Musaeus in English

The divided life of Hero and Leander is exemplified in its scholarly history. The earliest printed edition was that of Aldus, in 1494, which included the Greek text with a Latin translation – its printed history (like that of Aristotle’s Poetics) begins mediated through translation. The manuscript Aldus was working from identified the poem simply as the work of Musaeus, and Aldus therefore ascribed it to the legendary poet of that name, a pupil of Orpheus, and assumed it to be the most ancient classical poetry to survive – poetry, thus, in its purest, originary, form. Though throughout the next century there were many doubters concerning its antiquity, it was widely praised and often translated, again into Latin, and into various vernaculars (though not English). Scaliger, notoriously, preferred it to Homer, and maintained that if Musaeus had written the Iliad and Odyssey, they would have been better poems. But after Isaac Casaubon, late in the century, demonstrated that stylistically the poem could not, in fact, be early, but was clearly a work of the fifth century A.D. (its poet is appropriately called, in a number of other early manuscripts, not Musaeus but Musaeus the Grammarian) interest in it gradually subsided. The character of the poem thus went from radical innocence to over-sophistication in a very few decades. This history has been very well told by Gordon Braden in The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry;¹ but if one looks at English versions of the poem, the history becomes a little less straightforward. I am here focusing on the four English versions of it before 1700, all composed either in ignorance of Casaubon’s arguments (which were not widely circulated until the mid-seventeenth century), or unfazed by them.

It is customary to praise Marlowe’s scholarly achievement in Hero and Leander by observing how accurately it captures the high rhetorical flashiness of Musaeus’s style, though the style of the original is far more artificial and literary – Braden accurately sums up their similarities by observing that both involve “a simple love story dramatically overwritten” (p. 124). The modes of overwriting, however, are quite different. Here is Cedric Whitman’s translation of the opening lines:

Tell of the lamp, O goddess, the witness of hidden loves, And of the one who swam by night, to sea-borne spousals, And the darkling marriage-bond, unseen by deathless Dawn. And Sestos and Abydos, where I hear of the midnight bridals Of Hero, Leander swimming, and thereto of the lamp, The lamp that beaconed forth Aphrodite’s ministry.²

There is no match in Musaeus for Marlowe’s enthusiasm. Marlowe’s excitement may be the expression of his sense of the adolescence of poetry itself; but clearly this is a classic he is having a great deal of fun with, and there surely cannot have been many other young poets in Elizabethan England to whom Greek was this much fun. Certainly when Chapman undertook to complete Marlowe’s poem, it became much more serious.

Marlowe’s poem is very daring, in many of the ways that Doctor Faustus is. Like Faustus, it tempts the Renaissance reader with his deepest desires – the reader is in this case surely assumed to be male. If Faustus condemns blasphemy, the play nevertheless realizes or embodies it, represents blasphemy on the stage. Hero and Leander is a secular version of that Faustian presumptuousness, and all the blasphemy is sexual. The hero and heroine are incredibly, miraculously, outrageously beautiful, constantly being compared to the most perfect things imaginable – gods and goddesses, jewels, works of art – and coming out ahead. The god Apollo courted Hero (“for her hair”); Cupid himself pined for her, and mistook her for Venus; Leander was more beautiful than Endymion or Ganymede, his hair was more wonderful than the Golden Fleece, and so forth. A whole world of allusion and poetic elaboration is invoked just to adorn these two; the poem, the style, the rhetoric, impose on the lovers a dangerous case of hubris … and none of this comes from Musaeus.

One of the most striking aspects of the poem is its overt sexuality; there are Italian...