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.
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).