Leuce

In Greek mythology, Leuce (in Greek, Λευκή, that is, «white» or «white poplar») is a nymph mentioned by only one source late and who starred in an unhappy love episode with Hades.

Servius tells us that Leuce was a daughter of Oceanus but does not mention who her mother was. The author says that Hades, the god of the dead, fell in love with the oceanid and, showing off her strength, kidnapped her and took her to the Underworld. However, and despite her ancestry, Leuce was not immortal and when her time came she died. To eternalize it, Hades turned it into a white poplar that has since risen on the idyllic Champs Elysees. The author ends his dissertation by alleging that from this tree Heracles took the crown with which he girded his head after returning from hell during his twelfth and last labor.

Compare Leuce with another nymph of similar spelling, Leucipe, said to have been one of the nymphs who played with Persephone just before she was abducted by Hades.

Pausanias also tells us about the relationship between the white poplar and Heracles, but he does not talk about the nymph. The author tells us that the Eleans used to use only the logs of the white poplar and no other tree for Zeus's sacrifices, preferring this tree because Heracles introduced it into Greece from the Thesprotis region. Indeed Heracles, when he made a sacrifice in Olympia in honor of Zeus, he burned the thighs of the victims on white poplar wood. Heracles found that this tree grew on the banks of the Acheron river, in Thesprotia, and for this reason it is said to be called Aqueroid by Homer.

Robert Graves has expressed his version of the myth of Leuce and the white poplar, perhaps in a rather idiosyncratic way, which today is considered more of a poetic theory. This author tells us that the white poplar was also sacred to Persephone, for whom Leuce seems to be simply an epithet, corresponding to a title as goddess of regeneration. Graves, for example, maintains that the back of the poplar leaf was turned white by the glorious sweat of Heracles. However, these data do not appear in any of the written sources.

Homonymy

It is said that Leuce or Leuca is also the name given by the Greeks to the Island of Snakes, located in Pontus Euxino (the Black Sea).