightly ‘marriage’ are applied to the description of the onetime transition from virgin to woman that occurs with marriage. Readers sensitized to the parallel turned upside-down will extend the reversal further, noting that the lines follow the narrative of a properly ceremonial wedding, graced with wreaths and filled with celebratory sounds: applauses and the din of cymbals (9. 298). The implicit allusion to the silent non-wedding of Musaeus’ couple sets off the festivities that mark the novelistic happy ending. A third Byzantine romancer who might have used Musaeus is Eustathios Macrembolites, the author of the prose narrative Hysmine and Hysminias. I say ‘might’ because there is no unmistakable citation from the epyllion in it; but the hero’s erotic daring is strongly redolent of Leander’s behaviour. This novel owes tremendously to Achilles Tatius, including for the imagery of love’s soldiery. Hysminias is accused of being a ‘deserter’ (l1ipotajίoy, 3. 2. 4), just as Clitophon fears he is ‘timid’ and ‘cowardly’, calls himself ‘coward’, a ‘worthless soldier of the brave god’, and must be reminded of Eros’ ‘warlike appearance’ (Leucippe and Clitophon 2. 4. 4 –5. 1). But there is a crucial difference: the faint-hearted Clitophon is already enlisted in the god’s ranks and, accordingly, he should be brave, whereas Hysminias has not yet fallen in love because he is devoted to chastity. As soon as he joins Eros’ army, however, he does not hesitate like Clitophon but

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acts – and imitates Leander. Compare the two scenes in which the boy makes his first contact with the girl: Hysminias greets Hysmine and grabs her by her dress (4. 3. 1– 2), as Leander does Hero (H&L 118). Though the parallel is no conclusive evidence of Musaeus’ imprint, the sequence in which the gesture appears strongly suggests it in that it features other components of Musaeus’ scene, in a different order: Leander grabs Hero’s dress after touching her hand and meeting with silent resistance, while Hysminias has just met with Hysmine’s silent resistance and grabs her dress before touching her hand (4. 21 – 3). If Musaeus is behind this description, Leander presented the novelist with a model of erotic boldness that complemented his already paradigmatic courage in swimming at night for love. Whatever the case, Leander is the emblem of a lover again in a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Greek chivalry romance in verse. The anonymous author of the vernacular Belthandros and Chrysantza places an effigy of Leander in the Castle of Love that the protagonist, who has taken to wandering subsequent to maltreatment from his royal father, discovers and explores: ‘He marvelled also at the courtyard and there he saw a statue of Leander in stone’ (454– 5).34 Belthandros’ encounter with the image follows his encounter with his own destiny (437 – 40). He has never experienced love and fears it, but it is his lot to submit to the dreaded passion. This is what he is learning in the castle. He is about to be summoned by its king, who will show him the way to discover the woman who must be his.35 The tour of the premises prepares him for this higher step of his initiation by displaying several sculpted images that illustrate the power of love.36 Among them the statue of Leander, who died tragically, has the additional, more pointed function of confronting the protagonist’s fear.37 Belthandros, in fact, wishes he had not entered the Castle of Love (431) and calls its beauties ‘bittersweet’ (440). Where did the romancer get the idea of putting an effigy of Leander in the castle? The purpose of the image, to present Belthandros with the imperiousness of love, matches Leander’s well-established exemplarity in this domain. But his exploitation in this role is widespread, spanning as it does ancient and medieval literature in the West as in the East. Can we pinpoint a specific point

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of origin? If the Greek romances are strongly influenced by Western, especially French, models,38 the figure of a Leander consecrated to love could have been suggested to this author by his appearance in this role in that literature, for instance in the Roman de Troie. An additional prompt could have been the Heroides. The statue has indeed been taken to demonstrate the romancer’s familiarity with ancient culture and myths.39 Should we include those in Ovid’s works? Assuming that the core of the romance belongs to the fourteenth century, the activity of Maximus Planudes as translator of the Metamorphoses and the Heroides falls early enough (he was born around 1255 and died in 1305) to push forward the possibility that this well-read Greek writer, even if he did not know Latin, was familiar with Ovid’s Leander.40 Another source of inspiration, arguably a more probable one, was closer to home: Nicetas’ novel.41 And yet another cultural impulse behind the romancer’s choice might have been the surge of interest in Musaeus’ poem documented for the thirteenth century, when it was copied several times.42 Rather than only one text, several channels could have driven Leander into this narrative. But Leander is not just one mythic illustration of love’s power in the king’s castle: he is the only one. The other pictured victims of erotic passion are anonymous men and women, except two that bear the names of the hero and of the heroine to prefigure their destined union. Otherwise, one image represents a woman with a rope around her neck and dragged by a tyrant who forces her to love, another a man in chains, tortured by a Love, another a man resting in the Loves’ hands and waiting for the gift of love (339– 44), and so on. Why then is Leander the mythic paradigm of a lover? (A reader who does not check the Greek text could assume that it is also, if not only, for rhyming purposes, because Belthandros ends like Leandros. But this is not the case. The verse narrative does not exploit the homoteleuton, for it does not have rhymes except accidentally. One name is in the nominative while the other in the accusative and they appear inside two non-consecutive lines.) The romancer might have selected Leander because he was the most readily recognizable paradigm of love’s power for his projected Greek-speaking readership. If he was influenced by courtly

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literature, among the many examples of lovers he found there he might have picked the one with which his Greek public would be familiar. Lovers from the Arthurian cycle would not click with it in the same way. The cycle was known, but Greek writers did not choose it as their subject matter.43 A Tristan, though as fitted as Leander to confront Belthandros with his fear and destiny, would have brought exotic material into the narrative. Instead, the romancer sought to Hellenize the setting of Love’s Castle.44 Leander’s presence in it is part of this effort. Even if the author of Belthandros and Chrysantza did not write with courtly literature in mind, which other lover could he have used? What Greek examples were available to him? In the West, Leander’s story of love unto death has several close equivalents: in addition to those in courtly romances, the myths of Pyramus and Thisbe and of Ceyx and Alcyone (though the second pair is married), whereas neither tale is documented in ancient Greek literature. Ceyx and Alcyone do appear in Hesiod; not, however, as passionate and desperate lovers but as a happy and hubristic couple, who call themselves Zeus and Hera and are destroyed by the former on account of their arrogance. Apollodorus has the same story, the prequel to the tragedy.45 And Pyramus and Thisbe do not appear at all.46 Turning to the Byzantine novelists, in expatiating on love’s power they resort to mythic exemplars only sparsely. While comparable Western illustrations luxuriate in them (think, for instance, of Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione or of the Love Debate tradition in France), the Byzantine novels are restrained in this regard. Demonstrations of love’s tyranny unsupported by mythic paradigms are the majority. I will just mention one in Eustathios Macrembolites, which offers the closest parallel to the display of statues in Belthandros. Like the author of the vernacular romance, he gives prominence to Eros the King47 and explicates his tyranny by reviewing paintings of his slaves – and none of them has a name (Hysmine and Hysminias 2. 7 – 11).48 The mythic examples of love’s power that rarely appear in the Byzantine novels are only a few: they include Rhodopis and Euthynicus (Drosilla and Charicles 3. 264 – 84), Syrinx and Pan (ibid. 3. 298 – 310), Narcissus, Hyacinth, Aphrodite

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and Adonis (ibid. 4. 288 – 359; for the last example, see also Aristander and Callithea fr. 21a), and Zeus’ falling for mortal women (Aristander and Callithea fr. 21a). The one exemplar that Byzantine novelists repeatedly introduce is Alpheus mingling his waters with Arethusa. It features twice in the fragments of Constantine Manasses, in Nicetas and, among the vernacular romances, in Libistos and Rhodamne.49 As it seems, the myth owes its recurring presence to the readers’ assumed familiarity with it, for it was known from a great number of Greek sources in addition to Ovid. To give just a sample: Pausanias (Description of Greece 5. 7. 3), the epyllion inspired by Musaeus, now in the Palatine Anthology (9. 362), another poem in the same collection (9. 683) and Achilles Tatius’ novel (1. 18. 1– 2).50 The influence of this text in particular explains the later novelists’ shared preference for this tale, which in Leucippe and Clitophon fulfils the same purpose of illustrating love’s power. The addition of examples that feature also in Achilles Tatius, the palm trees in love with each other and the iron attracted to the loadstone, offer unequivocal proof of the derivation.51 The impact of Achilles Tatius is recognizable also in the novelists’ choice of Rhodopis and Syrinx.52 Presented with this store of examples, which one could the vernacular romancer choose as paradigm for a knightly figure whose destiny is to love a woman, be loved by her and take risks for that love? Surely not Pan the lecherous pursuer, and not Hyacinth, the object of homoerotic passion, who is furthermore caught between the jealousy of his two divine lovers Apollo and Zephyr; surely not the self-absorbed Narcissus.53 Alpheus could have made a better fit, for in a thick branch of the mythic tradition his union with Arethusa was cast as a passionate mutual love, even as marriage.54 But the commingling of their waters was still the endpoint of a pursuit. Like the other stories, that of Alpheus is apt to illustrate love’s compulsion rather than its power to unite two souls in an instantly reciprocal bond. Furthermore he was a divine river and, as such, inadequate to mirror the fate of a human lover. Examples of identically mutual love between humans were available from the ancient Greek and the Byzantine novels; those characters, though, were not well-known or ‘mythic’ enough to provide recognizable paradigms. And the

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markedly passive behaviour of the male protagonist clashes with the bravery expected of a chivalric lover like Belthandros.55 In this landscape Leander stood out as the best match. But he could also appeal to the romancer for a more specific, plot-related reason because his story is predictive of the couple’s climactic adventures. After falling in love, Belthandros manages to meet with Chrysantza in secret. One night he is discovered leaving her room and is subsequently imprisoned. The girl’s loyal servant takes the blame, pretending that it is she whom he loves and visited. Chrysantza’s father believes the story and weds the maid to him, but the two never consummate their union; instead, with her complicity, he meets his beloved night after night for a short while. Their situation calls the plight of Hero and Leander to mind: both pairs of lovers, barred from marriage, arrange nocturnal trysts – trysts, in both cases, that last only a brief season. In the romance the rendezvous are discontinued because the frustrated duo decide to elope, together with the loyal maid and a few squires. It is a dark and stormy night. At dawn they reach a swelling river and attempt to cross it, but all drown except the protagonists, who are flung onto opposite banks. He looks for her and she looks for him, and when she comes across the corpse of one of the squires, she believes him to be Belthandros. After lamenting him and nurturing thoughts of suicide, she faints. Revived by a helping dove, she digs a grave, places the corpse in it and points the sword she finds on the body to her own heart, saying: ‘You too, my soul, yes, go where the one you love is!’ (1192). But, lo and behold, as she is about to take her own life, she hears Belthandros’ voice calling her. The two see each other and he rushes to cross the river. The romancer’s introduction to the elopement conjures up Musaeus’ preface to the night of Leander’s last crossing: ‘That night was moonless and dark, with much lightning, thundering and whirlwind’ (1089 – 90). In both narratives the momentousness of the development calls for an ominous nocturnal setting. Belthandros does not die, but he still suffers from the violence of the water. His double passage evokes Leander’s two swims in Musaeus, and the girl’s predicament closely resembles Hero’s. The first time the lovers end up separated by the swelling river. She thinks him dead, weeps and

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almost kills herself over the body she mistakes for his. He, rejoicing at seeing her alive, swims across again, this time successfully. The outcomes of his two attempts are in reversed order compared to Leander’s: the first almost destroys the lovers while the second reunites them. This is consonant with the narrative’s generic identity as a romance, and one on its final stretch to its happy ending. In the ancient Greek and the Byzantine novels, journeying tends to be difficult except in its last lag, when the lovers’ marriage or definitive reunion is in sight. The romancer might have turned the results of Leander’s two swims around with this generic pattern in mind. To sum up: Leander’s statue in the Castle of Love is aimed not just to confront Belthandros with his fear of the unknown and powerful passion to which he is destined, but, more subtly, to foreshadow his adventures, the most important of which will bear a resemblance with those of his mythic paradigm. The daring swimmer of Musaeus provides the fitting parallel for a lover doomed to engage in a secret union and to wrestle with a threatening surge in a near-fatal swim, before he and his beloved, unlike Musaeus’ protagonists, can earn the happy ending that befits the romance they inhabit. CARING ABOUT LOCALITY: EAST VERSUS WEST The castle that houses Leander’s statue in Belthandros and Chrysantza is in Tarsus (234). This will not strike the reader as a misrepresentation of the myth’s setting, for the castle’s only connection to the story is the presence of Leander’s effigy. On the other hand, when a Greek-speaking author recounts the legend or alludes to it, he is careful to situate it in its original environment. A major aspect of Byzantine treatments of the tale is attentiveness to the locale. Let us go back to Callidemus’ speech. After sketching the lovers’ fate in its essentials – Leander’s drowning and the quenching of the lamp – he appeals to the two cities as witnesses: ‘Abydos knows this and the city of Sestos’. Nicetas is not only placing the story on the map, he is underscoring its enduring renown in the region of its origin. He is asserting that the love and death of Hero and Leander continues to be stored in the two cities’ collective memory. They ‘know’ it, that is, it belongs in their mythic identity.

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Agathias, likewise, is most attentive to the legend’s geographical setting. As we have seen, he locates Sestos with precision and attributes its renown to nothing else but the poem that sings of ‘the lamp of that Hero of Sestos and the love and death of Leander’. The terms are reversed compared to Nicetas’ passage: it is not the cities that know the legend, that keep remembering it century after century, but the legend in Musaeus’ version, almost coeval with Agathias, that makes the cities famous. The historian emphasizes the tight connection between the poem and the setting of its action, between Musaeus’ narrative and the site it maps. A description of the latter conjures up the former to the writer and, as expected, to the reader. This entwinement between legend and site is grounded in Musaeus’ own poem, the popularity of which in the eastern Mediterranean might also have been secured by his care to put Sestos and Abydos at the centre. We shall recall that the two cities are among the objects of song in the opening invocation to the Muse (H&L 4). By asking an imaginary traveller to report on the site, Musaeus further embeds it in his account. He also endows the setting with participatory feelings: ‘Tell me of the strait, in ancient Abydos, that echoes with the sound of the sea and still laments the death and the love of Leander’ (26 – 7). Musaeus rewrites the literary commonplace of the pathetic fallacy by substituting the whole of nature with the specific locale.56 This foregrounding of the tale’s site resonates with Antipater’s deictic emphasis on its highlights five centuries earlier: ‘This is where Leander swam across; this is the strait of the sea [. . .] This is Hero’s former residence, these are the remains of the tower. This is where that traitor, the lamp, lay. This tomb they both share’ (AP 7. 666). Antipater suggests both that the ruins of ‘Hero’s tower’, as Strabo calls it, were still visible toward the end of the first century BC , and that his readers would recognize the region and tie it intimately to the legend. He spreads the setting vividly before their eyes, taking them on a tour of it, place by place.57 Musaeus likewise plays the guide. He envisions his addressee to visit the site, following his directions. Is this imaginary tourist only a metaphorical traveller, a reader who is led to envision the legend’s

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setting in his mind, or is Musaeus pointing to the existence of actual visitors to the site? Its renown, repeatedly celebrated by Roman writers, suggests that it was considered worth a visit in antiquity as we know it was in later centuries, when it became a sightseeing attraction, thanks also to Musaeus’ poem.58 From the Ottoman period down to modernity, the fame of the tragic love has drawn European voyagers to the region, the most famous of whom is Byron.59 Musaeus might have in mind a well-travelled reader like these later tourists; certainly, his apostrophe gains in effectiveness if his addressee has at least some knowledge of the locale. But even if this is not the case, the strong connection Agathias builds between the epyllion and the legend’s site prepares the ground for these modern developments. An emphasis on places is shared with the Homeric cento, which frames the evocation of the legend with its geographical coordinates at both ends (the Hellespont in the opening line and Sestos and Abydos in closing, though the Homeric verse he borrows, from the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad, contains also the irrelevant Arisbe on the island of Lesbos). The setting remains implicit but is strongly felt in the exchange of epigrams between Agathias and Paul the Silentiary, whom ‘a narrow strait of the sea’ (AP 5. 293) separates as it did the lovers. It is indeed the two writers’ whereabouts that triggers Paul’s reference to Leander. Readers again are expected to recognize the locale – the narrow sea dividing the two friends – and to recall the myth along with it. The geographic vividness and precision characteristic of Byzantine mentionings of the legend brings them close to classical examples, Roman in addition to Greek, and sets them far apart from a large number of Western medieval retellings, which leave out the site altogether or get it squarely wrong. ‘On one shore of the sea there lived Leander, on the other Hero’ is a standard formulation. To give just a few, glaring, examples: in the Third Vatican Mythographer Hero dwells ‘across the sea’; in the First Mythographer the two lovers are “separated by a narrow strait of water’; Christine de Pizan places Hero in Abydos (in the ballad and in the Book of the City of Ladies), which she locates on one side of a nameless river, just as Leander is described crossing a nameless ‘salty sea’ (in the ballad). In her other

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two references to the tale (in the Epistle of Othea and the Debate of Two Lovers), she situates it nowhere. The latter is true also for Baudri de Bourgueil and for the Middle High German novella, where Leander was ‘raised across the sea’ and Hero lived ‘in a castle nearby’, while in Jean Froissart the storm kills the swimmer ‘between Abydos and the other shore’ (Le joli Buisson de Jonece 3202). Boccaccio, Corella and others mistake Sestos and Abydos for islands. And the author of the fifth prose version of the French Troy romance changes Leander’s dwelling at the moment when he composes his letter, from Abydos to Troy. These writers could get by with relocating the actors of the legend and with geographical errors and vagueness because for them, and the majority of their readers, the site was not real but imaginary, unknown in its topographical concreteness.60 Not surprisingly, among Western authors the most attentive to geographical accuracy and detail is the Venetian Nadal, who is also the most closely connected to the region because of the importance of Venice in the Levant.61 Another case in point is the chronicler William of Tyre (twelfth century), who describes the location with precision: ‘Going down the Bosphorus, which is known as the frontier between Europe and Asia, sailing 200 miles from the city along that strait between Sestos and Abydos, very famous cities, the residences of Leander and Hero, we enter the Mediterranean Sea’.62 Though William spent much time at European universities, he grew up in Jerusalem and returned to live there before becoming archbishop of Tyre. For him, as for other authors in the eastern regions as also for their audiences, the strait of the Hellespont and its cities were closer to home than for their Western counterparts and were still players in the region’s economy, at least Abydos, which was a customs post, mentioned in Digenis Akritis. The legend belonged there and nowhere else. AND THEY LOVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER: THE SEQUEL TO THE TALE ACCORDING TO GIOVANNI GRASSO One Byzantine treatment of the legend that exceptionally shows no interest whatsoever in its location is a poem by Giovanni Grasso, a thirteenth-century writer in Greek from the Otranto region in

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Southern Italy. As in the case of Western authors, his indifference to geography is perhaps related to his distance from the site. It certainly fits his design, which is to narrate not the tragic story but its aftermath, the sequel to the lovers’ death. Sestos, Abydos and the Hellespont do not appear because they do not matter, since the protagonists have left the surface of the earth: Stranger: Leander, how could you dare dive into the sea, and this at night and filled with fear? Leander: I cast my love for Hero around my heart, drove out fear and swam the sea. S: Why didn’t you take a little break from the waves, so as to avoid a wretched death? L: Hero’s face, filled with grace, did not allow me to stop from my wearying toil. S: And when you died, the maiden died with you. If you had died alone, it would not have been so painful. Hero: Don’t say this! Stop, whoever you are! Even though I am dead, I remain with Leander. S: After throwing yourself headlong from the tower, do you still breathe and speak, dearest? H: Yes. I fell around his body and we descended together, jointly, among the dead. S: Is there love and desire in the netherworld? No path detains your husband? H: There is love and much desire, as there is not in that strait, stranger. S: Then you indulge in love to the full, as soon as you see each other? H: We indulge luxuriously, without fear of parents or of the sea filled with bitterness.63

This is the most original, albeit not the most artistic, medieval rewriting of the legend. Grasso imagines the two lovers together in Hades, like Homeric or Virgilian shades, and conversing with someone who could be either a resident of the underworld like them (as in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead) or a visitor a` la Odysseus or Aeneas. This character addresses Leander rather than Hero, in keeping with a tradition that goes back to antiquity and privileges him as the main protagonist. Following this trend, which is reflected also in the poem’s likely title Verses of Leander, the stranger singles him out, asking him in a slightly reproachful tone why he could not stop himself from the crossing, which caused not just his own death.64 At this point, Hero unexpectedly steps in to clear her lover and to explain the quality of their death. It falls on her rather than on him to expound it, not just because she is eager to defend him but because she took her own life. Her suicide was the road to greater joy. They are still together, but more happily than when they were alive,

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for they can taste love to the full and satisfy their desire, a plentiful commodity in the netherworld, without meeting with interference. Death has rescued them from the fears and dangers that had prevented them from taking their fill of love’s delight in life. Grasso follows Byzantine tradition in concentrating on the lovers’ demise. Specifically, his main source is Nicetas, from whom he borrows both turns of phrase65 and thematic focus, engaging with Callidemus’ irresolution in assessing the quality of the couple’s death. The character of Nicetas had asked: was it tragic or happy? He had drawn a picture of bliss but had not settled on it. Grasso answers him, dispelling all doubts: Hero and Leander have found everlasting happiness. More, they live in a state of perennial erotic contentment, for their joy comes also from unobstructed and unchecked indulgence in their desire. This celebration of the lovers’ erotic fulfilment in death is unique in the medieval reception of the legend. A few Western authors do romanticize Hero’s suicide and the union with Leander that it achieves, but all fall short of picturing the dead lovers in unending and unqualified enjoyment of each other. Baudri and the poet of Ovid moralized, who idealize the couple’s death in a courtly manner, add to the image of their final union a moralizing comment that subverts it. Christine de Pizan in the Book of the City of Ladies ends her exalted celebration of Hero’s fidelity with the picture of the two lovers enlaced in death; but she also slips in the judgemental ‘she died from loving too much’. Nadal comes closest to imagining the pair joined in eternal happiness, for after taking them down to the bottom of the underworld, he rescues them from it and shoots them up to the sky, transforming them into stars.66 In his conception, however, the lovers do not indulge in erotic pleasure. Their bliss goes hand in hand with their transference to a heavenly dwelling, where they no longer feel the passion that ended their mortal life but sparkle with cold, sidereal immortality. Stars do not make love. This difference between Grasso and Western authors in envisioning the lovers’ afterlife seems related to two main facts. First, the Byzantine treatments of the legend on which Grasso bases his own are classical rather than Christian. In them, the agents responsible for

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the couple’s death, are the lamp and wind. There is hardly any reference to the lover’s moral fault, which is pervasive in Western retellings. The only detectable traces of this approach reside in three copies of Musaeus produced in the fifteenth century, which contain a hexameter invented by the scribe as a warning to the youth: ‘Such toils lie in store for strong men who are maddened by love’. But these three manuscripts actually constitute one source, for they depend on one another.67 The second, and connected reason for the difference, is the dominant role Musaeus plays in each subsequent Byzantine retelling. Even Grasso might have known his poem directly, for the first extant manuscript of the epyllion, dated to the tenth century, seems to have been produced in the Otranto region.68 Whatever the case, Nicetas, Grasso’s traceable source, is indebted to Musaeus for his particular version of the lovers’ death. And H&L does not apply a moralizing grid in a Christian mould to the legend. Though Musaeus blames Hero’s untimely lighting of the lamp on her erotically driven impatience, he does not condemn the lovers’ passion. Theirs is a tragedy of fate. In keeping with this outlook, the lovers’ death is not punishment but is a sensual union: ‘They took joy of each other even in the extremity of death’.69 The narratives of both Nicetas and Grasso can be read as expansions on Musaeus’ ending and on the motif of the lovers’ togetherness. Musaeus’ phrase ‘Hero died with (sύn) her dead husband’ (342) inspired them to multiply instances of the conjunction ‘with’. It appears five times in Nicetas: sύntymbon (‘tomb companion’, 476), synῆc1n syzygίan (‘joined together in one yoke’, 478), syntymbίan (‘one tomb’, 479), syntymbίan again (482). And Grasso, in describing the lovers’ journey to the Underworld, has Hero say that she ‘stays with’ (symmέnv, 12) Leander there. The poet overwrites their togetherness: ‘I fell around his body and we descended together (sygkatabῆm1n), jointly (ἅma), among the dead’ (16). Hero’s suicide prompts a switch in grammatical subject from singular (her solitary falling) to plural (the couple’s joint descent) and the redundant duplication of particles to convey the lovers’ indissoluble union. Free from Christian shackles, Grasso’s treatment grants to the couple’s love an unbounded fulfilment in death.

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MUSAEUS ENTERS WESTERN EUROPE, OR HOW TO ADVERTISE A POET The erotic purport of Musaeus’ last line is thrown into sharp relief in the Latin translation by Aldus Manutius: Suique potiti sunt et in ultima pernicie. Potiti sunt: they possessed each other. With full understanding of the original, Aldus chooses an expression that conjures up love’s ecstasy.70 I will conclude this chapter with Aldus’ endeavour as publisher and translator of Musaeus. His edition, by spreading knowledge of the epyllion in Western Europe, marks a momentous turn in the reception both of the poem and of the tale of the unfortunate lovers. It is true that Aldus’ printing business has its home not in the East but in Venice; it is also true that it belongs not in the Middle Ages but in the Renaissance. But the publication had the effect of grafting the Eastern tradition of the legend onto the Western, Musaeus onto Ovid, and the contribution of Greek scholars was instrumental in its production.71 Aldus’ text, in quarto and probably edited by him, appeared soon before November 1495, the first publication in his series of Greek authors.72 At that time issues of Musaeus were circulating in considerable numbers in Western Europe, especially in Italy, including the North.73 I will mention only two copies that found a home north of the Po river: the Bodleian Baroccianus 50, which might have been produced in Southern Italy, was, by the fifteenth century, in Venice, in possession of the eponymous collector Giacomo Barozzi. A second important codex, now in the National Library in Madrid (gr. 24), had been copied largely by the efforts of the Byzantine scholar Constantine Lascaris while he was in Milan as a tutor of Greek to the daughter of Francesco Sforza (he lays claims to the section containing Callimachus, saying that he wrote it ‘in Milan’).74 Lascaris himself owned it and with him it eventually travelled to Messina, from where it was carried to Spain along with the rest of the precious collection he bequeathed to the city. At the same time as numerous copies of Musaeus were appearing across Italy, printing was taking root. This serendipitous coincidence might have pushed H&L before the eyes of a publisher. Aldus, after all, is not the only one in the new profession whose attention was

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grabbed by Musaeus. The issuing of his edition almost coincided with another publication of the epyllion in Florence, by Laurentius de Alopa, which is the last book in Greek capitals from his press. The editor was Janus Lascaris, Constantine’s younger brother. While Janus’ edition was in monumental capitals, Aldus adopted the ‘fashionable’ minuscule script, the one his educated readers knew and even used.75 Marketing goals underlie this choice: a contemporary script would make the writing more accessible and appealing to a clientele who was actively familiar with the script. However, the timing was unfortunate because of the competing edition, and Aldus had problems selling.76 This stalemate might have urged him on to add an interleaved Latin translation (in 1497 or 1498), his own work, with the hope of broadening the appeal of the volume.77 The addition must have helped him gain advantage over Lascaris. By 1517, however, all the copies of the bilingual edition must have been sold because another, this time in octavo, was issued after Aldus’ death (1515) by his associate Andreas Torresanus. The smaller format of the 1517 edition bears witness to the growing attraction of Musaeus, as the policy of the press was to publish in octavo not new releases but works already known and in demand. Those ‘pocket books’ were marketed for intellectuals who travelled across Europe on behalf of princes and governors, and who wished to fill their idle hours – while waiting for a boat or a hearing in the hall of a potentate – with good reads.78 Apparently Musaeus was one of them. Since Torresanus reprinted all the contents of the first edition, including Aldus’ expressions of financial worries when he was launching his Greek series, I will base the remainder of my discussion on this later issue.79 Aldus makes no mystery of his need to do business. The publication’s contents are all targeted to selling the ‘little poem’ (poihmάtion or opusculum). The book opens with an epitaph (in Greek and Latin) for Musaeus, ‘the son of Eumolpus’. Aldus, who genuinely believed that the author of H&L was the legendary Musaeus, followed the tradition about the genealogy and the death of the mythic poet that is recorded in Diogenes Laertius: ‘“The soil of Phalerum holds the son of Eumolpus, dead and buried in this tomb;” and the Eumolpidae at Athens get their name from the father of Musaeus’

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(Lives of the Philosophers 1. 3). An epitaph from Diogenes Laertius’ biographies dignifies and dresses up its recipient, especially in the eyes of readers who have just had the opportunity of becoming acquainted with the epitaphs for poets and other distinguished men contained in the Greek Anthology, which appeared in print in 1494. Furthermore, by reproducing specifically Musaeus’ epitaph in Diogenes Laertius, Aldus enhances the aura of primal wisdom surrounding the presumed author of H&L, for the mythic poet is the first whom Diogenes mentions to buttress his claim that philosophy did not begin with the barbarians but in Greece. Aldus’ introduction, in Greek, furthers his goal of marketing the product.80 Did he keep the original text in the bilingual edition to flatter the learning of his intended readers? Aldus’ potential buyers must have included the scholarly community that spoke only Greek in his Neacademia: the highly educated, the humanists, ‘the studious’ he addresses in his preface. Aldus proceeds to call Musaeus ‘the oldest poet’ (a label that appears already in the title of the first edition: Musaei poetae antiquissimi De Herone &Leandro amantibus opusculum cum interpretatione latina [‘a little book, The Lovers Hero and Leander, by Musaeus, the most ancient poet, with a Latin translation’]), as well as the ‘sweetest’ and the ‘most eloquent’, and to promise readers that knowledge of his poem will increase their appreciation for the cleverness of Ovid’s treatment of the legend. If this should not be enough to lure buyers, Aldus adds that he will serve even better fare forthwith. He whets his addressees’ appetite with the prospect of more important publications to come by telling them that with this edition he is ‘providing a proem’ (prooimiάz1in) to the ‘imminent’ (aὐtίka) publication of Aristotle and ‘the other philosophers’. The epyllion is packaged as an attractive introduction to the even more exciting ventures that are in Aldus’ store and about to be released. It also serves as a fundraiser for those endeavours: ‘Take this little book but not for free. Give me money’. Aldus asks for cash unabashedly in order to be able to print the other Greek books: ‘If you give, I shall give’. He needs ‘a lot of money’ for an enterprise that takes ‘a lot of effort and expenditure’.81 But why did the publisher choose Musaeus to inaugurate his series? Size, (presumed) age and style made it an ideal fit.82

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One purpose in the launching of the series was to test the market. Since H&L was short, as Aldus cares to emphasize by calling it a ‘little poem’ and its printed issue a ‘little book’, the operation financially was not too risky.83 The volume was in fact priced low: one marcellus (or one lira), as opposed to prices running to two or three ducati (approximately 12 to 18 marcelli and 8 to 12 soldi) for editions of Aristotle and other better-known and more prolific authors.84 Furthermore, the epyllion benefitted from the widespread belief, mentioned above, that its author was the mythic Musaeus, a misrepresentation that might have been intended by the historical Musaeus himself.85 Probably Aldus was personally responsible for entrenching this false belief, which could gain from the vagueness with which a great number of manuscripts record the poet’s name. In some of them he is ‘the literary scholar Musaeus (moysaίoy grammatikoῦ)’, but in the majority he is simply ‘Musaeus’.86 We can assume that a copyist who wrote ‘the scholar Musaeus’ did not confuse him with the mythic personage; but when the epithet is absent, the road is open to ambiguity. Aldus might have used manuscripts that omitted the label or he might have chosen not to ponder over its meaning or otherwise investigate. In any case, he is the first to identify the author of H&L explicitly as antiquissimus or palaiόtato6, a strong selling point for humanists. Lastly, he could count on Musaeus’ language to be appealing, and (though he does not say it, perhaps in order to flatter his clientele) easy enough for readers still training in Greek. The poem served also as an educational tool.87 Aldus had been a teacher of Greek before turning to printing and he published Musaeus close to Constantine Lascaris’ Greek grammar. Which one came first is disputed. It makes sense to give priority to the grammar, for why would Aldus start with the still little-known Musaeus, follow it with a grammar, then resume the publication of Greek authors? Grammars were also safer bets; and, furthermore, the Latin characters in the Musaeus are of higher quality, another sign of its posterity.88 But it must be emphasized that in Aldus’ conception both books were ‘preludes’ to something else,89 that is, both were equally introductory. Aldus perceived Musaeus to be an effective complement to the grammar he issued, and which already contained easy readings: brief

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and familiar liturgical texts (Ave Maria, Pater Noster), to which he added two collections of short maxims, the Golden Verses attributed to Pythagoras and the ‘Verses of the wise Phocylides’, so termed but in reality spurious.90 Musaeus provided the next step for the student who had absorbed the rudiments of grammar. Think Intermediate Greek in contemporary American universities. The equivalent there – in diction, level of difficulty and prestige – would be ‘Selections from Homer’. Musaeus’ usability as a beginner’s reader is demonstrated by an interesting coincidence: the publication of the epyllion in Spain, in 1514, the work of another teacher of Greek, Demetrios Ducas, who was the first to hold a chair of Greek at the ‘Universitas Complutensis’ in Alcala´. Before moving on to this professorial position Ducas had collaborated with Aldus’ press, an experience which might have inspired him to print Musaeus. In fact, Ducas bases his Greek text on the Aldine,91 though he does not add a Latin translation. Its absence, which must have severely limited the number of students who could read the poem proficiently without the help of a teacher, suggests that Ducas was not as worried about sales as was Aldus: he was a professor, not a printer, and his aim was to tailor the text to his magisterial courses at the university. The edition, however, imitates Aldus’ in including a poem to enhance Musaeus’ reputation, though not an epitaph but a celebration of the Homer-like power of his poetry to confer glory. The speaker proclaims his willingness to be dead and gone in order to live forever in Musaeus’ immortal poetry: Big is small and small is big, and Phoebus granted only to singers to find the right measure. The maiden Hero and Leander were mortals, but have become immortal through enchanting words. If a Musaeus should sing me once I am dead, may I die quickly in order to earn life!92

As in the epitaph of Diogenes Laertius, copied by Aldus, the story of Hero and Leander is not in the foreground – the two are just ‘mortals’, not even lovers – but their poet is. And just like the former teacher of Greek whom he met in Venice, the professor of Greek at Alcala´ must have found Musaeus’ ‘enchanting’ diction effective in improving one’s knowledge of Greek.93

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The translation facing the Greek in Aldus’ edition serves the same pedagogical purpose.94 The rendering is generally quite literal. Some of Aldus’ readers might have objected to the addition of the Latin version, as we glean from the apologetic tone of his introduction to the bilingual edition of Lascaris’ grammar: he promises untranslated texts to come for the pleasure of ‘learned men and scholars’.95 But the Latin translation increased the books’ salability by making them accessible also to the Greekless or those still in need of help with the language. The other additions to Musaeus’ text are likewise geared to marketing the book, for their function is to familiarize the potential readers with his poem. Though numerous manuscripts of H&L circulated in Italy at the time, Aldus could not assume knowledge of the epyllion as he could of Aristotle or Homer. To be sure, Constantine Lascaris lectured on Musaeus in Milan in the 1460s;96 but how many other scholars taught the epyllion before it was printed? Evidence is lacking. In any case, Aldus included one Greek poem (by Antipater) in the first edition, and to the second his associate added a Roman one (by Martial), both of which deal with the same story and are more likely to be known to the anticipated buyers. An effective method to motivate readers has always been to introduce an unfamiliar text by means of familiar ones, which serve as a basis to tickle their curiosity. Already the mention of Ovid’s Heroides in Aldus’ preface will ring a bell with readers and get them interested (‘Ah, I know this story! Let’s buy and read this little poem written by an author who tells the same story!’). Likewise, the inclusion of the two epigrams must have activated their knowledge of the legend from other sources. Antipater’s poem was familiar at least to those acquainted with the newly published Greek Anthology, for whom Musaeus will have had the additional attraction of fitting with a trendy ‘new release’. Martial was more widely known (Aldus himself published him in 1501). This might have been a key factor that decided the addition of his epigram to the 1517 edition.97 As a further propaedeutic to the epyllion, right after the preface, Aldus inserts a verse ‘summary’ of the poem, penned by the Cretan poet and scholar Marcus Musurus:

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There was a temple in Sestos, where every year they zealously made sacrifices to Cypris. But baneful Eros (oὗlo6 Ἔrv6) was holding his bow. Furiously eager (m1mhnώ6) to shoot an arrow through it, he sharply glanced around (ὀjέa d1ndίll1sk1). And he aimed a bitter shaft at the priestess of his mother. Pressing on, after reaching the heart of the maiden, he came near to Leander’s liver. The two, driven by the same goad of desire, enjoyed each other. They made a lamp the witness of their secret wedding. But the much-wandering one [Eros], endowed with a blood of iron, gave up the lovers to storms and bereaved them of light and of love.

These lines offer an informative pre´cis of Musaeus. The main developments of the epyllion are there: the site and the religious context of the lovers’ encounter, Hero’s priestly investiture, the couple’s ‘secret wedding’, the lamp’s role as accomplice in it and the deadly storm. In addition to learning the essentials, readers are given a taste of Musaeus’ diction, which Musurus borrows heavily.98 But the Cretan poet twists the original in a significant detail: he entrusts Eros with a greater and more sinister role than does Musaeus. The god, ‘baneful Eros’, acts because he is moved by a ‘mad desire’ to shoot; he picks his victims coldly, after taking a good look around. His weapon is not just an arrow (H&L 18) but a ‘bitter’ one. By aiming at Hero first, he displays his power more aggressively than in Musaeus because he shatters from the outset any protection she might have hoped to obtain from Aphrodite, whom she serves. The poem emphasizes the god’s sway by calling his victim ‘the priestess of his mother’ right when he shoots at her. He is also entirely responsible for the lovers’ death, which Musaeus blames on destiny. There Eros is a goodminded deity who loses to the Fates (323), but in Musurus the destructive god sets out to kill the lovers.99 Musurus underscores Eros’ power in a second poem printed on the same page: Envy touches the hearts of the gods as well. Ares boasted in song that he had been allotted the prize for his works [. . .] Eros could not bear the insult. He sent down Musaeus. And he sang of the mad urge lovers feel to pluck the flower of virginity. Praise be to him for unfolding in a few pages the actions that Eros accomplished playing with his small hands.

The main thrust of these verses is to set Musaeus up as the poet laureate of love, the one Eros himself chooses as his representative.

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In his first composition Musurus summarizes the epyllion; in the second he lauds its author. Can marketing considerations be applied also to the picture of Eros as a baby whose small hands play with his victims’ hearts? Or, in the previous poem, to the introduction of the god as ‘baneful Eros’ (oὗlo6 Ἔrv6) and to his cruel behaviour, appropriate to his epithet? Love’s coldness, playfulness and cruelty are of course commonplaces in ancient and medieval literature. But I wish to propose that Musurus is alluding specifically to the Eros of Hellenistic poetry and that this allusion is intended to ignite a spark of recognition in his readers and by this means to increase their interest in the new publication. While oὗlo6 is a familiar epithet of Ares, so widespread that oὗlo6 Ἄrh6 makes both the lexicon of Hesychius (1758. 1) and the Etymologicum magnum (640. 39), the nexus oὗlo6 Ἔrv6 is rare and seems to occur only in Hellenistic poetry: in one fragment and in one epigram of Moschus (fr. 4. 2; AP 16. 200. 2) and twice in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica (3. 297 and 1078). These two poets have drawn memorable pictures of the baby Eros playing his harmful games for fun or to be given a toy. In Moschus’ Eros the Fugitive, Aphrodite treats her mischievous child like a runaway slave, offering the reward of her lips to those who will hunt him down and warning them to steer clear of his kiss. In Apollonius the ‘baneful’ youngster is branded with this epithet when he is about to shoot his arrow at Medea (3. 297), and again when he has shot it at Jason (3. 1078). Musurus, as we have seen, reproduces this order (which is not in Musaeus), activating ‘baneful Eros’ first against the girl, then the boy. Almost incontrovertible proof that the Cretan poet is echoing Apollonius is the god’s identical behaviour in another, marked detail: he sharply glances around, and the movement of his gaze is described in the same words (ὀjέa d1ndίll1sk1 in Musurus, ὀjέa d1ndίllvn in Apollonius, 3. 281). In addition to bespeaking Musurus’ literary sophistication, these allusions to Apollonius and Moschus probably helped Aldus sell the book, for two main reasons. Some of his anticipated readers must have been as cognizant as Musurus of Greek literature. The oblique references to Apollonius and Moschus resonated with them. All the more so, and this is my second reason, because Moschus’ Eros the

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Fugitive appears alongside Musaeus in a striking number of codices, and both this poem and Apollonius’ had been published by the younger Lascaris in Florence close to the time of Aldus’ first edition of Musaeus.100 As in the case of Antipater’s epigram, readers could enjoy Musurus’ engagement with works of literature that for several of them were enticing ‘new hits’. Yet another feature of the edition that was no doubt intended as a marketing tool are the two woodcuts that appear on two facing pages (Figure 4.1), under the Greek and the Latin versions of Antipater’s

FIGURE 4.1 The two illustrations contained in the 1517 Aldine edition of Hero and Leander. Source: Aldo Manuzio and Andrea Torresano (eds), Mousaiou poieˆmation ta kath’ Hero kai Leandron. Orpheoˆs Argonautika. Tou autou Hymnoi. Orpheus peri lithoˆn. Musaei opusculum de Herone & Leandro. Orphei Argonautica. Eiusdem hymni. Orpheus de lapidibus (Venice, 1517).

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poem (and the Latin of Martial in the 1517 edition). The images, in addition to attracting attention as images, must have found favour with Aldus’ readers because of their design and content. The names of Abydos and Sestos are spelled out. Their specification does justice to Musaeus’ text, which gives them prominence, but it might also have been aimed to satisfy the studious and exacting readers, fascinated by geographical precision, whom Aldus envisages. In this respect the Aldine woodcuts stand in sharp contrast to the medieval illuminations accompanying the works of Guillaume de Machaut and of Christine de Pizan, where the location is not specified, in keeping with the general lack of interest in it displayed by Western European authors and presumably their audiences. Another detail that probably appealed to Aldus’ readers is the orientation of the two cities, Abydos to the right and Sestos to the left. This angle reverses their placement in ancient images, where, as we have noted,101 Abydos is preferably to the left, reflecting an Asian perspective. This is true first and foremost for the coins minted in the two cities under the Severians, which adopt the orientation of the more powerful city, Abydos. By substituting the Asian outlook with a European viewpoint, Aldus’ woodcuts help his Western readers locate the cities on their own mental map. The subject matter of the woodcut on the left page is Leander’s swimming to Hero on the night of their meeting, while the image to the right represents the lovers’ death. The illustrator chose the two climactic episodes of the epyllion, though the poem devotes more effort to the protagonists’ first encounter and their falling in love. His is an informed choice, for the scene of first encounter is not the signature of this love story, the episode that makes it instantly recognizable and unique, but is common to almost all ancient love stories. The subject of the images will also appeal to readers familiar with the Heroides, which do not even evoke the first encounter but dwell at length on Leander’s first swim and are scattered with anticipations of his last and of the lovers’ death. The intense foreshadowing of death in Ovid’s epistles was felt by at least some fifteenth-century readers. One manuscript of the Heroides copied and illustrated in Florence in the first quarter of the century and currently at the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, gives as much

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prominence to it as to the couple’s letter-writing and to Leander’s feat. The manuscript has three illuminations in correspondence to Heroides 18 and 19. The first shows Leander swimming while Hero waits at the window with a light. On the second his body is carried by the sea while she appears twice, once writing, inside the palace, once outside, killing herself with a sword. And in the third Leander is writing.102 Aldus’ two pages containing the woodcuts put even greater emphasis on the pair’s death. In the 1517 edition, the images appear underneath the two poems of Antipater and of Martial, both of which focus on the tragic ending. In Antipater the strait is ‘grievous’ and the couple, already dead, curse the wind from their tomb; in Martial Leander is swimming but in ‘swollen waves’, and prays to be spared. These texts, which spell out or conjure up the lovers’ demise, provide captions, as it were, to the images, stirring the viewer’s mind to think of the tragedy even when his eyes take in Leander’s successful crossing.103 Death is also a central theme of Musurus’ ‘summary’. The Cretan author replaces the thematic core of Musaeus, the lovers’ meeting and their covenant, with Eros’ activity, which culminates with his iron-hearted abandonment of the pair to the deadly storm. This pervasive emphasis in Aldus’ edition on the tragic ending seems to be in keeping with the preferences of his contemporaries, both his Greek associates and his Italian public. As we have noted, the lovers’ death is central in Byzantine allusions to or retellings of the story, and it has a greater appeal than other sections of it for several Western European authors as well. The illuminated manuscript of the Heroides mentioned above, caring as it does to illustrate a death that is only foreshadowed (though strongly) in Ovid’s text, is yet another witness to this predilection for the story’s ending. Aldus’ choice, then, matches current taste and fashion. Had he lived in ancient Rome and published the Heroides then, would he have accessorized his edition with images and texts geared to underscore Leander’s ‘prize-winning’ swim and athleticism? Aldus’ advertisement of Musaeus soon reverberated across Europe. New editions and new handwritten copies appeared. Several of them reproduced the Aldine, which soon became the vulgate, eclipsing

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Lascaris’ edition by far.104 Though the Florentine print is generally considered to follow better manuscripts and is the basis for more respectable subsequent editions, the Aldine had greater currency. The Latin translation was also reprinted separately,105 which caused knowledge of Musaeus’ poem to spread among Greekless readers (a somewhat ironic turn, considering that its original publisher chose it also as a tool for learning Greek). Aldus’ Latin translation and occasionally the Greek original spawned in turn a great number of translations: Italian, French, German, Spanish and English. The exciting story of these versions and of more famous and creative retellings of the legend – Marlowe’s, Chapman’s, Bosca´n’s – which were also inspired by the dissemination of Musaeus’ poem, has been handsomely written.106 What I have attempted to do in the last section of this book is to add a preface to that story. Those electrifying developments might not have occurred with the same impetus or not at all, if Aldus had not successfully printed ‘the divine poem of Musaeus. First of all bookes’.107

EPILOGUE

Looking Back and Looking Forward

To conclude, I would like to weave together the most salient points that have emerged in the individual chapters as well as to sketch thematic comparisons between ancient and medieval treatments of the legend on the one hand and more modern ones on the other, with the goal of marking momentous developments in its reception beyond the time frame covered here. In the context of a conclusion, only snapshots of the tale’s subsequent incarnations can be offered. The main purpose of the following remarks is to re-focus the book’s main findings but, in order to gain in historical perspective, I will also make forays into later periods more systematically than just with occasional parallels, as I have done so far. Compared to later treatments, medieval versions of the legend tend to be concentrated and to have a simple plot line. To begin with, they hardly ever describe the lovers’ first encounter. Renaissance poets such as Marlowe or Bosca´n dwell on it in lavish detail. Two of Marlowe’s most memorable lines, ‘Who taught thee Rhetoricke to deceive a maid?’ and ‘Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?’, belong in the scene of first encounter, which offers him the opportunity to linger on the protagonists’ appearance and to display the deftness with which Leander, the ‘bold sharpe Sophister’, seduces Hero, while the Spanish poet exploits the scene for opposite effects, to bring out the youth’s innocence and lachrymose bashfulness. Similarly, several later authors spend much effort on that scene. In contrast, medieval narratives tend to begin in medias res, with

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mention of the lovers’ passion and of their arrangement: ‘Hero loved Leander and Leander Hero. Every night he swam to her’. This difference could be explained simply by invoking the sources at hand. Ovid, the main model for medieval retellings, does not even allude to the lovers’ first encounter, whereas Musaeus gives it the stage. His leisurely account worked as a prompt, presenting Renaissance and later poets with a new episode, one rich in plot possibilities, to prolong and complicate the bare story of the two lovers. Medieval authors had no such stimulus. There is no doubt that the serendipity of textual transmission played a fundamental role in the choice of themes authors included in their versions of the tale. We have noticed this throughout this investigation. But at least one medieval treatment, Nadal’s, does dwell on the lovers’ first encounter, and this narrative is unlikely to be dependent on Musaeus.1 Rather, I think that a main reason medieval writers disregard the preliminaries to the love story is that they tend to stay focused on its core, the couple’s passion and its tragic ending, and to avoid plot complications that could distract from or dilute this thematic kernel. This tight focus can explain the dismissal of another motif: parental opposition. The obstacle becomes important in later reworkings of the legend, such as Schiller’s ballad Hero and Leander (‘Yet the fathers’ opposition / Drove apart the couple’s bliss, / And the sweet fruit of affection / Hung upon the precipice’)2 and Wieland’s Schach Lolo (‘Why does the wrath of harsh parents, their pride or meanness sever what God joined together?’)3, but provides plot expansions already in the early seventeenth-century plays of the Italian Francesco Bracciolini dell’Api and of the Spanish Antonio Mira de Amezcua. Most medieval accounts, on the other hand, do not even state why the pair cannot marry. The obstacle is there but has no name: ‘since they could not come together . . .’4 Again, this vagueness finds its origins in the main sources available, Ovid’s epistles, which do almost nothing with the motif of family opposition. We can fruitfully contrast the nearly total absence of it in medieval treatments of the Hero and Leander theme and its resounding presence in rewritings of the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, some of which complicate the plot by exploiting the obstacle

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while others fault the lovers’ tragedy either on their parents for their harshness or on them for challenging rightful authority.5 Medieval authors in this case felt they had to come to grips with the parental role because Ovid integrates it organically into the story of Pyramus and Thisbe: the two families live in adjacent houses, the parents know of their children’s love and actively prevent them from meeting, and Thisbe, at the point of death, asks them to bury her and Pyramus in the same tomb. To inspire later writers on Hero and Leander to develop the motif was neither Ovid nor even Musaeus, where it has only an erratic presence, but, it seems, Romeo and Juliet. The play’s instant success is reflected in its power to fertilize the ancient story, whose similar plot line it enriched with components of its own.6 For instance, in the Leandris, an extensive Latin poem by the German Caspar Barth, Hero and Leander at dawn cannot part until her nurse intervenes, just as Juliet’s nurse does in Shakespeare’s play.7 Antonio Mira de Amezcua elaborates on a broader theme he possibly found in Romeo and Juliet: he politicizes the familial obstacle by imagining Sestos and Abydos at war, extending the enmity of the Capulets and the Montagues to entire communities, and ends his play with the words of two opponents of the protagonists, Leander’s rival and Leander’s father, one announcing the construction of marble monuments to honour the lovers, the other commenting on their tragic passion. As in Shakespeare, the couple’s death works as a pacifier. As an additional reason why medieval writers disregarded the motif of parental opposition, we could suggest another mechanical fact of literary history: they could not quarry ideas from Shakespeare’s tragedy. But, just as one author could conceive a scene of first encounter without knowing Musaeus, at least one made much of the familial obstruction without knowing the English playwright: the Valencian master of theology Corella, in whose version Hero’s harsh father rejects her suitor because he has a wealthier (and, to Hero, hateful) candidate in mind. Possibly Corella was inspired to enhance the role of parental opposition by the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, since he borrowed other details from that source. Certainly he needed the motif for his own goal of sanitizing the love story by turning it into a would-be marriage from which the pure and chaste lovers were

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barred. His example (and others) demonstrates that medieval writers, like modern ones, could expatiate on the legend beyond the sources available to them, by exercising their own inventiveness. The parental obstacle (like the scene of first encounter) generally did not interest them because they felt it was accessory to the story rather than part of the essence of its theme, the strength and tragedy of love. An obstacle is necessary to throw the couple into their dangerous predicament, but it does not need to be detailed or even specified. Medieval authors freely expand on the original plot line when that core benefits from the expansion. For instance, the poet of Ovid moralized augments Hero’s surge of frustration compared to Ovid, and several writers invent a lament of Hero over the dead Leander. They found the seeds of it in the Heroides, where he ominously images her expressions of despair at discovering his body (18. 199– 200), but they applied their imagination to convert those expressions into a real dirge. The motif is developed extensively and with pathos in Baudri, in Potter’s poem, in Nadal, who devotes almost three cantos to it (4. 14 – 6), in Corella, and its bare-bone features in Boccaccio’s Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, where Hero weeps profusely but wordlessly over Leander’s body. These authors’ interest in her sorrowful outpouring stems from its climactic force within a narrative focused on a tragic love. Furthermore, a lament for love, and one ending in the mourner’s suicide, allowed writers to enhance the pathetic and dramatic tone of their narrative. It is the lament’s melodramatic potential that must have appealed as well to the author of the Hellenistic poem, meant for the stage, in which Hero apparently gave voice to her distress as she does in some of her medieval incarnations. Of course those authors could not have known the Greek text. But their similar poetic goals resulted in similar thematic and generic choices – a first-person lament. The same preference for Hero’s final outburst of despair surfaces again in a later period and in a different medium, but one that shows a comparable penchant for dramatic effects: the cantata Qual ti riveggio, oh Dio, by Ha¨ndel (1707).8 Yet another reason a last lament of Hero might have appealed to medieval writers is the concern of some with religious piety. Her dirge could belong in a full requiem or accompany the preparations of the

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body for it. Hero’s lament and death are indeed followed by the lovers’ burial in Nadal, while in Corella’s strongly Christian version, Hero casts her dirge as a funeral rite, which she performs inadequately for lack of voice and tears, and her suicide as the only means that can provide the necessary elements for the anointing of Leander’s body. Boccaccio’s Hero in the Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta wipes off Leander’s face, then drenches it in tears, while in the Teseida she even gives him burial.9 The inclusion of funeral rites is often simultaneous with the revelation of the affair. This is markedly the case in Germanic territory. The Mary miracle fashioned after the legend ends with the monk’s pardon and burial by his congregation. Both the Middle High German novella and the poem of the Dutch Dirc Potter feature public mourning. Perhaps it is their influence that will cause another German poet, Barth, to conclude his Leandris with the couple’s parents burying their children in the same tomb.10 Outside of Germany, Nadal and Corella have communal funerary rites crown the tragedy. In these two treatments, an epitaph will also be carved on the couple’s tomb, broadcasting their dalliance. This care for publicizing it does not occur in courtly readings, where the secrecy of the affair is a dominant note, sounded until the very end. Neither Christine de Pizan, nor Baudri, nor the poet of Ovid moralized, three authors who introduce courtly motifs into their narratives of the couple’s love and death, imagine a communal ceremony to mourn them. But what happens to the lovers after their death (and burial)? The destination of their last journey does not interest Greek and Roman authors, with the one exception of Ausonius, who imagines Hero in the Virgilian fields of mourning. In Musaeus the journey ends in the sea, in Antipater of Thessalonica in a tomb. The thirteenth-century Italo-Greek poet Giovanni Grasso imagines the couple in the underworld, but gives no details. Among medieval writers, those who concern themselves with the issue of the lovers’ final residence are also those grappling with the moral purport of their affair: does it deserve Hell? Or can the pair be saved? Answers, as we have seen, differ, suggesting a variegated, non-monolithic outlook even within a Christian frame.

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Hesitations and contradictions concerning the couple’s dwelling in the afterlife endure beyond the Middle Ages. For instance, Bernardo Tasso in his translation of Musaeus cannot settle. The Amori will provide burial to allow the pair to cross the river Cocytus, ‘And go to the joyful and fortunate fields, or else to the grove of the shadowy myrtles’.11 Bosca´n resolves Tasso’s uncertainty by dispatching Hero and Leander to the pagan heaven: ‘And then their two souls joined and fled away to the Elysian fields forevermore’ (Leander 2792 – fin.).12 And yet the Christian mindset of this poet had declared Hero guilty: ‘For after all, the guilt lies in my will, and I have chosen that my will be thus!’ (775 – 6). Bosca´n’s judgement raises another question invested with moral significance: why do the lovers die? Do they earn their demise by choosing an illicit carnal dalliance or are they the victims of unconquerable powers? What kind of tragedy is theirs? Classical authors generally put emphasis only on material agents, winds and waves, as the cause for the couple’s death. Musaeus adds, as underlying culprit, the force that rules all things human, which he calls fate. Virgil’s view is as tragic, but fate or fortune plays no role in the pair’s destruction, which comes about because love is a killer. This interpretation resonates with those Western medieval authors bent on drawing a lesson from the tale. In their moralizing readings the couple die because they indulged in an illicit love while they had the freedom not to do so. Theirs is a tragedy of choice rather than of fate, hence they are culpable and merit death. But again judgements are more varied and nuanced than this sweeping statement might suggest. Blind Fortune, along with personal moral weakness, is often explicitly named as the cause of the lovers’ death.13 Moreover, readings of the legend as a tragedy of choice are not shared by Byzantine authors, who do not concern themselves with the ethical purport of the affair. Marcus Musurus faults the lovers’ death on a divine agent, Eros himself, but not as their deserved punishment. On the contrary, the god behaves with his familiar – that is, classical Greek – cruelty, first bringing the couple together then killing them through no fault of their own. An additional element, which in several modern authors is brought to bear on the pair’s culpability, is Hero’s betrayal of her vow

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of virginity. I will give two examples. In Franz Grillparzer’s tragedy Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (‘The Waves of the Sea and of Love’, but translated as Hero and Leander)14, the protagonists meet and fall in love on the very day Hero is consecrated to Aphrodite and renounces love and marriage. The timing enhances her misfortune and guilt. The defender of religious observance (or social appearances) is her uncle, the temple’s priest, who causes the lovers’ tragedy by plotting to send Hero off on wearying tasks so that as soon as she returns, exhausted, she falls asleep on a bench, allowing him to ascend to her tower and quench her light. A powerful man likewise destroys the lovers in Arrigo Boito’s operatic drama Ero e Leandro, where Hero, the priestess of Aphrodite, is compelled to pledge a life of virginity to avoid the lecherous advances of the high official Ariofarne, who suspects that she loves Leander and pressures her to choose between lifelong chastity and himself.15 Eventually he discovers the lovers and engineers their tragedy. These two treatments of Hero’s pledge differ in so far as in Grillparzer the agent of the couple’s death, though odious, hard-hearted and hypocritical,16 has not forced virginity on Hero like Ariofarne. Boito’s character is a Scarpia type, a monster of lust who takes advantage of his power just like Puccini’s figure. In Grillparzer, on the other hand, Hero freely chooses to forego love. But in both dramas it is her vow that causes, and religiously justifies, her demise. Hero’s pledge is almost entirely missing from ancient and medieval authors. For the latter group, possibly the main reason for its absence is, again, the main source, Ovid, where Hero has no priestly investiture and is therefore not bound to virginity. In the medieval West only Nadal exploits the motif: his Hero, a priestess of Diana dedicated to chastity, meets with punishment from the goddess for breaking her vow and is torn in her heart prior to breaking it. Hero’s pledge has a greater presence and relevance in Nadal than in Musaeus, the only ancient writer who vaguely sketches the virginity motif, without developing its psychological and dramatic potential. While Nadal might have come up with the motif independently, later authors found it in Musaeus. With the reappearance of his Hero and Leander in Europe, Hero acquires the priestly status she does not have in Ovid; its incompatibility with passionate love offers the

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opportunity for delving into the woman’s quandary and for setting the stage for psychodramas, an opportunity taken up by both Chapman and Barth. In Chapman Hero feels a stranger to herself: she cannot look upon her father for fear of revealing the truth, she dreads the goddess for having broken her vow, she dresses in black, mourns, is struck down by her despair and swoons. ‘And all this while the red sea of her blood / Ebd with Leander’ (3. 335– 6). The narrative of Hero’s psychomachy is perhaps the best part of Barth’s poem: though she clings to forces, nobility, glory and parents, that want her to stay chaste, Voluptas and Amor press her on. She sees Leander in a greater and greater size in her mind, and wants to touch again what has touched her (Leandris 3. 73 – 84). Hero’s conflict is one of the many episodes with which these two poets pad their lengthy accounts. Nadal’s treatment of her quandary is part of a similar process. He stands out among medieval authors for producing an extremely drawn-out narrative and for adding much action to complicate the legend’s simple storyline. The dramatization of Hero’s dilemma serves this purpose. Ancient and especially medieval authors, however, did blame the tragedy on Hero: not for breaking her vow but for being incapable of reigning in her amorous impulses. Musaeus faults her because she lighted her lamp on the stormy night, selfishly acting on her desire instead of waiting. The reproach reappears in the playwright Antonio Mira de Amezcua, who echoes and augments Musaeus: ‘Your Lady Hero really should take down the light that she’s displayed, seeing the sea in such a state, and try some other night instead. But when a woman’s set her head, when did she ever hesitate?’ (Hero and Leander Act 3. 2451 – 6).17 The Spanish writer (or the speaking character, Leander’s servant) sharpens Musaeus’ reprimand by adding the barbed generalizing comment on women’s ways. Among medieval versions, some depict Hero as outrageously impatient or even angry at Leander’s absence, still others, in stark contrast with Ovid, fault her letter with causing Leander’s swim and death. The extreme rendering of the idea that Hero could not control her desire is her allegorical identification with desire itself. For Fulgentius Hero is Eros, while the poet of Ovid moralized and Guillaume de Machaut merge the light of her lamp with the firebrand

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of lust, a lure for Leander. The youth is hardly at fault except insofar as he falls victim to love and with it to recklessness. But even evaluations of his perilous swim oscillate throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages: for many his gesture bespeaks bravery. And, generally, his character is showered with more compliments than is Hero’s. Outright misogynous treatments are predominantly French and have Christian roots. But a bias in favour of Leander can be traced back to classical sources, especially noticeable in Roman literature and art. Leander, not Hero, is elected as illustrating love’s power, for better or worse, while she is merely the dedicatee of his passion and the destination of his brave feat of swimming. The latter caught the fancy of Roman authors, painters and engravers, all of whom put a premium on Leander’s athletic achievement as much as or even more than on its passionate motive. Hero’s suicide receives almost no attention by comparison. In the extant evidence only Musaeus among Greco-Roman authors devotes a full narrative to it; but even his account dwells at greater length on Leander’s words and actions. In the Middle Ages the youth tends to retain his privileged position, though the most attractive part of his story is no longer his successful swim but his death. The new focus brings Hero’s suicide to the foreground, giving it more visibility than it has in classical sources. This shift of interest from Leander’s swimming to the couple’s death is one of the most important developments in the legend’s reception during the period covered by this study. The tragic end becomes central to a large number of the Western medieval versions, informing images that embellish the manuscripts of Guillaume de Machaut and Christine de Pizan, as well as to the Byzantine narratives of Nicetas Eugenianos and Giovanni Grasso. Byzantine treatments are generally laconic, merely allusive references to the legend in Musaeus’ version. But from his poem these two authors cull and elaborate upon the ending. The increased concern with the lovers’ demise fits the two opposing goals that pervade medieval readings: to condemn the affair or to idealize it by celebrating a love more enduring than life. Fascination with their deaths was set to last, although with Leander’s more so than with Hero’s, particularly in iconography. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century artists repeatedly picture

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Leander’s dead body and next to it Hero in the act of mourning her lover, of delivering her last lament.18 But representations of Hero’s death are not rare, starting with Rubens’ painting (Figure 0.1), continuing with a work of his almost contemporary Domenico Fetti (Figure 5.1), who, like Rubens, draws attention to her leap by showing her in a highly visible red dress,19 on to William Etty (Figure 2.2), whose focus is Hero falling upon the dead Leander and embracing him. How did the fact that Hero’s death was suicide impact moral evaluations of the story? In antiquity her gesture bears no stigma. Virgil chooses Leander’s death to illustrate the ruinous power of love while Hero’s comes second, as a consequence of his death, and is not condemned as suicide. Unease with it emerges in medieval authors who either turn it into a natural death (so the Middle High German poet) or fail to take note of it (so Fulgentius, the poet of Parce continuis and Boccaccio). The tendency is to ignore rather than come to grips with it. It was easy to do so without overly misrepresenting the legend because only one of the lovers kills herself, while the other dies violently but at the hands of nature. Hero’s self-inflicted death could be and was assimilated to Leander’s natural one for happening at sea: after all, Hero gives herself to Leander’s killer, the deep, which, in a sense, becomes the common murderer. We shall contrast medieval treatments of the germane myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, both of whom take their lives. The double suicide could hardly be disregarded

FIGURE 5.1 Domenico Fetti, Hero and Leander (c.1621), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Credit: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria / Bridgeman Images.

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for what it was: hence writers grappled with it, often condemning it openly.20 On the other hand, Hero’s suicide, like Thisbe’s, was extolled time and again as the ultimate proof of devotion. Unlike the manner of Hero’s death, the sexual aspect of the union could hardly be bypassed. How was it handled? The propelling force of desire rules in Musaeus’ narrative of the scene of first encounter, which stages Leander’s bold moves, and in the episode of the couple’s night of love, where Hero lets her erotic energy literally scream out. The culminating act, what medieval writers will call factum, generally poses no moral problem to classical authors,21 though Musaeus treats it with Homeric restraint and Ovid with suggestive reticence. It is again in medieval Europe that the pair’s erotic indulgence becomes an issue. Those who condemn their sexual drive, like Fulgentius and his followers, brand it ‘lust’, luxuria, while admiring or more sympathetic accounts, like those of Christine de Pizan in the Book of the City of Ladies, of Potter or of Corella, tend to desexualize the relationship. But how did they go about this? Concerning lovemaking, it was the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe that more easily allowed evading an uncomfortable matter, for even in the least sanitized version, Ovid’s, the unfortunate couple never get to consummate. Their failure to satisfy their desire could allow a spiritualization of their liaison, as in Parce continuis, while in the case of Hero and Leander, this manœuvre was more difficult because the lovers’ nocturnal trysts were a core element of the legend. The options available to a writer keen on erasing the sexual component of the dalliance were to be vague or to say nothing about the love nights. Once again Nadal stands out with his detailed and occasionally prurient account of the couple’s skirmishes. Marlowe did not know it, but his own exuberant narrative of the night of love has in Nadal’s graphic description, which like Marlowe’s offers readers even a glimpse of Hero’s nudity (3. 3. 82–7), an isolated medieval forerunner.22 A motif that is closely tied together with eroticism and sexuality, and additionally with gender, is the protagonists’ beauty. Depictions of it vary, but Hero’s consistently draws more writerly attention than Leander’s. In classical versions only her appearance warrants description. Even Musaeus, in spite of his effort to make the two protagonists equal along the lines of the Greek novels, dwells only on

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the woman’s beauty (unlike the novels), while he evokes the man’s only with insipid adjectives, such as ‘lovely’. This imbalance is slightly redressed in medieval literature, where, as a rule, neither Hero’s aspect nor Leander’s attract the eye. She is simply ‘beautiful’, kept from view, as befits more desexualized accounts of the affair; Leander is also ‘beautiful’; and they are equally endowed with moral qualities in addition to physical gifts: she is pure, he is honourable, and both are virtuous and noble. Corella is particularly assertive in stressing their identical and almost invisible attractiveness: ‘They differed only in this, that Leander possessed a man’s surpassing grace, and Hero a maiden’s’ (The Story of Leander and Hero 1). That said, however, the rare medieval narratives that elaborate on the protagonists’ beauty still focus on Hero’s only: so Nadal and the Middle High German novella.23 Against this background Marlowe will effect a dramatic change by giving privilege to Leander’s body. His description of Hero puts emphasis almost exclusively on her apparel – precious fabrics, dazzling jewelry – while the enticing youth makes his entry with ‘dangling tresses that were never shorne’ (Hero and Leander 1. 61) and he further displays a soft and white neck, a smooth breast, a white belly and an alluring spine. . . but no clothing! The portrayal evinces a homoerotic sensibility that is completely absent from previous treatments of the legend.24 Marlowe ends his account with the love night. Whether he intended to write the sequel or not is debated and cannot concern us here.25 As we have it, the continuation is authored by Chapman, whose stern and tragic voice contrasts starkly with Marlowe’s bubbly narrative. Chapman’s finger, however, is not pointed at the lovers’ indulgence in passion but at their haste. He blames their demise on their failure to wait for their love to be sanctified by marriage.26 Their union was not attended by Ceremonie, as he calls it. Her absence is already marked in Musaeus’ version, which Chapman here follows closely. Ceremonie’s words to Leander, that without Society’s approval ‘darknes decks the Bride’ (Hero and Leander 3. 166), is a literal echo of Musaeus’ ‘Darkness dressed the bride’ (H&L 280). But the English poet eliminates the parental obstacle that causes the lovers’ union to be a non-wedding, devoid of

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celebrations and rituals, in the Greek epyllion. While in Marlowe’s section Leander’s father knows about his love and rebukes him, though ‘mildly’ (2. 145), in Chapman he becomes ‘glad’ to hear that his son wants to marry (3. 174), and preparations for the festive event are already underway in Abydos when Leander dies at sea. The couple are not barred from marriage and are therefore responsible, and at fault, for rushing into an illicit affair. Chapman performs a radical intervention on the ancient tale, a mytheme of which is: ‘the two cannot marry’. The impediment, however barely developed, causes the lovers’ arrangements and ultimately their deaths. Given its essential role in the plot, it is surprising to discover that in ancient Rome the legend was exploited in wedding songs, for instance by Statius. The main reason for its counterintuitive suitability as subject matter of epithalamia seems to be Leander’s exemplarity as lover, which had such a powerful appeal in Roman culture as to overshadow the illegitimacy of the affair and even its tragic ending. His courage, perseverance and passion superseded the couple’s transgression and death. This striking presence of the tale in wedding festivities did not stop with Rome. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century in Italy it was fashionable to publish versions of Musaeus on the occasion of aristocratic nuptials.27 But at least one author felt that the legend’s plotline needed a major overhaul to fit the joyous circumstance. A double death would not do. The playwright Francesco Bracciolini dell’Api dedicated his play Hero e Leandro: Favola marittima to Taddeo Barberini in celebration of his wedding with Anna Colonna (1627).28 The writer is explicit about his source: Musaeus. But he engages with the epyllion creatively and even polemically to adapt it to the occasion. First, Hero is not a priestess bound to virginity, an investiture that would clash with marriage. Instead of a girl committed to chastity, she is a chaste girl, a virgin unschooled in love’s acts, as a bride should be. And instead of dying in the sea, the couple magically survive drowning thanks to the intervention of Cupid himself. Musaeus was wrong. Why would the god of love bring death rather than fostering life? It is the poet himself, reborn, who appears on stage at the end of the play to admit his mistake:

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After thousands and thousands years I come back to the world, where the sun blinds me, to the same cities, which were theatre and school to my verses, and I recognize that the two faithful lovers have joy, they who were praised and wept by my ancient lyre. Therefore, I now realize, I have to recant, overcome by the truth. Love with a happy fortune dispenses life, not death.

The oldest, most venerable of all poets (like almost everyone at the time, Bracciolini thought that the author of the epyllion was the mythic Musaeus and he belabours the point) is taken to task rather than worshipped, and forced to abjure the ending of his Divine Poem.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Heaney 1996: 25. 2. The competition is organized by the Rotary Club of C ¸ anakkale in Turkey: see Minchin 2016. 3. On the concept of mimetic memory, see Assmann 2011: 5. 4. Beaton 2013: 19. 5. For an analysis of the painting, see Golahny 1990. 6. See Chapter 2. 7. See Ragno 2012. 8. Cipriani 2006: 63. 9. Krummrich 2006. 10. A wide-ranging (though far from exhaustive) treatment of the legend is Cipriani 2006, which unfortunately is hardly available (it is not even listed in the World Catalogue). See also, e.g., Malcovati 1947, Orsini 1968 and Kost 1971. A useful pre´cis of sources with references to secondary literature is Jech 1990. Two extensive catalogues listing appearances of Hero and Leander in various art forms from antiquity to the twenty-first century are in Krummrich 2006. I will provide more bibliography, when relevant, in the course of the book. 11. For further discussion, see Chapter 3 and 4. 12. See Morgan 2008: 218. 13. For texts less familiar to classicists, the editions of the originals I have used are referenced in the footnotes. 14. See further Chapter 2. 15. See Rohde 1914: 133. The basic plot of the story, however, qualifies it as a folktale-type (666 Aarne 1961). Suggestions that it records a real event or, at the opposite extreme, that it is pure fiction have also been made (see Norwood 1950). 16. See Strabo 13. 1. 22 and Chapter 1.

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17. See Sittig 1912: 911; Malten 1950: 71, n. 21; Kost 1971: 19. 18. The text is Lloyd-Jones and Parson 1983, 901 A. Discussion in Kenney 1996: 10 –11, with further references. Asclepiades seems to play with the legend and even with the lovers’ names (AP 5. 209). This might suggest that a poem on Hero and Leander existed in the early Hellenistic period (see Ga¨rtner 2009b) but does not prove it, for Asclepiades might also have counted on his readers’ knowledge of the legend from other sources. 19. The text is Lloyd-Jones and Parson 1983, 951. For possible explanations of Laandros, see Colonna 1947; Solimano 1966. 20. Page (1942, vol. 1, n. 126: 513–14) opts for the first scenario, Snell (1939) and Malten (1950) for the second (see Kost 1917: 20), and D’Ippolito (1988) for the third (but already Colonna [1947] advanced the hypothesis that the lines are a pathetic evocation of the past in Hero’s voice). 21. Text Grenfell and Hunt 1908: 864 (vol. 6: 172). 22. Malten (1950: 68– 9) has raised these criticisms and Kost (1971: 21) is sceptical. But see D’Ippolito 1988. 23. See D’Ippolito 1988. Three examples of modern dramas that noticeably multiply episodes and characters are Antonio Mira de Amezcua’s Hero y Leandro, Bracciolini dell’Api’s Hero e Leandro: favola marittima (both from the seventeenth century) and the better-known play by Franz Grillparzer, Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (‘The Waves of the Sea and of Love’). 24. See Kost 1971: 20–1. 25. See D’Ippolito 1988.

CHAPTER 1 SEDUCTION, LOVE AND ATHLETICISM: LEANDER (AND HERO) IN ROMAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE 1. Translations are mine unless otherwise stated. Poetic texts in translation generally appear as prose, with a few exceptions. 2. Commentary on the Georgics 3. 258. Most modern scholars agree with Servius that by Virgil’s time the story was familiar (see, e.g. McKeown 1998: 354, on Amores 2. 16. 31 –2; Bajard 2002: 151. The comment has been considered anachronistic and iuvenis has been taken to emphasize a prominent detail of the story, Leander’s youth, for the adjective labels him time and again: see McKeown 1998: 354, on iuvenis. The references, however, could have been influenced by Virgil). They also point out that other Roman authors close in time to Virgil, namely Horace and Ovid, assume knowledge of it: see Hintermeier 1993: 99, n. 2; Rosati 1996: 11– 12; Gelzer 1975: 304, and this chapter. The tale must have become a sort of mythic archetype for drowning caused by love: see Rosati 1996: 14 –15, referencing Papanghelis 1987: 103–9, and here below. 3. So a scholion: ‘He [Virgil] speaks of Leander, or rather he takes him to indicate every lover in general’ (Scholia Bernensia ad Vergili Bucolica atque

Notes to Pages 15 – 21

4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

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Georgica, ed. H. Hagen 1867: 939). One modern scholar to endorse this interpretation is Traina 1999. Commentary on the Georgics 3. 258. There is no suggestion, as in Tibullus (2. 1. 67 –78), that the kind of love that ruins humans is of a more sophisticated kind than the passion that conquers animals. Virgil sandwiches Leander between two lists of animal examples. See Mynors 1990, ad loc; Kenney 1998. The citation is from Rohde 1914: 134. According to some critics the two poems make one, but even those see two self-contained units. See further Scioli (2015, Chapter 3), who also notes that another myth behind 26a is Ariadne looking at Theseus’ ship. For a different interpretation of Propertius’ attempt to jump into the sea, not to help Cynthia but to free himself from love of her, see Jacobson 1984. See Papanghelis 1987, Chapter 5. My discussion of Propertius’ poem owes much to this scholar’s. See further Chapter 2. Rimell (2006: 183–4) thinks that Propertius’ poem stimulated also Ovid’s Heroides 18, where Leander compares Hero to the Moon (‘Cynthia’). See McKeown 1998: 354, on 2. 16. 31 –2. See McKeown above. The oldest story is that Apollo was punished with this service. For the romantic version, see Callimachus Hymn to Apollo 47– 9; Tibullus 2. 3. 11 –32. The exemplars in fact do not prove the point but only show that great warriors have been lovers: see McKeown 1989: 272. This scholar further notes that two of the exemplars are incongruous: Achilles loses interest in fighting because of his love, and Andromache discourages Hector from fighting. In the same poem, the mention of swelling rivers and of storms among the weather hazards a lover must brave (11 –14) conjures up Leander. The long-debated issue of the authenticity of the double epistles seems to have been favourably settled. See, e.g., Rosati 1996: 27– 8; Farrell 1998: 309, n. 5; Barchiesi 1999; Casali 2005. The similarity between Leander and a lover performing a paraklausithyron (‘lament before a closed door’) is noted by Hintermeier 1993 and Rosati 1996. The text I use is Rosati’s. Virgil goes no further than mentioning Leander’s grieving parents. A few lines later, the Ovide moralise´ says that Leander swam rather than sailed in order that his love be not discovered (4. 3180): but not specifically by his parents. Her. 19. 99–100. Hero worries about the negative consideration in which the Thracians were held in Greece: see Rosati 1996, on 19. 99 –100. So Hintermeier 1993: 92–3, who contrasts Hero’s paranoia with Penelope’s legitimate worries in Heroides 1.

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Notes to Pages 21 – 28

21. See Solimano 1966. 22. See Knaack 1898, who ingeniously but very speculatively attempts a reconstruction of the local tale. 23. So Rohde 1914: 143, n. and Knaack 1898: 77 –82. 24. See Hintermeier 1993: 96 –8. 25. See Hintermeier 1993: 96 –8. I translate the modern adaptation. The ballad was printed at about 1565: see the text in Fa¨rber 1961: 88 –9. The Hero and Leander legend, known in medieval Germany, contributed accretions and modifications to the song: see Kommerell 1931 and here Chapter 3. 26. The variant is from Silesia: ‘And between the fathers of the two there was always trouble and strife’ (the original is in Kommerell 1931: 13 – 14). 27. See Ferna´ndez Taviel de Andrade 2004. For the motif in Greek literature, see Kost 1971: 385–6. See further Thompson 1955, vol. 5. T 381. 28. Kenney (1996: 12) thinks that the lovers’ social disparity was an original element of the story. 29. Hintermeier 1993: 98. 30. The numerous correspondences between the two letters do not imply that Leander’s influences Hero but emphasize the reciprocity of their love: see Rosati 1996: 22; Hardie 2002: 142. For Rimell (2006: 183), Hero and Leander are engaged in a joint writing venture. 31. Ἀkόntion means javelin. 32. See also Volk (1996), who thinks that Hero’s letter is conceivable even without Leander’s. 33. So Rosati 1996 ad loc. 34. More mythological references crowd Hero’s letter after the catalogue of Neptune’s loves: 148; 163; 175–6; 177–8. 35. Another parallel between the two epistles is the writer’s efforts to receive information about the beloved (see Rosati 1996: 176 on 19. 29 –30), and yet another is her imagined duration of his absence. As Farrell points out (1998), among the single epistles only Penelope’s and Hermione’s deal with a temporary separation. Hero, likewise, thinks that hers is temporary, though the reader knows better. On Penelope as a prototype for Hero’s waiting, see also Rimell 2006: 194. 36. See McKeown 1998: 345; 362. The chronology of Ovid’s poetry is a notorious problem, but it is safe to assume that the second edition (in three books instead of five) of the Amores is earlier than the double Heroides: see McKeown 1987: 78. 37. See Volk 1996. 38. See also Rosati 1996: 17 (for Hero); Hardie 2002: 138–9. 39. The line, however, might be an interpolation. Full discussion in Rosati (1996: 40 –2), whose penchant is to expunge it. 40. See Rosati 1996: 17. 41. On Hero’s irony, see Rosati 1996: 193.

Notes to Pages 29 – 33

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42. Her. 19. 208: tuto pectore, following Kenney 1996. This variant, though less supported by the manuscripts than toto pectore, fits the tone of the letter’s ending and matches tutus at 19. 92. Rosati (1996, on 19. 208) chooses toto pectore. 43. See also Volk 1996. 44. See Kenney 1996: 4. Rosati (1996: 23, and 237, on 19. 207–8) prefers to think that Hero’s letter goads Leander on, but remains open minded. He does not exclude the possibility that Leander is swimming while Hero is writing. Rimell (2006: 195) also suggests that Leander’s death might be contemporaneous with Hero’s writing. Himtermeier’s idea (1993: 87) that Leander’s last swim coincides with Hero’s dream of his death is not tenable because the dream occurs the night before she writes (see 19. 193). He would have been dead a whole day and another night before being discovered. 45. Rimell (2006: 161) notes that the heroines of the double epistles as a whole ‘do not share the same yearning for presence that typifies the men’s letters, but relish [. . .] the suspense teased out in frustrated, postponed or fantasized communion’. Maybe Hero does not enjoy the wait quite so much, but she is capable of enduring it. 46. See also Kenney 1996: 10, who pairs Ovid’s Leander with Virgil’s. Rosati (1996: 139, on 18. 195) considers felix audacia almost an oxymoron: Leander’s daring will not have a fortunate result. 47. For the etymology of Boreas ἀpὸ tῆ6 boῆ6, see Rosati 1996: 72 on obmurmurat. 48. On the equivalence of remembering and dreaming to vicarious sexual pleasures, see Hardie 2002: 138. 49. I think that the Homeric subtext is active and that Ovid plays with it. While Penelope has her dream in Odysseus’ presence, Hero has hers in Leander’s absence; while Penelope’s vision feels real (Od. 20. 90), Hero’s pleasure is non vera (Her. 19. 65); and while Penelope is indeed about to be reunited with Odysseus, Hero will be reunited with Leander only in death. 50. See also Rosati 1996: 24, n. 56. 51. Similarly L.C. Purser in Kenney 1996, on 19. 17– 18. See also Hintermeier 1993: 76. 52. Lines 23–4 have been condemned by Lehrs, followed, e.g., by Kenney 1996. This scholar finds verbera ‘oddly violent’ for swimming. Rosati (1996: 57), however, who defends the lines, points out that in Latin poetry this image is common for the action of oars and that the assimilation of swimming and navigating is a leitmotif in the letter. 53. Her. 18. 147. For a defense of the variant arte, see Rosati 1996: 115, ad loc., with further bibliography. 54. Kenney’s translation (1996), expanding on lenta: the word connotes pliancy, leisurely movement and persistence. 55. See Rosati 1996: 87– 8.

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Notes to Pages 34 – 41

56. See Rosati 1996: 95. 57. See already Her. 18. 58 (iactabam). 58. Leander also increases his credibility by admitting that his words might not have been quite the same as those he writes (75). 59. On the concettismo of these lines, see Rosati 1996, on 18. 85. 60. See Rosati 1996, on 18. 150; Kenney 1996, on 18. 150. Barchiesi (1999) also spots a mild critique of the tradition of catasterisms and divine loves of Hellenistic poetry. 61. See Rimell 2006: 188. 62. So Hintermeier 1993: 76 –80. 63. Kenney 1996 does not mark the reference but Rosati does (1996, on 18. 29 –30), though he gives privilege to the model of the abandoned heroine looking at the sea and waiting for her lover in vain (Ariadne at Her. 10. 49) or looking at the place where her absent love is (Scylla at Met. 8. 42 –3). Leander, though, is not waiting for Hero but eager to go to her, like Odysseus to Ithaca. I think that the Homeric subtext is the most prominent. 64. See also Her. 18. 123– 8, discussed in Chapter 2. 65. For Rosati (1996: 138, on 191), the syntax may reflect the ambivalence of the intentions Leander fears Hero might attribute to him. 66. See Rosati 1996: 136, on 18. 189–90. 67. See Rosati 1996: 75 on 18. 51 –2. 68. See Barchiesi 1999. 69. Farrell (1998) argues that in the single Heroides the writers speak from the heart. The same is true for Leander. His apologies to Hero should be taken not as empty excuses but as expressions of real frustration. 70. The Christian mythographer Fulgentius will use libido alongside amor in his explication of the tale (Mythologiae 3. 4, discussed in Chapter 3). 71. Seneca approvingly quotes Panaetius’ recommendation to avoid love, and extends it to the other passions (Ep. 19. 116. 5–6). He also condemns love for one’s own wife and love for the wife of another man as equally bad (Ep. 8. 74. 2; see also Jerome, Against Jovinianus 1. 49, reporting a similar view from Seneca’s lost treatise on marriage). However, Seneca appreciates this passion’s disinterestedness: ‘Does anyone love for the sake of riches? Or ambition, or glory?’ (Ep. 1. 9. 11). 72. See Chapter 2. 73. The reader of Statius will also remember Ovid’s treatment of Atalanta’s story in the Metamorphoses (10. 575– 680), where she falls in love with Hippomenes, making his job easier. 74. On Stella’s portrayal as an elegiac poet in love, see especially Horstmann 2004: 81; 83; 87. See also Pederzani 1995: 52 –3. 75. In Statius, though, Cupid is more compassionate. Ausonius’ debts to Statius are numerous and often noted. Specifically on Cupid’s speech, see Filosini 2014: 169–70 and her commentary.

Notes to Pages 41 – 49

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76. The epithet Sestias for Hero is rare, and might echo Ausonius’ Sestiaca [. . . ] puella, though it appears also in Statius Thebaid 6. 574. See Filosini 2014: 189, on 71. 77. The one exception is Seneca, if he refers to the tale. 78. See Portalupi 1979. 79. See Portalupi 1979. 80. On modern scholars faulting Hero’s letter, see note 44 above (further literature can be found in the authors mentioned there); on medieval interpreters, see Chapter 3. 81. Horace’s commentator Pomponius Porphyrio (third century?), however, is undecided about the meaning of ‘the neighbouring towers’: those ‘of Hero and Leander’ or ‘of the cities themselves’ (Ad ep. I 3. 4, in Fa¨rber 1961). He postulates the possibility that Leander’s home had a tower, which is conceivable but not relevant to the legend. 82. Rimell 2006: 188. 83. Manilius’ villa would have appealed to Epicurus (Silvae 1. 3. 90– 4). 84. See Newlands 1988. Laguna-Mariscal (1996) takes Statius’ praise of Vopiscus’ Epicureanism at face value. 85. On these details and their ironic significance, see Newlands 1988: 97, 99 –100. 86. See Newlands 1988: 99. 87. See also Ferna´ndez Taviel de Andrade 1996: 116. Fronto focuses on Hero, but only on one (alleged) aspect – and a negative one – of her behaviour. 88. See Cipriani 2006: 75 and here, Introduction. 89. See Chapter 3 and Ferna´ndez Taviel de Andrade 1996. 90. See Mehl 1931; Auberger 1996; Handy 2008: 108–9. The Romans even practised choreographic swimming (see Mariscalco 1999: 155, n. 78), of which the aquatic mime of Leander (see below) could be an example. 91. Rosati (1996: 95, on 18. 95) cites Horace’s passage in connection with Leander’s efforts to please Hero by swimming. 92. Another disrespectful specimen is a relief from Tunis, discussed below. 93. For more such wordplay in Vespa’s poem, see Milazzo 1983. 94. On iconographical representations of the legend see Sittig 1912; Malten 1950; Brommer 1976; and especially Kemp-Lindemann 1977 and Kossatz-Deissmann 1997. The last article offers a caption of every extant representation. A more selective but detailed analysis of images is in Cipriani 2006: 182–207. On theatrical transpositions, see especially Bajard 2002. 95. See Kemp-Lindemann 1977, followed by Bajard 2002: 153. For Sittig (1912: 912), figurative renderings of the tale generally would stem from the lost Hellenistic poem. 96. #7 in Kossatz-Deissmann 1997. A slow and unhelpful bureaucracy is responsible for my failure to include photographs of the paintings. 97. See Cipriani 2006: 205.

238

Notes to Pages 49 – 54

98. See Cipriani 2006: 198, and 190– 207 for further aspects of the paintings pointing to Ovid’s influence. See also Solimano 1966. Already Rohde (1914: 135–6) saw that the Pompeian paintings would hardly be conceivable without poetic treatments of the legend. 99. Martial’s invention might have a (very remote) origin in Her. 18. 120: ‘When I come there I think I am a swimmer, when I return, a shipwrecked’. See Rosati 1996: 105 ad loc. 100. Kossatz-Deissmann 1997 is sceptical, but Bajard thinks that Martial’s ekphrasis bears witness to the theme’s popularity in iconography (2002: 153). A sculpted Leander, though the product of the imagination, appears in the medieval Greek romance Belthandros and Chrysantza, where the hero, wandering around the ‘castle of love’, sees a Leander of carved stone: see Rohde 1914: 137, n. 2; Kost 1971: 71 and below, Chapter 4. 101. Mehl (1931) mentions only a diver and a Roman copy of a third-century BC statue (now at the Vatican Museums) that represents the swimming Orontes or rather his upper body, with outstretched arms to suggest the movement. 102. See Bajard 2002: 168. 103. On the second point, see Cipriani 2006: 82. See also Portalupi 1979; Bajard 2002: 154, n. 15. 104. See Bajard 2002. 105. See McKeown 1987: 34; Bajard (2002: 155) adds the Metamorphoses. On Tristia 2. 519 see especially Ingleheart 2008, and on the Heroides as scripts for dances, Hintermeier 1993: 180–89. 106. For the latter point, see Portalupi 1979: 84 –5. 107. On mimes illustrating the story, see Macrobius Sat. 5. 17. 4; Bajard 2002: 155; Panayotakis 2008. 108. #14 in Kossatz-Deissmann 1997. ˜ o 1966: 109. Line 86 of the poem’s second part. The text is in Moya de Ban 253. 110. So Kossatz-Deissmann 1997. 111. See Solimano 1966. 112. Additional evidence of this is a relief from Nevers (#13 in KassatzDeissmann 1997), where Leander is as agile in the water as the dolphin that follows him. Two great swimmers are paired. 113. See Bajard 2002: 155. 114. It is unclear whether the youth ‘who swims in the sea’ points to actual enactment of Leander’s swim or is simply the object of Hero’s waiting. The former scenario would require two performers, which is uncommon for the period, or Hero’s anxious wait and Leander’s swim would have to be staged sequentially. 115. See Hall 2008. 116. Dido’s love is listed only as a possible subject, but there is evidence that it was danced. See Panayotakis 2008.

Notes to Pages 54 – 60 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124. 125. 126.

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So Knaack 1898: 66. See Introduction. #25 in Kossatz-Deissmann 1997. For the painting (#5 in Kossatz-Deissmann 1997), see Elsner 2007: 31. Differently Scioli 2015: 126– 7. Possibly this is intimated by context (Fronto is dissuading Marcus Aurelius from dangerously wearing letter writing), but we are on speculative grounds. See Malcovati 1947: xiii. See Rohde 1914: 134 n. Histories 5. 12. See further Chapter 4. See also Kemp-Lindemann 1977: 203; Kossatz-Deissmann 1997: 622. Kemp-Lindemann (1977: 203) and Kossatz-Deissmann (1997: 622) are correct to point out that even in Musaeus, Leander’s death receives little attention compared to his swimming, but, as we shall see, there is a description of it as well as of Hero’s and the poem ends with the word ‘death’, marking its thematic importance.

CHAPTER 2 MUSAEUS’ HERO AND LEANDER, OR ‘LOVE AGAINST THE WORLD’ 1. Cameron (2007) thinks that most authors of classicizing and mythological poems were Christian (though he does not deal with Musaeus and, in a previous essay [2002: 53], he argues the opposite for him as for other poets) and Gelzer (1967: 136; 1975) has no doubt that Musaeus was. For criticism, see Kost 1971 passim. The ‘blessed womb’ of Hero’s mother (138) has parallels in classical literature; the prohibition of marrying a stranger (177–8) echoes Nausicaa’s words to Odysseus (Od. 6. 276– 9); and the fact that Musaeus used Nonnus’ Paraphrase of Saint John simply demonstrates his admiration for his teacher and his knowledge of Christian literature. Villarrubia (2000: 398–9) is critical of Musaeus’ alleged Christianity, though he remains open. Shorrock (2011) re-focuses the issue by proposing to call those poets who treat classical subjects, such as Musaeus, ‘poets of the Muses’, and by claiming that we cannot recover their personal beliefs from their poetry. 2. A dissenting critic is D’Ippolito 1988, who thinks that the poem in the Berlin papyrus was used by Musaeus but not by Ovid: see Introduction. 3. Exceptions are Rosati 1996: 13, n.13 (with more references) and Eleuteri 2014: 167. Shorrock (2011, Chapter 1) agrees that the debt Greek poets owe to Latin ones is greater than many scholars are ready to admit, but he does not deal with Musaeus. 4. This is debated: see Fisher 2011, who is sceptical. 5. So tentatively Rosati 1996: 14.

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Notes to Pages 60 – 66

6. Kost 1971. 7. See Kost 1971: 122. The text is Livrea-Eleuteri 1982. 8. See Braden 1978: 58– 9. ‘Wrath’ is the first word of the Iliad and ‘Man’ the first one of the Odyssey. 9. Colluthus’ slightly later epic The Rapt of Helen, which also has an erotic subject, does not begin with a typically epic invocation but by summoning the nymphs of Troy. 10. Alternatively, it is the lamp that toils in the night, but I think that ἄ1ulon, ‘toil’, better refers to love’s battles. Musaeus uses ἀ1ul1ύ1in for Leander’s battle to win Hero over with words (197) and ἀέuloy6 in the erotic sense (230). 11. See Hopkinson 1994: 142. 12. See Augustine De civitate Dei 21. 6 with Marcovich 1971. 13. Kost (1971: 120– 1) notes that this plurality of subjects is characteristic of later epic. 14. A large number of passages relating to light and darkness is in Kost 1971: 33. ¨ nberger 1987: 392. 15. See briefly Scho 16. The short o in nύxion is lengthened by the two consonants that follow it. 17. Vesper’s appearance in the fragment on the Rylands papyrus (5) might suggest Musaeus’ knowledge of that poem. 18. Gelzer’s observation (1975: 320) that the poem ends with daylight and Villarrubia’s contention that dawn for the first time sees the lovers united when they die (2000: 397) are correct in principle, but Musaeus obliterates the revealing power of the morning light. 19. Hopkinson 1994: 157. He suggests that ῥodo1idέa dάktyla (‘rosy fingers’) may allude to the Homeric ῥododάktylo6 ᾽Eώ6 (‘rosy-fingered Dawn’). Hero replaces Eos, which sinks at 110 (though Eos here means day, not dawn). See also Kost 1971: 308. 20. The contrast between night bringing rest to everyone except the protagonist is a common motif in Greek literature since Homer. Kost (1971: 436–7) lists several examples and notes that Musaeus does not expand on the motif by describing the calmness of nature, as does, for instance, Apollonius of Rhodes, but remains close to Homer by mentioning only the sleep of humans. I think that an additional reason for Musaeus’ choice, besides his fondness for imitating Homer, is that the sea, the main component of the landscape, is not quiet. See below. 21. The epithet ‘bringer of light’ is a familiar modifier of Dawn: see, e.g. Nonnus 15. 280 and 47. 331. More instances in Kost 1971: 308. See also Homer Iliad 11. 1; 19. 1. On the motif of love’s fire in Musaeus, see Spatafora 2007: 159–64. 22. See Od. 5. 271–4 (with the addition of the Pleiades). 23. See Schwabe’s comment in Kost 1971: 520. 24. See Kost 1971: 32– 3. 25. Both lines, and they alone in the prologue, contain an imperative.

Notes to Pages 66 – 69 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

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See Braden 1978: 63. See Kost 1971: 153. See Mastrocinque 2007. See Marcovich 1971. See also Marcovich 1971. On the power of lamps to awaken the dead, see Cumont 1949: 49–51. The use of sbέnnymi (‘I put out’) with the meaning ‘to die’ is not as common as one might think (at least a speaker of Italian, where spegnersi is as widespread a euphemism for dying as ‘to pass away’ in English). The Liddell Scott Jones gives as only reference AP 7. 20. 1, in an unattributed epitaph for Sophocles. See also Heliodorus 4. 19. 8. Alternative segmentations have been proposed. See, e.g, Norwood 1950; ¨ nberger 1978 (attempting to prove Kost 1971: 24; Gelzer 1975: 308; Scho that Musaeus planned the structure of his poem with great sophistication). The organization of H&L matches the tendency of ancient epic to use day and night as markers of narrative units. Part one covers one day and evening; part two one night; part three one night. ¨ nberger 1978. So Kost 1971: 25, followed by Scho See Kenney 1996, on 18. 89 –90. For a fuller list of parallels, see especially Knaack 1898 and Kost 1971, passim. A possible reason for Ovid’s omission is in Kenney 1996: 5 and on 18. 55 –104: the poet gives prominence to the first rendezvous instead. So, for instance, Knaack 1898: 49 –50; Gelzer 1975: 311–12. But see ¨ nberger 1978. For Villarrubia (2000: 375) the shortness of the last Scho part suggests precipitation, a sentiment of inevitability. See Kost 1971: 117–18; Hopkinson 1994: 138; Whitmarsh 2005: 603. In Whitmarsh’s plausible reconstruction (2005: 600), the girl’s name always comes first in the novels’ titles except for Heliodorus. In Chariton it appears alone. Gelzer (1975: 309) correctly notes this exclusiveness. Even if we choose Dilthey’s emendation jύnvs1n (‘he united’) for Musaeus’ passage, the correspondence with Chariton holds. The parallel is often noted. Villarrubia (2000: 378) adds that the dedication of the festival to Aphrodite and Adonis is a foreshadowing of the protagonists’ tragic death. Aphrodite cannot die from love because she is a goddess, but the human Hero will. The phrase is Callimachean (fr. 67. 8; Kost 1971: 164) but Musaeus inflates it. See Braden 1978: 67. Kost (1971: 33) further notes that the lovers’ togetherness in actions and decisions is emphasized repeatedly. This spells out their identical love, again in a novelistic fashion. For the scholarship on Musaeus’ indebtedness to the novels and to Achilles Tatius’ in particular, see Kost 1971: 29–30 and passim; Morales: ¨ mmler 2012. 1999; Du

242

Notes to Pages 69 – 72

45. These instructions come from Clitophon’s cousin (1. 10) and from his servant (2. 4. 4). The borrowing has long been noted: see the previous note. 46. Achilles Tatius 2. 10. 3. When earlier Clitophon screws up his courage to call Leucippe ‘mistress’, he is pale, blushes, is agitated and, initially, does not know what to say (2. 6. 1 –2). 47. Intentional repetitiveness is a hallmark of Musaeus’ style overall, as many have noted (Kost 1971, passim; Braden 1978, passim; Hopkinson 1994, passim). 48. See Kost 1971: 293. 49. See also Nonnus 26. 75. Both references are in Kost 1971: 311. 50. We are reminded of episodes in the Odyssey (21. 361 and 401) in which the ‘overweening youths’ make unpleasant but meaningless comments on members of Odysseus’ household. 51. See also Kost 1971: 272 – 3. Hero’s anonymous admirer has the unromantic detachment and the cold eye of a connoisseur of women, since he takes care to say that he is familiar with beauty contests (74 –5), before expressing his appreciation for this woman’s incomparable charms. ¨ mmel 2012: 440, n. 156. 52. See Du 53. See also Kost 1971: 289. It is not immediately clear whether Clitophon is ‘ashamed of being caught’ staring at Leucippe or by love. Musaeus chose the second reading (see Kost 1971: 290–1, who thinks that the novelist meant the same). Even if the first is intended, Clitophon still backpedals. ¨ mmel (2012: 424, n. 53) points out that Clitophon’s ‘shameless gaze 54. Du wins the battle’. But the battle is there. 55. The extent of Nonnus’ presence in the seduction scene of H&L is debated. Hopkinson (1994: 138) notes that the use of dialogue in first meetings of lovers is not in Nonnus. Kost (1971: 26 – 9) opposes Castiglioni’s view that Musaeus followed a Nonnian seduction scene in his, objecting that Nonnus has no love story of the Hero and Leander kind but, rather, unequal pursuits. He also notes that there are no pairs of speeches in Nonnus’ seduction scenes. Nonetheless, the description of Leander’s silent advances matches passages in Nonnus. Merone calls the exchange of glances between Leander and Hero ‘Nonnian’ (1952: 139). 56. See Iliad 3. 396, with Osborne 2011: 187, n. 7; see also, e.g., Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 181; Euripides Medea 30; AP 5. 132; Ovid Amores 1. 5. 9 –10; 1. 4; Petronius 126. 17. The neck’s charm is also in the Song of Solomon 6. 57. Erotic necks that attract a lover’s gaze in Nonnus are, e.g., at 1. 531; 4. 138; 4. 146; 7. 262; 15. 232; 16. 18; 34. 309; 42. 74; 42. 424. 58. See Kost 1971: 227. There might be an allusion also to Callirhoe’s beauty in the mention of Hero’s gleam-darting face (56), but her portrait comes closest to Leucippe’s. In Xenophon and Heliodorus, the main glories of the heroine’s beauty are hairdo and dress. Neither one is stressed by Musaeus, whereas the colour of Hero’s skin, white and

Notes to Pages 72 – 82

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

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rosy like Leucippe’s, is forefront. Hero outdoes Leucippe (or Musaeus, as often, overwrites): in addition to boasting a white face with blushing cheekbones, she has limbs like a ‘meadow of roses’ (60). See Kost 1971: 326. On Leander’s cunning in contrast to Clitophon’s social ineptitude, see also Morales 1999. See also De Temmerman 2014: 173–4. See Hopkinson 1994, on 243– 4. See Rosati 1996: 17 and above, Chapter 1. See Kost 1971: 33. I cannot agree with Norwood (1950: 12) that the storm has ‘a very minor place’ in the narrative. It takes up few lines but it incubates since Leander’s first swim. See Chapter 1. Alternatively, the list of stars was in the Hellenistic poem (if Ovid and Musaeus used the same one), in which case I am inclined to think that it is Ovid who changed them. But either way Musaeus pairs Leander with Odysseus. For different attitudes to swimming in Greece and Rome, see especially Auberger 1996. Differently Norwood (1950: 13), who calls Leander ‘reckless’, and Villarrubia (2000: 397), for whom his behaviour borders on hubris. But the sympathetic apostrophe, the epithet ‘strong hearted’ and the blame levelled on the lamp (304) challenge these negative judgements. See also Kost 1971: 423. See Paduano 1994: 19. More expressions of this idea are in Kost 1971: 416. A novelistic parallel is Heliodorus (2. 4. 1), where the lovers call Delphi their home because this is where they have met. See Kenney 1996, on 18. 207–8. On the harbour as erotic metaphor, see also Murgatroyd 1995: 16; 17; 23 (referencing also Musaeus 212– 15). See Kost 1971: 416, followed by Rosati 1996, on 18. 123. For the Homeric parallels (Od. 5. 42 and 115) see especially Gelzer 1968: 31. ‘Nourished by Zeus’ is an epithet of Homeric kings. See, in connection to Musaeus, Kost 1971: 181. The adjective could refer to Hero’s extraordinary beauty but also to her status: see Kost 1971: 275. See Knaack 1898. See also Gagua 1985. See Hopkinson 1994: 137; Kenney 1996: 13–14 and 1998. Some scholars ¨ nberger 1987: 391, with further references) think that (for instance Scho Hero’s investiture does not require a renunciation of marriage; but lines 126 and 180 suggest otherwise. Why would her parents be against marriage as such? See Malten 1950; Solimano 1966; Kost 1971: 18 –19, and more generally Malcovati 1947: 7, n. 6. There is scanty evidence for virgin priestesses of

244

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96.

97. 98.

99.

Notes to Pages 82 – 88 Aphrodite: Pausanias 2. 10. 4 (Morales [1999: 59] thinks that this account does not prove their existence, but Pausanias does mention a ‘virgin holding office for a year’); Orphic Hymns 55, 24 –6 (virgins celebrating Aphrodite and Adonis all year). This is Knaack’s thesis (1898). See also Gagua 1985. See Kost 1971: 181; Rosati 1996: 21. See also Kost 1971: 181 and tentatively Rosati 1996: 19, n. 34 and on 18. 13 –14. See Kost 1971: 34; Morales 1999: 59. Hero’s contentment, however, does not imply that she chose her position but only that she accepts it gladly. Otherwise Rosati 1996: 19, n. 33. The fact that she lives in an ‘ancestral’ tower (32: ἀpὸ progόnvn: probably not ‘parents’ but ‘ancestors’, though see Villarrubia 2000: 376) may suggest that she is following a family custom: see Kost 1971: 183 – 4. Paduano (1994) correctly notes that the representation of Hero’s conflict does not even convey a deeply felt psychic censorship of erotic passion. Kenney (1998) puts his finger on Hero’s extravagant behaviour. A few specimens are given in the Epilogue. For a medieval narrative that already develops the conflict, see Chapter 3. Asclepiades might play with the story in AP 5. 209 (see Ga¨rtner 2009b) but it is not his focus. Parallels and discussion in Kost 1971: 36 –43. ¨ schele 2014. Aristaenetus 1. 10. The translation is Bing and Ho One exception is Orsini 1968, xxiv. Some critics prefer to think that Musaeus had Christian ritual or literature in mind for the scene of anointment. The text is in Kenney 1996: 9. One partial exception is Od. 4. 252, where Helen washes and anoints the disguised Odysseus. But this is not a bathing scene properly speaking and its female protagonist is of course an unconventional woman. So Kenney 1996, on 18. 103–4. This scholar references Od. 8. 424–37 and 19. 317–20 as parallels. Though in Ovid Leander is naked when he lands, the text does not mention his nakedness. The same is true for Musaeus’ narrative. Knaack (1898: 61) assumes that Leander is wearing the clothes he tied around his head (252). If so, who strips the panting youth? Hero? Braden (1978: 76), speaks of a ‘fairly active discrimination’ on Musaeus’ part. This parallel has not been noted, but I think it is almost certain that Musaeus has used Apollonius here as elsewhere: see especially 160, echoing Argonautica 3. 422–3 (Kost 1971: 356; Hopkinson 1994, ad loc). Morros Mestres (2013: 241) sees a reference to Mary Magdalen. The original text is Chiodo 1995.

Notes to Pages 88 – 92

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100. The Aldine edition, which Tasso probably used, reads ἔnn1p1 (‘she spoke’) and – a sign of unease with the Greek? – softens wilήnora6, ‘man-loving’, rendering the phrase with blanda emisit verba (‘she uttered caressing words’). The variant and its interpretation misled several translators. Tasso chose to give the scene a stronger colouring, but he did it ‘not by energizing the verb but by surrounding it with kisses’ (Braden 1978: 97). When Hero’s shriek became known, it continued to pose problems of decorum: see Braden 1978: 85 – 6; 108; 112; 118. A telling example is Marot’s French translation: ‘And then she opened her ruby mouth, talking to her husband’ (478 – 9, in Guiffrey 1969). The detail of the red lips, absent from the original, adds to this Hero’s lady-like elegance. 101. See Morros Mestres 2013: 243. 102. The original text is Riquer et al. 1957. On Bosca´n’s moralization of the tale see Morros Mestres 2013. Unlike this scholar, though, I would not trace back the moralizing approach to Musaeus. 103. See Morales 1999. 104. Musaeus’ sympathy emerges especially from the heroic epithets he gives Leander and from his attacks on the elements that produced the catastrophe (13; 304; 329). 105. See Knaack 1898: 67, n. 2; Kost 1971: 449 – 50; Mynors 1990, on 3. 259. 106. The parallel has been suggested but purely for diction by Kost 1971: 450 and Villarrubia 2000: 391. 107. See Hintermeier 1993: 101. 108. See Rosati 1996, on 18. 32; 18. 216; 19. 151–2. 109. See Kenney 1996: 15 and Murdoch 1977 respectively. Catullus’ poem is 72 (7–8). 110. Ga¨rtner (2009a) considers the lovers perfectly innocent. 111. I wholeheartedly agree with Rudd (1981) on the existence of romantic love in antiquity. The novels are another case in point. Chariton’s protagonist would travel even to the sky to look for his beloved, and the athletic exploits of Theagenes under the influence of his passion conjure up the jousting of knights incited by their love. 112. On Musaeus’ hexameter see Nardelli 1985, especially her table on p. 154. 113. Merone’s judgement (1952: 144) that the last two lines are superfluous and ruin the effect of Hero’s tragic leap can be dismissed. Whatever our taste might be, Musaeus intended them to sound a last and meaningful note. 114. See Paduano 1994. I elaborate on some of this scholar’s insights. 115. A thought along these lines appears in connection with the wind putting out ‘the life and the love of much-suffering Leander’ (330), but the end of poem jarringly clashes with this statement.

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Notes to Pages 92 – 99

116. Orsini’s translation (1968) makes this explicit: Et ils jouirent l’un de l’autre, e´ternellement, jusque dans l’abıˆme de la mort. 117. See the list of parallels in Kost 1971: 546. Referencing Norden, this scholar thinks that the motif has its roots in tragedy (Euripides Alcestis 363– 4). 118. The original text of both translations cited here is in Eleuteri 2010: 377 and 385. 119. The ordering of the last 15 lines of H&L is highly uncertain. I follow Livrea-Eleuteri 1982. The same sequence is in Kost 1971, whereas Gelzer 1975 offers a different reconstruction. ¨ nberger 1987: 395. For Somville (2000), this eternizing of 120. See also Scho love gives a heroic stature to the protagonists and their story. 121. See Gelzer 1975, partially and dubitatively endorsed by Lamberton 1989, Chapter 4. 122. See Gelzer 1975: 319. 123. See Lamberton 1989: 157–61, followed by Morales 1999. 124. Hippolytus of Rome, Refutation of All Heresies 5. 14. 125. See, e.g., Morales 1999: 61. 126. On Style 100–1, with Roilos 2005: 116. 127. The contrast with Prudentius is in Lamberton 1989: 157–61 and Morales 1999: 61. 128. See Gelzer 1975. 129. So Hermias 147. 26 –9 (text in Lucarini and Moreschini 2012), followed by Gelzer 1975: 322. 130. See Kenney 1998. 131. See Kost 1971: 230. Proclus also offers a parallel (see Kost 1971: 231), but he should not be cited, as in Gelzer (see also 1967: 147), as Musaeus’ unquestionable and only source. 132. Curiously Gelzer mentions Achilles Tatius for the topos of love at first sight but only Plato as the model for Leander’s psychomachy and for the motif of the eye as love’s vector (1975: 357, n.). 133. Hermias’ reading of Plato’s passage does not strengthen the case for an allegorical interpretation of Musaeus. The Neoplatonic philosopher takes the union to mean a transcendence of the sensorial world by means of beauty for the philosophically minded (the one in whom the good horse prevails), and, for his antithesis, a consorting with that world, which he thinks is the intelligible realm, ‘through touching it and being in its company’ (202. 3– 203. 2). Leander resembles the non-philosophically minded person. 134. A Neoplatonic allegory of the novel with Chariclea as the Soul has been offered by Philip the Philosopher (date unknown, possibly the twelfth century; testimony 13. 130–1 Colonna 1938). See Lamberton 1989: 148, 152– 7; Hunter 2005; Roilos 2005: 130–3. 135. See the previous note.

Notes to Pages 101 – 118

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CHAPTER 3 LUSTFUL FORNICATORS OR COURTLY LOVERS? THE LEGEND IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN LITERATURE 1. The originals of Fulgentius, of Luxorius’ poem and of the Vatican Mythographers translated below are in Fa¨rber 1961: 68 –70, 72, 74 –6. 2. This is Fulgentius’ normal practice: see Whitbread 1971, Introduction; Demats: 1973: 55. A notable exception is the tale of Psyche, which Fulgentius narrates at length (3. 6). As a compatriot of Apuleius, he is familiar with the story and flaunts his knowledge. 3. See Whitbread 1971: 19. 4. The poem, of uncertain attribution, is not in Rosenblum’s collection of Luxorius (1961). 5. Specifically for Africa, see Rosenblum 1961: 33, n. 32. 6. See Malten 1950: 78; Villarrubia 2000: 367. 7. The same is true for the Second Vatican Mythographer: ‘And when his body was brought to the girl, she hurled herself into the sea’ (2. 218). There is no moral capping, though this text frequently offers one (see Pepin 2008: 4 and 6). 8. Lines 59 –70, translation Traill 1986, modified. The text is his. 9. See Triall 1986; Montiglio 2016: 2 –4. 10. From an invented letter inspired by the Tristia, Florus Ovidio, carmen 97. 45 –56 (ed. Tilliette 1998). The quoted lines are 55 –6 (also in Demats 1973: 116). On Baudri’s Ovidianism see, recently, Desmond 2014: 163. 11. Carmen 154. 1139– 242, ed. Tilliette 2002. The poem breaks off. 12. See Ga¨rtner 2009a. 13. Hero, 3 –6 [1788, original in Knaupp 1992–3, vol. 1: 53 –6). See Montiglio 2016: 7. 14. See Tilliette 2002: 260, n. 328. 15. See Tilliette 1996: 83 –5; 2002: 260, n. 328. 16. Tilliette 2002: 260, n. 330. 17. See Tilliette 1996. 18. See also Tilliette 2002: 259, n. 319. This scholar suggests a possible allusion to the Gospel episode of the forgiven sinner (Luke 7: 38). See also Morros Mestres 2013: 221. 19. On the author and his cultural environment, see Munari 1955: 20– 7. The text is his. 20. The interested reader is referred to Munari’s commentary (1955). 21. Lines 22111–29. A modern French translation is in Baumgartner et Vielliard 1998, which also contains the original. 22. See Croizy-Naquet 1998. 23. See Raimon Jordan poem VIII (in Asperti 1990: 343), where, curiously, the male speaker compares his love to Hero’s, not Leander’s; Arnaud de Mareuil Salut III, l. 150 (in Bec 1961: 108), featuring Leander alongside Paris, Pyramus and Flore. By the thirteenth century the tale was so familiar in Occitania that it could be narrated for entertainment on

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24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Notes to Pages 118 – 125 special occasions, as illustrated in the Romance de Flamenca: see Puerto Benito 2008: 186. A courtly mention in langue d’oil is in the Romance d’Yder, where the couple, especially Hero, exemplifies fidelity in love: see Puerto Benito 2008: 181. The text is Barbieri 2005 and 2007, cited by letter number and paragraph. My discussion is heavily indebted to this scholar’s. A brief treatment of the Epistres as a whole is in Desmond 2014: 169. Other changes are due to the translator’s misunderstanding of the text. For those I refer to Barbieri’s commentary and introduction (2005). Hero’s dream of a dead dolphin disappears (Barbieri 2005: 278, n. 81). She happens to be afraid of losing her lover, by which she means to another woman (14. 8). The author, however, does not fully succeed in erasing the drowning, for Leander does dwell at some length on the prospect of his death at sea (13. 11). See Barbieri 2005: 265, n. 1. One exception is 14. 4, but even there it is not the lamp that is mentioned but ‘lights’. See Barbieri 2005 passim. See Barbieri 2005: 276, n. 73. See Barbieri 2005: 12– 13. See Demats 1973: 119 and Hexter 1986, passim, on the three kinds of love, legitimus, stultus, illicitus. Illegitimate love can be tripartite, stultus, incestus (‘unchaste’) and furiosus. See Hexter 1986: 160; van Buuren 1994: 152. The text is in Hexter 1986: 289–90. See Lechat 2002. Text De Boer 1920 (my emphasis). Demats (1973: 68 –9) cites the episode of the Danaids in Book 2 as another example of narrative exuberance. Demats (1973: 68 –9) notes the mixture of tones. Demats 1973: 77. The detail that Leander and Hero have been sleepless for seven nights appears only later (4. 3229; 3478) and apart from the duration of the storm. The French poet found a model for his serial narrative in Ovid’s account of the deaths of Ceyx and Alcyone, but there the transition from his act to hers is marked by a ‘meanwhile’ (Metamorphoses 11. 573). Ferna´ndez Taviel de Andrade briefly touches upon the misogyny of the allegory (1996: 123). Already Isidorus of Seville had derived mare from amarum: ‘the sea (mare) is thus called because its waters are bitter (amarae)’ (Origines 13. 14. 1). See Chapter 2. The poem elaborates on Fulgentius’ explanation of Leander’s nakedness. The essential details of the narrative and of the two allegorical explanations reappear in the prose version of Ovid moralized (c.1466). Pierre Bersuire in the earlier Ovidius moralizatus (fourteenth century) likewise contains the two allegories, but adds a third: Leander is Christ who dies for the sake of the human soul, while Hero, the good

Notes to Pages 125 – 130

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

62.

63. 64.

65.

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clergyman, drowns for him. Readers are referred to the editions of De Boer (1954: 150–2) and Ghisalberti (1933: 117– 18) respectively. See Cerquiglini-Toulet 2001: 17. See Hoepffner 1908: lxxix–lxxx. The translation is Palmer 1988, adapted. The original is from the same book. Machaut might have borrowed this detail from Servius, Commentary on the Georgics 3. 258: ‘She threw herself from the tower’. See Hoepffner 1908: lxxxi. Kelly 2014: 158. Ferna´ndez Taviel de Andrade (1996: 125) disregards this distinction, on which see Kelly 2014: 3 and passim. The speaking ‘I’, though, identifies himself as author: see Lechat 2005: 81 –9. An autobiographical reading is defended by Leech-Wilkinson 1998. See, however, Cerquiglini-Toulet 2001: 95 –7; Kelley 2014: 3. See Cerquiglini-Toulet 2001: 27. The Book of the True Poem 6362– 70 and 6402 –8 (in Imbs 1999). The translation is Palmer in Leech-Wilkinson 1998. See also Letter 37. Good love is the term preferred by Kelly 2014. See Kelly 2014: 140–1. The Book of the True Poem 6558 –64. Letter 39. See also 6446–7. So for Lancelot and Guinevere (6409–14) and for the chatelaine de Vergi and her lover (6423–30). Manuscript A (c.1370–1377), in Leech-Wilkinson 1998: xci and 446 (It is unfortunate that an intricate bureaucracy discouraged me from seeking permission to print the image). On Machaut’s supervising the production of his books, see further Lechat 2005: 80–1, with bibliography. Caraffi (1997: 512) privileges Ovid moralized. On Evrart de Conty and Jacques Legrand, see below. Froissart narrates Leander’s swim and death briefly in Le joli Buisson de Jonece (3192–3207, text in Fourrier 1975), where, in the wake of Machaut, the lover illustrates desire. The poet alludes to the tale two more times: see Heinrichs 1990: 131, 181–3, and further below. On Christine’s attraction to love’s tragedy, see Roux 2006: 112–13; Margolis 2011: 37. On the predominantly gloomy vision of love in her poetry, see also T. Adams 2002. The text is Solente 1959–66. On Christine’s uses of the myth of Alcyone and Ceyx, see Kellogg 1998. She must have been particularly sensitive to the passion that bound that couple (Ovid Metamorphoses 11. 445. An excellent recent reading is Rudd 2008). An English translation of the Debate is in Altmann and Palmer 2006. In her most famous poem, seulete sui et seulete vueil estre (‘I am alone and

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66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82.

83. 84.

85. 86.

Notes to Pages 130 – 140 alone I want to be’), Christine calls her husband douz ami (‘sweet friend’, l. 2) and again ami in the refrain. On Christine’s husband as her lover, see Brink 2002: 148, who also notes, more broadly, that Christine replies to the decline of chivalric values in her time by extolling love in the context of marriage. See also Margolis 2011: 44. Translation Brown-Grant 1999a. Roy 1886, III, VI, ll. 9–10, p. 215. Brink 2002: 144–5 connects the two texts. Roy 1886, I 3. See Margolis 2011: 37. Margolis 2011: 38. See Parussa 1999: 14 –15. The edition is hers, text n. 42, 259–60. A translation into modern French is Basso 2008. See Parussa 1999: 17. Gloss 82 in Parussa 1999: 17. The notion that stories of love give pleasure is shared by Christine’s poetry: see T. Adams 2002. I leave out the allegory because it has no tie with the tale, which is mysteriously taken to illustrate the commandment ‘thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour’. See Chance 2002: 205, n. 5 with further bibliography. On the excessiveness of the couple’s love in the Epistle, see Brown-Grant 1999b: 66. See Text 47; Brown-Grant 1999b: 64–78; Cerquiglini-Toulet in Basso 2008: 15 –16. Translation Altmann and Palmer 2006. The original is in Altmann 1998. The manuscripts are Harley 4431, f. 114 v. and Bodmer f. 65 r. (Cerquiglini-Toulet 2008: 31). The text is easily available in a Penguin edition with English translation (Brown-Grant 1999a), which I quote with occasional changes. A modern French translation is Hicks and Moreau 1986; an Italian version accompanied by the original is Caraffi 1997. The original is in Beltran 1986: 167. The text is Guichard-Tesson and Roy 1993: 432. The other references are to the same page except when noted. On Hero and Leander as examples of sexual love in this work, see Kelly 2014: 27. See also Heinrichs 1990: 86. This claim, though, is in a different context (Guichard-Tesson and Roy 1993: 717). Contrast also Hero’s heightened impatience in the accessus to Heroides 19 (above) and in Filippo Ceffi’s prologue to his 1325 translation of them (Zaggia 2009: 600): Hero ‘instantly replied with her letter, urging him with sweet and loving words to come quickly’. Christine treats Boccaccio’s novellas in a similar way, erasing misogynous elements: see Caraffi 2002. See Brown-Grant 1999b: 171– 2; Gaggero 2015: 107.

Notes to Pages 140 – 147

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87. The accessus to the Heroides were produced in Germany from the beginning of the twelfth century: see Hexter 1986; Tilliette 1994. 88. The text is in Winkler 1914. 89. The original is F.H. Hagen 1850: 317–30. There is a German translation from 1895. The one I print is by Kristina Mueller, sometimes modified. 90. See Murdoch 1977: 235. 91. See Jellinek 1890: 6; Kommerell 1931: 51–8. 92. See also Murdoch 1977. 93. Murdoch (1977) believes that this disproportion is the signature of medieval retellings of the legend, but this is too sweeping a judgement. Baudri and Christine de Pizan do not fit. 94. Hero dies naturally from grief in modern versions as well, for instance in Franz Grillparzer’s Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen. 95. The dichotomy is rare also in medieval versions. In addition to the German novella, the prose narrative by the Valencian writer Joan Roı´c de Corella applies it: see below. 96. What follows this wish no longer concerns Hero and Leander but the poet’s own situation. 97. These anachronisms are noted by Jellinek 1890: 7. 98. The updated residence is not uncommon. For instance, Christine de Pizan has it in her texts as in the images that decorate her manuscripts. 99. The edition is Leendertz 1845, vol. 1: 127–39, and the translation is Martijn Buijs’, with slight changes. The narrative is summarized and briefly discussed by Jellinek 1890: 7–10. 100. Murdoch (1977: 239 – 40) does not exclude that Potter knew Musaeus, but the parallels he adduces (the crowd coming to Sestos, the description of Leander’s drowning) are too general. The heroine’s name Adonis calls to mind the Adonia in Musaeus. However, as Murdoch is ready to concede, it could be a misreading of Heroni, the salutation of Heroides 19. And if Potter used Musaeus, why does he mention only Ovid? 101. See Murdoch 1977: 242. 102. See van Buuren 1994, with further references. 103. See Hexter 1986: 157, n. 50, referencing van Buuren 1979; see also van Buuren 1994. 104. See van Buuren 1994: 156; 158. 105. See also Murdoch 1977: 239; 241. 106. I am not arguing that Potter reworked the German poem, which he probably did not know (so Kommerell 1931: 51 –8), but that he has a different view of the story, both ideologically and in terms of the respective roles of the protagonists. 107. So Kommerell (1931: 51 –8), who reconstructs possible trajectories of influence between the various versions of the ballad and the two Germanic poems. Murdoch is more sceptical (1977: 242). 108. The numerous versions are collected by Meier 1935, vol. 2: 47– 59.

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Notes to Pages 147 – 155

109. A scholion reads the ending of Virgil’s passage thus: ‘And they were buried by their parents’ (H. Hagen 1867: 938–9). 110. Text Limentani 1992. 111. Ceffi’s translation (1325) had a large diffusion: see Bellorini 1900, Chapter 1. The mistake appears also in the summary of the story by Alfonso X (General Estoria 5. 9. 15) and in Roic de Corella (La istoria de Leander y Hero 1 and 10). 112. Canto 24. 52 –69; translation Hollander et al. 1986 (printed as prose). The original is Branca 1994. 113. Geographical closeness is indeed the criterion that determines the shift to the next story (24. 70). I prefer the other hypothesis, however, because Benoıˆt de Sainte-Maure was popular in Italy (Zaggia [2009: 219, n. 18] notes that of the 30 testimonies of the romance, at least ten were produced in Italy between the Duecento and the Trecento) and because Boccaccio was a voracious reader of romances. 114. The same effect of contrast is produced at the beginning of Canto 23, where examples of unfortunate loves (Deidamia and Briseis for Achilles) follow a portrait of Orpheus blessed with happiness and singing love’s praise; at 27. 45–7, with the vita [. . . ] gioiosa of Helen and Paris and the tears of Oenone at two consecutive line endings; and, most strikingly, at the opening of Canto 29, where the contentment of Fleur and Blanchefleur is described after Dido’s suicide. 115. Translation Musa 2000 (printed as prose). 116. I follow Dronke 1970. 117. See Limentani 1992: 448, n. 15. 118. Ussani (1948) spots only one reference. 119. Translation Cheney and Bergin 1985. The original is Quaglio 1967. 120. The tale appears again in another love question (4. 29) but with a more conventional twist, to illustrate the incompatibility between love and wisdom. 121. The original text is Quaglio 1963. 122. This is not the place (and I do not have the expertise) to deal fully with the complexities of Boccaccio’s view of erotic passion. On Fiammetta as love’s victim, see Pabst 1958 and Hollander 1977. The latter (in my view correctly) emphasizes her culpable willingness in surrendering to Venus. See also Smarr 1986. 123. A gloss, if written by Boccaccio, makes the reference explicit; if written by someone else, it correctly recognizes it. 124. See Smarr 1986: 144. 125. Translation Causa-Steindler and Mauch 1990. 126. Between these two episodes, Fiammetta alludes to the tale, again with a tragic spin, when she learns that Panfilo is unfaithful and wishes that he and his new love be severed by divine will as Leander was from Hero (6. 111).

Notes to Pages 156 – 168

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127. See Heinrichs 1990: 75–6, referencing also Petrarch’s Remedium Contra Fortunam 1. 49. 128. For Filocolo, see also 4. 11. 129. See 8. 142 and 9. 159 respectively. The citation is from Smarr 1986: 146. 130. The original text is Zaggia 2009: 600. 131. See Ridgway 1970. 132. These and other stories are in Ridgway 1970. See also Beaulieu 2016, Chapter 4. 133. See Lippi 1996: i, n. 2. One indication is Hero’s resolve not only to weep over Leander but also to bury him, as in the Teseida (see Leandreride 4. 14. 41). 134. See Lippi 1996. 135. Many detailed correspondences between the Latin poet and his Venetian imitator are in Lippi’s commentary (1996). 136. The original text is Lippi 1996. 137. See Lippi 1996: 257. 138. For instance, Nadal borrows the description of the storm that kills Leander from the story of Ceyx and Alcyone in the Metamorphoses. One reference to the Heroides (18. 27 –30) after Dante’s rebuke is at 4. 9. 40, describing Leander’s insomnia: see Lippi 1996: 300. 139. See Lippi 1996: x. 140. See H&L 8– 10 and Morros Mestres 2013: 233. 141. See Chapter 2. 142. See the Epilogue. 143. The obstacle loses relevance when her father and her brothers die (2. 27), since Hero no longer has a male authority to reckon with. Nadal fails to explain why she does not then marry. 144. Fiammetta is a case in point. Her nurse opposes the notion that love is an irresistible god and Fiammetta the victim of his power and of fortune. 145. The attempts of Hero’s nurse to dissuade her from loving are in her voice, not the author’s (2. 17. 67 –81; 2. 18. 1–33). 146. A briefer discussion of the couple’s death is in Montiglio 2016: 8. 147. See Lippi 1996, ad loc. 148. See Morros Mestres 2013: 232. 149. The Italo-Greek Giovanni Grasso imagines the couple in the Underworld, but without specifying where: see Chapter 4. 150. Dante’s commentator Bernardino Daniello (sixteenth century) uses this line to explain the pleasure that keeps Francesca tied to Paolo even after death. See the text in Morros Mestres 2013: 229. ˜ana Valle´s 151. Summarized excerpts from section 14. The original is in Almin 1985, vol. 2. 152. Translation Krummrich 2006. 153. General History 5. 9. 15 (Sa´nchez-Prieto 2009). 154. The texts are in Morros Mestres 2013: 233–4. The conventional moralizing reading of the story as illustration of loco amor also appears.

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Notes to Pages 170 – 180

155. Likewise, in Christine de Pizan’s Debate of the Two Lovers (above) Leander has a shirt on. 156. See Morros Mestres 2013: 235. 157. See Chapter 2. The possibility that Corella knew Musaeus cannot be ruled out but is unlikely (the epyllion was published in Spain in 1514). Morros Mestres (2013: 235; 237 – 8) advances it. But the theme of marriage, as we shall see presently, is also in Nadal, and a phrase that seems inspired by H&L (‘the final syllable [. . .] brought an end [. . .] to his speech, his love and his life’ [18]; see H&L 329 – 30) could equally come from Ovid, as Morros Mestres himself admits (Her. 18. 196). Another theme that appears in Musaeus, the lovers’ meeting at a religious festival, is also in Nadal. The dates of Aldus’ edition and translation of Musaeus (c. 1495 and 1497 – 1498) and of Corella’s narrative are very close. 158. See Morros Mestres 2013: 235–6. The reference to Ceyx and Alcyone is his. 159. See also Montiglio 2016: 13. 160. See Chance 1994, vol. 1, xxxv and 60; Pepin 2008: 9 –10. 161. See Herbert 1910: 160, n. 45. 162. See Rodger 1957. 163. The Latin text is in Wollin 2000. 164. Rhyming puns on Hero and ero will become commonplace in Spanish versions of the legend. See, for instance, Antonio Mira de Amezcua, Hero and Leander Act 1. 217–18, with Krummrich’s note (2006: 186). 165. For the text, see Wollin 2000: 393. 166. John Gower confirms the tale’s currency: he inserts a reference to Hero lighting her lamp in his account of Phyllis’ love-mad actions (Confessio amantis 4. 817–18, with van Buuren 1994: 153).

CHAPTER 4 THE TALE AS MUSAEUS TOLD IT: HERO AND LEANDER IN MEDIEVAL GREEK LITERATURE AND THE DIFFUSION OF MUSAEUS’ POEM IN EUROPE 1. See (adjusted from Kost 1971: 15 –16) Colluthus 257 (Helen welcoming Paris) and H&L 260–3; Colluthus 259 (Helen filling her eyes with his beauty) and H&L 78; Colluthus 267 (Helen speaking) and H&L 172 and 121; Colluthus 295 (Paris speaking; likewise in the following two instances) and H&L 83; Colluthus 297 and H&L 203; Colluthus 298 and H&L 142; Colluthus 305–7 (Helen’s response) and H&L 160 and 172. 2. Spengel 1856: 149, lines 13 –19. 3. The preferred late candidate is Parthenius: see, e.g., Colonna 1947. 4. On this epigram see also Chapter 2. 5. AP 9. 215 might be echoed at Her. 19. 127–8: see Ga¨rtner 2000 and, more cautiously, Rosati 1996 ad loc.

Notes to Pages 180 – 185

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6. On pantomimes dramatizing the legend, see Chapter 1. The brief mention by Hippolytus (above, Chapter 2) does not deal with the story, nor does Strabo, who is concerned only with the site. If the fragment in the Berlin papyrus dates to the fifth century, this account must be corrected. But the dating is uncertain: see the Introduction. 7. For discussion, see Holland 1888: 412–14; Kost 1971: 467–8; Eleuteri 1981: 149; Eleuteri 2014: 168; Villarrubia 2000: 366. 8. Interested readers can find the parallels in Kost 1971: 70. 9. See Agosti 2012: 370; De Stefani 2006; for Agathias the historian, Alexakis 2009. 10. Historia 5. 22. 10 (Keydell 1967). 11. The bibliography on this topic is immense. See recently Assmann’s insightful discussion (2011: 24 –5 and passim) and in connection to the legend of Leander, Minchin 2016. 12. For further discussion, see below. 13. Agathias might also be referring to lost Hellenistic poem(s), but we have no means to prove it. 14. Lines 11 (Il. 14. 296; H&L 286) and 12 (Il. 2. 836; H&L 3), with Kost 1971: 71. 15. On centos as feats of memory, see Hunger 2002: 191–2. 16. A qualification to Musaeus’ fame in the period: he does not appear in the encyclopedic Suidas (tenth century), which records four other Musaeus, among whom the mythic poet (1294–7). His absence from Photius’ Library (ninth century) is irrelevant, for this scholar does not review works of poetry. 17. See Chiliades 2. 36. 439–45; 10. 337. 508–15; 12. 453. 934–7. 18. See Mercati 1947 –8. 19. References are to the Grottaferrata Version (‘G’) in the edition of E. Jeffreys 1998 and in her translation, sometimes slightly modified. 20. See the entries in Frazer and Matthews 1987–2013. ‘Hero’ might be a theophoric name. It is attributed to a cousin of Aristotle (Plutarch Alexander 55 with Sittig 1912: 916) but has hardly any resonance in myth. ‘Heros’ are a daughter of Priam and one of Danaus according to Hyginus (Fabulae 90 and 170), but nowhere else. 21. See Beaton 1996: 30–51 and passim. See also Jouanno 1998: 140–56; E. Jeffreys 2014. Jouanno calls the epic an illustration of the omnipotence of love (149). 22. See Kost 1971, s.v. ‘Digenes Akrites’. 23. The works are: Rhodantes and Dosicles by Theodore Prodromos, Drosilla and Charicles by Nicetas Eugenianos, Hysmine and Hysminias by Eustathios Macrembolites (in prose), and Aristander and Callithea (fragmentary) by Constantine Manasses, in Conca 1994. For the ancient Greek and the Byzantine narratives I use the terms ‘romance’ and ‘novel’ interchangeably, as both are regularly employed; for the narrative in vernacular Greek that I discuss below, only ‘romance’.

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Notes to Pages 186 – 194

24. See Chapter 2. 25. The translation is E. Jeffreys 2012. 26. See Kost 1971: 71 –2. More generally on Nicetas’ imitation of Theodore, see Roilos 2005: 9. 27. The translation is Burton 2004, sometimes modified. 28. See Chapter 1. 29. See Introduction. 30. On Callidemus’ rusticity, see 6. 299. Nicetas’ claim to ‘mythic status’ for his novelistic characters and Callidemus’ clumsiness are noted by Jouanno 1989 and Burton 2003. On Callidemus’ pretentious inadequacy, see Roilos 2005: 68 –76. 31. I say ‘apparently’ because Clitophon is the one telling the story and interpreting Leucippe’s reactions: is his reading correct or dictated by his desire? See De Temmerman 2014: 194–5. 32. Jouanno (1989: 354) questions the appropriateness of using a tragic love story in this context, though she also suggests that its function could be to move the girl. Burton (2003) implies that Callidemus’ dwelling on the happy-in-death motif serves to reconfigure the tragic story as a fortunate dalliance. 33. H&L 287. See Conca 1994: 497. 34. The text is Ellissen 2015. A French version is Bouchet 2007. 35. He is to be the judge in a beauty contest. The predestined woman is the winner. 36. See Cupane 1978: 242. 37. See Bouchet 2007: 167. 38. The bibliography on this debated issue is large: see, e.g., Cupane 1974; Kahane and Kahane 1983; Beaton 1996: 81; Bouchet 2007. 39. See Bouchet 2007: 166– 7; Kahane and Kahane 1983: 219 on the romancer’s erudition in classical literature. 40. On Planudes’ translation, see Michalopoulos 2003. 41. See Beaton 1996: 153. 42. See Sicherl 1997; Eleuteri 2014: 169. 43. See Cupane 1974: 268–9 and Beaton 1996: 142–5; 159. 44. See Kahane and Kahane 1983: 216. 45. The sources are in Gantz 1996: 168. 46. The story originated in the Greek East (see Knox 2014: 38 –9), but no Greek source is extant, though of course we cannot exclude that a fourteenth-century writer knew literature now lost. 47. See Cupane 1974. 48. The striking absence of mythological references is noted by Cupane 1974, to whom I refer for discussion of the paintings. Additional illustrations of love’s power without mythic examples are, e.g., Rhodanthe and Dosicles 2. 429–31; Drosilla and Charicles 2. 135–40; Aristander and Callithea frs. 95 and 165 (Conca 1994).

Notes to Pages 195 – 203

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49. See, respectively, Aristander and Callithea fr. 21 (Conca 1994), and fr. 21a, where Alpheus appears alongside Zeus and Aphrodite; Drosilla and Charicles 4. 145–8; Libistos and Rhodamne 153–5 (Lambert 1935). The union is chosen to illustrate all-conquering love also by Byzantine historians and rhetoricians: see Hunger 2002: 181. 50. More instances are in Holland 1888. 51. See Drosilla and Charicles 4. 137; 142–4; Libistos and Rhodamne 145–9; Leucippe and Clitophon 1. 18. 52. See Leucippe and Clitophon 8. 12 and 8. 6. 7 –8. 53. Belthandros shares features with Narcissus (see Kahane and Kahane 1983) – as a handsome hunter, reluctant to love and a hater of women – whose myth seems to be cryptically encoded in the two statues bearing his name and Chrysantza’s. Narcissus, however, does not function as a paradigm to follow but as a descriptive term of comparison. Unlike Narcissus, Belthandros will have to love another being. 54. Holland 1888: 393–7. We have seen that this is the case in the anonymous poem that imitates Musaeus. See also Moschus fr. 3, where Alpheus brings ‘marriage gifts’ to Arethusa, and Achilles Tatius 1. 18. Menander the Rhetor (On Epideictic Speeches, Spengel 1856: 401) advises use of this myth in wedding songs. 55. On this difference in the characterization of the hero between the ancient and the medieval Greek romances, see Cupane 1978; 2007. 56. See also Kost 1971: 175. 57. See Minchin 2016: 280. 58. See Minchin 2016. Gelzer (1975: 303) argues that, ‘the local topography is completely ignored’ by Musaeus except for the tower. What else should he have included, given the story? He is emphatic in underscoring its site. 59. See Minchin 2016 and Introduction. 60. As late as the seventeenth century, Western authors continue to make geographical mistakes. The Spanish playwright Antonio Mira de Amezcua, for instance, puts Sestos in Asia and Abydos in Europe (Hero and Leander Act 1. 36 –7). 61. See Chapter 3. 62. Chronicon 20. 24, in Wollin 2000: 392. 63. The text is in Mercati 1947–8; Gigante 1953: 60–1. Part of the discussion that follows is in Montiglio 2016: 9 –12. 64. The title (Stίxoi toῦ L1άndroy) is Gigante’s conjecture (1953: 60). 65. See Gigante 1953: 25. 66. See Chapter 3. 67. Parisinus Gr. 2763, Palatinus Vat. Gr. 179 and Ambrosianus S 31 sup. See Ludwich 1896: 1–4; Eleuteri 1981: 2; 21; 32. 68. See Eleuteri 1981: 150. The manuscript is the Bodleian Baroccianus 50. 69. See further Chapter 2.

258

Notes to Pages 204 – 207

70. See Lucretius De rerum natura 4. 1076, with J. N. Adams 1982: 188. Aldus might have chosen the verb also because Italian possedere can have strong erotic connotations. 71. Eleuteri (1981: 186), based on the possible presence of at least one early manuscript in Southern Italy (Baroccianus 50), argues that knowledge of Musaeus was never discontinued in the West as it was not in the East. In my opinion this needs qualification. Knowledge in the West seems to have been limited to a small area of educated Italo-Greeks (and perhaps to Venice: see Chapter 3) until the fifteenth century. The diffusion of copies across Italy dates to this period. Furthermore, as we have seen, the epyllion had hardly any impact (if it had any at all) on Western medieval treatments of the legend. 72. For the date, see Eleuteri 1981: 161; 2014: 172 and Sicherl 1997: 13. On 1 November 1495 Aldus started printing Aristotle. Sicherl (16) thinks that Aldus is the editor of the Musaeus. What manuscript he used is debated. See Eleuteri 1981, Chapter 8; Sicherl 1997. See also the list of manuscripts in Bolgar 1958: 501. 73. See Eleuteri 1981 and 2014: 171. This scholar counts 27 Greek manuscripts copied in Italy from the fifteenth to the early sixteenth century. See also Gelzer 1967: 131. 74. See Eleuteri 1981: 16. The section containing Musaeus, however, might be later: see Sicherl 1997: 18. 75. See Lowry 2000: 178– 9; Houston 2015: 158– 9. 76. See Botley 2002: 207–8. 77. On Aldus’ authorship see Sicherl 1997: 30. On marketing calculations, see Botley 2002: 207–8. 78. See Lowry 2000: 188; 193–4. 79. Manuzio and Torresano 1517. 80. All the prefaces of Aldus’ Greek books are now available in Greek and English in Wilson 2016. 81. See Davies 1999: 18. 82. See Sicherl 1997: 12. 83. Laurentius de Alopa likewise calls H&L poematium: see Malcovati 1947: xxvii. By emphasizing the small size of the book, Aldus might also have intended to conjure up Catullus’ recently published and fashionable libellus, which Aldus himself was to print in 1502. 84. Prices are given by Renouard 1834: 330–2 and 358. The first Aldine Musaeus is the cheapest book in the surviving catalogues of the press: see Botley 2002: 208. 85. ‘Musaeus’ has been taken as a pseudonym, with which his carrier meant to conjure up the mythic figure. For a review of the literature, see Villarrubia 2000: 365–6. A sixteenth-century author who exceptionally doubts the belief in Musaeus’ antiquity is Cle´ment Marot (see the text in Guiffrey 1969: 27, n.).

Notes to Pages 207 – 216

259

86. The qualifier ‘literary scholar’ appears in Harl. 5659 (Eleuteri 1981: 11), in Paris. gr. 2600 (Eleuteri 12– 13), in Nap., Biblioteca Nazionale II D 4 (Eleuteri 17), in the Baroccianus 50 and in Marc. gr. 522 (Eleuteri 26 –7). 87. See Sicherl 1997: 12 –13. 88. These various points are made by Renouard 1834: 2; Sicherl 1997: 14; Houston 2015: 119, n. 326; 119–20. Lowry (2000: 113), though, dates the Musaeus earlier than the grammar. 89. On the grammar, see Sicherl 1997: 14; Houston 2015: 121. 90. See Houston 2015: 186–7. 91. See Eleuteri 2014: 173. 92. The text is in Fa¨rber 1961: 86. 93. The same is true for Johann Froben (c.1460 –1527), printer in Basel, who published Musaeus with other texts that were primarily intended for teaching Greek: see Eleuteri 2014: 173. On Musaeus as a beginning Greek reader, see also Geanakoplos 1962: 120. 94. See Sicherl 1997: 13. 95. See Botley 2002: 207. 96. See Botley 2002: 199. 97. Antipater’s epigram (and Musurus’ two poems: see below) appears also in the 1464 manuscript now at the National Library in Madrid. The addition, though, must be credited to Aldus, for this section of the manuscript copies his edition: see Sicherl 1997. Martial’s poem was added to the reissue: see Eleuteri’s description of the first bilingual edition (1981: 34 – 5). 98. See, e.g., Nhὸ6 ἔhn ἀnὰ Shstόn (1; H&L 14), uyhlὰ6 (1; H&L 39), sp1ύdοnt16 (2; H&L 44), ἀllήlvn ἀpόnanto (8; H&L 343). 99. See Ga¨rtner 2009a. 100. Moschus is included in the Palatine Anthology (9. 440). For his presence in codices containing Musaeus, see Eleuteri 1981. 101. See Chapter 1. 102. MS sp. 13 bis, described by Zaggia 1996: 23 –38. Unfortunately I was not able to see it. 103. Golahny (1990: 22) and Cipriani (2006: 208 and 215) take even the engraving that depicts Leander’s swim to refer to the stormy night. This hypothesis is attractive because it fits with the overwhelming emphasis on death on the two pages, but it clashes with the representation of the sea: calm, not seething in the background as in the other woodcut. Sander (1942: 842, #4912) refers the image to Leander’s first swim. 104. See Eleuteri (1981: 7; 30; 161–4) on manuscripts copied from the Aldine. 105. See Sicherl 1997: 12. 106. See especially Braden 1978. On Italian translations specifically, see also Eleuteri 2010; Loi 2016. 107. From the title page of Chapman’s translation (1616). Marlowe as well calls Musaeus ‘divine’ (Hero and Leander 1. 58).

260

Notes to Pages 218 – 226

EPILOGUE LOOKING BACK AND LOOKING FORWARD 1. See Chapter 3. Corella also has a scene of first encounter, which he found in Nadal. 2. Hero and Leander 17– 20, in the verse translation of Daniel Platt (online). Text in Kurscheidt 2004: 145–52. 3. Schach Lolo 86– 7 (text in Wieland 1795: 210). 4. See especially the three Vatican Mythographers, Ovid moralized, the references to the tale in Christine de Pizan, Guillaume de Machaut and Boccaccio. ¨ hlenfels 1972: 39; 43; 47, 51– 2; Gaggero 2015: 82; 90. 5. See Schmitt-Von Mu On the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe in the Middle Ages, see also Glendinning 1986. 6. Shakespeare, on the other hand, knew the myth of Hero and Leander and cites it often: see Findlay 2010, s.v. ‘Hero.’ 7. See Jellinek 1890: 35. The Leandris is available online. 8. See Ragno 2014: 417–24. 9. Perhaps influenced by Boccaccio, Bernardo Tasso will elaborate on Musaeus’ line ‘she tore her embroidered dress around her breast’ (340) by imagining a full-scale lamentation of Hero on Leander’s body, ending with his funeral and her drowning (648–62). 10. Alternatively or in addition, Barth might have taken his cue from a scholion on Virgil’s relevant passage: ‘And they were buried by their parents’ (H. Hagen 1867: 938– 9). 11. Rime 3. 68. 674–5 in Chiodo 1995. 12. Translation Krummrich 2006. 13. To give just a few examples, in the Second Vatican Mythographer Hero’s lamp is put out ‘by chance’; fortune wages war against the couple in Ovid moralized (4. 3469), in Christine de Pizan’s ballad and in her Book of the City of Ladies. 14. See Burkhard 1962. 15. Text in D’Angelo 2004. This edition has a useful introduction (by Grazia Distaso), which illuminates the relationship between Boito’s libretto and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. An English translation is in Boito 1896. 16. When the affair is fully brought to light, the priest attempts to muffle it but to no avail, for Hero mourns Leander and dies from grief in the public light. 17. Translation Krummrich 2006. 18. The pairing appears, for instance, in Nicolas Re´gnier’s Hero and Leander (1626), in Jan van den Hoeckte’s Hero mourns the dead Leander (1635–6), in Gillis Backereel’s Hero mourns Leander (1640s), in Ferdinand Keller’s Hero finding Leander (1880s) and in Hugh Henry Armstead’s relief Hero and Leander (1875). 19. The composition of the whole painting demonstrates that Fetti was influenced by Rubens: see Golahny 1990: 27.

Notes to Pages 227 – 229

261

¨ hlenfels 1972, Chapter 2; Gaggero 2015: 85–6. 20. See Schmitt-Von Mu 21. One exception is Seneca (see Chapter 1). For Virgil Leander is the prey of erotic fury, but the brief treatment leaves out the night(s) of love. 22. In Marlowe’s version, though, lovemaking ends on a note of sadness, even despair, for Hero, who wishes ‘this night were never done’. See Braden 2015. Marlowe is original in this. Ancient and medieval authors, regardless of their moral outlook on the affair, attribute to the couple identical feelings after lovemaking. 23. Christine de Pizan does not describe either protagonist’s appearance but calls only Hero ‘beautiful’. 24. Heaney (1996) has insightful observations on this aspect of Marlowe’s poem. On Marlowe’s fascination with male beauty as revealed in this passage, see also Crompton 2003: 370–1. Contrast Bosca´n, who stays closer to Musaeus in describing only Hero’s beauty (124–59). 25. Whatever the case, Marlowe does foreshadow the tragic ending: he calls the story a ‘tragedie’ (1. 58) and the day of the lovers’ encounter ‘cursed’ (1. 137); he has Cupid mourn (1. 382–4) and the sun sink in the daytime, pitying the lovers (2. 108). See now Braden 2015. 26. See Lewis 1952. 27. See Gelzer 1975: 324; Morales 1999: 65. One eighteenth-century example is Florian’s Ero e Leandro, offered to Catterina Capello when she married the count Francesco Sugana di Trevigi: see Tufano 2009: 129. 28. The text is Bracciolini dell’Api 1630.

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Index

Abydos: see Sestos and Abydos accessus (Introductions) to Ovid’s Heroides, 119 – 20, 138, 168, 250 n. 84, 251 n. 87 Achilles Tatius, 68, 69, 97, 98, 185, 186, 189, 191, 195, 241 n. 44, 242 n. 46, 246 n. 132, 257 n. 54 Acontius and Cydippe, 23, 84 –5 Agathias, 56, 177– 8, 181 – 3, 189, 198 –9, 255 n. 9, 255 n. 13 Alfonso X, king of Spain, 168, 252 n. 111 allegory, 94 –9, 101– 6, 109, 114, 121 – 5, 132, 175, 224, 246 n. 133, 246 n. 134, 248 n. 39, 248 n. 43 Alopa, Laurentius de, 8, 205, 258 n. 83 Alpheus and Arethusa, 180, 195, 257 n. 49, 257 n. 54 Ange`li, Pietro, 93 Antipater of Thessalonica, 84, 93 – 4, 170, 178, 179 – 80, 188, 198, 209, 212, 215, 221, 259 n. 97

Aphrodite, 11, 21, 34, 39, 61, 67, 68, 71, 77, 80, 81, 82 – 3, 85– 6, 103, 144, 154, 158, 162, 163, 166, 171, 179, 187, 210, 211, 223, 244 n. 79, 252 n. 122, 257 n. 49 Aphrodite and Adonis, 68, 150, 154, 163, 194 – 5, 241 n. 41, 244 n. 79 Apollonius of Rhodes, 54, 86– 7, 211– 12, 240 n. 20, 244 n. 98 Aristaenetus, 84 – 5, 244 n. 90 Artemis: see Diana Ausonius, 41, 45 – 7, 56, 57, 116, 166, 221, 236 n. 75, 237 n. 76 Baldi, Bernardino, 93 Barth, Caspar, 219, 221, 224, 260 n. 10 Baudri de Bourgueil, 109 – 15, 116, 117, 120, 122, 125, 138, 168, 200, 202, 220, 221, 247 n. 10, 251 n. 93 Belthandros and Chrysantza, 192– 7, 238 n. 100, 257 n. 53

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Benoıˆt de Sainte-Maure, 116 – 17, 252 n. 113 Boccaccio, 139, 148 – 60, 194, 200, 220, 221, 226, 250 n. 85, 252 n. 113, 252 n. 122, 252 n. 123, 260 n. 4, 260 n. 9 Boito, Arrigo, 223, 260 n. 15 Bosca´n, Juan, 88, 217, 222, 245 n. 102 Bracciolini dell’Api, Francesco, 218, 229 – 30, 232 n. 23 Byron, 2 – 3, 64, 74, 86, 199 Callimachus, 12, 35, 75, 204, 233 n. 13, 241 n. 42 Ceffi, Filippo, 148, 159, 250 n. 84, 252, n. 111 Ceyx and Alcyone, 130, 140, 172, 194, 248 n. 38, 249 n. 64, 253 n. 138, 254 n. 158 Chapman, George, 216, 224, 228 –9, 259 n. 107 Chariton, 68, 97, 241 n. 38, 241 n. 40, 245 n. 111 Christine de Pizan, 10, 116, 129 –40, 199, 202, 214, 221, 225, 227, 249 n. 62, 249 n. 64, 249 n. 65, 250 n. 73, 250 n. 85, 251 n. 93, 251 n. 98, 254 n. 155, 260 n. 4, 260 n. 13, 261 n. 23 Colluthus, 178– 9, 180, 240 n. 9, 254 n. 1 Constantine Manasses, 195, 255 n. 23 Corella, Joan Roic
de, 167– 74, 200, 219, 220, 221, 227, 228, 251 n. 95, 252 n. 111, 254 n. 157, 260 n. 1

Cupid: see Eros Cupid and Psyche, 98, 101– 2, 247 n. 2 Dante, 150 – 1, 161– 2, 166, 253 n. 138, 253 n. 150 darkness (see also lamp, and darkness), 84, 92, 95 – 7, 117, 170, 228, 240 n. 14 Deianira, 139, 156, 158 Delorme, Pierre-Claude, 87 – 8 Diana, 68, 82, 83, 137, 162 – 3, 164, 165, 223 Dido, 41, 51, 54, 139– 40, 154, 156, 157, 158, 238 n. 116, 252 n. 114 Digenis Akritis, 183 – 5, 200 Diogenes Laertius, 205 – 6, 208 dolphins, 16, 29, 33, 34, 45, 48, 157, 159 –60, 238 n. 112, 248 n. 26 Ducas, Demetrios, 208 Epistres des dames de Gre`ce, 118– 20, 121, 136, 144, 248 n. 24 Eros, 38, 40, 41, 48, 51, 64, 68, 69, 73, 89, 95, 103, 123, 154, 156, 159, 161, 162, 165, 190, 191, 194, 210 –12, 215, 222, 224, 229, 236 n. 75, 261 n. 25 Es waren zwei Ko¨nigskinder (German ballad), 22, 146– 7 Etty, William, 93, 226 Eustathios Macrembolites, 191– 2, 194, 255 n. 23 Evadne, 41, 140 Evrart de Conty, 129, 137, 249 n. 61

Index fate (see also fortune), 78, 90 – 1, 123, 140, 174, 203, 210, 222 Fetti, Domenico, 226, 260 n. 19 fortune (see also fate), 131, 133, 164 –5, 174, 222, 253 n. 144, 260 n. 13 Froissart, Jean, 129, 134, 200, 249 n. 61 Fronto, 41 – 3, 50, 53, 237 n. 87, 239 n. 121 Fulgentius, 12, 101– 4, 105, 106, 109, 112, 114, 121, 123, 124, 224, 226, 227, 236 n. 70, 247 n. 1, 247 n. 2, 248 n. 42 Go´ngora, Luis de, 51 Grasso, Giovanni, 200– 3, 221, 225, 253 n. 149 Grillparzer, Franz, 223, 232 n. 23, 251 n. 94 Guillaume de Machaut, 125 – 9, 133, 134, 137, 168, 188, 214, 224 –5, 249 n. 47, 249 n. 59, 249 n. 61, 260 n. 4 Helen, 23, 24, 26, 118, 154, 156, 158, 179, 180, 244 n. 94, 252 n. 114, 254 n. 1 Heliodorus, 68, 82, 98, 189, 241 n. 38, 242 n. 58, 243 n. 71 Helle, 16, 56, 161 Hellespont, 1, 2, 10, 13, 20, 24, 33, 43, 45 – 7, 56, 74, 82, 148, 149, 160, 182, 199, 200, 201 Hero anger of, 126, 137, 224 beauty of, 34, 68 – 9, 71, 72, 90, 98, 126, 170, 185, 227 – 8, 261 n. 24

279 dilemma of, 162– 4, 223 – 4 dreams of, 28, 29, 31–2, 122, 145, 159, 162, 165, 166, 168–9, 173, 235 n. 44, 235 n. 48, 235 n. 49, 248 n. 26 eroticism of (see also dreams of), 85–7, 122, 227 fidelity of, 130, 139, 140, 168, 202, 248 n. 23 impatience/patience of, 26, 28, 29 – 30, 41 – 3, 89 – 90, 112, 120, 122, 123, 128, 137, 138, 142, 146, 167– 8, 203, 224, 250 n. 84 jealousy of, 21, 24, 25, 29, 111 – 12, 113, 128, 138, 145, 146, 168 lament of, 13, 14, 47, 54, 143, 172– 3, 220 – 1, 226, 260 n. 9 lamp of: see lamp and misogyny: see misogyny modesty of, 32, 86, 88, 169 and Penelope (in Ovid), 24 – 5, 26, 28, 31, 233 n. 20, 234 n. 35, 235, n. 49 priesthood of, 11, 21, 68, 81 – 4, 163, 210, 223, 229 selfishness/selflessness of: see impatience/patience of suicide of, 9, 41, 57, 91 – 4, 104, 106, 107, 108, 113, 116, 121 – 2, 125, 127, 129, 130, 134, 141, 142 – 3, 147, 157 – 9, 165, 170, 173, 201 – 3, 220, 221, 225, 226 – 7 sympathy for (see also Hero and Leander, sympathy for), 134, 138– 9, 146, 155

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tower of, 12, 43, 49, 56, 79, 90, 182– 3, 198, 237 n. 81, 244 n. 84 virginity of (see also dilemma of; priesthood of), 82 – 4, 162– 3, 172, 186, 187, 191, 222– 3, 229 Hero and Leander burial of, 147, 221, 222, 252 n. 109, 260 n. 10 on coins, 51 – 3, 55, 56, 182, 214 and courtly love, 10, 113, 116– 19, 120, 121, 130, 131, 133, 136, 145, 147, 155, 171, 193– 4, 202, 221 in dance and mime, 4, 13, 50 – 1, 53 – 5, 180, 237 n. 90, 238 n. 107, 255 n. 6 in figurative arts, 3 – 4, 48 – 9, 53 – 7, 87 – 8, 93, 225 –6, 260 n. 18 final dwelling of, 166 –7, 202, 221– 2, 253 n. 149 in illustrations, 129, 134– 6, 212– 15 legend of: its origins, 11 – 14, 21 – 2, 81 – 2 lovemaking of, 17, 31, 33, 88, 92, 145, 149, 169, 227, 262 n. 22 marriage of, 84, 85, 96, 162, 170– 4, 219 – 20, 228– 9, 254 n. 157 names of, 103, 104 – 5, 123, 184, 255 n. 20 and parental opposition, 20 – 3, 81 – 3, 84, 163 – 4, 186, 201– 2, 218 – 20, 228 sympathy for, 41, 88, 109 –13, 121, 131, 174

in Volkslieder, 22, 146 – 7, 175, 234 n. 25, 251 n. 107 in weddings, 38 – 9, 40 – 1, 229, 261 n. 27 ¨ lderlin, Friedrich, 113, Ho 247 n. 13 Homer Iliad 59, 60, 65, 85, 102, 179, 199, 240 n. 8, 240 n. 21, 242 n. 56 Odyssey (see also Leander and Odysseus), 31, 59, 60, 80, 95, 98, 183, 235 n. 49, 240 n. 8, 240 n. 22, 242 n. 50, 243 n. 74, 244 n. 94, 244 n. 95 Horace, 43, 47, 232 n. 2, 237 n. 81, 237 n. 91 Hyacinth, 44, 194, 195 lamp and darkness, 35, 60 – 6 and erotic passion, 34, 62 – 4, 67, 101 – 5, 123– 4, 125, 126, 137, 138, 224 and Leander’s life, 66 – 7, 138 quenching of, 16, 55, 66, 89, 103, 111– 12, 124, 168, 197, 223 Laodamia, 13, 140 Lascaris, Constantine, 204, 207, 209 Lascaris, Janus, 205, 212, 216 Leander athleticism of, 9, 14, 33 – 4, 44, 45, 48, 49, 55, 75 – 6, 111, 149, 154, 169, 215, 225 audacity of, 16, 19, 20, 25 – 7, 29 – 30, 44 – 5, 62, 69 – 73, 77 – 8, 89, 91, 106 – 7, 117,

Index 137, 167, 170, 192, 217, 225, 227, 235 n. 46, 243 n. 68 beauty of, 227 –8 burial of (see also Hero and Leander, burial of) 160, 172– 3, 221, 253 n. 133, 260 n. 9 and Clitophon, 68 – 73, 74, 191– 2, 242 n. 53, 243 n. 60 dominance of, 9, 47, 53, 54, 103, 105, 115– 16, 127, 129, 134, 201, 225 impatience of: see audacity of narcissism of: see vanity of and Odysseus, 73, 74 – 8, 79 – 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 236 n. 63, 243 n. 66 speaking skills of, 59, 73, 82, 187, 217 sympathy for (see also Hero and Leander, sympathy for), 9, 90, 116, 127, 158, 165, 243 n. 68, 245 n. 104 tiredness of, 34 – 5, 64, 76 – 7, 86 vanity of, 33 – 4, 36, 49 Legrand, Jacques, 129, 136, 249 n. 61 Leighton, Frederic, 4, 6 Libistos and Rhodamne, 195, 257 n. 49, 257 n. 51 lighthouses, 11, 43, 82 Longus, 189 Lucan, 56 lust (see also lamp, and erotic passion), 37 –8, 101– 3, 105, 106, 123 – 4, 136 – 7, 153, 223, 224 – 5, 227 Luxorius, 103, 247 n. 1, 247 n. 4

281

Manutius, Aldus, 8, 9, 204 – 16, 254 n. 157, 258 n. 70, 258 n. 72, 258 n. 77, 258 n. 80, 258 n. 83, 259 n. 97 Marcus Valerius, 115 –16 Marlowe, Christopher, 1, 73, 174, 216, 217, 227, 228, 228–9, 259 n. 107, 261 n. 22, 261 n. 24, 261 n. 25 Marot, Cle´ment, 245 n. 100, 258 n. 85 Martial, 49, 50, 55, 57, 209, 214, 215, 238 n. 99, 238 n. 100, 259 n. 97 Maximus Planudes, 193, 256 n. 40 Medea, 54, 86 –7, 95, 139– 40, 156, 158, 181, 211 Mira de Amezcua, Antonio, 218, 219, 224, 232 n. 23, 254 n. 164, 257 n. 60 misogyny, 10, 47, 90, 112, 120, 123–4, 125–7, 138, 139, 140, 168, 174, 225, 248 n. 39, 250 n. 85 moon, 30 – 1, 34, 64, 66, 74, 75, 143, 150, 151 – 2, 196, 233 n. 10 Moschus, 211, 257 n. 54, 259 n. 100 Musaeus, author of Hero and Leander, 3, 8 –9, 11, 17, 23, 33, 38, 56, 57, 59 – 99, 102, 113, 117, 121, 123, 140, 163, 164, 170, 176, 177 –216, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 227, 228, 229 –30, 239 n. 126, 239 n. 1, 239 n. 2, 240 n. 10, 240 n. 17, 240 n. 18, 240 n. 20, 240 n. 21, 241 n. 31,

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241 n. 40, 241 n. 42, 241 n. 44, 242 n. 47, 242 n. 53, 242 n. 55, 242 n. 58, 243 n. 66, 243 n. 72, 243 n. 75, 244 n. 92, 244 n. 96, 244 n. 97, 244 n. 98, 245 n. 102, 245 n. 104, 245 n. 112, 245 n. 113, 246 n. 131, 246 n. 133, 251 n. 100, 254 n. 157, 254 n. 1, 255 n. 16, 257 n. 54, 257 n. 58, 258 n. 71, 258 n. 74, 258 n. 85, 259 n. 93, 259 n. 100, 259 n. 107, 260 n. 9, 261 n. 24 Musaeus, mythic poet, 9, 205 –6, 207, 230, 255 n. 16, 258 n. 85 Musurus, Marcus, 209 – 12, 215, 222, 259 n. 97 Nadal, Giovanni Girolamo, 160 –7, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 200, 202, 218, 220, 221, 223, 224, 227, 228, 253 n. 138, 253 n. 143, 254 n. 157, 260 n. 1 nakedness, 17, 86, 88, 103, 105, 124, 158, 170, 228, 244 n. 96, 248 n. 42 Narcissus, 117, 194, 195, 257 n. 53 Nausicaa: see Leander and Odysseus Neckar, Alexander, 174, 175– 6 Neoplatonism, 94 –9, 102, 246 n. 133, 246 n. 134 Nicetas Eugenianos, 186 – 91, 193, 195, 197, 198, 202, 203,

225, 255 n. 23, 256 n. 26, 256 n. 30 night: see darkness Nonnus, 59, 60, 61, 70, 71, 72, 86, 239 n. 1, 240 n. 21, 242 n. 49, 242 n. 55, 242 n. 57 On the Figures of Speech, 179 Orpheus, 9, 48, 95, 106, 244 n. 79, 252 n. 114 and Eurydice 132 Ovid Amores, 18– 9, 20, 25, 57, 232 n. 2, 234 n. 36, 242 n. 56 Art of Love, 19 – 20, 28, 34, 35 – 7, 39, 161, 163 Heroides, 8, 16, 17, 20 – 37, 40, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 57, 60, 65, 80, 101, 102, 111, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 128, 138, 141, 142, 144, 148 – 59, 161, 162, 167, 168, 169, 181, 193, 209, 214 – 15, 220, 233 n. 10, 233 n. 20, 234 n. 36, 236 n. 69, 238 n. 105, 251 n. 100, 253 n. 138 Ibis, 44 Metamorphoses, 60, 120, 162, 193, 236 n. 73, 238 n. 105, 248 n. 38, 249 n. 64, 253 n. 138 Tristia, 43 – 4, 50, 238 n. 105, 247 n. 10 Ovid moralized, 120– 5, 125– 7, 128, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137, 138, 144, 167, 168, 202, 220, 221, 224, 248 n. 43, 249 n. 60, 260 n. 4, 260 n. 13

Index Paolo and Francesca, 165, 253 n. 150 Parce continuis (medieval poem from northern France), 106 –9, 116, 142, 226, 227 Paul the Silentiary, 177– 8, 181, 184, 189, 190, 199 Peter of Blois, 175 Petrarch, Francesco, 156, 158 Phyllis, 41, 156, 158, 254 n. 166 Plato: see Neoplatonism Pomponius Mela, 56 Potter, Dirc, 144 – 7, 148, 220, 221, 227, 251 n. 100, 251 n. 106 Propertius, 16 – 18, 36, 80, 233 n. 7, 233 n. 8, 233 n. 10 Pyramus and Thisbe, 1, 107– 9, 125, 132, 134, 139, 140, 157, 158, 170, 173, 194, 218 –19, 226 –7, 260 n. 5 Rhodopis, 194, 195 Rinehart, William Henry, 4 – 5 Romeo and Juliet, 1, 23, 54, 79, 219 Rubens, Peter Paul, 3 – 4, 226 Scalinger, Julius Caesar, 73 Schiller, Friedrich, 218 secrecy (see also darkness; silence), 1, 38, 39, 61 – 3, 84 – 5, 97, 108, 118– 19, 121, 125, 128, 131, 133, 136, 138, 139, 147, 164, 170, 172, 191, 196 –7, 210, 221 Seneca, 37 – 8, 57, 236 n. 71, 237 n. 77, 261 n. 21 Servius, 15 – 16, 103, 232 n. 2, 249 n. 47

283

Sestos and Abydos (see also Hellespont), 1, 21, 43, 46, 47, 51 – 3, 56, 69, 74, 80, 90, 105, 119, 124, 131, 144, 148, 150, 152, 160, 168, 182, 183, 184, 186, 197– 200, 201, 214, 219, 229, 257 n. 60 Shakespeare (see also Romeo and Juliet), 260 n. 6 Sidonius Apollinaris, 40 – 1, 57, 116 silence (see also secrecy), 30 – 1, 32, 66, 69, 72, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 96 – 7, 170, 187 Silius Italicus, 56 stars, 13, 25, 35, 62, 64, 75, 163, 166– 7, 173, 202, 243 n. 66 Statius, 38 – 41, 44 –5, 46, 47, 48, 51, 53, 55, 56, 57, 229, 236 n. 73, 236 n. 75, 237 n. 76, 237 n. 84 storm, 3, 4, 7, 13, 18, 20, 24, 25, 27– 8, 31, 33, 36, 40, 42, 46, 50, 55, 59, 64, 65 – 6, 67, 74– 5, 78, 84, 89, 92, 94, 105, 115– 16, 121, 123, 124, 126, 130, 136, 137, 152 –3, 164, 166, 168, 188, 190 –1, 196– 7, 200, 210, 215, 224, 233 n. 14, 243 n. 64, 248 n. 37, 253 n. 138, 259 n. 103 Strabo, 12, 74, 160, 198, 231 n. 16, 255 n. 6 Straparola, Giovanni Francesco, 22 suicide: see Hero, suicide of swimming and athleticism: see Leander, athleticism of

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in Greece and Rome, 47, 76, 237 n. 90, 243 n. 67 in imitation of Leander, 2 – 3 and writing, 27 – 8, 29, 30, 34, 42 – 3, 142, 235 n. 44 Syrinx, 194, 195 Tasso, Bernardo, 88, 222, 244 n. 100, 260 n. 9 Tennyson, Alfred, 1, 85 Theodore Prodromos, 186, 255 n. 23, 256 n. 26 Torresanus, Andreas, 205 Tristan and Isolde, 113, 134, 194, 260 n. 15 Tzetzes, Joannes, 183, 187 Vatican Mythographers, 104 – 6, 114, 174, 175, 199, 247 n. 1, 247 n. 7, 260 n. 4, 260 n. 13

Venus: see Aphrodite Vespa, 48, 237 n. 93 Virgil, 13, 15 – 16, 18 – 19, 20, 36, 43, 57, 65, 78, 81, 89, 106 – 7, 112, 114, 115, 116, 131, 139, 140, 147, 154, 166, 201, 221, 222, 226, 232 n. 2, 232 n. 3, 233 n. 4, 233 n. 17, 235 n. 46, 252 n. 109, 260 n. 10, 261 n. 21 wandering, 35, 83, 92, 114 – 15, 125 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 218 William of Tyre, 200 Xenophon of Ephesus, 68, 69, 242 n. 58 Xerxes, 46, 150, 163