Word: hellespont
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...farthest extreme of Europe, he committed the master symbol of the Romantic movement. "This morning," he exulted, "I swam from Sestos to Abydos." And then, being Byron, he saw the funny side of it: "The immediate distance [across the Hellespont] is not above a mile, but the current renders it hazardous, so much so that I doubt whether Leander's conjugal affection must not have been a little chilled in his passage...
...Fleece. According to Greek legend, the fleece first belonged to a ram provided by the god Hermes to help two children, Helle and Phryxus, dodge an untrustworthy stepmother. The ram took off through the air with the children on its back. Helle fell off and was drowned (hence the Hellespont, now the Dardanelles), but Phryxus reached the eastern shore of the Black Sea. He ungratefully sacrificed the ram to Zeus and gave its fleece to the King of Colchis, who put it in a sacred grove guarded by a dragon...
...Argonauts boldly pushed on through the dangerous Hellespont and entered the Black Sea. To their dismay, Hercules deserted, was later summoned home to perform another of his mighty labors. "Holy Serpents!" he growled. "Tell me what [it is] this time?" The job-cleaning the Augean Stables-didn't take Hercules long. Afterwards, he stayed around with the high priestess of Lydia-who in due time bore male triplets. In gratitude, the priestess taught Hercules how to spin, and tied up his hair in blue braids; he was crazy about it, and admitted confidentially that he had always wanted...
Richard Halliburton fulfilled himself in many ways and made it pay. He batted about Europe and the Orient, toured Tibet, climbed Fujiyama in midwinter. He mounted Olympus, swam the Hellespont, followed the trail of Ulysses from Ithaca back to Ithaca. Women's clubs began to clamor for him to address them and in 1925 he published his first book, The Royal Road to Romance...
Smarting under the defeat of Marathon, Persia's great Xerxes crossed the Hellespont on a bridge of boats in the summer of 480 B. c., and marched through Thessaly. Herodotus recorded that he had 1,800,000 men; modern historians say about 180,000. Leonidas, king of Sparta, met him with only 7,000 men at Thermopylae, a narrow strip of dry shore between the cliffs of Mount Oeta and the swampy border of the Maliac Gulf. Hearing that a big detachment of Persians had found a way around the pass, Leonidas sent 5,000 soldiers to head them...