The End? The Death of Hero and Leander from Antiquity to the Rediscovery of Musaeus in Western Europe

Abstract

Hero and Leander are the protagonists of a gripping tale of contrasted and tragic love. She lives secluded in a tower in the city of Sestos on the European side of the Hellespont and he in Abydos on the opposite 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 light 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 her lover in death. The early developments of the legend are debated, but it became a hit in Augustan Rome: Horace, Virgil, and especially Ovid make reference to it.1 Ovid’s Heroides provides the most extensive treatment of it in the form of two letters (18 and 19) written by Hero and Leander to each other while the storm is keeping them apart. Some five centuries later, the Greek poet Musaeus told the tale in an epyllion, Hero and Leander, which ends with this line: «and they took joy of each other even in the extremity of death.»2 The lovers’ death remains a key-concern for medieval interpreters of the story, both in Western Europe and in Byzantium. How did these readers, who lived in a Christian world, come to terms with a death – in Hero’s case a suicide – caused by a passionate and illegitimate love? What happened to Hero and Leander after love killed them? This essay will address these questions, sampling episodes from the two lovers’ literary adventures until the reappearance of Musaeus in Europe in the 15th century.