Hero

Q: Who was Hero?

Hero was a young woman of Sestos on the European shore of the Hellespont, the lover of Leander of Abydos, who swam across the strait at night to be with her, guided by the light in her tower. When he drowned in a storm, Hero died with him.

Hero was a young woman of Sestos on the European shore of the Hellespont, the lover of Leander of Abydos, who swam across the strait at night to be with her, guided by the light in her tower. When he drowned in a storm, Hero died with him. The story is told in two verse letters of Ovid’s Heroides and alluded to by Virgil; the fullest ancient telling is a late Greek poem, Hero and Leander, by Musaeus.

The Story of Hero and Leander

Hero lived in a tower in Sestos, on the western (European) shore of the Hellespont, the narrow strait between Europe and Asia. She fell in love with Leander, a young man from Abydos, on the eastern shore. Leander would swim across the strait at night to meet her, guided by a light that Hero kept burning at the top of the tower (Ovid, Heroides 18.31, 18.85–86, 18.105–106). Ovid’s Leander says that he has been kept from crossing for seven nights by the rough sea (Heroides 18.25), and Ovid’s Hero warns him not to trust his arms more than oars and to swim only when the sea is calm (Heroides 19.184, 19.204).

In the poem of Musaeus, Hero is a priestess of Aphrodite who lives in a tower by the sea. One winter night a storm blew out her lamp, and Leander, without his guide, was overcome by the waves and drowned. When Hero saw his body washed up at the foot of the tower, she threw herself down from it and died beside him.

Sestos and Abydos

The two towns were real places on either side of the strait. Strabo says that Abydos lay at the mouth of the Hellespont and the Propontis, on the Asian side, and that Sestos was the best of the cities in the Chersonesus on the opposite side; from harbour to harbour they are about thirty stades apart, though the strait itself at the crossing used for Xerxes’ bridge is only seven stades wide (Strabo, Geography 13.1.22; compare Herodotus 7.34). Strabo adds that a person crossing from Sestos first coasts a little towards the Tower of Hero, and then lets the current carry the ship across, while those crossing from Abydos must go about eight stades in the opposite direction, to a tower opposite Sestos, before taking an oblique course (Strabo, Geography 13.1.22). A place called the Tower of Hero was therefore a landmark on the strait.

Hero and Leander in Roman Poetry

Virgil refers to the lovers in the Georgics, in a passage on the power of desire. What does love not do to the young man, he asks, in whose very bones it stirs a great fire? In the dark of the night, through broken storm-gusts, he swims the sea; above him the great gate of heaven thunders, and the waters, dashed on the rocks, roar back; neither his unhappy parents can call him back, nor the girl who will die over him in a cruel death (Virgil, Georgics 3.258–263). Virgil does not name the pair, but the passage matches the story of Leander and Hero.

Ovid wrote a pair of letters on the subject in the Heroides: Leander to Hero, and Hero’s reply. In the first, written from Abydos, Leander says that for seven nights the sea has been too rough to cross; he looks from a cliff towards the watchful light on the tower top that guides his course, and he remembers the first night, when he swam by the light of the moon and found Hero watching from the top of her tower, with her nurse trying to hold her back from rushing into the waves. He also recalls Helle, from whom the strait took its name (Ovid, Heroides 18.25–31, 18.55–106, 18.141). In her answer, Hero begs him to come and warns him to be careful, since his arms are not oars; she writes beside a crackling lamp, and her nurse pours wine on the flame as a good omen (Ovid, Heroides 19.151–153, 19.184). Ovid also mentions Leander’s swim in the Ars Amatoria: he often crossed, he says, so that his girl would know his heart (Ars Amatoria 2.249–250).