Hero and Leander, the lamp burning over the Hellespont

Between Europe and Asia runs a narrow arm of the sea, the Hellespont, which we now call the Dardanelles. On its two shores, according to myth, lived two young lovers: Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite in the city of Sestos, and Leander, who lived at Abydos on the opposite shore. Every night he swam across the strait to reach her, guided only by a small light.

The ancient sources

The story was already known in the Augustan age. Virgil alludes to it in the third book of the Georgics without naming anyone, describing a young man swimming at night in a stormy sea, driven by love. Ovid devotes two letters of the Heroides to it, the eighteenth and nineteenth, in which Leander and then Hero write to each other during days of rough sea; the attribution of these paired letters to Ovid is, however, debated.

The fullest account is a short Greek poem, Hero and Leander, composed by an author called Musaeus, known as the Grammarian, who probably lived between the 5th and 6th centuries AD. He should not be confused with the mythical singer Musaeus, a disciple of Orpheus. It is this late, refined and melancholy text that fixed the version of the legend known to modern readers.

The festival and the tower

According to Musaeus, the two meet at Sestos during a festival in honour of Aphrodite and Adonis, to which young people flock from all the neighbouring cities. Leander falls in love with the priestess and persuades her to receive him. Hero lives alone in a tower by the sea, and their love must remain secret, because she is consecrated to the goddess and her parents would not approve.

So they agree: every night Hero will light a lamp at the top of the tower, and Leander, swimming in the dark, will steer by that light. All summer the pact holds. The two meet at night and part before dawn, while the city knows nothing. In the poem the lamp becomes almost a character, witness and accomplice of their love.

The night of the storm

With the coming of winter the sea grows dangerous, but Leander does not give up. One night of raging wind Hero lights the lamp as always, and he throws himself into the waves. Halfway across the strait a gust puts out the light. Without his guide, exhausted by the currents, Leander drowns. At dawn Hero sees her beloved's body driven by the waves to the foot of the tower.

In despair the priestess throws herself from the top and dies beside him. Musaeus ends the poem by noting that not even in death were the two lovers parted. For the ancients their story became the example of the courage that love gives the young and, at the same time, of the price it may demand from those who defy nature.

Swimming like Leander

In the English Renaissance Christopher Marlowe wrote a poem on Hero and Leander that was left unfinished at his death and completed by George Chapman; it was published in 1598. On 3 May 1810 Lord Byron decided to test the feat and swam the Hellespont from Sestos to Abydos together with a naval officer, taking a little over an hour. The painter William Turner depicted the parting of the two lovers in 1837.

Swimming races across the Dardanelles that recall Leander's feat are still organised today. The myth has thus left its mark on geography too, and that lamp burning at the top of the tower remains one of the simplest and most powerful images of a faithfulness that defies the sea and the night. A small light, entrusted to the wind, is enough to hold two continents together.