Musaeus

Hero and Leander

The author of the celebrated poem on the loves of Hero and Leander. Nothing is known of his personal history; and the elder Scaliger even supposed that the poem was the work of the ancient Athenian bard. But in many of the manuscripts the author is distinctly called Musaeus the grammarian; and it is now agreed on all hands that the poem is quite a late production. According to Schrader and other critics the author did not live earlier than the fifth century of our era. The general style is quite different from the simplicity of the older poets, and several individual expressions betray the lateness of its origin. The poem was first discovered in the thirteenth century.