The post-Homeric name of Nericus was Leucadia. Æneas is represented as having debarked there, and Apollo had a temple on the heights which terminate the island to the south. From the cliffs which overlook the Adriatic on that side, Sappho is said to have leaped into the sea, overcome by the sorrows of her unhappy love. “Sappho’s Leap” is the name of the cliff to this day, and my Corfiote captain, as we glided by, told me how the place was celebrated because the Duchess of the island had jumped off into the sea from it, and that the people had put up a great inscription in memory of it. He had never seen it, and didn’t know exactly where the leap was made; but I think he was very excusable for his ignorance, as the action of the sea, driven as it is sometimes by the furious southwest wind into a very “hell of waters,” which consume the rock in their fury, must long ago have brought down all that classical times had seen of the rock, and changed the face of the cliff entirely. As it now is, I could find hardly a point where a new Sappho would have found a welcome so gentle as the embrace of the Adriatic; masses of fallen rock and stony beach would have given a harsher but more speedy end.
Mythology says that when Adonis was killed, Aphrodite, seeking him through all the earth, finally found him lying dead in the temple of the Erythræan Apollo. The Sun-god, to cure her grief, counseled her to throw herself from the cliffs of Leucadia into the sea, where she would find oblivion. Here Zeus, who seems to have found obstacles in the way of his legitimate marriage, and to have wooed Hera at first with less success than attended his mortal loves, found by the same process a salutary indifference to the charms of his divine sister and afterwards spouse, to which temporary coolness on his part might, perhaps, be ascribed his ultimate success with the fickle fair.
And here, in practical historical times, criminals condemned to death were thrown into the sea. The people (who even now preserve a certain sympathy with the criminal class) used to tie numbers of birds to the limbs of the condemned and cover them with feathers to break the force of their fall, and then send boats to pick them up. If they survived, they were pardoned.