Leander

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Leander is mentioned by Dante in Purgatorio (XXVIII, v. 73) as a celebrated example of a lover: «più odio da Leandro non sofferse», referring to the stormy sea that prevented him from reaching his beloved Hero, who lived on the other shore of the Hellespont. According to the note on Canto XXVIII, Leander swam across the strait between Sestos and Abydos every night to go to Hero, but during storms the crossing was impossible; in the Ovidian verses he repeatedly laments the fury of the waves and the wind that keep him on shore. Dante adopts his story as a simile to describe the brief stretch of water that separates the poet from Matelda, hindered by the wind after Matelda's passage. The placement in Dante's journey is therefore that of the earthly Purgatory, but Leander is not a figure on stage: he is evoked as a mythical point of comparison.