Introduction
According to legend, one stormy night the wind extinguished the candle that Hero lit to guide her lover Leander as he swam to her across the Dardanelles Strait, and he was lost. Roman poet Ovid imagined the letter that Leander might have sent by ship to his darling, while he waited impatiently for calmer waters.
MEANTIME, while wind and wave deny me everything, I ponder in my heart the first times I stole to you.* Night was but just beginning — for the memory has charm for me — when I left my father’s doors on the errand of love. Nor did I wait, but, flinging away my garments, and with them my fears, I struck out with pliant arm upon the liquid deep. The moon for the most shed me a tremulous light as I swam, like a duteous attendant watchful over my path. Lifting to her my eyes, “Be gracious to me, shining deity,”* I said, “and let the rocks of Latmos rise in thy mind! Endymion will not have thee austere of heart. Bend, O I pray, thy face to aid my secret loves. Thou, a goddess, didst glide from the skies and seek a mortal love; ah, may it be allowed me to say the truth! — she I seek is a goddess too.”
* Leander and Hero sought to hide their relationship, which drove Leander to swim by night across the narrow but perilous Hellespont or Dardanelles Strait (which leads from the Aegean Sea towards the Black Sea) to meet her, guided by the light of her lantern. Leander lived in Abydos, near modern-day Çanakkale on the strait’s southern shore. Barely a mile away across the busy shipping channel was Sestos, near what is now Eceabat on the long finger of the Gallipoli Peninsula, where Hero was a priestess of Aphrodite. It was here at this narrow neck that Xerxes the Persian king crossed from Asia into Europe in 483 BC: see Xerxes Scourges the Hellespont. And it was here that poet Lord Byron recreated Leander’s homeward swim: see Byron Swims the Hellespont.
* The moon-goddess Selene found a surpassingly beautiful shepherd named Endymion fast asleep on Mt Latmos in the Carian mountains of southwestern Asia Minor. She fell in love with him; and for her sake Zeus, who was the mortal boy’s father, granted him to be young forever, and to sleep for ever, in which state he fathered fifty daughters by her. John Keats (1795-1821) worked the tiny fragments of myth into a long narrative poem, published in 1818, familiar from its opening lines:
‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Précis
Roman poet Ovid imagined how Leander, the young man who according to legend used to swim the Hellespont to meet his lover Hero, might have written to her when a storm made the crossing impossible, remembering sentimentally the night when he first plunged into the sea, and called on the moon-goddess to bless his errand of love. (57 / 60 words)
Roman poet Ovid imagined how Leander, the young man who according to legend used to swim the Hellespont to meet his lover Hero, might have written to her when a storm made the crossing impossible, remembering sentimentally the night when he first plunged into the sea, and called on the moon-goddess to bless his errand of love.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 60 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 50 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: because, despite, otherwise, ought, unless, until, whereas, whether.
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