‘Thus to old Hellespont we come – but bring / New times, new tears, new poet's questioning’ wrote William Ellery Leonard (1876–1944) in a poem that appeared as a preface to a 1916 American edition of Austrian Franz Grillparzer's five-act tragedy about Hero and Leander entitled Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (1840). The distich that M. discusses (p. 238) would also aptly serve as introductory material to his own large-scale comparative study tracing the reception of the legend of Hero and Leander from its classical sources all the way to its contemporary incarnations. M.'s volume, clearly the work of a learned comparatist who possesses a magisterial grasp of languages, literatures and other artistic modes of expression, has much to commend it to readers interested in the enduring power of narrative and story-telling. Displaying nothing short of an impressive range, M. slides effortlessly from high poetry to burlesque ditties, from pop songs to cantatas, operas and ballets, from Greek and Latin to German, French, Italian and Spanish. He wears his learning very lightly, however, drawing his reader in, Odysseus-like, with a finely-honed ability to spin a narrative, to retell different versions of the same story in a constantly enchanting manner.
Perhaps what comes through most clearly from M.'s 400-page compilation of versions of the legend of Hero and Leander is how little the story actually changes despite permutations of genre or the author's historical moment. Hero and heroine fall in love, but are forbidden to be together. In addition to social opposition to their union, the two dwell in separate cities, across the Hellespont from one another. Aided only by the light of Hero's lamp, Leander swims across the waters under the cover of night to be with his beloved. The story ends tragically when a storm extinguishes the light and Leander drowns. When Hero learns his fate, she kills herself. Although many writers feel compelled to supplement the skeletal narratives that come down to us from Ovid's Heroides and Musaeus’ late antique epyllion Hero and Leander, the embellishments come in the guise of additional peripheral characters who serve to explain why the protagonists’ love was forbidden (strict parents, a high priest who jealously guards Hero's vows of chastity, rival lovers) or why Hero's lamp was extinguished on the fateful night (did she do it to keep him from swimming or was it the wind or the gods or some ill-intentioned human actor) or, in the more humorous versions, why Leander had to swim at all (rather than cross the stormy Hellespont in a boat). Perhaps the story was so well known that large-scale narrative interventions seemed impossible; perhaps the story of young forbidden love really offers no real option beyond the traditional narrative denouement (see Romeo and Juliet or Pyramus and Thisbe). M. does not see it as part of his remit to offer an exploration of the reasons.
Within the multitude of similar versions, the moments of variation in which we get something patently distinct in a Hero and Leander (like) story leap off the page. I choose four particular instances of reception where the reader misses, in M.'s lively recounting of the narrative, an in-depth consideration of the differences. In the sixteenth century the Italian writer Giovani Francesco Straparola recasts the tale in the story of Malgherita and the hermit Teodoro. Malgherita, exhibiting striking erotic boldness, falls in love with Teodoro, who plays the story's Hero role, and takes it upon herself, Leander-like, to swim to the hermitage to sleep with him. Not entirely averse, he lights her way with a lamp. After a few successful visits, some fishermen spot her out at sea and report her activities to her brothers. Furious, the brothers attach a lamp to their own boat and, unnoticed by the poor heroine who mistakes their light for Teodoro's, they lead their sister astray, far from the desired destination. Exhausted, she drowns, and Teodoro finds her corpse. He does not kill himself, but instead buries her so that no one discovers what her brothers have done. In a similarly dark vein, Frenchman Louis Ratisbonne composes a nineteenth-century one-act tragedy entitled Héro et Léandre, which in large measure follows the tale as we know it from Ovid and Musaeus. As a tragedy, the ending is generically prescribed, and yet here Ratisbonne offers a fascinating innovation. As Leander swims for the final time through the storm-tossed waters of the Hellespont, Hero is gripped with terror. She swears an oath on the river Styx that, if the gods spare Leander, she will give up her lover for good. He survives the sea, but nevertheless the ultimate tragedy is not averted. Devasted by Hero's seeming change of heart, the rebuffed Leander dies as he swims back home, and Hero commits suicide over his corpse.
Two further versions of the story also stand out as potentially fruitful alternative tellings. At the turn of the twentieth century, Austrian Otto Sommerstorff provides a comic twist on the tale. In a clever reversal, the storm on the Hellespont arises while the protagonists are together sharing a night of love. In the morning Hero, with exaggerated distress, pleads with Leander not to undertake his famous swimming. The hero, casting his eyes on the crashing waves, agrees that there is no good reason to tempt fate. Their tragedy is averted – so simply, so obviously – when he suggests instead that they get married and live happily ever after. The final text M. mentions is graphic artist Anke Feuchtenberger's 2004 illustrated version of an adapted, abridged and otherwise conflated text of a German translation of Musaeus. In this surreal adaptation a young girl watches Leander, the championship swimmer, on her television screen. There is much left unexplored in these four moments of reception, for example, questions about gender (how does the story change when the woman swims), about narrative perspective (what happens when we watch Leander on TV through the eyes of young Hero), about canonical tales and narrative possibility (is the ending inevitable).
A work tracing the afterlife of texts or tales from classical antiquity, as S. Montiglio points out in the introduction to her own study of this topic, The Myth of Hero and Leander: the History and Reception of an Enduring Greek Legend (2018), must make a choice either to pursue comprehensiveness or to focus on close analysis of fewer, selected instances of reception (p. 7). While Montiglio embraces close analysis, M. has certainly opted for broad and exhaustive coverage, although perhaps surprisingly he leaves out the visual arts. In choosing this path, M. foregoes engaging with the most up-to-date works of scholarship. For me, the problems emerge most clearly in M.'s discussions of Ovid (p. 38), where he approvingly cites G. Highet's 1957 assertions that the Latin poet possesses ‘an acute knowledge of women's psychology’. An analysis of the Heroides that took into account more recent interpretations of the poetic epistles, more steeped in questions of gender and genre, for example, would set the table for more in-depth and nuanced readings of later texts of all sorts. The volume as it exists, however, ambitious in its scale and capacious in its coverage, establishes a solid foundation for future work on the reception of the story of Hero and Leander.
