ABSTRACT
It is an infelicitous irony that Hero and Leander, a poem which, as this chapter aims to demonstrate, engages centrally with issues of identity, was afforded pride of place in the Western European literary imagination during the Renaissance, because of the complete misidentification of its author.1 With seeming blithe indifference to points of style and literary allusion which place the text after Nonnus’ Dionysiaca and thus firmly in late antiquity, Renaissance writers and teachers identified Musaeus, its author, with Musaeus of Eleusis, the archaic poet and legendary colleague of Orpheus, which places the work in early antiquity. It is possible that this misidentification was courted by the author, who purposefully assumed a pseudonym (although, as Neil Hopkinson notes, Musaeus was a common Late Antique name, at least in Egypt; Hopkinson 1994: 137). However that may be, the misidentification afforded the poet originary status and Hero and Leander was used in schools as an introduction to Greek literature. It was either the first or the second book to be published by the Aldine Press in 1494, in which Musaeus is acclaimed in the preface as ‘the most ancient poet’ (Braden 1978: 81). There were numerous versions of the story, perhaps the most renowned of which is Christopher Marlowe’s archly comic Hero and Leander (1593), supplemented after his death by George Chapman, which has given us the immortal line, ‘Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?’ (On Marlowe, see Braden 1978:57-81; Snare 1989; Heaney 1994; more generally on the reception of the poem see Malcovati 1962; Farber 1961:96-7; Blakeney 1934:8-9). However, after scholars reassessed the dating of the poem in the early seventeenth century, with irrefutable arguments for a later date, Musaeus was relegated
to relative obscurity. Elements of the poem’s style and content which appealed to readers when they thought Musaeus pre-Homeric were singled out for criticism once he was repositioned as Late Antique. Seldom are the speciousness of periodisation and the caprice of the canon revealed with such clarity.
