Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

‘Aphrodite I bless you! Aphrodite greatest of all the gods, I thank you and pledge myself to serve you always!’

He bends down to meet warm lips that eagerly return his kisses. Soon the pair are in each other’s arms laughing, weeping, sighing and loving.

Nine times the moon changes before the union of this happy pair is blessed with the birth of a child, a boy they call PAPHOS, and whose name will be given to the town in which Pygmalion and Galatea live out the remainder of their loving and contented lives.

Just once or twice in Greek myth mortal lovers are granted a felicitous ending. It is that hope, perhaps, that spurs us on to believe that our quest for happiness will not be futile.fn4

Hero and Leander

The Greek Sea, or ‘Hellespont’, is called the Dardanelles in our age and is best known as the scene of some of the most furious fighting around Gallipoli during the Great War. As part of the natural boundary that separates Europe and Asia, these straits have always been strategically important for war and trade. Despite the size of the symbolic gap between them, they are in reality narrow enough to be crossed by a strong swimmer.

LEANDER’sfn5 home was in Abydos, on the Asian side of the Hellespont, but he was in love with a priestess of Aphrodite called HERO, who lived in a tower in Sestos on the European side. They had met during the yearly festival of Aphrodite. Many youths had been smitten by ‘the meadow of roses in her limbs’fn6 and her face as pure as Selene, but it was only the handsome Leander who awoke a like passion in her. In the brief time they had together at the festival they hatched a plan that would allow them to see each other once they were back home and separated by the straits. Each night Hero was to set a lamp in the window of her tower and Leander, eyes fixed on this point of light in the darkness, would breast the currents of the Hellespont, climb up and be with her.

As a priestess, Hero was sworn to celibacy, but Leander persuaded her that the physical consummation of their love would be a holy thing, a consecration of which Aphrodite would approve. In fact, he said, it was surely an insult to devote herself to the goddess of love and yet remain a virgin. It would be like worshipping Ares but refusing to fight. This excellent argument won Hero over and each night the lamp was lit, the straits swum and love made. They were the happiest couple in all the world.

All summer long this blissful state of affairs prevailed, but summer all too soon turned to autumn and before long the equinoctial gales blew. One night the three winds Boreas, Zephyrus and Notus – the North, West and South Winds – howled together, sending blusters and gusts all around, one of which blew out the lamp in Hero’s window. With nothing to guide him across the Hellespont and with the winds stirring up the waves into heaving walls of water, Leander lost his way, got into trouble and drowned.

Hero waited up all night for her lover. The next morning, as soon as Eos had cast open the gates of dawn and there was light enough to see, she looked down to see Leander’s broken body spread out over the rocks beneath her tower. In an agony of despair she leapt from her window and dashed herself on those same rocks.fn7

Since Leander many others have swum the Hellespont. None more notably than the poet Byron, who managed it on 3 May 1810 – at the second attempt. In his journal he proudly recorded a time of one hour and ten minutes. ‘Did it with little difficulty,’ he noted. ‘I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical.’

Lord Byron swam in the company of one Lieutenant William Ekenhead of the Royal Marines who obtained his own share of immortality with his inclusion in this stanza from Byron’s mock epic masterpiece, Don Juan. Praising his hero’s prowess in swimming across the Guadalquivir in Seville, Byron writes of Juan:

He could, perhaps, have passed the Hellespont,

As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided)

Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did.fn8

Shakespeare seems to have been especially fond of the ancient lovers’ story, giving a character in Much Ado About Nothing the name Hero and putting these wonderfully cynical anti-romantic words into the mouth of Rosalind in As You Like It:

Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun if it had not been for a hot midsummer night, for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and, being taken with the cramp, was drowned; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

Arion and the Dolphin