whom the wonderful horse Bayard was presented by Charlemagne; the traitor Doon of Mayence; Ganelon, responsible for the treachery that led to the death of Roland; Archbishop Turpin, a typical specimen of muscular Christianity; William Fierabras, William au court nez, William of Toulouse, and William of Orange (all probably identical), and Vivien, the nephew of the latter and the hero of Aliscans. The late Charlemagne romances originated the legends, in English form, of Sowdone of Babylone, Sir Otnel, Sir Firumbras and Huon of Bordeaux (in which Oberon, the king of the fairies, the son of Julius Caesar and Morgan the Fay, was first made known to England).
The chief remains of the Spanish heroic epic are some poems on the Cid, on the seven Infantes of Lara, and on Fernán Gonzalez, count of Castile. The legend of Charlemagne as told in the Crónica general of Alfonso X. created the desire for a national hero distinguished for his exploits against the Moors, and Roland was thus supplanted by Bernardo del Carpio. Another famous hero and centre of a 14th-century cycle of romance was Amadis of Gaul; its earliest form is Spanish, although the Portuguese have claimed it as a translation from their own language. There is no trace of a French original.
Slavonic Heroes.—The Slavonic heroic saga of Russia centres round Vladimir of Kiev (980–1015), the first Christian ruler of that country, whose personality is eclipsed by that of Ilya (Elias) of Mourom, the son of a peasant, who was said to have saved the empire from the Tatars at the urgent request of his emperor. It is not known whether he was an historical personage; many of the achievements attributed to him border on the miraculous. A much-discussed work is the Tale of Igor, the oldest of the Russian medieval epics. Igor was the leader of a raid against the heathen Polovtsi in 1185; at first successful, he was afterwards defeated and taken prisoner, but finally managed to escape. Although the Finns are not Slavs, on topographical grounds mention may here be made of Wainamoinen, the great magician and hero of the Finnish epic Kalevala (“land of heroes”). The popular hero of the Servians and Bulgarians is Marko Kralyevich (q.v.), son of Vukashin, characterized by Goethe as a counterpart of the Greek Heracles and the Persian Rustem. For the Persian, Indian, &c., heroes see the articles on the literature and religions of the various countries.
Authorities.—On the subject generally, see J. G. T. Grässe, Die grossen Sagenkreise des Mittelalters (Dresden, 1842), forming part of his Lehrbuch einer Literärgeschichte der berühmtesten Völker des Mittelalters; W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance (2nd ed., 1908). Teutonic.—B. Symons, “Germanische Heldensage” in H. Paul’s Grundris der germanischen Philologie, iii. (Strassburg, 1900), 2nd revised edition, separately printed (ib., 1905); W. Grimm, Die deutsche Heldensage (1829, 3rd ed., 1889), still one of the most important works; W. Müller, Mythologie der deutschen Heldensage (Heilbronn, 1886) and supplement, Zur Mythologie der griechischen und deutschen Heldensage (ib., 1889); O. L. Jiriczek, Deutsche Heldensagen, i. (Strassburg, 1898) and Die deutsche Heldensage (3rd revised edition, Leipzig, 1906); Chantepie de la Saussaye, The Religion of the Teutons (Eng. tr., Boston, U.S.A., 1902); J. G. Robertson, History of German Literature (1902). See also Heldenbuch.
Celtic.—M. H. d’Arbois de Jubainville, Cours de littérature celtique (12 vols., 1883–1902), one vol. trans. into English by R. I. Best, The Irish Mythological Cycle and Celtic Mythology (1903); L. Petit de Julleville, Hist. de la langue et de la litt. française, i. Moyen âge (1896); C. Squire, The Mythology of the British Isles: an Introduction to Celtic Myth and Romance (1905); J. Rhys, Celtic Britain (3rd ed., 1904). Slavonic.—A. N. Rambaud, La Russie épique (1876); W. Wollner, Untersuchungen über die Volksepik der Grossrussen (1879); W. R. Morfill, Slavonic Literature (1883).
HERO AND LEANDER, two lovers celebrated in antiquity.
Hero, the beautiful priestess of Aphrodite at Sestos, was seen by
Leander, a youth of Abydos, at the celebration of the festival
of Aphrodite and Adonis. He became deeply enamoured of
her; but, as her position as priestess and the opposition of her
parents rendered their marriage impossible they agreed to carry
on a clandestine intercourse. Every night Hero placed a lamp
in the top of the tower where she dwelt by the sea, and Leander,
guided by it, swam across the dangerous Hellespont. One
stormy night the lamp was blown out and Leander perished.
On finding his body next morning on the shore, Hero flung
herself into the waves. The story is referred to by Virgil (Georg.
iii. 258), Statius (Theb. vi. 535) and Ovid (Her. xviii. and xix.).
The beautiful little epic of Musaeus has been frequently translated,
and is expanded in the Hero and Leander of C. Marlowe
and G. Chapman. It is also the subject of a ballad by Schiller
and a drama by F. Grillparzer.
See M. H. Jellinek, Die Sage von Hero und Leander in der Dichtung (1890), and G. Knaack “Hero und Leander” in Festgabe für Franz Susemihl (1898). A careful collection of materials will be found in F. Köppner, Die Sage von Hero und Leander in der Literatur und Kunst des Altertums (1894).
HERO OF ALEXANDRIA Greek geometer and writer on
mechanical and physical subjects, probably flourished in the
second half of the 1st century. This is the more modern view,
in contrast to the earlier theory most generally accepted, according
to which he flourished about 100 B.C. The earlier theory started
from the superscription of one of his works, Ἥρωνος Κτησιβίου βελοποιϊκά, from which it was inferred that Hero was a pupil of
Ctesibius. Martin, Hultsch and Cantor took this Ctesibius to be
a barber of that name who lived in the reign of Ptolemy Euergetes
II. (d. 117 B.C.) and is credited with having invented an improved
water-organ. But this identification is far from certain, as a
Ctesibius mechanicus is mentioned by Athenaeus as having lived
under Ptolemy II. Philadelphus (285–247 B.C.). Nor can the
relation of master and pupil be certainly inferred from the superscription
quoted (observe the omission of any article), which
really asserts no more than that Hero re-edited an earlier treatise
by Ctesibius, and implies nothing about his being an immediate
predecessor. Further, it is certain that Hero used physical and
mathematical writings by Posidonius, the Stoic, of Apamea,
Cicero’s teacher, who lived until about the middle of the 1st
century B.C. The positive arguments for the more modern view
of Hero’s date are (1) the use by him of Latinisms from which
Diels concluded that the 1st century A.D. was the earliest possible
date, (2) the description in Hero’s Mechanics iii. of a small
olive-press with one screw which is alluded to by Pliny (Nat.
Hist. viii.) as having been introduced since A.D. 55, (3) an
allusion by Plutarch (who died A.D. 120) to the proposition that
light is reflected from a surface at an angle equal to the angle of
incidence, which Hero proved in his Catoptrica, the words used
by Plutarch fitting well with the corresponding passage of that
work (as to which see below). Thus we arrive at the latter half of
the 1st century A.D. as the approximate date of Hero’s activity.
The geometrical treatises which have survived (though not interpolated) in Greek are entitled respectively Definitiones, Geometria, Geodaesia, Stereometrica (i. and ii.), Mensurae, Liber Geoponicus, to which must now be added the Metrica recently discovered by R. Schöne in a MS. at Constantinople. These books, except the Definitiones, mostly consist of directions for obtaining, from given parts, the areas or volumes, and other parts, of plane or solid figures. A remarkable feature is the bare statement of a number of very close approximations to the square roots of numbers which are not complete squares. Others occur in the Metrica where also a method of finding such approximate square, and even approximate cube, roots is shown. Hero’s expressions for the areas of regular polygons of from 5 to 12 sides in terms of the squares of the sides show interesting approximations to the values of trigonometrical ratios. Akin to the geometrical works is that On the Dioptra, a remarkable book on land-surveying, so called from the instrument described in it, which was used for the same purposes as the modern theodolite. It is in this book that Hero proves the expression for the area of a triangle in terms of its sides. The Pneumatica in two books is also extant in Greek as is also the Automatopoietica. In the former will be found such things as siphons, “Hero’s fountain,” “penny-in-the-slot” machines, a fire-engine, a water-organ, and arrangements employing the force of steam. Pappus quotes from three books of Mechanics and from a work called Barulcus, both by Hero. The three books on Mechanics survive in an Arabic translation which, however, bears a title “On the lifting of heavy objects.” This corresponds exactly to Barulcus, and it is probable that Barulcus and Mechanics were only alternative titles for one and the same work. It is indeed not credible that Hero wrote two
