Hero And Leander

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_ Our survey of Greek erotic literature may be brought to a close with two famous stories which are closely allied to the Greek romances, although one of them--_Hero and Leander_--was written in verse, and the other--_Cupid and Psyche_--in Latin prose. While Apuleius was an African and wrote his story in Latin, he evidently derived it from a Greek source.[333] He lived in the second century of our era, and Musaeus, the author of _Hero and Leander_, in the fifth. It is more than probable that Musaeus did not invent the story, but found it as a local legend and simply adorned it with his pen.

[FOOTNOTE 333: See Rehde, 345; on Musaeus, 472, 133.]

On the shores of the Hellespont, near the narrowest part of the strait, lay the cities of Sestos and Abydos. It was at Sestos that Xerxes undertook to cross with his vast armies, while Abydos claimed to be the true burial place of Osiris; yet these circumstance were considered insignificant in comparison with the fact that it was from Abydos to Sestos and back that Leander was fabled to have swum on his nightly visits to his beloved Hero; for the coins of both the cities were adorned with the solitary tower in which Hero was supposed to live at the time. Why she lived there is not stated by any of the poets who elaborated the legend, but it may be surmised that she did so in order to give them a chance to invent a romantic story. To the present day the Turks point out what they claim to be her tower, and it is well-known that in 1810, Lord Byron and Lieutenant Ekenhead, in order to test the possibility of Leander's feat, swam from Europe to Asia at this place; it took them an hour and five and an hour and ten minutes respectively, and on account of the strong current the distance actually traversed was estimated at more than four miles, while in a straight line it was only a mile from shore to shore.

I have already pointed out (202, 204) that the action of Leander in swimming across this strait for the sake of enjoying the favor of Hero, and her suicide when she finds him dead on the rocks, have nothing so do with the altruistic self-sacrifice that indicates _soul_-love. Here I merely wish to remark that apart from that there is not a line or word in the whole poem to prove that this story "completely upsets" my theory, as one critic wrote. The story is not merely frivolous and cold, as W. von Humboldt called it; it is as unmitigatedly sensual as _Daphnis and Chloe_, though less offensively so because it does not add the vice of hypocrisy to its immodesty. From beginning to end there is but one thought in Leanders mind, as there is in Hero's, whose words and actions are even more indelicate than those of Leander; they are the words and actions of a priestess of Venus true to her function--a girl to whom the higher feminine virtues, which alone can inspire romantic love, are unknown. On the impulse of the moment, in response to coarse flattery, she makes an assignation in a lonely tower with a perfect stranger, regardless of her parents, her honor, her future. Details need not be cited, as the poem is accessible to everybody. It is a romantic story, in Ovid's version even more so than in that of Musaeus; but of romantic love--soul-love--there is no trace in either version. There are touches of sentimentality in Ovid, but not of sentiment; a distinction on which I should have dwelt in my first book (91). _

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