Chapter 8: Rehearsing Leander

The event alluded to in the title of this essay, Lord Byron swimming the Dardanelles in 1810, obviously took place some distance from the Britain of more ordinary recreational pastimes. Preparation for the swim, however, began in 1807 in London where Byron swam under the watchful eye of a trainer and the skeptical eye of the writer Leigh Hunt: “The first time I saw Lord Byron, he was rehearsing the part of Leander, under the auspices of Mr. Jackson, the prizefighter. It was in the river Thames, before his first visit to Greece.” ¹ In his Autobiography (1850), written long after Byron had crossed the strait formerly known as the Hellespont, Hunt uses the theatrical metaphor “rehearsing the part” to poke fun at Byron’s role-playing, something Byron himself did in his letters and in the poem “Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos” (9 May 1810). ² In the poem, the young lord describes himself as a “degenerate modern wretch” who completes the swim half dead. And when Byron writes to Francis Hodgson and says “I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical,” he uses “plume” as a variation on both the classical victory wreath and the modern feather. ³