Mapping the Hellespont with Leander and Hero: "The Swimming Lover and the Nightly Bride"

Abstract

This chapter explores through the lens of memory studies in a variety of fields the intimate relationship between the story of Hero and Leander and its setting on the Hellespont. It draws on research in cognitive and social psychology on the way in which features of the landscape serve as prompts for the recollection of other material, a study from archaeology of the phenomenology of landscape, and recent work on the operations of collective memory in a dispersed community. These observations are then applied to this well-known story from the ancient world. The chapter demonstrates how this story of love and loss, a cultural memory, was used, for at least twelve centuries, not only to recreate this distinctive location in the mind of a listener or reader, but also to represent it, both to those who lived locally and to a remote audience.