The Hellespont

The Greek name of the strait, Hellḗspontos, “the sea of Helle,” the narrow water between Europe and Asia at the gate of the Troad. It was one of the great crossing-places of the ancient world: Xerxes yoked it with a bridge of boats to carry his army into Greece and, when a storm broke the bridge, had the water itself lashed for its insolence; Alexander crossed it the other way to begin the conquest of Asia.

The name is a piece of myth. Hellḗspontos is the póntos, the sea, of Hellē, the girl who fled with her brother Phrixus on a golden-fleeced ram that flew over land and sea; over this strait she lost her hold and fell, and the water has carried her name ever since, while the ram bore Phrixus on to Colchis and the fleece the Argonauts would seek. The strait that armies and empires fought to control is named, at its root, for a child who drowned in it; the modern Dardanelles, from the Trojan town of Dardanus, replaced the myth with a map.

The Latin name of the strait, Hellespontus, taken from the Greek and keeping the myth of Helle within it. The Roman poets loved its second legend, the nightly swim of Leander across the strait to his beloved Hero, until the night he drowned; Ovid gives the lovers a pair of letters in the Heroides, and the swim became a stock figure of devotion and of danger.

The Latin carried the Greek name to the European languages as the learned term for the strait, beside the medieval and modern Dardanelles. Like the Bosporus to its northeast, the Hellespont is a place whose strategic weight, the gate of the grain-route to the Black Sea, is matched by the lightness of its name, a girl fallen from a flying ram. The waterway over which Persia and Macedon and later empires fought keeps, in Greek and Latin alike, only the memory of Helle.