Abstract
IT is one of the most delightful features of classical study that so many classical authors are practically anonymous. Too often nowadays is the student of literature turned aside from his examination of a work by his examination of the writer. This may, and frequently does, assist in explaining why the author said what he did. But there is always the temptation to read the elicited biographical knowledge into the actual words, so that literary criticism becomes psychoanalysis, fascinating, fashionable-and an altogether different subject. This is a temptation from which the student of classical literature is at times saved in spite of himself. In the present instance, the poet under discussion has withdrawn behind a singularly thick veil of obscurity. His name was-perhaps-Musaeus. He lived-probably-in the latter half of the fifth century after Christ. He may have been a grammarian, and-possibly-Procopius of Gaza addressed two letters to him. This being all our information about the poet, we can dismiss him without reluctance and turn to his poem. It is a miniature epic of three hundred and forty-two hexameters on the subject of Hero and Leander. John Addington Symonds has described it as the pure rose of Greek summer.' In other and more cumbrous words, it is in the traditional style, with qualities which characterize Greek literature of the best period. But before inquiring what those qualities are, let me first outline the plot of the poem. Facing each other across the Hellespont at the eastern end of its narrows, lay two Greek cities, Sestos and Abydos. Sestos, on the Thracian side, was the home of Hero, priestess of Aphrodite, a maiden no less respected for her dignity than admired for her beauty. At a festival of the goddess, Hero encountered young Leander who had come across from Abydos, and the two at once fell in love. Marriage of a revered priestess to a foreigner being impossible, Leander resolved upon a nocturnal visit to the lonely tower on the shore where Hero lodged, and urged her to kindle a lamp which would guide him in his swim across the strait. Argument and her own emotion conquered the maiden's scruples. The nightly tryst once accomplished was repeated until at length winter set in, and swimming became not merely a feat but a peril. The lovers were, however, powerless in the grip of Fate; Hero could not refrain from her nightly ritual of lighting the lamp, nor Leander from his passage of the storm-tossed waters. At last they overcame his strength, the beacon was extinguished by the wind, and he was drowned. In the grey dawn which followed,
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