This Yale lecture, the fifth in the series Let This Be a Lesson, examines Rubens's painting of the doomed lovers Hero and Leander. The instructor walks through how the young Rubens stages the story's fatal climax, inventing a crowded retinue of sea nymphs and a violent storm to heighten the drama beyond anything in the ancient sources. Close attention goes to composition and color, showing how Rubens uses the churning water and twisting bodies to turn a swimming accident into a moral spectacle. The lecture asks what the lovers were meant to have done wrong in the eyes of Rubens's audience, and how the painting functions as a warning as much as a tragedy. Mythological background, workshop practice, and the visual rhetoric of Baroque painting all get discussed, making this a close reading of one canvas as a way into how seventeenth-century viewers read moral lessons into classical myth.