SEX, LIES, AND LATIN LOVE POETRY: THE OVIDIAN HEROINE AND THE RECLAMATION OF ABANDONMENT NARRATIVE

By

IRINA GREENMAN

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2017

© 2017 Irina Greenman

To Beecher Greenman, My Faithful Hero

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I extend my deepest gratitude to the four members of my graduate committee:

Dr. Jennifer Rea, of the Department of Classics, committee chair and advisor extraordinaire; Drs. Velvet Yates and Mary Ann Eaverly, of the Department of Classics; and Dr. Marsha Bryant, of the Department of English. It was an amazing opportunity to work with such exemplary women scholars, particularly on a project of this nature. I appreciate their patience, expertise, and support.

I thank my parents, Mary Ashby Kimball and Paul Michael Ruden, for supporting me and inspiring me to achieve this level of education and for reminding me that I should never have to settle for less. I believe that the gift of education is the greatest in the world, and my parents have always ensured that mine is the best I could wish for.

I thank the many classicists with whom I have eagerly discussed this paper, for their patience and for their thoughtful criticism. In particular, I wish to acknowledge the efforts of Bethany Abelseth and Emily Lewis, spectacular Latin teachers and very dear friends; and all my contemporary members of the Classics Department Writing Group:

Miriam Patrick, Rachel Ash, Jennifer Nelson, April Spratley, and Oswald Sobrino.

I have had more than my fair share of astounding Latin instructors throughout my education. I extend my deepest gratitude to all of them.

I could not have achieved this without my loving husband, Beecher Greenman.

He has been my rock and my inspiration, and his unwavering support continues to be vital in everything I do.

All translations from Latin into English used throughout this paper are my own, created for this purpose and not previously published in any form, unless otherwise cited.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF TABLES ...... 8

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 9

ABSTRACT ...... 10

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION: GENRE AND INNOVATION OF THE HEROIDES ...... 12

Ancient and Modern Genre Theory: A Comparison ...... 19 Genre Theory and Ovidian Studies ...... 22 Ovid’s Claims About His Own Work ...... 25 Locating the Heroides within Literary Tradition ...... 30 Rhetoric and Suasoriae ...... 30 Epistolary Literature ...... 31 Mythological Love Stories...... 32 Roman Amatory Elegy...... 33 Ovid’s Claims on Trial ...... 35

2 SACRIFICIAL WOMEN: HEROINES OF EPIC ...... 38

Epic-Transplanted Heroides as Set Pieces ...... 40 Penelope’s Letter Within the Odyssey ...... 40 Briseis’ Letter Within the Iliad ...... 45 Hypsipyle’s Letter Within the Argonautica ...... 49 Dido’s Letter Within the Aeneid ...... 52 Laodamia’s Letter Within the Iliad ...... 54 Sacrificial Women Speaking Out and Claiming Center Stage ...... 56 Penelope’s Programmatic Assertion ...... 57 Briseis’ Establishment of Self ...... 59 Hypsipyle’s Flouting of Expectations ...... 60 Dido’s Practical Rebuke ...... 61 Laodamia’s Claims of Marriage ...... 64 A Nod to Expectations: False Displays of Weakness ...... 65 Transplantation to Friendlier Soil ...... 67

3 FATED WOMEN: HEROINES OF TRAGEDY ...... 70

Tragedy-Transplanted Heroides as Monologues ...... 73 Phaedra’s Manipulative Skill ...... 74 Hermione’s Desperate Plea ...... 77

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Deianira’s Self-Defense ...... 81 Canace’s Vicarious Delivery ...... 84 Medea’s Invective ...... 90 Hypermnestra’s Legal Case ...... 94 Fated Women Speaking Out and Claiming Justice ...... 97 Phaedra’s Persuasion for Sexual Equality...... 98 Hermione’s Plea for Help ...... 98 Deianira’s Position Defense ...... 99 Canace’s Confessional ...... 99 Medea’s Demand for Reciprocity ...... 100 Hypermnestra’s Demand for Justice ...... 101 A Nod to Realism: Discussion of Regret ...... 101 Transplantation to Healthier Soil ...... 107

4 POWERFUL WOMEN: HEROINES OF LYRIC POETRY ...... 110

Lyric-Derived Heroides as Narrative Reinventions and Commentaries ...... 112 Phyllis’ Erudition and Power ...... 112 Oenone’s Pastoralism ...... 115 Ariadne’s Epistolography ...... 117 Sappho’s Lyricism ...... 121 Powerful Women Re-Appropriating Narrative ...... 136 Phyllis’ Reclamation from Callimachus’ Aitia ...... 137 Oenone’s Reclamation from Greek City Culture ...... 137 Ariadne’s Reclamation from Theseus’ Hero-Centrism ...... 137 Sappho’s Reclamation from Greek Middle Comedy ...... 138 A Nod to Tradition: Defeat as Narrative Denouement ...... 142 Transplantation to Richer Soil ...... 148

5 CONCLUSION: GENERIC ENRICHMENT AND NARRATIVE RECLAMATION .. 151

Necessity of Generic Enrichment in the Heroides ...... 151 Roman Elegiac Poetry as Multi-Media ...... 154 The Literary Authority of the Heroides ...... 157 Ovid and Feminism ...... 158 Success from the Jaws of Failure ...... 160

APPENDIX

A SOURCE TEXTS OF THE HEROIDES ...... 162

B SUMMARIES OF THE EPISTLES ...... 163

Epistle I: Penelope to Ulixes ...... 163 Epistle II: Phyllis to Demophoön ...... 163 Epistle III: Briseis to Achilles ...... 164 Epistle IV: Phaedra to Hippolytus ...... 164

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Epistle V: Oenone to Paris ...... 165 Epistle VI: Hypsipyle to Jason ...... 165 Epistle VII: Dido to Aeneas ...... 166 Epistle VIII: Hermione to Orestes ...... 166 Epistle IX: Deianira to Hercules ...... 167 Epistle X: Ariadne to Theseus ...... 167 Epistle XI: Canace to Macareus ...... 168 Epistle XII: Medea to Jason ...... 168 Epistle XIII: Laodamia to Protesilaus ...... 169 Epistle XIV: Hypermnestra to Lynceus...... 170 Epistle XV: Sappho to Phaon ...... 170

C MANUSCRIPT TRADITION AND THE QUESTION OF AUTHENTICITY...... 172

Ovid’s Indices ...... 172 Manuscript Tradition ...... 174 Narrowest Estimations ...... 175 Broadest Estimations ...... 176 Other Estimations ...... 178

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 179

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 188

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LIST OF TABLES

Table page

A-1 Source Texts for the Individual Heroides ...... 162

C-1 Latin Manuscripts of the Heroides ...... 175

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Am. Ovid’s Amores

Ars Am. Ovid’s Ars Amatoria

Her. Ovid’s Heroides

Inst. Or. Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria

Met. Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Rem. Am. Ovid’s Remedia Amoris

Tr. Ovid’s Tristia

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Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

SEX, LIES, AND LATIN LOVE POETRY: THE OVIDIAN HEROINE AND THE RECLAMATION OF ABANDONMENT NARRATIVE

By

Irina Greenman

May 2017

Chair: Jennifer Rea Major: Classical Studies

Ovid’s fictional epistolary heroines are often seen as failures by scholars. This is in part why they were chosen as the protagonists for these letters: they are failures in their own genres of epic, tragedy, and lyric poetry. Only in Roman elegiac poetry can their stories be seen as successful and fulfilling the requirements of the genre.

Ovid reimagines the heroines as characters by transplanting them from their original genres into Latin elegiac poetry, allowing them to reclaim their individual experiences of abandonment and explicate them as valid in a way that is uniquely impermissible in each heroine’s genre of origin. This has a different effect on each heroine, depending on the genre from which she is transplanted.

The poems belong to numerous literary traditions. The theory of generic enrichment leads to the conclusion that each letter partakes of different aspects of literary tradition to create a specific experience for the reader by interweaving the recollections of the original text with the introduction of new material.

The five heroines transplanted from epic are Penelope, Briseis, Hypsipyle, Dido, and Laodamia. These heroines claim center stage in a series of set pieces, and refuse

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the burden of moral failure, laying it instead on the epic hero. This is facilitated by the recitative nature of epic.

The heroines transplanted from tragedy are Phaedra, Hermione, Deianira,

Canace, Medea, and Hypermnestra. These heroines produce a series of rhetorically advanced monologues, and criticize the narrative of inevitability of feminine tragedy.

This is enhanced by expectations of the audience in stage drama.

The remaining heroines are transplanted from Greek lyric poetry: Phyllis,

Oenone, Ariadne, and Sappho. These heroines exemplify different forms of feminine power, corresponding to the lyric forms from which their stories derive, and in the

Heroides speak out against versions of their narratives which would render them powerless. Their efforts gain authority from the lyric tradition of the sympathetic audience.

These explorations of the female experience of abandonment, as elucidated in the Heroides texts, place female voices in an exceptional position of primacy. As such, they allow unprecedented validity to the female perspective.

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: GENRE AND INNOVATION OF THE HEROIDES

Ovid’s fictional epistolary heroines are often seen as failures by scholars. This may be one reason why they were chosen as the protagonists for these letters: they are failures in their own genres of epic, tragedy, and various forms of lyric poetry. Only in elegiac poetry can their stories be seen as successful and fulfilling the requirements of the genre, and only in elegiac poetry can they fulfill their own personal narrative goals as those naturally change when they become protagonists in a new genre.

Ovid, in the Heroides, has already changed the requirements of Roman amatory elegy by reversing the genders of the usual characters, making the female protagonist the pursuer rather than the male. However, he maintains the requirements of a pursuer and a pursued, a bereaved lover and an absent beloved. By these authorial choices

Ovid transmutes the narrative failures of these women, whose characters do not achieve their plot-related goals, into a success. In Ovid’s version of their stories, they simultaneously achieve the expectations of their readers and fulfill a new plot-related goal found only in their stories as told in elegy: that of having their stories from their own point of view heard and remembered.1

These are heroines whose struggles – or at least whose specific struggles as outlined in these letters – are more emotionally realistic and likely to resonate with real

1 See Ramsby 2007. Ramsby herein lays out analysis, primarily focusing on the Amores but equally applicable to the Heroides, detailing the ways in which women have traditionally been restricted to telling stories about the men in their lives in ways that will hold any degree of epigraphic permanence. She points out that their views and desires are given a more central role in elegy, particularly Ovidian elegy, and that this is vital to the understanding of women in Ovid’s work. This is a more positive view of Ovidian portrayals of women and of the roles he gives women than is found in earlier feminist scholarship until Fulkerson. The foundation for the negative feminist interpretation is laid by Verducci 1985, and is brought into the twenty-first century by Lindheim 2003. Earlier scholars with positive views on the Heroides, Jacobson 1974 for example, concern themselves less with Ovid’s portrayal of women than with the cleverness of his poetics and similar.

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people than others he could have selected.2 Ovid’s understanding of these women could only have been expressed in the form of elegy, because only in that form could they be seen as successful characters and as the protagonists of their own stories.

This argument uses a dual-layered definition of narrative success. The first and most obvious layer is that in which characters achieve their goals within the plot of the story. The second, subtler layer of the definition involves characters achieving the expectations the audience has of them. Ovid’s epistolary heroines are often regarded as failures in both senses in their original source material: they fail in their narrative goals, first and foremost in that of perpetuating a relationship with the male objects of their desire.3 They also fail to fulfill the expectations of their different audiences, in some cases even by failing to allow events to run their course without protest.4 These different layers enrich one another and at times create a thematic conflict which plays out in the context of the letters, a classic display of Ovidian depth.

2 Ovid’s heroines are read in significantly different ways by Jacobson, Fulkerson 2005, and Lindheim 2003. Jacobson sees them all as complex to different degrees, according to the differing literary quality of each individual poem and according to the source material from which each is drawn. Lindheim sees them as potentially multifaceted and different from one another, but drawn by Ovid as an essentially homogeneous group, fulfilling male visions of “Woman” rather than playing out their own stories as individual women. Fulkerson is by far the most vehement in her views of the heroines as complex and individual in their own right, as she interprets them as different and vital members of a community of women.

3 The nature of the relationships sought by the different heroines are influenced strongly by the source genres; the epic heroines are far more likely to pursue a relationship which is perpetual, exclusive, and legal, as the moral expectations of a hero in the epic genre are higher. Pathos is generated in tragedy by the heroines’ willingness to settle for less. The heroines of lyric poetry are more focused on permanence of relationship.

4 It is worth noting both that such relationships are rare in Greco-Roman mythology, and that such expectations were rarely placed on male heroes by the surrounding societies. By these standards, there are few successful heroines. Ovid’s selected heroine authors are notable for their failed struggles against these trends in their origin texts.

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Discussing the failure of heroines is a politically fraught endeavor, because it has always been far too easy to describe women as failures, regardless of their choices. In this case, I am referring to women who, because of the genre in which they are operating, are laboring under very specific sets of gender expectations that come with those genres, and who then do not meet those expectations. Additionally, the primary goal of each woman in her source story is to acquire the love of, and a permanent relationship with, a specific male hero of mythology, and in each case Ovid’s chosen heroines fail at this. Each of them manages to accomplish secondary goals in her story, but because they are not the protagonists of their own stories, those successes are subordinated to the primary failure of their romances, which remain the aspects of their stories for which they are best known.

Ovid, by transplanting these heroines into elegy, places as central to their characters the issue of their perspectives being heard by their audiences. As this becomes one of their primary narrative goals, and they are now the narrators of their own stories, they all achieve that success, even if they do not achieve others – and in fact, since elegiac narrators are expected to be deprived of the objects of their desire, even this form of plot-based failure becomes a genre-related success.5 Ovid also changes the expectations of the characters, through the transfer of genre and audience, and these women meet those expectations in ways they were unable to do in their original stories.

5 Note that this is different from Curley 2013 in his interpretation of the Heroides as “constructing a space for heroines… to display their suffering.” See Curley 2013, 5. I argue here that while displaying their suffering is a part of the heroines’ agenda, it is only a part, and that their case is built upon far more than their suffering, in ways determined in part by their origin genre, and not necessarily originating in what Curley refers to as the “tragic code.”

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The fact that the Heroides have often been regarded dismissively by factions of scholars has left them severely under-examined, as even scholars examining them as part of studies of intertextuality have felt a need to add disclaimers showing their lack of interest in the Heroides for their own sake.6 Only recently have scholars such as E.J.

Kenney begun to acknowledge the Heroides as “Ovidian pathos at its best.”7 As of recent years, however, the obvious need for discussion of gender roles in the collection has drawn a number of influential voices, as has the need for analysis of Ovid’s gender play. What is still relatively rare is a combination of the two: examining gender roles in terms of generic restrictions and expectations. The existing scholarship, though relatively scanty, is valuable, and I will engage directly with these scholars in my discussions.8

My argument is based upon a thorough examination of each source genre, and of the accompanying expectations for the heroines in their original setting. These are

6 Miller 2004 begins his essay on Ovid’s reception of Vergil with the absolute statement, “As everyone knows, Heroides 7 is a failure.” See Miller 2004, 52. He then spends the rest of his introductory paragraph explaining the lack of scholarship as contempt for the work, before proceeding to relate this to the prevailing attitude toward the collection as a whole. As another example, Pearce 1914 consistently praises the Amores and other poetry while denigrating the Heroides. Both essentially state that they are only analyzing the Heroides because they have to in order to fully explore their topics, rather than because the collection is worth studying on its own. Myers 1999 describes the degree to which Ovidian studies, until recently were generally marginalized in the field of classical literary criticism, and even as she discusses the ways in which this has changed, the paucity of major positive analyses of the Heroides is noticeable in her catalog of important works on Ovid. Since Myers’ article, several more have been published, but studies of the Heroides, particularly studies which acknowledge the considerable value they have as a collection to modern understanding of Ovidian intertextuality and mythography, still lag far behind analyses of most of his other works.

7 Kenney 2012, 53.

8 The scholarship concerning genre and gender in Ovidian elegy and in the Heroides in particular has been led recently by the various works of five women, who have laid the foundation upon which I intend to build: Lindheim, Fulkerson, Verducci, Boyd, and Ramsby. The significance of Verducci, Lindheim, Fulkerson, and Ramsby, to list them chronologically, is discussed above (see notes 1 and 2). Boyd’s work is concerned more generally with Latin love elegy and its presentation to a modern audience, and the ways in which it can be understood by modern readers. Her work is influenced strongly by Verducci, and influences the others; as an editor, she is also an important figure in the field of Ovidian scholarship.

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primarily divided into three categories: epic, tragedy, and the various sub-genres of

Greek lyric poetry. I then compare those expectations of women with the very different expectations of women in traditional Roman elegy, and in Roman elegy as Ovid wrote it.

The purpose of this examination is the determination of the exact effects – and addressing the question of the author’s purpose – in transplanting the heroines from one genre to another.

My discussion of Ovid’s use of genre incorporates the general idea that each of his works is in a specific genre because his genre choices are integral to the statement he’s trying to make with each work. As a writer, his originality lies in the fact that rather than writing new stories, he changes existing stories, reads works by other authors in specific genres, and then alters them as the new genre necessitates. Therefore, a vital part of the overall statement in each of his works can be discerned by the fact that he found the new genre appropriate for telling the story.

I have organized the single letters by the genre from which their heroines were originally drawn, to identify commonalities, for example, among the epic heroines, and the tragic heroines, and the lyric heroines. I then identify the ways in which the genre transfer to Roman amatory elegy has allowed each of those heroines a measure of success, and what commonalities exist on the elegiac side of that transplantation.

My methodology has been strongly influenced by Stephen Harrison’s work in generic interfacing and enrichment, both as exemplified in his own studies and as set forth in his theory.9 This theory holds that the depth of many great works of Roman

9 Harrison 2007. Also Papanghelis, Harrison, and Frangoulidis 2013, 1-16. Harrison’s work on Vergil and Horace exemplifies the kind of study he describes in his initial theory, which is laid out in the introduction to Generic Interfaces in Latin Literature. The theory bears much in common with translation theory, in which interpretive richness is gained by understanding the original context of images and words before

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literature cannot be appreciated without understanding the genres from which the

Romans appropriated parts of their tradition, including self-appropriation and adaptation of their own literature and genres, and that an understanding of the interplay between those genres – and between the different audiences of those genres – is crucial to full comprehension of the texts. His scholarship does not include specific work on the

Heroides, and I have applied his theories, among others, to this significant work by

Ovid. Harrison’s method of analysis introduces to literary theory the concepts of a “host” genre and a “guest” genre, whose contexts determine the nature of the intertextual conversation created when one work or concept is transplanted into another.

My methodology as I examine each individual poem has also been influenced by modern genre theory which, as per Farrell, regards as false the dichotomy of form and genre, and instead views genre as a multi-tiered concept, with lyric poetry, for example, containing multiple other sub-genres within it.10 Farrell’s further examination of the role of writer, reader, and recitative audience are also key to this examination, and are discussed intensively below, within my more general examination of the genre innovation of the Heroides as well.

My understanding of the heroines as characters, and of their desires, is strongly informed by not only my reading of Ovid’s primary texts of the single Heroides, but also by the ideas presented by Ramsby, as discussed above. My methodology in comparison of the characters as presented is informed by Lindheim, though my

they were translated into a new language. The theory of generic interfacing dates only from the 2007 volume, as it is an innovation of Harrison in the field of classical literary analysis. This theory is a more expansive version of what Curley 2013 refers to as metatheater, and does not necessarily have stage drama as its origin medium or genre.

10 Farrell 2003.

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conclusions based upon the primary texts and existent scholarship are significantly different.11

In order to fully examine the effects of the transplanted heroines, and the results of the generic interfacing found in the characterizations of the Heroides, one must first examine two things: the guest genre, and the host genre. This chapter will be spent on the host genre, that into which items, in this case the heroines themselves, have been transplanted: the genre and literary innovation of the Heroides, and the degree to which

Ovid’s claims that nothing like them had ever been written before are supportable. In order to examine the ways in which the Heroides are and are not innovative and unique, one must first examine the variety of traditions of which they are a vital part. Only then can their divergences from those traditions be identified. Likewise, the nature of Ovid’s claims regarding the uniqueness of the Heroides must be examined closely before these claims can be supported or denied.

This will include, first, a summary of the theory of generic interfacing and how it interacts with both classical genre theory and modern genre theory applied to classical literature. Second, I will examine Ovid’s specific claims about his own innovations, and the relationship between the Heroides and traditional Roman ideas concerning genre and characterization. Finally, I will compare the Heroides with the traditions that form

11 While I acknowledge the validity and importance of her analysis of the role of reader and audience in the Heroides, I strongly disagree with her assertion that all of the heroines in the collection form an essentially homogeneous group as written by Ovid. She predicates upon this assertion the idea that Ovid’s purpose and effect in writing the Heroides is primarily appropriative, whether this is conscious or otherwise on his part. This is a typical feminist approach, based on the earlier work of Verducci, with which I shall engage in the dissertation, as the question of male appropriation of the female voice is a crucial one in gender-based analysis of the collection. See Lindheim 2003 and Verducci 1985. I am much more in agreement with Fulkerson and Ramsby’s later views, which place greater stock in the individuality and realism of the heroines as found in a psycho-dramatic interpretation of the Heroides. See Fulkerson 2005 and Ramsby 2007.

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the backdrop to the collection, to determine the degree to which they are unique in genre. This will include discussion of rhetorical suasoriae, epistolary recording, plus the mishmash of prior genre tradition that Roman amatory elegy already represents. I will then discuss how the different genres Ovid references over the course of the collection enrich the collection as a whole.

Ancient and Modern Genre Theory: A Comparison

Ovid’s claims regarding the innovation of the Heroides are rooted in the ancient theory of his own time, which in turn is foundational to our modern scholarship and views of literature. The Heroides must therefore be examined fully from both perspectives, with a clear understanding of the differences between them.

The literary theory of the Greeks and Romans – for they are inextricably intertwined, being both based upon the works of Plato and Aristotle – is founded upon certain ideas held to be incontrovertible. For example, Greek theorists believed that there was a link, possibly spiritual in nature, between the type of literature produced by a person, and their character; there was a similar perceived link between content and physical structure, including meter, prose, length, and other structural features.12

Additionally, the classical theorists place primary emphasis upon form in their definitions of genre, with the result that the concept of subgenres barely existed. Farrell gives as an example the didactic epic, which was barely recognized by ancient critics as

12 “A poet of serious character will produce serious poetry, which will involve the imitation of serious actions; a poet of less noble character will produce less exalted poetry that imitates baser actions.” Farrell 2003, 384. This is also visible in the careers of numerous poets in Greece and Rome whose generic choices are still described as “ascents,” when they begin with epigram or pastoral, and end with epic or other similarly “lofty” genres, and may even now contribute to the scholarly dismissal of Ovid’s work other than the Metamorphoses. Further examination of this concept which influences this paper is found in Miller, Platter and Platter 1999, 445-454.

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separate from heroic epic. Ancient critics also did not recognize that generic ambiguity could exist, because for them it was the form of a poem above all that determined to what genre it belonged. In contrast, later Greek and Roman authors and theorists began to use innovation and testing of these boundaries as a form of commentary and thematic examination. This does not mean that they disregarded such rules in principle, however – Horace coins the term operis lex, often translated as “the law of genre,” in line 135 of the Ars Poetica.13 The process of testing these boundaries and engaging in deliberate transgression of generic boundaries is a gradual one, with individual authors contributing to it much as they did to every other part of the traditions in which they participated. In the cases of some authors, it was likely more deliberate than in others, but over time, genre play seems to have become an important part of craftsmanship, particularly in poetry.14

13 Horace’s use of the term seems to contradict Farrell, who believes that “The Roman poets were demonstrably concerned, even obsessed, with genre as a discursive device… But their interest in genre as a set of prescriptive rules… is powerfully undermined, almost to a point of parody, by an attitude of practical inventiveness and what looks like nothing so much as an interest in the untenability of any position founded on the idea of generic essence.” Farrell 2003, 396 The poets’ interest in genre is clear from not only Horace’s work, but also Ovid’s own, as will be discussed later in this chapter. However, the idea that generic essence is untenable would be an odd one for Horace to overlook in such a seminal work as the Ars Poetica – but is, as one might expect from such a transgressive statement, much more identifiable in works of Ovid.

14 As Farrell describes the trend, “With time one finds an ever-greater sense of adventure until, by the Hellenistic and Roman periods, it comes to seem that testing and even violating generic boundaries was not merely an inevitable and accidental consequence of writing in any genre, but an important aspect of the poet’s craft.” Farrell, 2003, 388. One can easily recognize Ovid, nearly a compulsive innovator, in such a description, and this drive to examine and cross these boundaries would naturally affect each of his works. This also provides an explanation for his noticeable pride in the Heroides in terms of his literary innovations; Ovid’s discussion of his own work will be examined later in this chapter. Miller, Platter, and Platter agree, but phrase it differently and more precisely referential to Augustan era poetry: “the aporetical nature of elegy, as suggested by these papers, and as intensely studied by the recent scholarship summarized by them and in the Introduction, is systematic, and that any attempt to reduce the genre to a more eas- ily resolvable set of interpretive problems necessarily involves a misreading of the polyvalent discourses out of which these texts are constructed” Miller, Platter, and Platter 1999, 446.

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As Kahane notes, it was accepted even by ancient theorists as natural that genre should evolve, and its boundaries change, even though those same theorists believed they should not, or in some cases even could not, be violated in their given states at any time.15 It stands to reason, then, that literary theory itself should evolve. It is unsurprising that, in a world where philosophies and politics often reach back to those of ancient Rome, the literary theory should more closely resemble that of the Roman authors than that of the Greek theorists. Literary theory of today, in particular that of post-modern criticism, tends much more toward flexible ideas of genre and form and the relationships between the two.16

Modern literary theory regards the division between genre and form as a false dichotomy, and completely unlike ancient genre theory, takes for granted the concepts of genres, super-genres, and sub-genres – often, but not always, determined by form.17

Additionally, modern theorists such as Harrison, Farrell and others acknowledge that genre itself is a tricky topic, and one that cannot be divided with firm statements that have no exceptions. This practical acknowledgment of the possibility of genre

15 Kahane 2013, 35-54. Kahane draws this theory initially from Aristotle, then from other theorists throughout Western history as late as the Renaissance, before describing it as a generally accepted modern idea as well. This is congruent with both Farrell and Harrison, and is essential to any understanding of the Heroides: both the guest and host genres involved in any given poem of the collection are genres which evolved over time. Ovidian elegy is unlike elegy as written by other individual authors (who are also unlike each other), and epic, tragedy, and lyric poetry changed over time as well.

16 This is related in part to the modern archaeological practice of analyzing processes rather than written theories. An observation of actual classical authors reveals that their writing was much more complicated than their theorists wanted to believe, and that portions of Roman genre theory were attempting to comprehend Roman literature through simplification. To quote Farrell: “The practice of ancient writers was much more sophisticated than anything that classical theory could account for, and it is mainly upon this practice that classicists now base their understanding of ancient ideas about genre.” Farrell 2003, 383.

17 Hutchinson 2013 describes super-genres as most often bound by form, giving “Hexameters,” “Elegiacs,” and “Drama” as examples; the genre itself, didactic versus heroic epic for example, is then determined by content. Hutchinson 2013, 19-34. This is a different way of defining genre than that embraced by Farrell, discussed above, which is the methodology I use in this dissertation.

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ambiguity, and of the potential for such exploration and the enrichment it would lend to the poetic craft, is in fact a partial basis for modern genre theory, which acknowledges not only the potential inherent in the testing of generic boundaries, but also that available in generic interfacing.

Generic interfacing occurs when a concept, character, or digression from one genre is transplanted into another for a variety of purposes, ranging from a simple artistic need for comic relief to complex social or literary commentary. The genre into which the subject is transplanted is referred to as the “host” genre, and the genre of origin is referred to as the “guest” genre.

Generic interfacing, as described in this way by Stephen Harrison, bears remarkable resemblances to the terminology used in translation theory. This is not a coincidence: meanings change when concepts are transplanted from one genre to another, and communication and careful examination are necessary to understand the process.18

Genre Theory and Ovidian Studies

The study of any of Ovid’s works, or of the Ovidian corpus as a whole, is illuminated greatly when one pays close attention to his testing and transgression of generic boundaries. Ovid is by nature a transgressive poet, a fact which certainly

18 Harrison points out that he borrows language from terms of hospitality: “The dominating genre of the text is the ‘host’ which entertains the subordinate genre as the ‘guest.’ The ‘guest’ genre can be higher or lower than the ‘host’ in the conventional generic hierarchy… but the ‘host’ in all cases retains its dominant and determining role, though the ‘guest’ enriches and enlarges its ‘host’ now and for the future.” Harrison 2007, 16. I note that these terms are also very similar to those used in translation theory, which seems more closely related to the topic at hand: the way in which the meaning of a story changes when transplanted from one genre into another. I borrow terms from both translation theory and from the unrelated field of horticulture. I choose to use the term transplantation for Ovid’s process, rather than transition, transposition, migration, or similar words, because I keep in mind the processes and considerations involved in moving a plant from one location to another in order for it to thrive and achieve greater success.

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caused him trouble in his later life, and which he spends a great deal of time defending in his exile poetry. Some of this is related to genre and content: he claims to regret his elegiac writings, in his exile poetry, but such displays of regret are a genre requirement of exile poetry.19 An example is seen in book V of the Tristia V, where he laments that he is numbered among the traditional quartet of elegists – naming here the same four who are listed in Quintilian, including himself:

Aptior huic Gallus blandique Propertius oris, aptior, ingenium come, Tibullus erit. Atque utinam numero non nos essemus in isto! Ei mihi, cur umquam Musa iocata mea est? (Ov. Tr. V.1.17-20)

Gallus was more appropriate for this, Propertius of the sweet voice More appropriate, the charming talent Tibullus will be. And would that we were not among that number! Alas for me, why ever was my Muse a mischievous one?20

Ovid indicates here that he considers himself primarily a poet of the elegiac genre, the

Metamorphoses notwithstanding. This should theoretically, according to ancient methods, indicate certain things about him as a person, but he contradicts the

Aristotelian model of the spiritual link between genre and authorial spirituality in book II of the Tristia:

Crede mihi, distant mores a carmine nostro, vita verecunda est, Musa iocosa mea.” (Ov. Tr. II.353-4)

Believe me, my morals are far from my poetry; My life is modest, my Muse is the mischievous one.

This light-hearted nature of Ovid’s muse has drawn criticism both ancient and modern; until recently, in fact, as discussed above, many scholars have dismissed Ovid

19 See Farrell 2008.

20 This and all other translations of Latin in this paper are my own unless part of a larger citation of a scholar’s words.

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as a poet worth reading. Another reason for this is the formulaic similarity of many of his narratives. If Ovid lived in a world in which genre boundaries were as rigid as ancient theory seems to indicate, however, this makes more sense than it would in the work of a modern writer; the specific genre expectations force certain similarities on the writing. In the Heroides in particular, the stories bear similarities not only from their host genre –

Roman amatory elegy – but many of them show generic conventions from their guest genres as well. After all, the Heroides are themselves a spectacular exercise in generic interfacing, when viewed through a modern lens.21 The Heroides are not the only example of Ovidian genre play: to name a few, the Ars Amatoria transplants love as a theme into didactic epic; the Metamorphoses transplants numerous stories into epic that would normally have been found in other genres. However, of all of these, the Heroides are the only one which Ovid claims is utterly unique in Latin literary tradition, and it is indeed in this generic interfacing, in the transplantation of heroines from other genres into Roman amatory elegy, that such uniqueness can be found.

As I examine the conventions of genre, one thing is immediately clear, and bears stating up front: the use of mythological heroines as narrators in elegy is in fact as unique as Ovid claims. The combination of content and form is seen nowhere else in

Latin literature up to this point, so in terms of ancient genre theory, there is no other

21 “Most importantly, the stories are so much alike not because Ovid repeated himself (although there is no doubt that he did), but because he seems to have conceived of his heroines as sharing not only the situation of abandonment and the use of epistolary form, but also common vocabularies and sets of poetic influences.” Fulkerson 2005, 4. Fulkerson is here in disagreement with Lindheim, who argues that Ovid’s heroines bear similarities because they represent not individual women but Ovid’s male visions of Woman in an appropriative context, deliberate or otherwise, and that the sense of representation of the feminine voice and perspective in the collection is entirely illusory. Insert bibliographic information. Lindheim is likewise in disagreement with Verducci, who acknowledges the illusion merely as an appealing play with female characters, without any real artistic attempt at realism. See Verducci 1985 and Lindheim 2003.

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elegy like this at Ovid’s time. Hence the term “novavit,” below, meaning not just making a new genre, but taking something already in existence and making a new version of it, and renewing the potential thereof. Among other things, Ovid seems to be keenly aware of the power of response.22

Ovid’s Claims About His Own Work

Conveniently for modern scholars, Ovid did not hesitate to discuss the merits of his own work, nor does he have any qualms about claiming his place in literary history as he perceives it. Less conveniently, for reasons described above, his perceptions of both his work and his literary backdrop shift throughout his career, and these shifts must be taken into account in any analysis of his claims.

The most significant reference to the innovative qualities of the Heroides is found in a passage in book III of the Ars Amatoria, in which he lists his own works as potentially important among those which a lover might consult for instruction:

Atque aliquis dicet 'nostri lege culta magistri carmina, quis partes instruit ille duas: deve tribus libris, titulus quos signat Amorum, elige, quod docili molliter ore legas: vel tibi composita cantetur Epistola voce: ignotum hoc aliis ille novavit opus.' (Ovid, Ars Am., III.341-346)

22 “Part of the effect of Ovidian rewriting is to alter our response to the work being rewritten.” Tarrant 2002, 26. This comment is relevant both to Ovid’s perceived place in his own literary tradition, which changes with every work published because they are responses to previous works by him and other authors, and also to the content of the Heroides, as responses to pre-existing mythological traditions. Tarrant refers here to specific content and intertextual play with narrative; this is another expression of the same phenomenon Harrison discovers in his discussions of generic interfacing and enrichment. Fulkerson draws on both, including in her interpretations of individual letters as valid source texts which refer to each other; this is foundational to her discussion of the heroines as a community of authors who influence each other much as contemporary authors of ancient Rome did.

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And someone will say “Read, by our teacher, those urbane Poems, in which he instructs two parties: Or of those three books, whom their title marks as Loves, Choose, which you might read sweetly in a teachable voice: Or a Letter might sing to you, in its composed voice: A work he brought to new life, unknown to others.

The three works he describes, for which he imagines he might be remembered among the great poets who have written of love, are the Ars Amatoria itself (line 342), the

Amores (line 343-344), and the Heroides (lines 345-346), which he specifically describes in line 346 as being a work, or, as “opus” is commonly interpreted to mean

“genre” in works such as Horace’s Ars Poetica, a type of work, unknown to others.23

The Ars Amatoria and the Amores, Ovid’s two best-known works directly engaging with the topic of love and amatory narrative, provide numerous opportunities for analysis of Ovid’s evolving views on the subject. The Amores have a major pitfall for scholars within, however, which is the fact that we know he revised them at least once, based on the content of their starting epigram. It is impossible to determine which views came into existence at what point in his career.

This is not an unusual problem in analysis of Ovid’s work: rewriting his own words may be part of the trend of Ovid’s near-compulsion to innovate. We know from the poet’s own words that he revised at least the Heroides and the Amores, releasing both in totally new forms (the Amores in three books instead of five, and the Heroides including the double letters). He also released the Fasti in revised form, and possibly

23 By “others,” we can infer from the context of the poem he refers to other writers and readers on the subject of love. The inclusion of the phrase “composite voce” indicates the importance of the chosen narrative voices to the innovation of the Heroides, as part of what makes this work, or genre, unknown to Ovid’s audience until their composition.

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the Ars Amatoria as well. According to his exile poetry, he intended to do further revisions on the Metamorphoses.

Ovid discusses his decision to write the double letters of the Heroides in a passage of the Amores which also contains significant information regarding his perceptions of elegy as a genre. In Amores II.18.19-34, he points out that love can be a topic in epic writing, and that epic and tragic topics can be a topic in elegy.24 This is not the only time that Ovid makes this assertion; Tristia II.361ff. contains a similar theme, pointing out the many “serious” writers who have included love as a major, even essential, theme in their works. Amores III.1 in its entirety, though, seems to contradict this, in a return to traditional Hellenic genre theory.

Because the writing process of the Amores covers so much of Ovid’s career in chronological terms, we can identify many of the different points of view the poet held over time, and can assume that the finished product of the collection as a whole presents his final viewpoints accurately. Amores III.15, the final poem in the collection, gives the last word on the generic controversy, and it is one which reconciles the two opinions, as it identifies the topic as crucial to the nature of the individual work, as the

Amores are definitely “imbelles elegi” (line 19), while the Heroides are more tragic and epic in content.

24 Ovid assumes that the question will arise: if he wants to write about epic and tragic topics, why not write in those genres? He then defends his choice of elegy as a genre on the grounds that he is currently engaged with love in his life, and that elegiac poetry is all he is permitted to write by his lady. This is perhaps not a defense that most Romans of the day would have taken seriously, but is certainly one that fits within the light-hearted tone of the Amores. Similarly, readers must wonder whether the necessity of addressing the question is real or whether it too is a generic requirement for specifically Roman amatory elegy, given how expected genre play had become by the time of Ovid.

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It is also in Amores III.15 that Ovid addresses his role in the tradition and the possible extent of his fame after his death, openly comparing his influence to that of

Vergil and Catullus:

Nec me deliciae dedecuere meae — siquid id est, usque a proavis vetus ordinis heres, non modo militiae turbine factus eques. Mantua Vergilio, gaudet Verona Catullo; Paelignae dicar gloria gentis ego, (Ovid, Am. III.15.4-8)

Nor have my delights brought me shame – If it is anything to speak of, an established heir of an origin from forefathers, Not a knight made recently in the whirlwind of war. Mantua rejoices in Vergil, Verona in Catullus: I shall be called the glory of the Paelignian race.

It is noteworthy that he ties his fame specifically to his identity with the Paelignian tribe and displays his pride in his Italian heritage, rather than in being part of the Roman

Empire. This forms a startling contrast with the final lines of the Metamorphoses, where

Ovid claims that his fame will be immortal, but in line 877 ties it specifically to the dominion of Rome:

Parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum, quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris, ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam. (Ovid, Met. XV.875-879)

Still in the better part of me, everlasting above the lofty Stars I shall be borne, and our name shall be indestructible. And wherever Roman power extends over subjugated lands, I will be read in the voice of the people, and in fame through all ages, If the prophecies of the bards have any truth, I will live on.

Ovid’s words here, tying his own significance to that of Rome, can be interpreted to be a claim that he is essentially Rome’s national elegiac poet. He makes similar claims in the

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Remedia Amoris that he writes elegiac poetry of a literary importance equivalent to that of the Aeneid:

Nam iuvat et studium famae mihi crevit honore; principio clivi noster anhelat equus. Tantum se nobis elegi debere fatentur, quantum Vergilio nobile debet epos. (Ovid, Rem. Am., 393-396)

For the eagerness for fame gratifies me, and has grown with my reputation; Our horse pants at the beginning of the ascent. Elegies confess that they owe to me, As much as noble epic owes to Vergil. In these lines, he is specifically defending the work of the Remedia Amoris, but it is a very general statement, and he is defending the validity of writing something totally different in content from the standard expectations of elegiac couplet – something sufficiently unacceptable that he defends it dramatically to Cupid himself earlier in the poem.25

It is entirely appropriate, given the shifting and changing nature of the Roman literary landscape and its relationship to elegy in particular, that Ovid should claim the position of elegy’s representative poet. He possesses a constant awareness not only of the protean qualities of literature, but of the ways in which that can be used in his own work to enrich any of his own writing through incorporation of ideas in response to their previous uses – something which modern theory would identify as generic interfacing, perhaps in a new and unique form.26

25 This defense occupies the opening 40 lines of the poem. Later, from line 359 up until the passage quoted above, Ovid returns to the idea of metrical appropriateness for certain subjects, and in fact refers to a number of very violent myths, some of which would then be incorporated into the Heroides, stating that the women of those myths would have found the text of the Remedia Amoris useful – again, the poet plays with the power of response and intertext.

26 This is also something which ancient theory would recognize as a use of persuasive rhetoric, in thematic terms. Tarrant says: “If ‘literary history’ connotes a stable record of writers’ careers and of their relations to one another, Ovid is an anti-historian, who delights in reshuffling the data and producing constantly new accounts. For Ovid literary history is a species of rhetoric, a way of showing how a thing

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Locating the Heroides within Literary Tradition

There are some genre influences on the Heroides about which we have little to no information, largely because oral tradition by nature doesn’t leave the kinds of records we need in order to do a full study – this gives us only cloudy looks at both performance possibility and contemporary reception. We do have enough knowledge to form hypotheses about both, however. Scholars have concluded with a fair degree of surety that the poems were performed at the court of Augustus, and were received well by audiences there. Cunningham goes so far as to make the argument that the true genre innovation of the Heroides may have been as a performance genre rather than as a written one, given the existence of Propertius’ fictional letter from Arethusa. Given this possibility, and given chronology, he says, it is highly likely that the unidentified poetry of Ovid’s known to have been performed before Augustus was in fact the Heroides.27

Rhetoric and Suasoriae

A performance of the Heroides would have borne remarkable resemblances to declamation. These letters are, of course, meant to persuade, and as such, incorporate rhetoric throughout their content. Schiesaro interprets the scholarly tendency to identify the Heroides with suasoriae, or even with declamation in general, to be an insult to the collection, and indeed, if one sees that as the sum of the work, that makes sense – particularly since that identifies a collection of poems with a prose genre. He posits that the serial nature of the letters, and the forced repetition of similar scenarios in each

can be made to look depending on the perspective adopted or the effect desired.” Tarrant 2002, 13). See note 22 for further discussion of this. Curley 2013 agrees, identifying that “genre, especially in Ovidian hands, is not only an impure but also an elusive construct. Its very constructedness, in turn, thematizes and exposes its own negotiability.” See Curley 2013, 11.

27 See Cunningham 1949.

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story, causes this to seem a larger problem than it in fact is.28 Repetition, as discussed both previously and below, is a feature of works that remain strictly within generic boundaries, and also of works which thematize generic expectations and interfacing thereof. Additionally, it is a feature of numerous other genres than rhetorical ones, and the ability to repeat artistically was often seen as an indicator of skill rather than a flaw in one’s craft.

Epistolary Literature

A significant point in the uniqueness of the Heroides lies in their use of the epistolary format to express the story. Epistolary literature grants tremendous power to the addressee and the audience, because in the end it is the immediate reception that determines the lasting effect in terms of the version of the story that lasts. By writing their stories in epistolary form, the heroines have placed in the hands of their readers

(including but not limited to their heroic addressees – these are, after all, publicly published poems as well as private correspondence) the power to believe or disbelieve their versions of events.29 At the same time, the acceptance of letters as a primary

28 Fulkerson notes this issue as well, and ascribes it to the blending of genres. Schiesaro 2002 then opts for the more traditional valuation of the Heroides as repetitive, facile, and openly manipulative, rather than complex works of psychology, and here we disagree. Because his analysis only includes discussion of rhetorical style and rhetorical aims, and does not acknowledge the potential for analysis of the collection beyond that, he comes to the same conclusion most scholars do who try to approach the collection from only one angle: it is a failure. See Schiesaro 2002, 62-75.

29 Fulkerson explains the role of the heroines, and the way in which the epistolary genre gives them a degree of power that could not have been found in any other. “The fact that these women write poetic letters serves not only Ovid’s needs but their own, and reinforces the desirability of a study of them not simply as women who are unhappy in their personal lives, but as authors. Their status as letters, then, is key to a nuanced understanding of the Heroides. Epistolarity most profitably takes into account the situation of the heroines as they compose, asking why they write letters and exploring their relationships to their readers and intended addressees (not necessarily the same people).” Fulkerson 2005, 8-9. Ramsby adds to this the idea that the heroines are given a unique opportunity to establish their narrative voices in a form that will have permanence and the additional authority that comes with that. I would add that Ovid shows in numerous places in his poetry, most notably the Amores and the Metamorphoses

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source, and therefore trustworthy, gives them an authority that is unique to the epistolary form.

Mythological Love Stories

Given the presence of earlier and much more famous versions of these stories,

Ovid as an author can reasonably expect that his readers will already be familiar with these stories, and with some specific sources thereof. Therefore, a reader, upon recognizing the heroine-authors of each poem, immediately develops certain expectations based on that prior knowledge, which Ovid can then choose to either fulfill or overturn, depending on the effect he wishes to bring about. This is one of the key differences between the Heroides and Propertius IV.3, the story of Arethusa and

Lycotas. Their story was entirely a creation of Propertius, and did not have any history for readers to engage with.30

Fulkerson points out that the traditional view of the Heroides in modern scholarship depends on viewing them as mythological love stories, but as little else.31

But the mythological love stories are themselves found within very significant genres: epic, tragedy, and lyric narrative, many of which are considered loftier by nature than

when he refers to the immortality of poetic fame, that he is thoroughly conscious of this authority and the power he grants to his heroine authors.

30 Tarrant 2002 points out that the previous history, and the expectations readers have as a result, forms an essential part of the heroines’ Ovidian personae as the letters begin. See Tarrant 2002, 20. Harrison’s theory would have it that this enriches the experience for the reader, and adds layers of meaning. Fulkerson adds that the heroines themselves are written as characters who are conscious of this influence and layering of narrative.

31 See Fulkerson 2005. Fulkerson’s introductory chapter here is devoted to challenging this reading of the collection, as it is but one genre of many incorporated into Ovid’s crafting of the letters. She acknowledges that, purely as mythological romances, these women fail in their goals as presented in the Heroides, but goes on to discuss the ways in which this reading is, though essentially correct, far too limited to be acceptable as a whole.

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elegy, and therefore which might be considered to lend an additional enrichment to the more ephemeral genre of elegy. These relationships between these genres and the elegiac genre into which the heroines have been transplanted, will be explored later in this paper.

Roman Amatory Elegy

In form, according to the ancient genre theories as laid out by Farrell, the

Heroides fall unambiguously into the genre of Roman amatory elegy. They are written in elegiac couplet, they are collected in a book suitable for publication in this form, they are of appropriate length, and their subject matter is appropriate to the meter, as Ovid put it in Amores I.1: materia conveniente modis.32

Roman amatory elegy itself comes from a mixed tradition, including Greek epigram, which eventually absorbed elegiac epigram; New Comedy, with its stock characters and plots; epigraphy, with its recording of daily emotional struggles and triumphs in such a way that renders those otherwise ephemeral moments in a lasting form; and pastoralism with its simple elevation of love above other pleasures of life.

Quintilian’s canon of elegists, found in Institutio Oratoria X.1.93, begins with Gallus and ends with Ovid, and does not include Catullus, a poet modern readers often classify with the others:

Elegia quoque Graecos provocamus, cuius mihi tersus atque elegans maxime videtur auctor Tibullus. Sunt qui Propertium malint. Ovidius utroque lascivior, sicut durior Gallus. (Quintilian, Inst. Or. X.1.93)

32 The one exception is minor and a clear result of the content choice made by Ovid: the narrator does not share the name of the author, which Farrell considers to be crucial to the form. See Farrell 2003, 397. This is not necessarily the case, as Propertius’ IV.3 is clearly an important predecessor to the Heroides – though Ovid clearly steps much further out of bounds than Propertius.

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We challenge the Greeks also in elegy, the most concise and elegant author of which seems to me to be Tibullus. There are those who prefer Propertius. Ovid is more naughty than either, just as Gallus is harsher.

It is unclear whether Ovid sees himself as bringing an end to a genre. Certainly he never mentions it, if so, and something of such import seems unlikely to have been omitted from Ovid’s work, particularly as writing love poetry was apparently a cause for his exile. This idea, then, comes from later authors looking back with knowledge of the tradition after Ovid.

It is certain that the elegiac poets, many of whom were contemporaries to each other in whole or in part, read each other’s work and cross-pollinated each other’s ideas. Fulkerson compares the potential of reading the Heroides as a community of authors, with this progressive and communal influence of the neoteric poets, who read and were influenced by each other’s amatory poetry.33

One of the triumphs of the Heroides as a text lies in the fact that readers can find great enjoyment from examining not only what sources and traditions Ovid might have drawn from in composing the collection, but what sources and traditions the individual heroines, had they actually written the letters, deliberately utilized in creating their texts

33 Fulkerson continues, “My focus on how the heroines attempt to refashion their stories because of their membership in a poetic community – the fictional community created by their shared presence in a poetic book – is predicated upon the notion that they themselves create influential texts.” Fulkerson 2005, 2. This view, as espoused by Fulkerson, serves to a large degree as a repudiation of the prevailing view of the similarities between the letters. There are certainly many similarities, simply because there are similarities between their situations. Yet, firstly, the same is true of almost all elegiac authors. Secondly, as Fulkerson points out, “As with much of Ovid’s oeuvre, however, ‘repetitive’ themes show themselves, on careful examination, to differ in subtle but crucial ways. The women of the Heroides… are accustomed to saying the same thing in different ways… an ability which in the Ars [Amatoria] is seen as the height of erotic skill.” Fulkerson 2005, 4. This concept of lasting textual influence is one of the primary concepts discussed in Ramsby 2007, though the women in the Heroides are given a more traditionally male role, in that they are actually publishing poetic texts rather than producing epigraphy.

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and textual influences. This layering of influence and fiction is characteristic of Ovid’s psychological interaction with his own characters.

Ovid’s Claims on Trial

Now, following an examination of Ovid’s claims of total innovation and vital national influence upon the elegiac genre, and after an identification of the literary background against which the Heroides appear, it is possible to identify the comparisons and contrasts between the two. Clearly, the exact usage of elegy as a host genre for others, and the usage of mythical heroines as the narrators for expressing that interfacing and enrichment of genre, is new. The closest examples to the Heroides identifiable in Latin literature bear sufficient significant differences that, while they clearly form part of the complex tradition and inspiration for the collection, they cannot be said to be the exact same type of work: elegy is enriched to a point that a new sub-genre, to use modern terminology, is brought into existence. To use ancient terminology, the

Heroides unquestionably represent a new set of content expressed in an elegiac form.

Very much like Shakespeare, Ovid is not known for making up original stories, though there may be original stories among those he tells, particularly in the

Metamorphoses. As Tarrant comments, “Innovation for him consisted less in free invention than in seeing richer possibilities in existing material. In fact, Ovid applies the rhetoric of invention to his poetry only once, about the Heroides… and even here his originality lay in relocation and elaboration rather than in creation ex nihilo.”34 If we take the interpretation of the Ars Amatoria quote above concerning the innovation of the

Heroides, that Ovid claims to be reinventing existing genre and material, then as Tarrant

34 Tarrant 2002, 18.

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says here, his claim is completely supported. Narrative re-examination of these stories has never been accomplished in quite the way Ovid manages here, nor has enrichment of any of the genres involved. As such, these poems also definitely represent a bold transgression of genre boundaries, which the ancient theorists both decried and declared as nonexistent.

If this particular combination of genres – and thematized expression of genres in combination – is totally new, it stands to reason that its effects would be unique as well.

The use of mythological heroines in this collection in fact presents women’s voices in a way that had never been seen before in Latin literature.35 The letter-writers of the

Heroides are given the ultimate form of agency: the ability to create their own self- images, and the chance to tell their own stories in a form which is designed to last. Even

Lindheim’s skepticism of Ovid’s methodology and intentions allows this: “The writer of each letter receives the long deferred chance to occupy center stage, possessing, as every letter writer does, the opportunity to narrate her own story from her own subjective perspective.”36

As Lindheim points out, it is the nature of letter-writing, and of love poetry, for such subjective storytelling to be considered valid and convincing. It makes sense, then, that Ovid would choose such genres to be more hospitable soil for the transplantation of his heroine narrators who had previously been relegated to satellite positions in their source materials. These genres are also a natural fit for the romantic nature of the

35 Obviously, since Ovid is in fact male, there is a degree of illusion to this presentation, but Ovid’s commitment to artistry throughout his poetry would seem to indicate that his psychological portrayals would receive every effort he was able to put into them. The degree to which he may or may not have succeeded in this will be discussed in future chapters.

36 Lindheim 2003, 31.

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stories, while at the same time leaving the possibility of intense enrichment by the numerous generic differences between, for example, epic and amatory elegy.

Ovid’s experiment holds up to claims of uniqueness, not only in its form, then, but in the ways in which it presents its characters and allows the characters to present themselves and their stories. Through such radical experimentation, we will see that failed heroines can be so thoroughly re-imagined as to become successful protagonists of their own narratives.

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CHAPTER 2 SACRIFICIAL WOMEN: HEROINES OF EPIC

Of the fifteen heroines whose letters are published without replies in the collection, five are derived from sources in Greek and Roman epic: Penelope writing to

Ulixes, Briseis writing to Achilles, Hypsipyle writing to Jason, Dido writing to Aeneas, and Laodamia writing to Protesilaus. This chapter will examine the commonalities among the situations from which these heroines are transplanted, and the ways in which Ovid has changed each of their stories in similar fashions to achieve a result unique to this collection: a reimagining of the experience of abandonment, told from the viewpoint of the abandoned, and considered as a valid experience. He accomplishes this through writing new commentary on existing text while maintaining a summary of each story from its original source materials which would be recognizable to his contemporary readers.1

There is an emotional progression visible in these epistles: from the steadfast waiting of Penelope, to the fearful lingering of Briseis, to the furious abandonment of

Hypsipyle, to the raging despair of Dido, to the fragile and doomed hope of Laodamia.

Each woman represents a very different type of abandonment experienced by women in epic. Each of the situations is drawn from a very specific epic source, and though not all of them are still extant or complete, the nature of the lost sources can be determined from the surrounding traditions.

Epistle I, from Penelope to Ulixes is derived from Homer’s Odyssey, specifically from Book XIX, though there are numerous departures from Homer’s depiction of the

1 For modern readers, summaries have been appended and noted in order to highlight these outlines as a basis for comparison.

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situation at that moment, as seen below.2 Briseis’ anecdote is found almost verbatim in

Book I of Homer’s Iliad, with a few additions which are all clearly identifiable from specific verbiage found later in the epic, such as references to Patroclus found in Iliad

XIX.295ff).3 Hypsipyle’s letter to Jason fits easily within the narrative of Book I of

Apollonius’ Argonautica, particularly since Ovid lengthens Jason’s stay on Lemnos to two full years.4 Dido, another hostess to a hero, is clearly situated at the end of Book IV of the Aeneid, on the morning of Aeneas’ departure, just before her suicide.5 Lastly,

Ovid’s version of the story of Laodamia is drawn once more from Homer’s Iliad, as referred to in Book II.6 Ovid does not match all of his sources exactly, as I will demonstrate, but he matches each enough to be clear about its origin text.

2 In this epistle, whose programmatic position will be discussed later in this chapter, Penelope waits steadfastly and defiantly for Ulixes to come home, while hearing stories of the end of the Trojan War and while being harassed by the suitors and urged to re-marry by various men in her life.

3 Briseis, in epistle III, languishes in the tent of Agamemnon, and scolds Achilles for his failure to delay her departure from him and later even to act for her return.

4 Epistle VI shows Hypsipyle, queen of the Lemnian women, at once both furious at being abandoned for Medea and afraid for her twin children by Jason because of Medea’s murderous reputation, cursing the new couple to a tragic end which, of course, their story bears out. Bloch 2000 repeatedly notes this as one of the major changes Ovid makes, with the goal of bringing significance to Jason’s relationship with Hypsipyle. Hypsipyle then has a whole new and valid perspective on Medea’s story, which is really the topic of this epistle. I disagree with Bloch’s last assertion, because any woman who has children with Jason has a very legitimate reason to fear Medea within the context of her own story, given her murderous reputation as described in the letter.

5 Epistle VII is the only letter to have a heroine derived from a Roman source: Dido, queen of Carthage, watches Aeneas’ ships preparing for departure toward Italy, and while cursing him she pens the suicide note she wishes to be found with her body.

6 In the last of the epic-derived letters, Epistle XIII, Laodamia unwillingly sees her husband Protesilaus off to the Trojan War, dreaming of prophecies and suspecting, quite correctly, that he will die as the first to set foot on the shores of Troy. There are numerous references to, for example, Euripides’ tragedy Protesilaus, but this is not unique among the collection; the overall sketch of the story is far more similar to Homer, and the set piece nature of the story placed within it identifies it as an epic derivation.

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Epic-Transplanted Heroides as Set Pieces

Each of the epic-derived letters is not just a series of references to the source material, but a highlight of a specific personal moment within the material, in order to present the heroine’s specific experience of the story. Reimagining the epic stories as individual set pieces is both natural and integral to the type of genre transplantation

Ovid accomplishes with this portion of the collection. In part this is true because epistolary and elegiac poetry are both genres in which the set piece is central to the way the genres’ content is expressed. In the case of the Heroides, Ovid also takes advantage of the fact that set pieces, and therefore the epistolary and elegiac genres, are admirably suited for both character study and the revelation of new perspective on old stories. Each poem is therefore a letter whose composition actually occurs within the story of the epic as Ovid envisions it, and each focuses on the heroine author’s experience of aloneness, loneliness, abandonment, and occasionally self-sufficiency.7

They are all identifiable as taking place within the source material to varying degrees.

Penelope’s Letter Within the Odyssey

Penelope’s letter is written to be given to a foreigner and carried to Ulixes; like

Ariadne’s, one of many such letters written by the abandoned heroine, but Penelope writes from a far greater position of power and self-reliance which is integral to her experience of the anecdote, expressed throughout her letter. Fulkerson points out that the very first letter in the collection achieves unlooked-for success in this regard: “This particular letter makes it directly into Odysseus’ hands, and Penelope gets what she

7 As identified specifically in Kennedy 1984 and Jacobson 1974, and more generally before them in Baca 1969, Ovid makes plenty of changes to fit his own versions of the story, but keeps the outline of it accurate enough that his letter can fit into the structure, often with the slight detail change of the existence of the letter itself into a scene we have described with great vividness in the original.

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wants. Yet the fact that there are so many letters out there, opens up the question whether Odysseus has received other missives from his wife. Our reading of the

Odyssey may change significantly if we insert periodic, Ovidian communication.”8 I follow both Knox and Kennedy in drawing my identification of the exact moment of the letter’s composition from the text of Heroides I:

Quisquis ad haec vertit peregrinam litora puppim, ille mihi de te multa rogatus abit, quamque tibi reddat, si te modo viderit usquam, traditur huic digitis charta notata meis. (Ovid, Her. I.59-62)

Whoever turns a foreign ship to these shores, He leaves only after I have asked him many questions about you. And that which he might pass to you, if he should ever have but seen you, Is given to him, a paper written with these fingers.

The lines immediately following indicate that Telemachus has returned from his trip to visit Nestor in Pylos to gather information, placing the moment sometime after book XVII of the Odyssey. The moment when such a stranger approaches Ithaca within the course of the epic is, then, the arrival of the impoverished foreigner in book XIX, who, unbeknownst to Penelope, is Odysseus himself. The Homeric text describes the scene much as Ovid does above, with more detail – the only change Ovid makes here is the addition of a written letter. This is not to say that Ovid does not make changes to the

Homeric version of the Odyssey – there are numerous such emendations to be found.9

8 Fulkerson 2005, 38, following and building upon an observation from Kennedy 1984. See Kennedy 1984 and Fulkerson 2005 for identification of this specific instance, which Lindheim 2003 questions on the grounds that Penelope seems unsure that the letter will in fact reach him – I agree with Kennedy and Fulkerson and place Penelope’s questioning of the letter’s reaching its destination to be a moment of immersion into Penelope’s point of view rather than a third-person omniscient questioning. I likewise follow Drinkwater 2007 in identifying letter-writing as an integral part of Penelope’s communication strategies.

9 Kennedy expertly catalogues them, for the purpose of generally addressing whether or not Ovid actually had purposes in altering Homeric stories. See Kennedy 1984, 419.

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A select few of these alterations bear further examination in the light of this paper’s examination of Penelope’s character.

In Heroides I, Penelope’s language implies that she sent Telemachus to Pylos:

Omnia namque tuo senior te quaerere misso rettulerat nato Nestor, at ille mihi. (Ovid, Her. I.37-38)

For, when your son was sent to seek you, the older man Nestor told him everything, and he told it to me.

This is a direct contrast with Homer’s Odyssey III.373-6, in which he actually instructs the nurse Eurycleia not to reveal his mission. Strictly speaking, since Penelope’s name was never mentioned, these lines could refer to Athena’s interventions, but since

Penelope has no way of knowing this, I believe this interpretation to be unfounded.

Kennedy and Knox both interpret this line as a stretch of the truth, if not an outright lie, on Penelope’s part. While other changes do support calling Penelope’s truthfulness into question, as does the basic fact that she is matched in a love story with a hero known for his ability to bend the truth, I find two possible other interpretations of these lines to be equally plausible. The first is that this may be an intimation on Penelope’s part that she engineered the situation and manipulated Telemachus into departing for Pylos without his knowledge. The second is that this is a deliberate alteration to the story on

Ovid’s part, and that we are meant to take Penelope’s version of the story at face value for this text. These interpretations are supported by another change in the story. A few lines later, Penelope references the attack by Diomedes and Ulixes on the horse of

Rhesus:

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Rettulit et ferro Rhesumque Dolonaque caesos, utque sit hic somno proditus, ille dolo. Ausus es—O nimium nimiumque oblite tuorum!— Thracia nocturno tangere castra dolo totque simul mactare viros, adiutus ab uno! (Ovid, Her. XI.39-43)

He told of Rhesus and Dolon cut down with iron, As this one was betrayed by sleep, that one by trickery. You dared – O, too much and too much again forgetful of your people! – To breach the Thracian camps with nighttime treachery And to slaughter so many men all at once, aided only by one!

The language here implies that Ulixes carried out the main role in every aspect of this action, from the planning to the actual slaughter, with Diomedes acting as a sidekick and aid when necessary. This is different from Homer’s version in Iliad X.488ff, where

Diomedes is the one who actually carries out the slaughter according to Odysseus’ plan, with Odysseus merely taking over for the clean-up operation. Given that in the

Heroides text, Penelope’s letter is supposed to reach Ulixes (and in fact, unbeknownst to her, is actually being passed to him directly), it makes little sense to assume that

Penelope is trying to lie about her husband’s role in the night attack. While the distribution of the letters might cause his fame to change, her husband remains an important addressee, and as such would know perfectly well what had actually happened, rendering the whole story extremely awkward. I therefore turn to other interpretations: this is either a natural change in which Penelope’s own imagination gives Ulixes the more dangerous role; or it is plausible that Penelope has heard slightly altered version of the truth – this change may reinforce Penelope’s distance from her husband’s activities of recent decades; or lastly, Ovid may be outright changing the story to reinforce his heroine’s perspective, making more correct her rebuke of his rashness.

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Penelope also makes numerous omissions – leaving out information that

Telemachus gave her upon return from Pylos, leaving out the information about how she held off the suitors. In particular, she seems to be as comfortable with manipulation of truth and information as her husband, and seems to be communicating with him in half-truths to let him know what she knows and what she thinks. We see this in Homer with her ruse involving the pair’s marriage bed – and much has been made of the significance of her proving her loyalty to Odysseus upon their reunion with a mind game, a puzzle – but only here in this text is this characteristic allowed to take center stage, as her character does.

It is unreasonable to assume that these changes are accidental, given the accuracy with which Ovid represents other sources; it is obvious that, had he wished,

Ovid could have been equally adherent to the Odyssey here.10 While scholars posit the existence of other lost works on Penelope which probably served as ancillary sources to

Ovid’s work, the setting of this letter within the Homeric backdrop makes any such text decision purposeful, and the result worth examining.

Penelope’s experience of abandonment, while painful, is not one of being abandoned by her author: Homer continues to write her story in Odysseus’ absence. In response, in Ovid’s version of the story, she lays claim to her own power in the absence of her husband, making changes to a story as told by Homer, which places her in direct contradiction to the genre with the highest authority, and one of the authors with the most authority in that genre. In the programmatic position in the collection, her confidence in taking on this contradiction is significant: she relies on her own

10 See Jacobson 1974, 244. Following Baca 1969, he makes this exact point, and I follow both scholars.

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perceptions and knowledge and is willing to make decisions based on her needs at the time in order to survive. She is matched well with Ulixes, whose actions are spectacularly cold and callous on occasion, including as described in this letter in the deaths of Rhesus and Dolon; but she is also a woman who claims her place on center stage in this set piece with considerable authority of her own.

Briseis’ Letter Within the Iliad

Briseis’ character experiences a situation very unlike the prominence of

Penelope, and it is fitting that the Heroides gives her the opportunity for substantial speech for the first time in literary tradition: her objectification has been a key part of her abandonment by Achilles, and is expressed fully in this letter. As a result, the changes

Ovid makes to her character in Heroides III are both more substantive and harder to track, because there is scant evidence of her character before the collection. Ovid’s primary source would have been the Iliad, with all other sources likely being merely short references to the epic.11 As a result, most of the changes made to the story are simple additions which there is nothing in the Homeric text to explicitly contradict. Ovid creates most of the character out of his own imagination, rather than having a rich literary tradition to draw upon, as he did with some of the heroine authors of the other

11 Says Jacobson: “Ovid had virgin soil to sow, little standing between him and Homer. He may well have seen himself as the creator of Briseis by virtue of his endowing her with a complete and psychologically suitable character that she lacks in the Iliad. In so doing it is remarkable how he utilizes (one might say, exhausts) every event, every remark in the Iliad which bears, even indirectly, on Briseis.” Jacobson 1974, 340. Jacobson defends this construction of new, or possibly renewed, character, in a way described as potentially necessary by Fulkerson, who compares it with Hermione’s epistle in this regard: “The reception of Heroides 3 and 8 has been mixed; prior readers have thought both letters a dismal failure, possibly because each author attempts to rewrite the canonical version of her own story and most readers of the Heroides have been uninterested in this kind of revision.” Fulkerson 2005, 89. Here Verducci 1985 stands alongside Jacobson as one of the most important and earliest scholars to begin having at least mixed responses to these letters, finding the poetics appealing but the feminine portrayals completely unrealistic, thoroughly offensive, or both, depending on the epistle in question.

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letters. Even so, most of these additions shed little light on Briseis’ own personality; for reasons discussed more extensively below, the letter is concerned mostly with others’ perceptions of the relationship between Briseis and Achilles, and with the potential damage to Achilles’ reputation based upon the length and apparent ease of their separation.

The contrast between the situations of Penelope and Briseis could not be clearer: while Penelope is a queen in the absence of her husband, acting often as regent for her son, Briseis is a captive and a pawn in the power games between Achilles and

Agamemnon, and is expected to allow herself to be used as such in order to motivate the primary heroic protagonist of the Iliad. Briseis’ experience of abandonment is therefore naturally one of objectification. She is in a far more peripheral position in her source material than Penelope in the Odyssey, to a point that there is actually very little material for Ovid to work with. As a result, Ovid is able to reference most of the extant material with ease, and create his own wherever he wishes, as discussed above.

Lindheim catalogs the Iliad’s references to Briseis, and to her relationship with Achilles, pointing out quite correctly the ambiguity of the emotions between the two characters.12

Ovid’s version of Briseis displays a similar variance of expression, but all in a single poem, without numerous lines or even books intervening. The result is a letter full of apologies, backtracking, and self-questioning, as one might expect from a woman in

Briseis’ precarious position. Her task is a difficult one: she must express her position in

12 Lindheim 2003, 51-52. Lindheim concludes from the varying nature of these references that any affectionate emotions on Achilles’ part are false or at least fleeting, rather than my favored interpretation, which is that Achilles is a complicated figure who experiences different emotions under different circumstances, and expresses them differently depending upon his audience.

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this letter without stepping out of the boundaries of a war captive currently in servitude to a king hostile both to her own country and to the warrior addressee of her letter, who also happens to be her preferred master if she must remain in servitude at all.13 As such, she uses the thoughts of others, rather than her own, as her arsenal of argumentation against Achilles. An example appears in Heroides III, in a scene invented by Ovid rather than drawn from Homer:

Nam simul Eurybates me Talthybiusque vocarunt, Eurybati data sum Talthybioque comes. Alter in alterius iactantes lumina vultum quaerebant taciti, noster ubi esset amor. (Ovid, Her. III.9-12)

For together Eurybates and Talthybius summoned me, And I was given as a companion to Eurybates and Talthybius. Each casting their eyes upon the face of the other, They asked in silence, where was our love.

As Briseis, a slave, cannot accuse Achilles directly or deny his spoken words of affection, she places her doubts in the assumed perspective of the heralds, whose very job it is to spread word of important happenings.14 Another, more spectacular example begins in line 111 of the poem, as Briseis refers to the Greek perception of events, contrasting them with the reality she knows:

Si tibi nunc dicam, fortissime: 'Tu quoque iura nulla tibi sine me gaudia capta!' neges. At Danai maerere putant—tibi plectra moventur, te tenet in tepido mollis amica sinu! (Ovid, Her. III.111-114)

13 Fulkerson describes the traditional interpretation of this letter as “a pathetic attempt to increase her own importance.” Fulkerson 2005, 87. Lindheim 2003 agrees with this, both as an interpretation of tradition and as a reading of Ovid’s letter. I believe this is more of a realistic psychological portrayal of a woman in a terrifyingly powerless and dangerous position in a time of war. My interpretation is also consistent with Briseis’ behavior in XIX.282ff. of Homer’s Iliad, when she takes the opportunity of her public lament for Patroclus to try to win sympathy for herself, spending a significant portion of her lament discussing her own position.

14 Jacobson 1974 views this as an artistic moment, but little more, agreeing with Wilkinson before him. My reading methodology is such that I prefer to give more weight to any time when Ovid deliberately changes a story in such a way that it influences the characterization of the heroine author, as in this example.

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If I were to say to you now, most brave one, “You, swear as well That you have taken no joys without me!” You would refuse. But the Greeks think you mourn – yet your harp is moved, A sweet lady-friend holds you in her warm bosom!

Her reality includes not only abandonment, but replacement, and the knowledge that her warlike hero is engaging in pursuits that are anything but valiant rather than attempting to win her back or indeed establish his power against Agamemnon in any way. In the lines immediately following, she continues to speculate as to the reactions of

Achilles’ fellow warriors, and the questions they might begin to ask if they were to discover this truth, and in particular the reasons they might concoct for Achilles’ ongoing refusal to fight:

Et quisquam quaerit, quare pugnare recuses? Pugna nocet, citharae voxque Venusque iuvant. Tutius est iacuisse toro, tenuisse puellam, Threiciam digitis increpuisse lyram, quam manibus clipeos et acutae cuspidis hastam, et galeam pressa sustinuisse coma. (Ovid, Her. III.115-120)

And does anyone ask, why you refuse to fight? Combat wounds. Lyres and the voice and Venus are pleasing. It is safer to have lain upon a couch, to have held a girl, To have played upon a Thracian lyre with the fingers, Than to have held up in your hands shields and the sharp-pointed spear, And a helmet upon your pressed hair.

Obviously it would be a dangerous move to outwardly accuse Achilles of cowardice; yet, rhetorically, Briseis manages to make these insinuations by inserting them into the minds of others, whose opinion Achilles would likely value more than her own in any event – particularly given the importance placed upon reputation in ancient Greek epic concepts of honor.

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These passages, and indeed the letter as a whole, are carefully crafted to spur a hero such as Achilles to action. What we are not given in this letter is Briseis’ reasons for preferring Achilles over Agamemnon, given that she seems to question his emotional attachment to her, as well as, for obvious reasons, his ability to keep her safe. In terms of logistics, there is no reason for this letter to be composed. Yet it fits perfectly within the storyline of the Iliad, the character of Briseis waiting for Achilles to act on her behalf, writing a letter to him explaining her perspective. Since logistics and emotional attachment are removed from the possible motivations for writing the letter, the conclusion remains that the letter itself, its composition and distribution, may be a valid objective. Briseis’ experience is one of being passed over, ignored, objectified, and used as a tool rather than viewed as a person. Homer, as the author of the Iliad, treats her in much the same way. In the Heroides, she is given the chance to exert her personality and describe the nature of her experience in a way that is utterly new for her character in the literary tradition of Ovid’s time.

Hypsipyle’s Letter Within the Argonautica

The primary similarity between the Briseis epistle and the Hypsipyle letter is the degree to which each heroine occupies herself with the story and perspectives of other people. However, they do so in very different ways and for very different reasons.

Hypsipyle’s situation, beyond the basics of being abandoned by a hero, bears few similarities to Briseis’ – she is far more similar to Penelope, in that she is queen of her own island, and in fact she bears more power in her state than Penelope does.

Hypsipyle’s letter takes place directly after the parting between the two in book 1 of

Apollonius’ Argonautica, a work in which it is implied at several points that Jason and

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Hypsipyle have actually married during the Argonauts’ stay on Lemnos.15 Ovid also refers to the twin sons Hypsipyle bore to Jason, and writes that Hypsipyle was pregnant at the time of Jason’s departure, and makes that a significant part of the vows Jason speaks as he leaves. His speech takes up four full of Heroides VI:

"Abstrahor, Hypsipyle. Sed dent modo fata recursus; vir tuus hinc abeo, vir tibi semper ero. Quod tamen e nobis gravida celatur in alvo, vivat et eiusdem simus uterque parens!" (Ovid, Her. VI.59-62)

“I am dragged away, Hypsipyle. But would the fates might give me a way back; I go from here as your husband, your husband I will always be. What now is hidden, born of both of us, in your heavy womb, May it live and may we both be parents to it!”

As Hypsipyle points out, Jason has broken not only his vows to her but his vows to their shared children as well. Unlike Briseis, who posits concerns about Achilles’ reputation,

Hypsipyle’s concern is for her own position and for that of her children, which she sees as potentially damaged by her relationship with Jason and the way in which it has ended and been followed so rapidly by Jason’s relationship with Medea. Familiarity with the story of Medea lends credence to Hypsipyle’s concerns, as Jason does in fact discard not only Medea but her children as well, when he pursues a more convenient marriage yet again. Like Penelope, Hypsipyle is also concerned about rumors – equally founded, but far more dangerous in this case – that her epistle’s addressee has not only

15 Bloch 2000 and Knox 1995 both emphasize that Ovid draws on Apollonius’ portrayals of both characters, in particular allowing Hypsipyle to point out the ironies and falsehoods of Jason’s promises of fidelity in the book. It is worth noting, as both scholars do, that a legal marriage is not actually confirmed in the text, though it is implied at several points and also found elsewhere in the post-Apollonius tradition, including the prominent Latin Argonautica of Varro. Fulkerson 2005 points out that the letters themselves are also valid sources for each other’s texts, and therefore Heroides VI and XII are related in this way as well.

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abandoned her, but has added insult to injury by leaving her for another woman.16

Uniquely to this epistle, however, Hypsipyle also hears rumors of the viciousness of

Jason’s new mistress, who could pose an actual danger to the Lemnian queen and her two children by Jason. Ironically, if one assumes that final curses have power, Ovid’s version of Hypsipyle may contribute to Medea’s dangerousness, by cursing Jason in the final lines of the epistle:

Nec male parta diu teneat peiusque relinquat: exulet et toto quaerat in orbe fugam. Quam fratri germana fuit miseroque parenti filia tam natis, tam sit acerba viro! Cum mare, cum terras consumpserit, aera temptet; erret inops, exspes, caede cruenta sua. Haec ego, coniugio fraudata Thoantias, oro. Vivite devoto nuptaque virque toro! (Ovid, Her. VI.157-164)

Nor may she hold for long what she gained badly, and may she leave it worse: Let her live in exile and seek her flight throughout the world. Just as she has been a sister to her brother, and to her wretched parent A daughter, may she be so bitter to her children, to her husband! When she shall have used up the see, and the land, let her try the air; Let her wander penniless, despairing, and bloody with her murder. These things I pray, daughter of Thoas, cheated of my marriage. Live, wife and husband, in your cursed marriage bed!

As we see in these lines, even Hypsipyle’s final expression of defiance has more impact upon Medea’s story than upon her own. This finale is crucial to her experience here: she is fighting against the experience of having her story delegitimized and handed to another. Because she is unquestionably a less important figure to Jason’s overall story, in part because she is both less useful and less dangerous to him in the long run, she

16 Ovid uses to great effect the fact that Hypsipyle does not know at this point in the story that Jason will abandon Medea as well, giving rise to another epistle in the collection. Between the two, a spectacularly negative portrayal is constructed of one of the most famous heroes of Greek mythology. Other than Jason, only Paris, usually not considered a paragon of masculine virtue, receives criticism from two different heroines, and in Helen’s case he is given a chance to respond, as this is one of the sets of paired letters.

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experiences an abandonment not only by her hero but by the authors who engage with her story as well. Her letter is an expression of defiance against this, reframing even this as a valid experience in her own terms.

Dido’s Letter Within the Aeneid

Hypsipyle’s dangerous final curse is both a commonality and natural transition to the Dido epistle, as Ovid’s contemporary readers would have been very recently influenced by readings of the Aeneid, and by the portrayal of Dido’s historical curse at the end of book IV. This is the only instance in which two epic heroines are found as authors of consecutive letters in the collection, and the transition is a smooth one. Like

Hypsipyle, Dido finds herself abandoned by a hero to whom she gave shelter and companionship. The setting for this letter, however, is just before the departure scene, rather than a brief period after. Dido clearly pens this letter during the events of book IV, while Aeneas is still in Carthage, preparing his ships to leave that morning.17 Unlike

Hypsipyle and any of the other previous heroines, Dido is actually in a position of asking her addressee to stay, as her abandonment is not yet complete in its logistics, inevitable though it actually is; the whole situation is rendered more pathetic by the degree to which Dido’s ravings, consistent with her mental downfall in the Aeneid at the hands of

Cupid and Venus, cause her to wonder whether she might actually have a chance of preventing his departure. It is clear that on some level she knows that this is impossible, as she says very early in the poem, lines 3-6:

17 Knox 1995 notes that scholars have accepted the specific setting as lines Aen. IV.413-415, in which Dido marshals her arguments to Aeneas. Vergil’s writing of the event does not specify whether her arguments are being gathered in spoken or written form at that time, though she does attempt to present them to him later in book IV in spoken form. Drinkwater 2007 also identifies the importance of Dido’s habit of communication by proxy.

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Nec quia te nostra sperem prece posse moveri, alloquor: adverso movimus ista deo! Sed meriti famam corpusque animumque pudicum cum male perdiderim, perdere verba leve est. (Ovid, Her. VII.3-6)

Not because I might hope that you are able to be moved by our prayer, Do I speak to you: we begin these things with a god against us! But because my reputation of merit, and my chaste body and spirit I have lost ill, to lose words is a weightless matter.

Given this knowledge of the outcome of her pleadings to Aeneas, her later description of her suicidal intent as conditional upon his leaving, found in lines 181-182, seems far more certain:

Si minus, est animus nobis effundere vitam; in me crudelis non potes esse diu. (Ovid, Her. VII.181-182)

If you grant less than this, it is our intent to pour forth our life; You cannot be cruel to me for long.

This is completely consistent with the actual events of the Aeneid, as Dido’s death occurs in the final lines of book IV. The basic sequence of events leading to Dido’s death – Aeneas’ shipwreck on the shores of Carthage; the affair between the two; the consequent rage and jealousy of prince Iarbas, who threatens to invade Carthage once

Aeneas departs; Dido’s descent into despair and eventual suicide – is maintained in

Heroides VII. The changes in her story are character-based, as discussed below.

Likewise consistent with the Aeneid is the fact that Dido’s death happens because of Aeneas’ mission to Italy: she receives from her hero an explanation as to why her abandonment is necessary, but finds it unsatisfying. Her experience is that of a sacrificial figure, whose death, while something that Aeneas in book VI of the Aeneid shows an emotional reaction to, is even then justified by its necessity. It is better, in the mind of Aeneas, that she die than that she hinder his mission, and she knows this. From

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her own perspective, her abandonment holds certain practical consequences which make her death seem all the more attractive as an option, if Aeneas cannot stay with her: her city is likely to be invaded, and she herself married off by force to any one of a number of leaders. Her city, the project which had previously given her the will to survive, is probably doomed – for Dido does not receive the benefits of Aeneas’ underworld visions, knowing that Carthage will one day become a powerful empire in its own right – and the one man she might have accepted in her widowhood has abandoned her to found his own city, with an explanation that his gods require her happiness and safety as a sacrifice for his mission. Additionally, Dido’s reference to a hostile deity in the passage above could refer to the fact that she has been directly manipulated by a number of forces beyond her control, including Cupid and Venus; if she is aware of these forces, as she is aware of various other supernatural aspects of her story, then she also knows that her very love for Aeneas happens not through her own will but because her role in the relationship exists solely to further his mission. The greatest overall change to her story in this letter is therefore that of perspective: retelling this set piece from the point of view of the sacrificial heroine, describing the experience of the sacrificed and demanding accountability from hero and author alike.

Laodamia’s Letter Within the Iliad

Laodamia, in contrast, does not consider reputation or position to be her greatest fear. Her letter is written, like Dido’s, before the abandonment is complete, and like

Penelope’s, while waiting for a hero to return from the Trojan War. Like Dido and unlike

Penelope, however, her pleas for Protesilaus to return to her are futile, as he is destined to be the first to die in fulfillment of the needs of the epic setting of the Iliad and its literary antecedents. Ovid draws on numerous tragic sources as well as the epic for this

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tale, but the setting is placed clearly within the epic cycle rather than the tragic, as those plays take place after Protesilaus’ death. In Ovid’s version, the Greeks have not in fact departed for Troy, though Protesilaus has already left home. The majority of the letter is occupied with Laodamia’s specific fears about Protesilaus’ death at the hands of the

Trojans, and her enumeration of the unlucky omens she has witnessed which point toward that outcome.18 She is of course correct, and even identifies the specifics beginning in line 93:

Sors quoque nescio quem fato designat iniquo, qui primus Danaum Troada tangat humum: infelix, quae prima virum lugebit ademptum! Di faciant, ne tu strenuus esse velis! (Ovid, Her. XIII.93-96)

Fate also picks out I know not whom for an unfair destiny, Who first of the Greeks shall touch Trojan soil: Unhappy, she who first will mourn her lost husband! May the gods make it that you not be quick to act!

Laodamia recognizes that her husband is likely to be drawn to this kind of heroic action, and indeed this is the exact outcome. Protesilaus’ abandonment of Laodamia occurs in two stages, then: the first being his departure for Troy in the first place, the second being his noble sacrifice on behalf of the Greek army. The first, as of the writing of the epistle, has already occurred, and Laodamia clearly sees that the second is virtually inevitable. Her letter, if it were to reach its intended recipient, might have some chance of changing this, except that the omens Laodamia witnesses indicate otherwise.

Laodamia’s abandonment experience is actually two-fold, unlike any of the other heroines in the collection: first she loses Protesilaus as he goes off to war, then she

18 These include a range of omens from Protesilaus tripping on his way to the ship, according to line 88; to a dream of Protesilaus’ death in line 109, foreshadowing the dream which will later inform Laodamia that his death has in fact occurred.

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loses him again when she hears of his death and in fact encounters his ghost in a dream. It is this last which, according to the tragedies, undoes her completely, but this is not the subject of this letter. Ovid deals with the first abandonment, and the fear of the second – a fear which the reader knows to be accurate for increased pathos and sympathy. Laodamia’s experience as described in this letter, then, is remarkable partly in its normality: the experience of a wife seeing a husband off to war, with a prophecy of death looming on the horizon, is one shared by thousands of women in Greece. It is the knowledge of the future which makes it remarkable, as does the fact that Laodamia chooses to speak out as she does and remind Protesilaus that he in fact has conflicting obligations: those to his country, and those to his family. Laodamia’s experience is that of the everywoman, and is therefore placed last among these in the collection, a finale to the epic set pieces as she bears witness to her husband’s departure and eventual sacrifice.

Sacrificial Women Speaking Out and Claiming Center Stage

It is this act of bearing witness which unites all of the epic heroines and their epistles, as their original stories simply told of them watching the heroes leave, and their stories ended there. Because the original texts focused on the male heroes rather than these heroines, the women were abandoned by both the heroes and the authors who wrote about them. Ovid reverses this, by filling in the gaps of the story and turning the proverbial cinematic camera back on the characters who are usually edited out of the picture.

Chapter 1 of this paper described the Heroides as derived in part from a tradition of mythological love stories. The nature of mythological love stories is that they can appear in many genres, with different emphasis, perspective, tone, and plot depending

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on the genre. As a result, however different the requirements for epic and elegy, the same story can be told in both, with only certain changes required.

The traditional role of women in epic is to be a plot device, a side character whose sole purpose is to help a hero on his way, and, when necessary, withdraw from the stage without complaint and let the hero carry on the greater agenda to which he, too, is subordinate. In each of Ovid’s letters, the women of epic, who are placed in satellite positions surrounding their men in their source material, speak out in their point of view and their personal emotions in ways they are not allowed to in their source genre. In particular, they express their experiences of an incident which is usually the terminus of their stories in their source material, as they are abandoned not only by the hero, but by the author as well.

In an epic setting, by speaking out as they do in their original stories, these women become threats to the hero, rather than aids. The hero is suddenly justified in leaving them because they are a distraction. The women are expected to simply back away and leave the story when it is convenient for the men for them to do so. Elegy, in contrast, is entirely occupied with the personal agenda, as is the epistolary genre. The

Heroides, as demonstrated in chapter 1, are both.

Penelope’s Programmatic Assertion

It is significant that Ovid brackets the epic-derived letters of the collection with the perspectives of the two women who are indisputably married to their epistles’ heroic addressees. Penelope, whose letter is in the programmatic position, is traditionally seen as the model of the woman who waits, the reward for Odysseus' journey. In this letter, she refuses to be only this, and reclaims agency in bringing Ulixes home and

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accomplishing her goals.19 Scholars such as Lindheim disagree with this perspective on

Penelope’s agency: “Heroides 1 seemingly offers Penelope the opportunity to tell the story of the Odyssey… from her own perspective… the heroine’s first order of business in her re-fashioned narrative, however… succeeds in questioning the notion that her preferred narrative form can in fact convey the intended information to the appropriate addressee.”20 This interpretation assumes that the “appropriate addressee” only includes Odysseus – it seems out of character for a woman as canny as Penelope is portrayed, both in the Heroides and in the Odyssey, to hand out copies of her story far and wide, if she only intends one man to read them. Penelope, in fact, as the programmatic heroine of the collection, is also the first to deliberately distribute copies of her version of the narrative.21 Authors such as Fulkerson argue that Penelope manages to preserve her status as an epic heroine despite her transplantation into elegy; I argue that in fact she accomplishes this partly because she is in an elegiac poem, where her story is allowed primacy – in epic, she is only allowed to save herself

19 “At the same time, though she writes elegy, Penelope refuses to sacrifice herself to her Heroidean models and adapts only certain elegiac strategies.” Fulkerson 2005, 19. Fulkerson discusses the fact that Penelope waits perhaps the longest out of the heroines, but without ever losing hope and without ever giving in to despair that seems so characteristic of the elegiac narrator – her comment applies equally to the fact that she refuses to fall into any passive role.

20 Lindheim 2003, 38.

21 As such, while Ovid certainly references the tradition of Penelope as an exemplar of chastity, fidelity, and womanly virtue in general, as Knox points out, “it was [Ovid] who took the imaginative step of representing the Odyssey from her point of view. In so doing, he has taken her character far beyond the traditional role of a paradigm…” Knox 1995, 86. This view is furthered in Knox’ analysis by the numerous examples he cites in the same note, of other authors, mostly Hellenistic writers with the notable exception of Horace, who approach this topic but never fulfill it to any major degree. Knox concludes his note with a nod to Ovid’s claim of originality and renovation of prior texts: “Thus conceived, [Ovid]’s epistle of Penelope is not simply a rhetorical reworking of a Homeric theme, but a masterly exploration of a character, making new material of the oldest literary tradition available to him.” Knox 1995, 87. This comment is also a repudiation of the common disregard shown by many earlier scholars for the Heroides as a collection, as discussed in Chapter 1 of this paper.

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for the epic hero.22 In elegy, she is allowed to save herself for her own pride, and so that she can legitimately lord her superiority over the potential rivals she mentions at several points in the poem.

Briseis’ Establishment of Self

Briseis as a character has been almost entirely neglected except for Ovid’s work in the Heroides. Modern interpretations of the epistle tend to focus on the pathos of her situation, seeing her as a figure of pity rather than of any kind of feminine power. What I believe these interpretations overlook is Briseis’ own position in the war: a Trojan woman in the enemy camp. While she may have genuine feelings for Achilles, at least in the early stages of their interactions, she can also safely be assumed to want the worst for this army as a whole. At the same time, she has every reason, if she believes the Greeks will be victorious, to want Achilles to survive and to gather as much glory and power for himself as possible. The words of her epistle are carefully crafted to cast division among heroes and simultaneously rouse Achilles to action, while diverting attention from herself. If Penelope is the programmatic heroine of the collection, it is important to look at manipulative and cunning interpretations and reasons why these women might have chosen to express their experiences, and Briseis has a clear motivation regardless of her ultimate loyalties and their outcomes. Her divided loyalties can be seen clearly in lines 123-126, when she speculates as to Achilles’ motivations for going to war in the first place:

An tantum dum me caperes, fera bella probabas, cumque mea patria laus tua victa iacet? Di melius! Validoque, precor, vibrata lacerto transeat Hectoreum Pelias hasta latus! (Ovid, Her. III.123-126)

22 Here I agree with Fulkerson 2005, 37.

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Or did you only approve of fierce wars, until you captured me, And your glory now lies conquered with my country? May the gods wish better! I pray, hurled from your strong arm May the Pelian spear pierce Hector’s side!

In these lines, she openly wishes for Achilles to be victorious over Hector, an odd wish for a woman of Troy but less so for a woman hoping to be Achilles’ legitimate wife. For

Briseis, the worst case scenario is the fall of Troy and the destruction of Achilles’ power at the same time, as is reflected here. She takes a thoroughly practical approach to a very dangerous situation, and her apparently passive stance is just that: a front for the sake of appearances. She goes through every motion of fulfilling her position as a pawn in the power games, while in fact taking very specific steps to determine her own fate.

Hypsipyle’s Flouting of Expectations

Hypsipyle’s personality and perspective are rarely discussed or even considered important to the story of Jason and the Argonauts, as Medea is by far the more prominent heroine. Indeed, her letter is primarily concerned with rumors of Medea, and with placing herself in competition with Jason’s new love interest. This contrasts with what is expected of her: as a secondary character and a plot device to keep Jason safe and ensure the continuation of his lineage after Medea’s tragic murder of her own children, Hypsipyle is expected to step back and let Medea, or other women, take her place, and withdraw from the story entirely. This letter in its entirety represents her refusal to do so, and her assertion of the very real and practical concerns that a woman in her position might have. As discussed above, her concerns for her position are valid, as is her perception that Jason has used her for convenience, pretended to fidelity, and then discarded her when a more useful woman came along, and readers of the whole collection know that he will do the same again to Medea. One point of interest here is

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that Ovid is not required to make any substantive changes to the story in order to draw these parallels, only to make concrete what is merely implied in his source material.

Dido’s Practical Rebuke

Ovid’s version of Dido, in contrast, shows numerous alterations to his literary model, allowing her to plead a startlingly rational case for the rightness of her viewpoint, in contrast to Vergil’s demented queen. The Aeneid is in a position of being the exclusive source for the full story of Dido and Aeneas, as far as scholars are aware.

Though the stories of both characters existed in a long tradition before the Aeneid,

Vergil can be credited with inventing the intersection of the two stories. Though, as discussed above, the setting of her death is perfectly consistent with the original text, there are a number of other points that Ovid makes which are less consistent, or which even represent outright changes to the story. One clear example is Dido’s reference to a possible pregnancy, which would again be a commonality with Hypsipyle:

Forsitan et gravidam Didon, scelerate, relinquas parsque tui lateat corpore clausa meo. Accedet fatis matris miserabilis infans et nondum nato funeris auctor eris. Cumque parente sua frater morietur Iuli, poenaque conexos auferet una duos. (Ovid, Her. VII.133-138)

Perhaps you abandon a pregnant Dido, wicked one, And a part of you lies hidden enclosed in my body. A wretched infant will fall to the fate of its mother And you will be the author of the death of one not yet born. The brother of Iulus will die with his parent, And one penalty shall carry away two still tied together.

In the Aeneid, it is specifically stated in line IV.328 that Dido wishes she were pregnant, so she could have a child to remember Aeneas by, and perhaps someone to live for.

There has been almost no scholarly analysis of this particular claim beyond acknowledgment of the change from the Vergilian model, so different possibilities bear

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examination here. I discard the idea that it is simply a mistake, and that Ovid simply was unfamiliar with the subject matter; this is a significant character description, and he devotes eight lines of the poem to it, and I cannot believe that such prominence would be given to this if it were not deliberate.23 This leaves a few other interpretations open, the first of which, given the questioning of the veracity of the other heroines, must be that Dido is simply lying in an attempt to manipulate Aeneas. Based on the passages discussed above, this makes little sense, as she knows her pleas, even her pleas for more time rather than for a permanent relationship, are destined to fail. This leaves only the conclusion that Ovid has deliberately changed the story, which leads to the immediate questions of why he might do such a thing and what this does for his portrayal of Dido’s character. I believe this is one of several examples of Dido’s greater rationality as displayed in the Heroides, as contrasted with her ravings in the Aeneid.

Her concern about invasion from the barbarian prince Iarbas is present in both versions, but is given greater relative prominence in Heroides VII, simply by virtue of being a significantly shorter poem than even one book of the Aeneid. This concern is placed directly before the pregnancy concern in Ovid’s version, and the two are logically connected: if Iarbas successfully invades Carthage to take Dido as his wife because of the simple fact of her relationship with Aeneas, he will clearly not stand for the presence of another man’s son once that invasion is complete. In her situation, it is logistically much more sensible for Dido to be angry at being abandoned while potentially pregnant, than for her to be upset that Aeneas has failed to give her a child. Likewise more rational is her reasoning for why Aeneas should stay at least a brief period, when she

23 Knox 1995 and Fulkerson 2005 draw the same conclusion for the same reasons.

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lays out a concern which is missing entirely from the Vergilian text, but which would certainly be compelling in light of Aeneas’ own travels:

Da breve saevitiae spatium pelagique tuaeque; grande morae pretium tuta futura via est. Haec minus ut cures, puero parcatur Iulo! Te satis est titulum mortis habere meae. Quid puer Ascanius, quid di meruere Penates? Ignibus ereptos obruet unda deos? (Ovid, Her. VII.73-78)

Give a brief space for the sea’s cruelty, and yours; A safe road to come is a great reward for a delay. Though you may care less for these things, let the boy Iulus be spared! It is enough that you have the credit of my death. What has the boy Ascanius, what have your gods the Penates, deserved? Will the ocean destroy the gods torn from the fires?

In particular, Dido’s concerns about the weather bear weight here because it was a storm which shipwrecked Aeneas on the shores of Carthage in the first place: weather has already proven to be one of the greatest hazards to Aeneas’ mission in Italy. In

Vergil’s narrative, Aeneas is the only character privy to the wishes of the gods; Ovid’s

Dido also seems to have knowledge Aeneas lacks, when it comes to the will of the gods; appropriately for the queen of Juno’s favorite city, she claims to have heard

Juno’s nymphs blessing their marriage:

Audieram vocem; nymphas ululasse putavi: Eumenides fatis signa dedere meis. (Ovid, Her. VII.95-96)

I had heard a voice; I thought the nymphs had cried out; The Furies gave the signals for my death.

Though her interpretation of this supernatural phenomenon changes in light of subsequent events, Dido’s perception is entirely consistent with the events of the

Aeneid, as described in IV.166-168. The reference to Juno and her nymphs, appearing in capacity as the goddess of marriage and attendants, lends legitimacy to Dido’s

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claims, though Dido herself may no longer believe it. She is keenly aware that it is expected of her that she sacrifice her happiness and safety, as well as that of the city she has founded and built, for Aeneas, in order to allow him to leave her to pursue his destiny in Italy. In Vergil’s descriptions, she is often portrayed as tongue-tied or nearly incoherent with emotion; Ovid’s letter gives her a chance to actually make her case in a way that the original does not.24

Laodamia’s Claims of Marriage

Protesilaus is already a far less problematic hero than many of those in the collection, as his abandonment of Laodamia is unquestionably in service of a noble cause. Someone must be the first to step off the ships at Troy, and he is the one to make the brave sacrifice. However, Laodamia also has a valid point, that he knows he is leaving behind a loving wife, who, like many Greek women married to chieftains fighting at Troy, is expected to make whatever sacrifices are necessary for the war effort to preserve someone else’s marriage. Laodamia, therefore, as the opposing bookend to

Penelope, is expected to accept her upcoming loss without complaint. She speaks out not so much against the cause of war in general, as against the cause of war for the sake of someone else’s marriage:

Dyspari Priamide, damno formose tuorum, tam sis hostis iners quam malus hospes eras! Aut te Taenariae faciem culpasse maritae aut illi vellem displicuisse tuam. Tu, qui pro rapta nimium, Menelae, laboras, ei mihi! Quam multis flebilis ultor eris. (Ovid, Her. XIII.43-48)

24 Knox credits Ovid, in furthering this version of the narrative, in beginning the tradition of the “pessimistic reading” of the Aeneid. Knox 1995, 202. I would go further and point out that this is a brilliant example of an intertextual narrator, in this case a heroine author, questioning the entire heroic underpinning of the epic genre.

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Cursed Paris, son of Priam, lovely to the ruin of your people, May you be as weak an enemy as you were an evil guest! I would wish that either you had faulted the face of the Taenarian wife Or that yours had displeased her. You, Menelaus, who work too hard for a stolen woman, Alas for me! As an avenger you will be the cause of tears for many.

Her point is eminently reasonable in the case of this specific war: why should

Protesilaus’ marriage to Laodamia, a loving and faithful marriage, be destroyed in order to restore a marriage already rendered faithless by Helen? It is questions such as these which necessitate the setting of this letter before Protesilaus’ death rather than after, when she would naturally be consumed with mourning her husband, in the tragic rather than epic portion of the story. As such, Ovid simultaneously gives Laodamia the opportunity to speak in an epic setting where she was previously rendered mute, and also to set the stage for the tragedies surrounding her husband by giving her perspective not only on those events but also on all events leading up to them.

A Nod to Expectations: False Displays of Weakness

It is worth noting that the text does in some cases openly place the heroines in positions lower or less significant than the men they write about (a fact which is central to Lindheim’s analysis of the letters both individually and as a collection) – but always in such a way that can be easily denied using the text itself, and the nature of the text. The inclusion of this material in the letters is also a nod to the epic genre from which each letter is derived. Laodamia begins her letter by blaming herself for Protesilaus’ quick departure, but then leaves that theme behind to rail against the injustice of the situation.

The very brevity of the inclusion here, as well as its placement just after the salutation – it is found only in line 7 of the poem – indicates that it is more of a formality than a real sentiment. In this line, “oscula plura viro mandataque plura dedissem,” she blames

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herself for not openly loving Protesilaus enough, which seems an absurd claim from a woman who wears mourning clothes while her husband is away, sleeps with a wax statue of him, and commits suicide upon word of his death.

Dido’s letter places herself in a position of hopelessness, because the very fates and gods are against her, and Aeneas has a goal that is far beyond anything she can hope to offer. She counters with practicality, human concerns, family, and all the things

Aeneas has lost; these things are beneath the power that she is up against, but they are also powerfully attractive to him.

Hypsipyle’s letter acknowledges that Medea seems to be more powerful than she, and more dangerous. However, she immediately proceeds to point out that this is not necessarily a positive quality, and questions Jason’s choices, in what readers are meant to recognize as an accurately predictive analysis.25

Briseis’ letter, as described and discussed above, is almost entirely composed of such language, as expected of a woman in her position. She uses this rhetorically, to cast her views entirely onto other people, whose opinions likely hold much more weight with her heroic addressee and with anyone else who might read her letter.

This self-deprecating language contributes to the modern perception of these heroines as failures. Each heroine does have goals which she fails to achieve: even

Penelope does not receive back to her a Ulixes who has remained faithful as long as she has. Briseis does not bring back Achilles immediately, and his return to the war

25 Fulkerson 2005 devotes almost an entire chapter of her book to an analysis of Hypsipyle’s ability to predict the story of Medea, bringing up questions intertextual influence and reading, to whether Hypsipyle might share some of Medea’s magical ability. While these are excellent questions, I think the prediction also functions at face value, coming from a woman with the intelligence and analytical ability to rule an island.

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action does not occur because of her. Hypsipyle never regains Jason’s love, and her place in his story is completely taken over by Medea. Dido loses not only Aeneas but her life and her reputation. Ariadne never sees Theseus again. Laodamia’s pleas fall on deaf ears, and Protesilaus rushes to his death at the very start of the Trojan War.

Transplantation to Friendlier Soil

In the text of the Heroides in particular, there is a new goal assigned to all of these heroines in common which, because of the requirements of the elegiac and epistolary genres, supersedes their previously established narrative goals: that of having their stories take precedence, of gaining moral superiority, and having their side be the one that matters. The heroines are now occupied with the task of making their audiences, who have previously been informed by sources more or less hostile to their perspective, listen to them. They want to reframe their sacrifices as not just something that was necessary for someone else’s character development, and therefore they deny their own ruin as in any way being deserved or even a morally positive outcome. Each woman is therefore given the chance to deny that she is a failure, and to place the burden of failure upon the male hero.

In elegy, because the perspective of the heroines is given centrality, the hero’s actions are seen from a different moral perspective – and in fact, they seem less heroic, more flawed, and more valid targets for human judgment. This is what makes necessary the transplantation from the epic genre to the elegiac. To return to Harrison’s theory of generic enrichment, a story in which a personal agenda and perspective take moral precedence cannot be told through epic, according to modern genre theory; however, such a story can be thoroughly enriched by epic literary antecedents, even and especially when the new text is engaging in commentary and criticism of those

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antecedents. Elegy is the perfect genre for a “psycho-dramatic” portrayal of heroines who have previously been overlooked by authors of epic because those authors have been primarily concerned with the missions, agendas, and perspectives of the epic heroes. This interpretation, which analyzes and celebrates the compelling realism of the inner landscape of the characters’ thoughts and emotional processes, traditionally focuses just on the characters of the women, but it applies to the male heroes as well, bringing the down to earth and redrawing them in life size – naturally furthering the new generic goals of the female narrators. The women of the Heroides have existed before this text as satellites to the male characters, and a character renewal of this magnitude requires a transplantation to a new genre, one not inherently hostile to their concerns and experiences, in order to succeed.

Finally, it is necessary to address the issue of generic ascendancy, as perceived by ancient authors, in context of the Heroides. If Ovid wishes his heroines to be seen as more successful than in previous texts, why place them in a genre traditionally seen as less worthy than the epic from which they are derived? Firstly, it is already a genre in which by tradition women are granted more agency, even when the narrator is male.

Giving the heroines the narrator position only increases this agency. Additionally, it must be noted that the Greek-derived heroines are mostly from sources when speech was placed in primacy over the written word, but the fact is, each heroine’s supposed

Homeric-located epistle has theoretically survived to Roman times, or says Ovid’s

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authorial conceit, and to a time when the written word, as dictated by Ovid’s own poetry, will preserve her fame.26

Again, Penelope’s programmatic letter sets the tone for the collection: she must set an example of a woman playing the men’s game, by the men’s rules, and being so good at it that none may criticize her. As in Homer, she is the perfect wily match for her husband – she is the perfect wife by being too intellectually superior for any man but

Odysseus, or in this case, any author but Ovid. As a result, each epic heroine follows her example and achieves not only the telling of her story, but the permanence of her text and her perspective – a far greater success and power than she has found in any text before the Heroides.

26 Much of Ramsby 2007 is occupied with this point: elegy, while delivered in performance, is also according to the text itself a written, rather than primarily oral, form.

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CHAPTER 3 FATED WOMEN: HEROINES OF TRAGEDY

The “single” or “unpaired letters” of the Heroides include six letters derived from sources in Greek and Roman tragic drama: Epistle VI in which Phaedra writes to

Hippolytus, Epistle VIII in which Hermione writes to Orestes, Epistle IX in which Deianira writes to Hercules, Epistle XI in which Canace writes to Macareus, Epistle XII in which

Medea writes to Jason, and Epistle XIV in which Hypermnestra writes to Lynceus. This chapter continues the examination of individual narratives begun in chapter 2, extending the same methods of inquiry toward these heroines to analyze the commonalities and differences in the experiences of abandonment among this group of heroines, and the effect of genre transplantation upon the portrayal both of that experience and of the characters as a whole.1 I argue here for a new interpretation of the letters by contrasting each heroine’s experience with the societal expectations of women as highlighted in the tragic representations of her story, and by examining the way each heroine uses demonstration of rhetorical skill to claim authority for her viewpoint.

Epistle IV is set within the context of both Euripides’ two Hippolytus plays, and possibly also Sophocles’ Phaedra; Ovid’s text significantly places Phaedra rather than

Hippolytus at the center of his version of the tale, and makes Hippolytus the absent addressee.2 Epistle VIII is set within the general tragic setting surrounding the Trojan

1 While, as previously, Ovid’s commentary exists enriched by original source texts with which his contemporaries would have been familiar, these heroines somewhat less famous among modern audiences than some of the epic heroines, and so slightly more detailed summaries are included here.

2 Jacobson 1974 points out that while there are numerous references to all three plays, when it comes to determining which is the primary source, “The critic… can only smile bitterly and wonder. Without further ado, we must admit that the student of Heroides 4, charting the relationship between Ovid and the Greek sources, must run aground on the rocks of conjecture and insufficient evidence.” Jacobson 1974, 142. All three tragedies are based upon the same general outline of the story: in Theseus’ absence, his wife Phaedra falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus, who has sworn off love altogether, preferring sacred virginity in some form. Upon being rejected by Hippolytus, Phaedra lies to Theseus that Hippolytus has

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War, but the character of Hermione is startlingly different than is found in most extant tragedies, particularly those of Euripides’ Andromache.3 Epistle IX is set securely within

Sophocles’ Trachiniae, with Ovid’s text focusing again on the single heroine rather than the hero.4 The source of Epistle XI is Euripides’ Aeolus, which is no longer extant, but there are significant sources which discuss it, allowing scholarly tracking of the story and its roots.5 The most familiar of the tragic heroines to modern readers is likely

Medea, the heroine of Epistle XII, whose letter and story are drawn from the Medea productions of numerous tragedians both Greek and Roman, likely including the lost

raped her; whereupon Theseus in a rage brings about his son’s death, and in some versions Phaedra then commits suicide. The Heroides text takes place during the point at which Phaedra realizes she has been maddened by a forbidden love, but has not yet been rejected by Hippolytus – a point that exists in the actual plot of Euripides’ second and surviving Hippolytus play.

3 Jacobson says bluntly, “There is no trace in Ovid of Euripides’ arrogant and villainous bitch, no hint of the wanton shrew and unconscionable murderess.” Jacobson 1974, 43. Unfortunately, the Euripides play is the most complete extant treatment of Hermione’s character before the Heroides, though fragments indicate a more complex tradition of tragic portrayal. Evidence does not exist to identify specific sources, except to make clear that Ovid is not using Euripides. Jacobson 1974 catalogs the reasons why scholars believe Euripides’ portrayal, rather than Ovid’s, to be the one that contrasts with the surrounding tradition, and why Sophocles’ lost Hermione is the likely primary source for the Heroides text (see Jacobson 1974, 44-45). The outline, again, is the same: Hermione, daughter of Menelaus and Helen, is promised in marriage to two different men, Orestes and Neoptolemus (Pyrrhus, in the Roman texts), both of noble birth, under unclear circumstances. Hermione marries Orestes, and is then claimed by Neoptolemus at the end of the Trojan War in a marriage which ends both unproductively and unhappily under varying circumstances which may or may not include conflict with Neoptolemus’ Trojan concubine Andromache. Eventually she escapes to Orestes.

4 At the beginning of the tragedy, Deianira bemoans the state of her marriage and her state of neglect at the hands of her heroic husband, before receiving word that Hercules is on his way home with a new concubine. Deianira resorts to using a love charm that had been given to her by a centaur, only to discover too late to prevent its delivery that it is actually a poison deadly enough to burn even Hercules to death. She commits suicide in shame for her accidental murder of her husband, who is finally given a mercy killing by his son by Deianira. The Heroides text is set during the point at which she deliberates over her own suicide.

5 Summaries of the tragedy exist in both the Papyrus Oxyrhynchus and the Suda, in addition to various other references catalogued by Knox 1995. The story involves the incestuous seduction and impregnation of Canace by her brother Macareus, two of the twelve children of Aeolus, king of the winds. Macareus attempts to arrange their marriage to one another, but fails, and she is ordered by her father to kill herself and her unborn child. Macareus attempts to stop the suicide order, but fails to do so in time to save Canace and her child, whereupon he kills himself. The letter is set just before Canace’s suicide, with the epistolary narrator unaware that Macareus is in fact on his way to her.

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play by Ovid himself.6 It is necessary to note here that Epistle XII is one of those whose authenticity is most in question.7 I follow Fulkerson 2005 and Lindheim 2003, rather than Knox 1986, in accepting epistle XII as authentically Ovidian and as part of the original collection of the Heroides. Like Lindheim, I find that Knox’ selections of text can be easily interpreted other ways, and that the Ovidian style is too prevalent to ignore.

Lastly, Epistle XIV is drawn from the Danaid trilogy by Aeschylus, of which only The

Supplicants is now extant.8 The prevalence of stories about each of these heroines contributes to confusion about the exact source texts for the heroines, but each is clearly drawn from a selection of tragedies both Greek and Roman. Ovid therefore places his stories within the context of the larger tragic tradition of performance, rather than rendering a specific moment within a text.9

6 In Ovid’s letter, Medea has been abandoned by the hero Jason, after assisting him in stealing the Golden Fleece from her own homeland of Colchis; this assistance included provision of tools to overcome heroic challenges, but also the murder of her own brother and the deliberate implication of two young women in the murder of their grandfather. Medea is now faced with the fact that Jason is marrying another woman. As a result, she plots the murder of Jason’s new wife. Some of these events are drawn from Euripides’ Medea, others from Greek and Roman sources now lost.

7 See Appendix C for more detailed information about the manuscript tradition and the authenticity questions surrounding the individual epistles.

8 Little is known of the missing plays, but the basic story can be gleaned from the extant one, and from Ovid’s letter. Hypermnestra was one of the fifty daughters of Danaus, who were betrothed to the fifty sons of Aegyptus over their objections and those of Danaus. Forty-nine of the women murdered their husbands on their wedding night, only to be condemned to eternal punishment in the Underworld. Danaus, meanwhile, had Hypermnestra tried for treason in the Argive courts, where she was saved by Aphrodite and went on to found a dynasty with Lynceus.

9 In this aspect of my interpretation I partially follow Curley 2013: “Given the Heroides as a kind of Roman tragedy, which was rhetorical in the extreme, it would be foolish to deny rhetoric a place in the collection… we can consider the letters rhetorical without classifying them as pure rhetoric even if Ovid never intended them for performance.” See Curley 2013, 61. The degree to which the collection might have been intended for performance is unknown and a matter of dispute, as indicated by Cunningham 1949 and discussed in Chapter 1. Additionally, I believe Curtis overstates the connection between tragedy and the letters as a whole, primarily in that he reduces too far the importance of other generic interfacing with elegiac and epistolary expression within the collection, in particular disregarding the influence of very different origin texts upon the writing and reading of the Heroides.

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Tragedy-Transplanted Heroides as Monologues

Disaster and pathos are an inherent part of the tragic genre; as a result, these women are usually portrayed as “doomed,” the disasters of their lives “inevitable,” and this includes their abandonment by the heroes.10 A lack of possibility of avoidance becomes a lack of moral necessity: the heroes had no obligation to try to avoid abandoning the heroines, because avoiding the disastrous end to their relationships was never possible in the first place. It is noteworthy that neither the first nor the last letter in the collection is derived from a tragic source; heroines whose origin genre is inherently based upon personal disaster are given neither the programmatic position

(given, as described in chapter 2, to Penelope) nor the last word (given to Sappho, discussed in chapter 4). These heroines live an experience common to many actual women of the ancient world: expectations of others, and forces beyond their control, are crucial to their experience of their stories; it is their reactions to those forces and those expectations which differentiates them from each other and show their true characters.11

The text of the Heroides addresses these societal issues in the form of rhetorical and philosophical examinations on the part of the heroine, not as missing monologues within a single play but as separate performance texts.12 The importance of the rhetorical

10 Curley 2013 returns over and over to the idea that the pathos of absent love is equally inherent to both tragedy and elegy.

11 I identify this as one reason for a phenomenon highlighted by Bolton 2009: that of Ovid’s heroines writing from within confined spaces, yet engaging with narratives taking place in larger, usually public areas. Bolton’s examination of each heroine’s experience of powerlessness in the face of societal forces, represented metaphorically as the walls of rooms, palaces, or even prison cells, is crucial to my understanding of these heroines’ situations.

12 Cunningham 1949 examines the Heroides as a performance collection, and makes a clear case for performance as integral to their genre analysis. He identifies this as related to both suasoriae and to tragic-dramatic monologue. Curley 2013 makes significant comparisons between the texts of the Heroides and monologues found in the Metamorphoses by characters drawn from Euripides in particular,

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influence in these letters is greater than in any other subset within the collection. The rhetoric is present because these are more explicitly oral than some of the others, in spite of the written medium that is more a part of the epistolary and elegiac genres than of the tragic. The best method for identifying the usefulness and prevalence of oratorical and performance influence in these letters is analysis of the epistles’ overall structure.

Phaedra’s Manipulative Skill

As Lindheim points out, however, Phaedra is a letter writer in the text of

Euripides Hippolytus as well, and one with tremendous authority – the deception of her letter to Theseus is the vehicle for Hippolytus’ wrongful death.13 It is worth noting, then, that her letter here is not addressed to Theseus, whom she does not at this time love, but to Hippolytus. The first tragic heroine in the collection is one who, a contemporary reader would know, is skilled at using letters to manipulate.14 There is, as Jacobson and

Drnkwater point out, a considerable irony in the early lines of epistle IV:15

Perlege, quodcumque est—quid epistula lecta nocebit? Te quoque in hac aliquid quod iuvet esse potest; (Ovid, Her. IV.3-4)

Read it through, whatever is here – what harm will a reading of a letter do? There could be in this one even something which pleases you.

While the irony is obvious to the reader here, it is important to recall that there is little reason to question Phaedra’s sincerity because she has not yet written the letter

whose oratorical style mimics those of the Greek plays. Curley also identifies the oratorical anthology as a significant part of the tragic formula on the ancient stage.

13 See Lindheim 2003, 25-27.

14 Curley 2013 identifies this point: “Consider how Ovid recapitulates a key Euripidean theme – a woman’s anxiety over her reputation – and adapts it to the seductive aims of the erotic epistle.” See Curley 2013, 15. I would add to this point that this is something Phaedra is already shown in Euripides to possess great skill in doing.

15 See Jacobson 1947 and Drinkwater 2007 for very similar comments on this letter.

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accusing Hippolytus. Additionally, though she has not yet discovered the true depth of

Hippolytus’ well-known disgust with women, her next two lines do seem to indicate that she has some inkling of how Hippolytus will receive such a message:

His arcana notis terra pelagoque feruntur. Inspicit acceptas hostis ab hoste notas. (Ovid, Her. IV.5-6)

In these notes secrets are carried over land and sea. Even an enemy examines letters received from an enemy.

Phaedra seems aware that Hippolytus will view her as an opposition to the vows he has taken and the way of life he has embraced. Perhaps just as importantly, she acknowledges the audience’s awareness of these facts, setting up the situation in a rhetorical exposition reminiscent of a peroratio in the Roman oratorical tradition. I follow

Jacobson in my interpretation of the structure of the epistle: there is exposition through line 84, not only of Phaedra’s own viewpoint but of the situation as a whole, presented in a manner most favorable to her: she identifies herself with religious piety and ritual, particularly in association with goddesses of youth and purity: Diana in lines 39-44, and then Proserpina in 67-68. She presents her love for him as if she is drawn to him through similarity, both of temperament and of choices made. Following this exposition, she makes an oratorical defense of the virtues and benefits and even necessities of love, through line 136. She spends several lines (93-100) indicating mythological precedents in a similar manner to a jurist citing legal and intellectual history. She then begins to address possible counterarguments, following still the Roman oratorical formula:

Nec labor est celare, licet peccemus, amorem. Cognato poterit nomine culpa tegi. Viderit amplexos aliquis, laudabimur ambo; dicar privigno fida noverca meo. (Ovid, Her. IV.137-140)

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Nor is it a difficulty to conceal our love, although we sin. The crime could be hidden in the name of family. If someone should see us embraced, we shall both be praised; I will be called a faithful stepmother to my stepson.

In these lines, she waves away concerns about getting caught, with the ironic twist that the familial relationship between the two can be used to conceal one of the very reasons why the relationship is so illicit in the first place. She then identifies ways in which she is not hostile to Hippolytus and begs him to be similarly kind to her, finishing according to oratorical tradition with an impassioned appeal to the emotions and a prayer that the gods treat him as he treats her:

Per Venerem, parcas, oro, quae plurima mecum est! Sic numquam, quae te spernere possit, ames; sic tibi secretis agilis dea saltibus adsit, silvaque perdendas praebeat alta feras; sic faveant Satyri montanaque numina Panes, et cadat adversa cuspide fossus aper; sic tibi dent Nymphae, quamvis odisse puellas diceris, arentem quae levet unda sitim! Addimus his precibus lacrimas quoque; verba precantis qui legis, et lacrimas finge videre meas! (Ovid, Her. IV.167-176)

By Venus, who is ever with me, I pray, spare me! Thus may you never love someone who could reject you; Thus may the graceful goddess be with you in the shadowy glades, Thus the lofty forest offer you wild beasts for the slaying; Thus may the Satyrs favor you, and the Pans, the mountain spirits, And may the boar fall pierced by your oncoming spear; Thus may the Nymphs grant you, although it is said that you hate Girls, a flowing water to lighten your thirst! We add tears also to these prayers; you who read my words As I pray, imagine that you see these tears!

Again, there is an irony which is available to audiences, but not to either of the characters: Phaedra will go on to accuse Hippolytus of rape, resulting in his expulsion by Theseus and eventual death, as she herself commits suicide.

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The incorporation of the suasoria, the performative oratorical monologue, into the format of this epistle is so clear, it cannot be interpreted as accidental; the logically sequential and persuasive aspect of Phaedra’s story is therefore central to Ovid’s interpretation of her character. This is not a hysterical heroine on a tragic stage:

Phaedra is calmly manipulative, skillfully presenting reasons why acceding to her requests is the only reasonable thing to do. If her arguments are correct, the entire tragic finish to the story of Theseus, Phaedra, and Hippolytus could have been prevented.16 Her love for her stepson is obviously dangerous and just as obviously impossible to fight, if one accepts the premise of a family curse. This letter is therefore her final attempt at preventing tragedy; Phaedra’s experience is that of a woman surrounded by powerful forces, but refusing to accept that tragedy is inevitable.

Hermione’s Desperate Plea

Hermione is likewise writing from a position of trying to prevent family tragedy, though from a very different position within it: she has been traded away by her `father, against her own wishes, to a man she clearly despises and sees as equally hostile to her as if the Trojans had defeated the Greeks:

Quid gravius capta Lacedaemone serva tulissem, si raperet Graias barbara turba nurus? Parcius Andromachen vexavit Achaia victrix, cum Danaus Phrygias ureret ignis opes. (Ovid, Her. VIII.11-14)

How would I have been worse off as a slave if Sparta had been captured, If the barbarian horde seized the daughters of Greece? Victorious Achaia more sparingly abused Andromache, When Greek fire burned up Phrygian treasures.

16 Drinkwater 2007 points out the importance of the fact that Ovid chooses deliberately not to envision Phaedra’s epistle as her suicide note, which would have been an obvious choice and a direct reference to the myth; instead, he inserts a new letter into the story. I agree that this is a particularly identifiable choice given the contrast with Deianira’s situation, in which another fatal letter has already been sent: Ovid is clearly just as comfortable writing that situation, and has chosen to avoid it here.

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Her accusations are severe: she believes she is being treated as a slave and a concubine rather than as a wife, given the comparisons with Andromache, and that

Pyrrhus is not her rightful husband. She casts herself as the next generation of stolen woman in the family of Menelaus:

An si quis rapiat stabulis armenta reclusis, arma feras, rapta coniuge lentus eris? Sit socer exemplo nuptae repetitor ademptae, cui pia militiae causa puella fuit. (Ovid, Her. VIII.17-20)

Or if anyone should seize the herds closed away in the stables, You would take up arms, will you be tardy with your spouse stolen away? Let your father-in-law be as an example, demanding back a stolen bride, For whom a girl was a pious cause for waging war.

She casts herself sarcastically as the child of Helen and Menelaus, and therefore

Orestes by right of marriage, as the heirs to the family history and family destiny, both directly in the above lines and directly in later lines:

Num generis fato, quod nostros errat in annos, Tantalides matres apta rapina sumus? (Ovid, Her. VIII.65-66)

Surely not by the fate of our family, which traces through our years, Are we matron daughters of Tantalus so suited for ravishing?

She occupies the next eleven lines with affirmations of this assertion with numerous examples from her family history.17 All of this constitutes a firm foundation for an oratorical argument concerning her marriage to Orestes, and why he should act immediately to preserve it.

17 Fullkerson and Jacobson both agree that she likewise reenacts the story of Briseis, and there are numerous similarities between the two letters which indicate that this is intentional on Ovid’s part as well, if not on the part of the heroine narrator. Fulkerson identifies both letters as mutually influential texts, while Jacobson merely identifies Heroides VIII as influenced by Heroides III. In terms of overall narrative structure I follow Fulkerson in this, though in terms of characterization I agree with Jacobson.

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Jacobson points out that the tone of Hermione’s letter, as she casts herself into this narrative, is similarly defensive along the lines of Briseis’ letter, as though she feels the need to justify her position. He claims that this is unnecessary in her position, but I disagree: given the expectation that women allow themselves to be used as playing pieces on a political chessboard, this attitude makes perfect sense. Hermione wants

Orestes to know that in this case, her position as a playing piece is not one she has consented to in general or in any specific, and she would rather be with him. She predicts that she could be blamed for any aspect of her relationship with Pyrrhus, and seeks to defend herself from such accusations before they can be made.

Hermione’s situation creates another need for rhetorical persuasion: she is uncertain as to whether Orestes will come to her defense at all, and epistle VIII is a plea for him to do so. As the poem itself is shorter than epistle IV, the sections are necessarily shorter as well, and less clearly divided. The opening argument occupies roughly the first fourteen lines, in which she describes her situation and its horror. It is in line 15 that she first asks Orestes directly to come to her rescue, citing the examples in her family, as seen above. In line 23 we see the first place where she actually differentiates herself and Orestes from that lineage:

Nec tu mille rates sinuosaque vela pararis nec numeros Danai militis: ipse veni! (Ovid, Her. VIII.23-24)

Nor should you prepare a thousand ships with billowing sails Nor ranks of a Greek army: come yourself!

At this point in her argument, her lineage could actually be used against her, so she takes a moment to explain, in the oratorical tradition of confronting potential counterarguments. She reassures Orestes: there is no need to engage in a decade-

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long, destructive, expensive war on her behalf, as Menelaus did for Helen. Likewise, these women carry some moral ambiguity, so she continues to describe the legitimacy of her marriage to Orestes, in contrast to the earlier description of her “capture” by

Pyrrhus, claiming in line 34 that the marriage contracts negotiated by her grandfather take precedence by virtue of familial rank over those negotiated in accidental conflict by her father. She then turns, as tradition dictates, to flattery in line 49, swearing that she has defended Orestes as others have insulted him in her hearing. She describes how her loyalty to Orestes is greater than that to her parents, and why this is justified in her situation, and finishes again with an extended appeal to emotion in the form of a declaration of love and emotional fidelity, beginning in line 101 and reaching the end of the poem in line 122.

Hermione, like Briseis, also brings up concerns about Orestes’ reputation. She describes very specifically in line 55 that Pyrrhus has insulted Orestes to her, and claimed that he himself is the better warrior and the stronger man. In a monologue so thoroughly organized in terms of oratory, as demonstrated above, she passes this information not only to Orestes but to the audience as well; like Phaedra’s letter, this argument is meant to be heard by a larger group of recipients than just the hero named.

Hermione here uses the presence of the audience to further compel Orestes to action.

The role of the audience here is as a tool in Hermione’s arsenal against Orestes, since her experience is that of a woman who finds it likely, given her society, that she will be blamed for her own situation, and abandoned to it.

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Deianira’s Self-Defense

Deianira seems on the surface to be more concerned with her own reputation than that of Hercules, but because of the specific way in which the cultural position of women as war captives is at the heart of her experiences, the threat she feels is much broader than her own fame. Deianira views the issue from the opposite side, as the woman to whom a concubine is brought home. She has already been abandoned once, as Hercules has left her at home, absent for their entire marriage, while he completes his heroic exploits, and now faces a different kind of abandonment, possibly before the law. Her problem with the situation is two-fold: first, that Hercules himself has not arrived at the same time; and second, that the concubine Iole does not show the humility Deianira expects from a woman in her position, but rather takes her position as the preferred woman for granted, placing Deianira’s own hard-earned legitimacy in question.18 It is this which she finds intolerable, and which she feels threatens the cultural foundations of her city:

Nec venit incultis captarum more capillis: fortunam vultu fassa decente suam. Ingreditur late lato spectabilis auro, qualiter in Phrygia tu quoque cultus eras; dat vultum populo sublimis ut Hercule victo: Oechaliam vivo stare parente putes. (Ovid, Her. IX.125-130)

Nor does she proceed in the manner of captive women with hair disarrayed, And with decorous face speaking her fortune. She goes far and wide, conspicuous in plentiful gold, In the way that you were also dressed in Phrygia; She turns her face to the people from above as if Hercules were conquered: You would think that Oechalia still stands and her father lives.

18 Hicks 1992 examines the ways in which gender is under examination in the original play, and Deianira’s feminine erasure by her traditional portrayal by a male actor – often the same actor to play Heracles in the second half of the play – forms a background to Ovid’s psychological portrayal here.

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The lines above are followed with a query as to whether Deianira can in fact expect to be set aside for a new wife. By displaying this defiant confidence, Deianira feels, Iole threatens the very principle that she is a slave representing a conquered land. This is merely the culmination of a set of rumors Deianira recounts which she has heard regarding Hercules’ less-than-heroic exploits, involving wearing women’s clothing and taking on servile roles to women. These rumors are included to make Deianira’s arguments all the more persuasive.

Deianira in this scene has much to answer for.19 She has already sent the cloak to Hercules which she acknowledges in this letter was soaked with poison. It is worth noting that Ovid’s version of the heroine does not indicate whether or not she knew it was so at the time she sent it. I interpret this letter as a speech from a guilty defendant, a combination of defense, confession, apology and expiation, as it appears to herald

Deianira’s upcoming suicide – she speaks directly to this intent in lines 159-164, discussed in greater detail below. The vast majority of the letter, after the brief salutation and argumentative summary in the first ten lines, is taken up with exposition of

Hercules’ own story, to explain why Deianira feels as she does. As is appropriate to her position, she honors Hercules’ accomplishments, starting from the very first lines of the poem, but from that point on also intersperses and juxtaposes them with questions about the truth of his heroic nature:

Gratulor Oechaliam titulis accedere nostris, victorem victae succubuisse queror. (Ovid, Her. IX.1-2)

I offer congratulations that Oechalia is added to our honors, But I complain that the conqueror lies in submission to the conquered.

19 Bolton 1997 makes an excellent defense both of Deianira’s character and her letter-writing capability; I follow much of her interpretation here.

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From line 11 until line 118, Deianira occupies herself with the narrative of Hercules as she has heard it from others, rather than personally witnessing it herself as a result of his long absences. This includes an intermixed collection of anecdotes both heroic and otherwise, yielding an impression of a very human woman with very understandably mixed feelings about her household and its status. Line 119 begins the tale of Iole, including the description of her found above. She then contrasts this tale with that of her own first meeting with Hercules, and his rescue of her from the centaur Nessus. Of note is that Deianira acknowledges later in the poem that Hercules has had many lovers other than herself, and does not seem to mind this as long as she is given the legitimacy she is owed through her lawful marriage to him:

Me quoque cum multis, sed me sine crimine amasti; ne pigeat, pugnae bis tibi causa fui. (Ovid, Her. IX.137-138)

You loved me also among many, but you loved me without transgression; Let it not shame you, that I have been twice the cause of your combat.20

From the tale of Nessus is a natural transition to the emotional confession that Deianira has murdered Hercules. She increases the pathos by describing the sheer loneliness of her situation, describing how she has no other family or people to care for her, and announces her death in an appeal for pity. She finishes with a weak defense of her current situation, claiming that at least she is innocent of ever wanting Hercules dead.

This appeal, since it is too late for Hercules, is intended not for him but for the audience, standing in for her citizenry; she has already been subject to the ultimate abandonment

20 There has been little to no examination of the impersonal subject of pigeat in line 138, but translators such as Showerman assume it refers to Hercules’ marriage to Deianira. There is another possibility indicated by the text and by the impersonal nature of the verb, which is the entire situation that Deianira is just one of his many conquests.

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by Hercules, and this is her final plea for the audience not to reject all sympathy for her situation. This plea comes at its most effective moment, just before her final farewell in the last couplets of the poem.

Canace’s Vicarious Delivery

Canace, like Deianira, prepares to die, but her final missive is a request to her lover to complete an unusual set of last requests: to survive and remember her, and to plead for the proper burial of their child to its grandfather Aeolus.21 Canace’s experience is that of a heroine who has nothing to lose for herself, but still has people she cares for whose fate she can affect; her ability to affect their fates belies any lack of agency that might at first appear to be in place. This letter, more even than the previous, is a monologue in the tragic tradition, including a brilliant use on Ovid’s part of tragic irony:

Canace, the epistolary author, is unaware that Macareus is in fact on his way to her to bring word of their father’s pardon.22

Scholars have questioned the true recipient of this letter, pointing out that portions of it appear to be addressed to Aeolus rather than Macareus; I believe that the final couplet of the letter indicates that Macareus is the singular recipient within the story, and that the only other recipient is the listening audience.

Vive memor nostri lacrimasque in vulnera funde, neve reformida corpus amantis amans. Tu, rogo, dilectae nimium mandata sororis perfer! mandatis persequar ipsa patris. (Ovid, Her. XI.125-128)

21 The first request is not granted, as Macareus also commits suicide; the second is rendered unnecessary, as Aeolus spares the child upon learning of its full parentage. The Heroides text brings up the possibility that this was accomplished not by Macareus but by Canace herself. Fulkerson 2005 takes this as a factual interpretation, where I see it as a deliberately open question.

22 I follow Philippides 1996 and subsequently Fulkerson 2005 in interpreting the story of Canace, Macareus, and Aeolus as a tragedy based primarily upon poor timing and information revealed and concealed at the wrong times by the wrong people.

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Live remembering us, and pour tears into our wounds, And do not shudder at loving the body of your lover. I ask of you, these requests of a sister loved too much, Carry them on! I myself will pursue the mandates of our father.

The word perfer in line 128 is under dispute; some manuscripts list perfice instead. In either case, the line indicates that Canace wishes Macareus to carry out her last requests, as described above. Therefore, the pleas she makes to Aeolus on behalf of her child are those she wishes Macareus to make on her behalf. The difference between the two wordings of the line does not change the sense of her request, but the dual possibilities reveal a common interpretation.

Line 125 in the passage above indicates an important role for the audience to play, whether intended as such by Canace or not. Since Macareus will not in fact survive in the original story, committing suicide once he discovers he is too late to stop

Canace’s death, it will be up to the audience to vive memor, and to have the continued emotional reaction to which she refers. This is a particularly touching moment, given that one of the harshest parts of Canace’s plight is the harshness of her treatment by her father, who has ordered her suicide seemingly without qualm: the audience is asked to give Canace the emotional reaction to her death which she understandably does not expect her father to provide.

Canace’s letter is significantly less rhetorically proficient than those of the previous heroines, in part because she can safely assume that Macareus is not hostile to her own views.23 Rhetorically, her letter comes less in the form of a finished oration

23 Verducci, in part based upon this, finds this letter less compelling as a feminine narrative even than the rest of the collection, given the severity of Canace’s plight. I, however, agree with Jacobson that Canace simply places the blame upon Aeolus rather than upon Macareus, as discussed later in this chapter.

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and more in the form of notes for someone else to use in their own speech. This makes sense given that her foremost request to Macareus is to save at least the body of their son from Aeolus’ wrath. She therefore takes the majority of the letter – from line 21 all the way to line 118 out of a letter that is only 128 lines long – explaining facts.

The first twenty lines of the letter, in an oratorically proficient piece, would be spent in not only summarizing the argument to its recipient. Canace instead directs the early part of her writing to descriptions of Aeolus’ cruelty and her wishes that he might be present for her death since he is the one causing it; these lines are often interpreted to indicate that Aeolus is another recipient of the letter, but the consistent use of third- person wording to him and second-person toward Macareus makes it clear that

Canace, at least, intends only the one recipient. At the same time, her wish that Aeolus be present is effectively a wish that he might perceive her viewpoint, in order to garner sympathy from him. She identifies this as her wish very early on:

Siqua tamen caecis errabunt scripta lituris, oblitus a dominae caede libellus erit. Dextra tenet calamum, strictum tenet altera ferrum et iacet in gremio charta soluta meo. Haec est Aeolidos fratri scribentis imago; sic videor duro posse placere patri. (Ovid, Her. XI.1-6)

If any of my writings will escape from your eyes, blind though you intend to read, The little book will be wiped out by the blood of its mistress. My right hand holds the pen, the other holds the drawn blade, And the scroll lies unrolled in my lap. This is the image of Aeolus’ daughter writing to her brother; Thus I seem to be able to please my cruel father.

Canace believes that Aeolus’ wish for her is anguish and penitence, and that perhaps knowing her attitude here can at least change the way he feels about her. She posits, however, that even if he were to watch her die, he would not care; this, rhetorically, is

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her first argument that her situation is unfair: only by her death can she convince the judge in her case that her death was unfair. This is clear from her description of Aeolus:

Ipse necis cuperem nostrae spectator adesset auctorisque oculis exigeretur opus. Ut ferus est multoque suis truculentior euris, spectasset siccis vulnera nostra genis. Scilicet est aliquid cum saevis vivere ventis; ingenio populi convenit ille sui. (Ovid, Her. XI.7-12)

I would wish that he himself were present as a spectator of my death And the work were carried out before the eyes of its author. As he is fierce and more harsh than his own east winds, He would have watched our wounds with dry cheeks. Of course there is some reason for him to live with the savage winds; In character, he is suited to his people.

The effectiveness and efficiency of these lines in identifying Aeolus as the judge in this case is also a testament to Canace’s actual rhetorical skill.24

Canace spends most of the remaining lines of the epistle intermingling those facts Macareus must have already known, such as how the two came to have an affair in the first place and the nature of Aeolus’ orders concerning their child, with those of which Macareus might reasonably have been ignorant, such as Canace’s attempts to abort the child and her confidences in her old nurse. She takes very little time with each part of her story, giving Macareus only a basic outline. To give one example, she takes only six lines total, to describe everything up through her difficult pregnancy:

Prima malum nutrix animo praesensit anili; prima mihi nutrix "Aeoli," dixit, "amas!" Erubui gremioque pudor deiecit ocellos; haec satis in tacita signa fatentis erant. Iamque tumescebant vitiati pondera ventris aegraque furtivum membra gravabat onus. (Ovid, Her. XI.7-12)

24 This demonstrated skill explains why scholars do not attribute Canace’s brevity to lack of ability in writing rhetorical argument.

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My nurse, with her old woman’s spirit, was the first to sense my trouble; My nurse was the first to say, “Daughter of Aeolus, you love him!” I blushed, and shame drew down my eyes to my lap; These things were sign enough for a confession even in one silent. And now the weight of my sinful womb swelled And a secret burden weighted down my sickened limbs.

These lines are pure information, with very little emotion attached to the facts. Canace lays out far more of her story in far more detail than the other tragic heroines in the collection. Phaedra, Deianira, Hermione, and Medea do not feel the need to spend almost one hundred lines explicating their background stories. At the same time, stories as complex as these would be difficult to fit into one hundred lines of poetry, and the skill of Ovid’s composition of Canace’s simple voice should not be overlooked. It would have been easier for him to wax emotional, particularly given that Canace’s is one of the most horrific situations of any of the women in the Heroides. It must, therefore, be assumed that Ovid characterizes Canace as needing to put all of these facts on paper for Macareus, and doing so in spite of the extra effort required.

Near the end of these factual recitations, in line 107, she argues for the first time using the innocence of her child, though the occasional plural pronoun when referring to herself can be interpreted either as poetic speech or as a literal reference to both of them together. At this point in the epistle, Canace discusses the infant alone:

Quid puer admisit tam paucis editus horis? Quo laesit facto vix bene natus avum? Si potuit meruisse necem, meruisse putetur; A! miser admisso plectitur ille meo! (Ovid, Her. XI.107-110)

What crime has the boy committed, brought into the world for such a few hours? With what deed has he wounded his grandfather, only just barely born? If he were able to deserve death, let it be considered that he deserved it; Alas, the poor boy weeps because of my crime!

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She points out here that it is her sin, rather than his own, which condemns her son to death; nowhere else in the epistle does she address her child’s innocence directly.

Given her protestations about her love for her son, which we have no reason to doubt, we can assume that this part of her argument is important to her; in this light, its brevity is a notable example of Canace’s decision to be abrupt and rapid in forming her case for

Macareus to deliver.

Canace immediately returns to her own fate, and states her intention to follow her father’s orders unless prevented, and concludes from line 119ff with her own plans and requests for Macareus, as already demonstrated above. Again, the brevity – assigning only ten lines to such a grave matter as the last requests of a dying narrator – is notable, and brings home the conclusion that Macareus is to take her letter as instructions, and deliver her message where she cannot.

Unless one identifies what Jacobson refers to as Canace’s situation being

“almost artificially cruel” as the primary appeal to the emotions, Canace also saves her emotional appeal for these ending lines, on the assumption that Macareus is already a sympathetic figure. It is Aeolus whom she identifies very early in the letter as the figure who must be persuaded, as discussed above in his introductory description. Why then, a reader must ask, does Canace not simply address this letter to Aeolus? Firstly, as she points out in lines 79-92, she has already failed in this regard. Specifically, she is unable to take the one opportunity she is presented, to try to appease Aeolus:

Inruit et nostrum vulgat clamore pudorem et vix a misero continet ore manus. Ipsa nihil praeter lacrimas pudibunda profudi. Torpuerat gelido lingua retenta metu. (Ovid, Her. XI.79-82)

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He rushed in and with his shouting spread my shame to all And scarcely restrained his hand from my wretched face. I myself in shame did nothing but poor fourth tears. My tongue had grown heavy, held back by freezing fear.

That Canace, quite realistically, freezes in fear before her father’s wrath at a crucial moment is one of the ways in which Canace is often viewed by scholars such as

Verducci as a failed character. First, however, I argue that this failure to achieve her narrative goals in the tragedy is a fact which places her squarely among the tragic heroines and is therefore immutable if Ovid is to achieve enrichment of his narrative by remaining in continuity with the original text. Second, I interpret this specific use of her failure in the original text to mean that Ovid returns Canace’s agency to her in allowing her to direct the actions of Macareus by allowing her a recipient appropriate to the elegiac genre; the fact that Macareus is one of the most sympathetic recipients in the collection does not detract from this. Ovid’s decision to have Canace direct others is also what prevents Canace’s famous selflessness and acceptance from denying her power at this point in the story.

Medea’s Invective

Medea, in contrast, writes to one of the least sympathetic heroes among the set, so much so that he is the only hero to be the recipient of two letters without being given a chance to respond. Where Deianira’s speech is a defense, this epistle is a prosecution. The letter is placed at the moment in the story when Medea and her children by Jason have just been driven from Jason’s home in favor of the hero’s new child-bride Creusa. I follow Lindheim in interpreting Medea here as presenting herself as an average of Jason’s other women, Hypsipyle and Creusa, and as carefully

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manipulating her self-image for the purpose.25 Additionally, however, I see her as torn between desire and fury, on the one hand wishing for Jason to return to her, and on the other hand desiring vengeance; both desires find their expression in epistle XII, resulting in some mixed rhetoric, which matches her experience of justifiably mixed emotions following horrendous mistreatment by a man whom she still loves.26

In contrast with much of rhetorical tradition, Medea actually begins with an emotional digression, regretting that she had ever met Jason and fallen in love with him.

Though this is not a standard opening to a speech, it is reminiscent of some of the more passionate political speeches still extant from the late Roman Republic.27 She then turns to her task of exposition in line 21, approaching it as something she will at least enjoy:

Est aliqua ingrato meritum exprobrare voluptas; hac fruar, haec de te gaudia sola feram. (Ovid, Her. XII.21-22)

It is some pleasure to prove merit to an ungrateful man; I will enjoy this; I will have these joys alone from you.

Medea then proceeds to do as she says, and lists numerous exploits which Jason could not have completed without her aid, including the harnessing of the bulls and the slaying of the dragon which guarded the Golden Fleece, as well as her betrayal of her homeland and the murder of her brother. In the middle of her chronological account, she

25 See Lindheim 2003, 125-128.

26 Jacobson 1974 and Verducci 1985 both identify the mixing of emotions as a flaw in the portrayal of the character; I follow both Lindheim 2003 and Fulkerson 2005 in identifying it as a psychologically realistic portrayal, adding that I believe it to be at least in part a portrayal of a trauma survivor, as are all the texts of the Heroides.

27 For example, Cicero’s earlier, less polished speeches often have this characteristic, including the belligerent immediate address to the defendant in a hearing.

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makes one of the most important arguments as to why Jason owes her his loyalty: not only has she done so much for him, but she claims in lines 83-88 that he has actually admitted this himself before the eyes of his men and in a temple:

Quodsi forte virum non dedignare Pelasgum— Sed mihi tam faciles unde meosque deos?— spiritus ante meus tenues vanescet in auras, quam thalamo, nisi tu, nupta sit ulla meo. Conscia sit Iuno sacris praefecta maritis et dea marmorea cuius in aede sumus! (Ovid, Her. XII.83-88)

Which, if by chance you do not find a Pelasgian husband unworthy— But since when are the gods so pliant to my wishes?— May my spirit vanish into thin air, before Any wife except you be in my marriage bed. Let Juno be a witness, she the ruler of the wedding rites And also the marble goddess in whose temple we are!

There is no reason to suspect that Medea’s account here is false; given that she is writing to Jason, he would know if this had never happened. Even though this, like the other tragic letters, is meant to be delivered publicly, and therefore has a greater audience than its named recipient, the heroines of these letters are also aware of the presumptive authority retained by the heroes to whom they write, and it would be inappropriate for them to place words in the mouths of other characters in this setting.

Medea then turns to address briefly the people of her homeland, for whom the audience here stand in; as viewers, people often find the story of Medea unsatisfying in that she commits so many crimes, but is never actually punished for them. There is an audience expectation that awful things will eventually happen to the awful people seen on stage, and audiences sometimes feel that Medea does not fulfill this expectation.28 In

28 It has been a matter of scholarly consensus that the lack of punishment for Medea is one of the aspects of her character which is most disappointing, with the result that this is usually considered one of the most unsuccessful epistles in the collection. See Pearce 1914 for an example of this viewpoint. Given the terrible things which happen to so many characters in this particular myth, viewers often feel that they

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some ways, this is what makes her a failed tragic heroine in the eyes of audiences. She therefore makes a claim otherwise, in lines 159-178, stating that her current situation is an apt punishment, including loneliness, destitution, and a total lack of any pleasure or happiness in any of what she has brought about. The rhetorical point is weakened, however, if not ruined entirely, by the subsequent lines, in which Medea is distracted from her pleas to Jason by her desire for revenge on Creusa, and Jason through her:

Rideat et vitiis laeta sit illa meis. Rideat et Tyrio iaceat sublimis in ostro— flebit et ardores vincet adusta meos. Dum ferrum flammaeque aderunt sucusque veneni, hostis Medeae nullus inultus erit. (Ovid, Her. XII.178-182)

Let her laugh and let her be joyful in my vices. Let her laugh and let her lie on high in Tyrian purple— She will weep and her burning will slake my passions. While sword and flames and the juice of poison are at hand, No enemy of Medea will be unpunished.29

The narrative moves smoothly from this moment, however, as Medea makes her next argument: the needs of their shared children, whose fate she fears at the hands of their new stepparent should Jason neglect them as he has neglected Medea.30 Medea comments that the children are a living symbol of everything that Jason owes her, and

have been cheated, when Medea always barely escapes justice, somehow. It is worth noting that this is a double bind: if she failed to escape justice, it would be a narrative failure on her part; succeeding in her narrative goals leads her to a failure in the eyes of the audience, whose perspective is vital in the tragic genre.

29 The masculine gender of hostis and inultus indicates that the “enemy” in question could be either Creusa or Jason, or both together. Medea here recognizes that Jason has mistreated her horribly, and she casts him as a hostile party to everything she has ever wanted, in extreme contrast to Canace’s views on Macareus as shown above. Additionally, the vincet can refer either to Creusa’s literal burning being even worse than Medea’s figurative one, or that it will set Medea’s desire for revenge to rest.

30 There is considerable debate as to whether the murder of their children by Medea is a Euripidean invention, or whether it is part of the early tradition in non-surviving texts. It is also unknown whether Ovid used this plot point in his own version of the tragedy. In the Heroides text, it is left ambiguous as to whether this murder will follow the events of the letter, but a contemporary audience would certainly have recognized at least the potential for a chilling dramatic irony here.

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then finishes her epistle with a commingling of a legal accounting of her dowry, and a chilling threat against Jason’s new life as she deliberately tosses caution to the winds in the final couplets. The threats here do make their own rhetorical point: Jason could still choose to return to Medea, and render any danger from Medea’s part unnecessary.31

Hypermnestra’s Legal Case

The necessity of crime is central to Hypermnestra’s tragedy, and yet the irony of her situation is opposed to that of Medea’s: the letter is written while she is imprisoned for failing to commit murder. Her experience with regard to societal expectations is one of irony and wrongness: the natural laws are inverted, and expectations are not treated as normal, due to the existence of suddenly conflicting rules about marriage and filial piety which it is impossible to fulfill completely. While I agree with Fulkerson that

Hypermnestra writes her letter for more than one audience, I believe there are three audiences for the epistle XIV, rather than two: her husband Lynceus, whom she asks to free her; her father Danaus, whom she hopes will spare her life; and the audience, whose opinion she hopes to sway in her favor.32 Hypermnestra therefore employs her rhetorical skill hoping to affect all three recipients, leading to the complexity and occasional confusion of this letter.

31 It is important to note that the burden of correcting this situation, and for its literary effect, is not traditionally placed on Jason, who narratively actually has the power to do something about the abandonment in question; rather the onus is placed upon Medea by almost all audiences. She is criticized here precisely for offering Jason alternatives, and then for not accepting punishment when he chooses not to take them.

32 See Fulkerson 2003 for an examination of the ways in which Danaus is clearly an additional intended recipient of epistle XIV. I disagree with Fulkerson’s 2005 argument that Hypermnestra copies Canace’s technique of writing to her father directly, for reasons discussed above in my identification of Canace’s epistolary recipient, but this does not remove the possibility of intertextual influence and Hypermnestra’s technique bearing similarities to Canace’s indirect addresses to her father.

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Much has been made of the lack of emotion in this letter; to the previous discussions I add the idea that emotional appeals would weaken Hypermnestra’s case, as much as they strengthen Canace’s.33 Hypermnestra’s arguments as to her innocence rest on moral grounds rather than those of victimization, because the reader is, as in most versions of the story, left without information on the subject of why the marriages between the children of Danaus and Aegyptus were arranged, or rejected by

Danaus and his daughters, in the first place.34

Hypermnestra begins by calling attention to the irony of her situation, in an appeal to the audience:

Clausa domo teneor gravibusque coercita vinclis; est mihi supplicii causa fuisse piam. Quod manus extimuit iugulo demittere ferrum, sum rea; laudarer, si scelus ausa forem. (Ovid, Her. XIV.2-6)

I am held trapped in my home and bound with heavy chains; And the cause of my punishment is that I have been pious. Because my hand feared to drive iron down to your throat, I am guilty; I should be praised, if I had dared the crime.

The wrongness of this is immediately obvious to any reader or listener, and our sympathy for the heroine is established with great efficiency. She promptly turns to

Lynceus, as the amatory recipient, while continuing in a vein which is entirely palatable to audiences, particularly in contrast with such heroines as Medea. She reminds him

33 Jacobson 1974 and Fulkerson 2005 both consider this aspect of the text to be an ambiguity in the story based upon the multiplicity of sources, which of course it also is.

34 Jacobson 1974 sees many of Hypermnestra’s arguments as a smokescreen for her emotional turmoil; I find his continued skepticism of the heroines’ basic statements to be unconvincing, as they are often, as here, based solely upon the repetition of those arguments and statements. The repetition is more clearly of a feature of rhetorical argument and elegiac tropes than of desperate need for concealment.

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obliquely that she saved his life, and indicating that she worries of his opinion of her, laying the foundation for why she is making arguments in the first place:

Quam tu caede putes fungi potuisse mariti, scribere de facta non sibi caede timet! (Ovid, Her. XIV.19-20)

She whom you might think was able to carry out the slaughter of her husband, Fears to write of a slaughter she did not carry out!

She then occupies lines 21 through 84 with a summary of the wedding night, given without information as to prior context, from her own point of view, primarily for the benefit of Lynceus, as well as for the continued edification of the audience. Additionally,

I follow Fulkerson in reading into this summary an explanation for Danaus, who might intercept this letter before it reaches Lynceus, in the hope that he might release her himself. This adds yet another reason for the lack of affection Hypermnestra shows in her writing, as this would only anger Danaus further, and she is unwilling to increase her chances with Lynceus in exchange for completely dashing them with Danaus. The digression concerning Io which runs from line 85 to line 108 is a mythological precedent, both in the sense that it is a story of the importance of the goddess of marriage and why she should be feared, and in that it references Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, which similarly associates the two myths. This argument about why the bonds of marriage should not be violated, even under extreme circumstances, is clearly aimed for Danaus’ readership, as is the subsequent mourning of Hypermnestra’s family and bonds of kinship. The letter addresses Lynceus by name for the first time only in line 123, lending further credence to theories of multiple readership for this epistle. The heroine occupies herself from lines 123 to line 130 with instructions for Lynceus which also serve as a plea to Danaus, for her release or at least for her proper burial, before turning to a

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simple farewell couplet which reminds the audience of the wretchedness of her circumstances.

Each of the tragedy-derived letters’ recipients therefore includes its named hero, but is also a performance piece for an audience. This is in part a function of the guest genre of tragedy, but is also not foreign to the host genre of elegy. Ovid uses the nature of public performance, doubled due to the confluence and enrichment of genres, to raise awareness of the importance of persuasion in these stories. The heroines therefore have a slight advantage in that speaking of their opinions and experiences is acceptable in tragedy; it is the importation of this into the elegiac genre that is an

Ovidian innovation.

Fated Women Speaking Out and Claiming Justice

There is also a rhetorical argumentation sequence to these letters, similar to the emotional sequence found in the epic heroines’ epistles, as each views some aspect of the previous heroine’s experiences from the opposite side of the lens. Phaedra’s experience is one of seeing others not held to the same sexual expectations she herself has known throughout her life; Hermione suffers for those same expectations when they are imposed upon her; Deianira is the woman already living in the household when a war captive is brought home, when the captive refuses to bow to those expectations;

Canace is a woman bearing the brunt of societal and familial anger upon failing expectations as a woman; Medea has fulfilled the expectations of her hero too well and her father not enough; and lastly, Hypermnestra’s crime seems to be making a marriage that actually works, but one against the wishes of her father.

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Phaedra’s Persuasion for Sexual Equality

Phaedra’s oratorical debut of the tragic heroines is clearly structured not just as a letter, but as a persuasive performance typical more of a speech. As such, it is designed for a greater audience than just its named recipient, much in the way that legal speeches in the Roman law courts were designed for audiences and political purposes as well as aimed at procuring a specific judicial verdict. Phaedra makes her arguments not just to Hippolytus, but to all of her readers and listeners – for she expects to have both – and makes her case seem far more reasonable than Hippolytus’ irrational misogyny. Phaedra’s case as she makes it is in fact an exact reversal of a familiar case made against women both in ancient times and modern: Hippolytus could have prevented the entire debacle by saying yes, as women in mythology and history were routinely expected to do.

Hermione’s Plea for Help

Hermione stands as an example of such a woman, speaking out against the injustice of these expectations on women, particularly women who are already married.35 Her father’s use of her in this way has violated her earlier marriage, one which she still considers to be legitimate, and she sees this as a serious political error as well as a personal betrayal, in the violation of societal norms to curry favor with a separate city-state and its king. While she sees herself as the successor to Helen, she is also, as Fulkerson points out, the successor to Briseis; I would add that Hermione, in placing herself in these parallels, sees herself likewise as the successor to Chryseis, the

35 See Fulkerson 2005, 87-106 for her chapter on Hermione’s and Briseis’ intertextually related discussions of women as war prizes and trading commodities.

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priestess who was wrongly stolen as a war prize, and whose theft brought a plague down upon the Greeks in Book I of the Iliad. Both women are given illegitimately, because they belong rightfully to someone else. Ovid’s Hermione, very much unlike

Euripides’, is not at fault for her situation and is merely the victim of others’ poor decisions.

Deianira’s Position Defense

Deianira, in epistle IX, examines the same situation from the opposite perspective – her husband, always neglectful of their marriage, has brought home a new concubine, and she sees this as wrongly diminishing of her own importance as

Hercules’ wife, an abandonment of spirit and law even as Hercules physically prepares to return home. It is this, a flouting of what she sees as the natural order within her city’s culture, which she will not stand, and refuses to take without complaint, to a point that she sends Hercules a cloak which she may or may not be aware is soaked in deadly contact poison, before ending her own life in unendurable shame which she places almost entirely at the hands of others.

Canace’s Confessional

Canace’s shame, in contrast to Deianira’s, comes from the forbidden quality of her love for the hero in the first place. I follow Knox in that I do not interpret the

Heroides’ version of Canace’s story as a version involving rape, but that does not mean that Macareus is not the instigator of the actual affair.36 At the same time, Canace seems to see herself less as a victim of her brother-lover than of her father, though she

36 See Knox 1995, 263, for Knox’ identification of specific words within the poem that indicate this to be the specific nature of Canace’s situation.

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has clearly been placed in a position of having to face down her father’s wrath alone and without the support she feels she was owed by Macareus; given that Macareus is the father of her baby, this seems reasonable under the circumstances. Additionally,

Canace’s victimization is not just about her, but about the death of her child as well.

Canace’s argument that this is all unnecessary, and that Aeolus is being unnecessarily harsh, is one of the most easily accepted arguments in the Heroides collection, as the argument is accepted even in the original tragedy. The pathos of the situation is in fact derived in part from the fact that Canace is never made aware of the fact that her argument has in fact already won the day, and that she is about to take her own life without necessity.37

Medea’s Demand for Reciprocity

Medea’s argument, in contrast, falls on hostile ears, which she clearly knows; her letter is full of blame for Jason, and a refusal to take responsibility even for the crimes which she has committed. Her letter is a mix of prosecution and defense, and of wishes that Jason had acted differently at every turn: never arriving in Colchis, never meeting

Medea, and at the point at which the letter takes place, at least not abandoning Medea and her children after Medea has done so much for him. While Medea’s actions are certainly horrific, her argument does make a valid point in that Jason is hardly sympathetic or without blame, and that in fact his callousness is the direct cause of

Medea’s current plight. The foundation of her letter rests on the argument that this

37 See Williams 1992. Williams identifies this as wit and humor on Ovid’s part; while this is not an unreasonable interpretation, Jacobson 1974 quite correctly points out that it also serves to increase pathos. Phillippides 1996 agrees with Jacobson, identifying this coincidence of timing as foundational to the generic identification with tragedy, as well as to the success of the play and the story’s emotional reception.

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callousness is inexcusable in view of the favors she has completed for him and the vows he gave her.

Hypermnestra’s Demand for Justice

It is unclear that Lynceus has done any wrong; while Hypermnestra shows him little affection, she seems to bear him no hostility either, which is the one piece of information we as the audience receive about the circumstances of the marriage between the two sets of cousins. Hypermnestra may have protested the marriage because her father was unwilling; however, once it is complete, her loyalty appears to shift at least in part to her husband. Contemporary readers familiar with the rest of the story would have known that, in fact, Hypermnestra would achieve success here, and after being rescued by Lynceus in some versions or acquitted by the Argive courts in others, the two became the ancestors to a long line of Argive kings. Those who see

Hypermnestra as a failure see this because of her failure to live up to the much more overwhelming expectations of her father and her sisters, who in fact become much more famous as a group for their crimes than she does as an individual for her restraint.38

A Nod to Realism: Discussion of Regret

One of the most common feminist critiques of Ovid’s heroines, as discussed in

Chapter 2, comes from their use of self-deprecating language, and this cannot be ignored; just as the epic heroines do, all of the tragic heroines except one have moments in their letters when they express themselves in a subservient or submissive

38 See Diamantopoulos 1957 for a discussion of what is known of the tetralogy as a whole, and Hypermnestra’s role within it, including the fact that she is not even the titular heroine for the satyr play which follows on the core trilogy. See Verducci 1985 for an example of this interpretation of Hypermnestra as a failed heroine.

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manner which devalues their worth or individuality separate from their heroes of choice.

This is usually taken at face value, but as with the epic heroines, I argue that there are deeper rhetorical reasons for this.39 Many are specific to each letter, explained above, and there is also one greater reason they all hold in common: all of the heroines engage with the question of regret for their histories. These regrets do not undermine each heroine’s speaking out regarding the inevitability of her experiences: necessary for this type of emotional regret is the idea that they could have been prevented, or at least altered. This experience of regret is therefore key to these heroines’ repudiation of tragic inevitability, and is expressed in each letter.

Hypermnestra is the one notable exception mentioned above, deliberately and explicitly refuses to express regret on the theory that doing so would effectively negate the moral high ground upon which she stands regarding her rescue of Lynceus:

Aut illo iugulet, quem non bene tradidit ensem, ut qua non cecidit vir nece, nupta cadam,— non tamen ut dicant morientia "Paenitet!" ora, efficiet. Non est, quam piget esse piam! Paeniteat sceleris Danaum saevasque sorores; hic solet eventus facta nefanda sequi. (Ovid, Her. XIV.11-16)

Or he may cut my throat with that sword, which he evilly handed me, So that I the wife may fall by the death my husband did not die— Nevertheless he will not make my dying lips say, “I regret it!” She is not pious, who is ashamed of being pious! Let Danaus and my savage sisters repent their crime; This event is accustomed to follow unspeakable deeds.

Again, Hypermnestra’s argument rests on the idea that the crime should never have been committed in the first place, and that natural law is on her side. She clearly rejects

39 See Verducci 1985, Lindheim 2003, and to a lesser extent James 2003 for a face value reading of such language.

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the idea that she bears responsibility for any resulting tragedy, placing the burden on her father, and on the public who will decide her fate, for whom the audience stands in.

Regret, therefore, has no place in her particular argument that she is not responsible for her family tragedy, making her a reasonable exception to this trend. As the last word among the tragic heroines in epistle XIV, Hypermnestra points out that even a heroine with no regrets is surrounded by disaster not of her own making.

Medea blames Jason at every turn, including for her own crimes; in line 132 she claims that she has been coacta, forced, into being a criminal, a traitor, and a murderer, and that Jason’s toxic influence over her is to blame. In versions where she is under the influence of Cupid’s arrows, this is nearly believable, except for one fact: Medea should have no way of knowing this. Ovid therefore stops short of making Medea an innocent figure and so completely flouting literary tradition. She shows no regret for her crimes, but does regret one thing, which she therefore does seem to believe she had some measure of control over:

Quo feret ira sequar. facti fortasse pigebit; et piget infido consuluisse viro. Viderit ista deus, qui nunc mea pectora versat. Nescio quid certe mens mea maius agit. (Ovid, Her. XII.209-212)

Where my anger carries me, I shall follow. Perhaps I will regret my deed; I regret also to have held regard for a faithless man. Let the god see these things, who now moves in my heart. My mind brings about something greater, I do not know for certain what.

According to the final couplets of the poem, Medea’s sole wish for things she could have done differently is never having cared what Jason thought of her, in spite of whatever emotional attachment she might have felt. Given that there is divine intervention at work in her emotions in some versions of her story, it makes little sense

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for her to regret her actual love for Jason, and indeed this is not what she points to here; she regrets only her own reactions to a situation which was already out of her control, due to someone else’s decisions. Additionally, the letter as a whole points out, the situation would not have been a problem in the first place had Jason simply fulfilled his responsibilities to her in the first place.

Canace’s love is the most obviously forbidden of those in the collection, and indeed it is likewise the source of her regrets:

O utinam, Macareu, quae nos commisit in unum, venisset leto serior hora meo! Cur umquam plus me, frater, quam frater amasti et tibi, non debet quod soror esse, fui? (Ovid, Her. XI.21-24)

O Macareus, would that the hour which brought us to be one, Had come later than my death! Why ever, brother, did you love me as more than a brother And why was I to you, what a sister should not be?

Here, as with Medea, her regret is not for the emotions Canace has experienced, but the actions she has carried out as a result of them. Her language here and elsewhere in the poem, though, first places the blame for these on Macareus, suggesting that he was the prime mover of the situation and she merely followed his lead.40 It is only after the affair has started and Canace has discovered herself pregnant that she takes her fate into her own hands, and she shows no regrets for her actions from that time onward.

Her regret for her earlier decisions does not detract from her agency in directing

Macareus at the end of her life, and attempting to affect the course of her family’s destiny after her death.

40 Jacobson 1974, 159-175 uses the same interpretation throughout his chapter on Canace.

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Deianira regrets only her most recent actions, but in traditional tragic fashion, it is too late to stop their effects; she has received word that her gift has poisoned Hercules, and wishes ineffectually that this were not the case:

Deprecor hoc unum per iura sacerrima lecti, ne videar fatis insidiata tuis. Nessus, ut est avidum percussus harundine pectus, "Hic," dixit, "vires sanguis amoris habet." Illita Nesseo misi tibi texta veneno. Impia quid dubitas Deianira mori? (Ovid, Her. IX.159-164)

This one thing I decry by the most sacred oaths of our marriage bed, Lest I seem to have plotted your death. Nessus, as he was pierced by the shaft in his lustful heart, Said, “This blood has the power of love.” I sent to you the cloth, soaked with the venom of Nessus. Wicked Deianira, why do you hesitate to die?

Even here, however, she abdicates responsibility, as discussed above, with the implication that, as in other versions, she was tricked by the centaur Nessus. Her concern is that Hercules, and the audience, might think otherwise, and she regrets the effect upon the reputation of her marriage that these actions might have. Her defense is not particularly impassioned, but it is, if one accepts the premise of trickery, a valid one.

Hermione’s one regret is psychologically realistic and horrific, and reflects a trickery from within her own mind: the moments when she reached out to Pyrrhus while asleep and unaware of his identity:

Saepe malis stupeo rerumque oblita locique ignara tetigi Scyria membra manu; utque nefas sensi, male corpora tacta relinquo et mihi pollutas credor habere manus. (Ovid, Her. VIII.111-114)

Often I am distraught with the evils of my situation and forgetful of where I am And unaware, I have touched the Scyrian’s body with my hand; When I have sensed this horror, I withdraw from the body I unwillingly touched And I believe that I have hands which are polluted.

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These lines form is a vivid psychological portrait of ongoing trauma, and of captivity.

She demonstrates here the experience of being betrayed by one’s own perceptions, and some of the propensity that survivors have for self-recrimination, but at the same time retains enough rationality to be aware that she does not have a choice about her situation at the moment, a key topic to which she returns throughout the letter.

Phaedra seems to feel the same way, but uses this in a much more deliberately manipulative way as she writes; she uses her own emotional turmoil as a reason why she is not responsible for her actions:

Et pugnare diu nec me submittere culpae certa fui—certi siquid haberet amor; victa precor genibusque tuis regalia tendo bracchia! Quid deceat, non videt ullus amans. Depudui, profugusque pudor sua signa reliquit. Da veniam fassae duraque corda doma! (Ovid, Her. IV.151-156)

But to fight for a long time and not to submit myself to crime I was resolved—if Love holds anything to be resolved; Conquered, I pray to your knees and I extend my queenly Arms! Of what is becoming, no lover is aware. I have shed my shame, and my fled modesty has abandoned its standards.41

Again, it is striking how similar these arguments are to traditional male arguments abrogating sexual responsibility, particularly in the face of desire. Phaedra is, as before, demanding that she be treated not as women are traditionally treated, but as men are, in terms of expectations, and demands that Hippolytus be given women’s expectations.

If he cannot meet them, therefore, according to those redistributed expectations it would be he who is to blame if tragedy should befall the family.

41 The term signa here refers to the standards carried by the army in the military; Phaedra again is appropriating male terminology and masculine signs of strength and weakness – in this case, the dishonor of army desertion.

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The women of tragedy function in a uniquely public setting, interacting with characters and relationships always before the eye of the audience. As such, their arguments must take into account to a greater degree the actual societal burdens faced by real women at the times the tragedies were written. Societal expectations and their effects upon women’s lives, public and private, are therefore an integral part of these heroines’ experiences. Since the element of lived experience is one in common between tragedy, epistolary, and elegy, Ovid is able to use this feature of tragedy to further enrich both the epistolary and elegiac aspects of the Heroides texts.

Transplantation to Healthier Soil

The importance of the audience cannot be discounted when dealing with any form of ancient drama. Characters turn to them as listeners, to plead their cases throughout their stories. In tragedies, the audience often represent citizens of a city, or more generally, public observers. These listeners are therefore those whose expectations are at work in the situations in which the heroines of these tragedies find themselves.

Tragedy is often constructed out of the pathos of conflicting law and expectation, and the public perception of natural law, political law, and therefore also of cultural expectation.42 In the case of the Heroides, then, the text also engages with the ways in which the public perception treats women differently from men.43 This is another aspect

42 To quote Curley 2013: “Tragedy was always a socio-political enterprise: this is true regardless of whether we mean the works of the Greek dramatists, their Latin successors, Seneca, or even Vergil. It must also be true of Ovid’s tragic texts.” See Curley 2013, 217

43 Bolton 2009 argues that cultural displacement is part of the experience as well; I would add that due to the ways in which conflicting expectations are at issue in each of these heroines’ stories, such experiences of displacement and lack of conformity to societal expectations is inevitable, whether

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of failure these heroines must grapple with which is absent from epic, whose natural exoticism and nostalgia for another time prevents the closeness of the cultural settings from matching even when such correspondence is historically inaccurate on the part of the tragedian.

The transplantation of these ideas to elegy is a natural one.44 For Ovid to make use of these Greek texts to additionally comment about Roman social expectations of men and women as well as Greek expectations, using the tragic women in particular to examine and make comment upon those expectations, is clever and innovative, but not jarring or unnatural.

Women have, throughout history, been confronted with situations in which conflicting expectations do not allow them to be fully correct or fully moral in any set of actions. However, normally the perspective of these women is overwhelmed by other information given in a source text, in this case a tragic play. In the Heroides, suddenly, the perspective of women is the sole source of information, and therefore given primacy of place. In this, the abandonment aspect of these tragic stories actually facilitates and enables this act of speaking out. Because the hero is no longer present, the Ovidian heroine of these letters is free at last to have the experience of explicating the ways in which feminine roles are dysfunctional and women are subject to a form of gendered mistreatment on a societal level. Because such an explication would not have been socially acceptable, each heroine tells only her own story as a stunning example, and

physical displacement is central or not: these women have no place in which they are not, on some level, outsiders from the male-generated society.

44 Miller, Platter, and Platter 1999 examine the ways in which engagement with social expectations, particularly as related to gender, are a vital part of the elegiac genre by Ovid’s time.

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leaves the rhetorical devices and structure cunningly woven into the letters to do their work.

In the end, however, it is left to the audience to be influenced by the words and perspectives and stories of each heroine. The audience is immersed in the story as if they are the chorus of a play, given a chance to become part of the story, with equal responsibility in changing the outcome. The heroines of the Heroides who have been transplanted from tragedy are all rejecting the idea that their tragic disasters are either inevitable, or a result of exclusively their own failings. Like the epic heroines, they place those burdens on the men in their lives – the lovers, fathers, and brothers who are part of the addressee group of the epistles, but especially the audience, particularly the male audience who would have been the ones to establish law and expectation for women.

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CHAPTER 4 POWERFUL WOMEN: HEROINES OF LYRIC POETRY

The four remaining single letters in the collection are derived from sources in

Greek lyric poetry. Since Greek lyric includes, according to the genre theory of Farrell, multiple sub-genres within it, each letter will be examined separately in terms of its generic enrichment and transplantation to Roman elegy, but I will use a shared framework to accomplish this, identifying each by the different ways in which each heroine reclaims her narrative from the different poetic traditions of her origin.1 One issue at hand when examining the lyric-derived poems in the collection is the lack of pre-Ovidian versions of two of the three heroines.2

These four letters are those written from Phyllis to Demophoön, Oenone to Paris,

Ariadne to Theseus, and Sappho to Phaon. Epistle III, narrated by Phyllis, bears some inspiration from Euripides Heraclids, but its primary source lies in Callimachus’ Aitia, a four-book collection of learned Greek elegies, now extant only in fragments.3 The story of Oenone, the subject of Epistle V, is referred to in Apollodorus’ Bibliotheke, but based

1 See Farrell 2003, for discussion of multi-layered genre theory and its application to classical literature. This modern approach to distinguishing classical genre has become the standard of scholarship in the last decade, based on Farrell’s justifications.

2 As a result, I follow Lindheim 2003 in my methodology here, grouping the heroines but then coming to a final point with the story of Sappho as the exemplar of Ovid’s methodologies and their effects, due to her importance as a historical and literary figure, as well as an actual female voice for purposes of comparison with Ovid’s writing.

3 Phyllis, a Thracian princess, offers hospitality to Demophoön when he is shipwrecked, and the two have a brief affair. When he has to leave, she gives him a casket and tells him not to open it unless there is no chance of him ever returning to Thrace. In some versions, he simply forgets her; in others, he opens the casket and is driven to his death by its horrific contents; it is unclear in this letter which is occurring, since Phyllis has no way of knowing why he has not returned. In either case, Phyllis hangs herself in heartbreak and turns into an almond tree. Jacobson 1974 identifies Callimachus as the main source for the poem, based upon fragments of both source texts and the fact that only Callimachus gives a full summary of the story of Phyllis. He points out that there are likely other versions which are completely lost to us, which Ovid used to fill in details, selecting from various examples, but without any of the originals or even other references to them, it is impossible to do more than vaguely theorize about those texts or their authors.

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upon the woodland setting and the prominence of connections with nature and shepherding practices, the story appears to have its antecedents in pastoral lyric poetry, though the actual texts are now lost.4 Ariadne’s situation as found in Epistle X comes to us most recently from Catullus 64, but that in turn is a representation of a number of lost

Greek epics, which are referenced in Plutarch's life of Theseus. Plutarch references an older tradition involving the women of Naxos carrying letters back and forth between

Ariadne and Theseus, some written by the pair and some forged.5 Given the context of the Heroides, this letter is intended to be one of the former. It is the placement of the letter within this tradition, and the clarity of the letter as a set piece, that cements

Ariadne as epic-derived rather than lyric-derived. The last of the lyric epistles is also the final single letter in the collection: epistle XV is the letter from Sappho to Phaon, whose heroine narrator is the one historical figure in the collection, whose primary textual source is obviously the poetry of Sappho herself.6

4 Oenone, a nymph who had been raped and then given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, was a lover of prince Paris of Troy, and taught him everything she knew, only to be abandoned for Helen. Later, he returned to her when he was wounded in the war, asking for her to use her healing arts; she abandoned him to die before killing herself. The Heroides epistle takes place after Paris has left her for Helen and before he has returned to her. Jacobson 1974 again identifies the Apollodorus text as a major source, but discusses the fact that the tradition upon which he based this work is entirely missing. Ovid does not seem to reference the Bibliotheke directly, and I therefore identify the misisng pastoral sources as the primary source for the Heroides poem.

5 In Epistle X, the princess Ariadne writes a hopeless letter to Theseus for someone to carry to the shoreline of Naxos after her abandonment there by the victorious hero on his way back to Athens, waiting for her death by wild beasts or, though she does not yet know it, her affair with the god Bacchus.

6 The letter engages with a mythologized version of Sappho’s story, in which she fell in love with Phaon, a boatman from Cyprus who was granted youth and beauty by Aphrodite. He abandoned her when she began to age, and Sappho threw herself from the cliffs of Leucas, which supposedly possessed the magical power that if someone survived a fall from them they would be cured of love; Sappho did not survive. This story, of course, does not appear in Sappho’s own work, but in numerous Greek lyric and comedic sources produced after her death, forming a tradition that stretches from Sappho’s time to that of Ovid.

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Elegiac poetry in its Roman form also falls within the genre of lyric poetry, and therefore it is appropriate that Ovid grants particular power to the heroines of lyric poetry. In writing the Heroides texts, he deliberately uses the different forms of lyric poetry to enrich each other and amplify those voices.

Lyric-Derived Heroides as Narrative Reinventions and Commentaries

Each of the lyric heroines in the collection is reclaiming her story from someone else, either a man or a group of men, who wrote it on his own terms. As a group, these are women whose stories have been appropriated for the purposes of male knowledge, male entertainment, or male historical narrative enrichment, sometimes to the demonstrable detriment of the female heroine. Each heroine takes the opportunity furnished by Ovid to reverse the process, re-appropriating her story from the existing tradition.

Phyllis’ Erudition and Power

The character of Phyllis exists as a relatively minor character who is part of a strong local tradition in a specific part of ancient Greece. At the same time, the Aitia, of which her story is a part, is a famous work of extremely erudite poetry, discussing knowledge and learning, and her tradition is inherently therefore part of that by virtue of

Callimachus’ inclusion of her story. However, as a minor figure within a larger corpus written by a male author, Callimachus, she is usually sidelined and stripped of that power, and Ovid’s version is in fact unique in granting her this much agency and significance as a person, as well as a literary figure. In Ovid’s version, Phyllis speaks out with a version of her story that she explicitly states as a redefinition of her reputation, which she accomplishes primarily through a re-characterization of her power dynamic and relationship with Demophoön.

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For example, Phyllis reclaims her position as a queen, demanding that she be treated with the dignity of her station and with the honor due to a host. While she never uses the term “queen” to describe herself, she repeatedly describes the power she wields in her land, as well as specific orders she has given in aiding Demophoön, and makes clear that no other is the ruler. No male relatives are mentioned at any time in the letter. Her queenly status is an Ovidian invention, or perhaps an Ovidian progression of events: in most earlier versions, she is portrayed as a princess at the time of Demophoön’s departure. It is possible to interpret the letter such that either Ovid has changed the story, as he is wont to do, or that events have naturally progressed such that Phyllis’ actual position has changed. The latter, however, is in effect a subset of the former, since this progression of events is not mentioned in any earlier source. I argue that any such major change to a character must not be accidental on the part of the poet: in this case it reflects a desire to empower the heroine and narrator of the epistle.7

Equally important to her regal status is Phyllis’ position as hostess, emphasized from the very first couplet of the poem:

Hospita, Demophoön, tua te Rhodopeia Phyllis ultra promissum tempus abesse queror. (Ovid, Her. II.1-2)

Your Rhodopeian Phyllis, Demophoon, as your host I complain that the promised time is gone and beyond.

The first relationship identified between Phyllis and Demophoön is not even that of lovers, but that of hostess and guest. This immediately places Phyllis in the position of

7 Fulkerson points out that it also identifies her more closely with other heroines such as Dido, as well as giving her practical power over her choice of husband. I add to this that it also invests her with a degree of dignity in her own right, rather than because of the identities of the men in her life.

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not only a woman abandoned, but wronged, as she has been denied her due not only as a lover but according to the sacred laws of hospitality. As host, she reclaims here the position of authority and power due her.

Later, however, she does identify that the two have exchanged marriage vows, in a manner reminiscent of Dido’s narrative:

Iura fides ubi nunc, commissaque dextera dextrae, quique erat in falso plurimus ore deus? Promissus socios ubi nunc Hymenaeus in annos, qui mihi coniugii sponsor et obses erat? (Ovid, Her. II.31-34)

Where now are the oaths and the faith, the right hand promised to right hand, The god who was so much in your false speech? Where now the Hymenaeus promised for our years joined together, Who was my sponsor and my (stand-in) for wedlock?

Demophoön’s sins compound each other, as the complex layers of the societal relationships between him and Phyllis are revealed, and Phyllis reclaims the position and power she should have relative to Demophoön as one to whom he is bound by vows of marriage.

Additionally, as a lyric heroine and an elegiac heroine, Phyllis takes part in a tradition of abandonment poetry and grief poetry which includes unwilling parting and mourning as an integral part of its natural storytelling sequence. Phyllis, however, has not had this experience. When she describes Demophoön as leaving her the first time, he clearly promised to return, giving her every reason to believe his departure was essentially a routine trip and no cause for concern. She describes her own progression of emotions, only gradually coming to realize that her lover was never planning to return to her:

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Spes quoque lenta fuit; tarde, quae credita laedunt, credimus. Invita nunc es amante nocens. Saepe fui mendax pro te mihi, saepe putavi Alba procellosos vela referre Notos. (Ovid, Her. II.9-12)

Hope was also slow to vanish; beliefs which wound, we believe Slowly. Though I am unwilling, you are now a guilty lover. Often I lied to myself on your behalf, often I thought The frequent South Winds brought back your white sails.

Phyllis has effectively been denied the emotional climax of the sudden abandonment which is due her as a literary figure. Instead, she has been left to realize the fact of her own abandonment over a long period of time, without ever understanding the reasons behind it – a brilliant example of psychological realism in Ovidian style. By writing this letter, she reclaims that moment of emotional outpouring in epistolary form, reclaiming the power of words which had previously been stripped from her by Demophoön’s actions.

Oenone’s Pastoralism

Oenone, as a pastoral heroine, is strongly associated with Apollo, though not through her own will: she is a victim of rape, and all through her story with Paris,

Oenone’s violation by Apollo casts a shadow. It is the fact of this relationship being a violation, rather than voluntary worship and priestesshood on her part, that in part explains her emotional state. In addition to the realism of psychological trauma, there is a genre impact: in pastoral poetry, music, nature, and healing are all bound up and conflated. Oenone, as a nymph and a nature goddess, learned healing, prophecy, and music from Apollo as a sort of apology or gift after being raped by the god. This renders her unable to follow through on the pastoral ideals of using nature and music to find healing and completely move on from not one, but two disastrous relationships.

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The very beginning of the letter also places Oenone in contrast with the Greek society Paris frequents, by virtue of her connections to nature rather than to grand cities such as Troy and Mycenae:

Perlegis? An coniunx prohibet nova? Perlege – non est ista Mycenaea littera facta manu! Pegasis Oenone, Phrygiis celeberrima silvis, laesa queror de te, si sinis ipse, meo. (Ovid, Her. V.1-4)

Do you read this through? Or does your new wife prohibit it? Read it – this letter Is not made by a Mycenaean hand! Fountain-nymph Oenone writes, most famous of the Phrygian forests, Wounded, I complain of you, my own, if you yourself allow it.

Rather than claiming this as a disadvantage, she claims her position at the time of her relationship to Paris as one in which she consorted with a man beneath her. She points out that while she was a goddess, he was, at the time, a slave. Rather than learning from him, she taught him the hunting arts. Though she has experienced violation and then abandonment, she is a figure of power, and insists upon being read and identified as such in spite of traditions that might say otherwise.

Through this, Oenone eventually comes into her own as a pastoral protagonist, seeking healing and reaffirming her power through natural arts, but misses the key point in pastoral poetry, as Apollo himself does in other works of Ovid: pastoral healing is found through poetry itself.8 Because she misses this point, she is refocused instead through the lens of elegiac poetry, where grief and poetry are intertwined as a feature of the genre. While pastoral poetry and elegiac poetry are both found under the larger umbrella of lyric, according to Farrell, a Harrisonian enrichment takes place here within

8 An example of this is found in Book I of the Metamorphoses, lines 517ff., in which Apollo laments the fact that his own healing arts are useless in curing his love for Daphne.

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the sub-genres: where Oenone fails reader expectations as a pastoral figure, she fulfills them perfectly as an elegiac narrator.9

Knox points out that Ovid’s primary invention in this epistle seems to be his choice of focus and setting.10 I would argue that this is merely the beginning of a larger conceptual change: Oenone is usually portrayed as a footnote to the story of Paris, a device to bring about his tragic death; Ovid effectively reverses this, telling the story as a narrative of Paris bringing about the tragic death of Oenone, who in her anger withholds healing from both of them. I believe Knox is correct, however, in identifying places throughout the letter in which Ovid, and therefore Oenone as well, with her gift of prophecy, play on the audience’s shared foreknowledge of the end of the story.11

As with the tradition concerning Phyllis, Epistle V is almost the only source on the story of Oenone, and we have no reason to believe there were numerous important sources we have lost. In the case of Oenone in particular, Ovid takes advantage of the paucity of precedent in order to be the author who takes the position of traditional authority.12

Ariadne’s Epistolography

The changes to Ariadne’s story are likewise difficult to track, as the original source material is lost. What we are left with is two secondary sources: Plutarch’s Life of

Theseus, and Catullus 64. In the former, Plutarch makes a direct reference to the

9 See Chapter 1 for further discussion of Harrison’s theory of generic enrichment and its definitions as used in this paper.

10 See Knox 1995, 141.

11 See Knox 1995 for a full catalogue of these instances.

12 It is worth noting that Ovid chooses to do so here, rather than in the Metamorphoses – in other words, that he chooses to expand upon these narratives in the work in which the heroines are the narrators.

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women of Naxos attempting to bolster Ariadne’s spirits by forging letters from Theseus to the abandoned heroine. The latter source makes no direct reference to epistolary exchange between the couple, but is more generally a clear and direct influence on

Ovid’s version of the tale. Both Plutarch and Catullus draw from the same prior literary tradition, which would have been available to Ovid at the time of the Heroides’ composition.13 Ovid’s version of the character closely resembles that of Catullus; both are overwrought and intensely emotional, in contrast to the earlier rationality displayed by many of the epic women, and by most of the other heroines of the collection in general. The emotional nature of her narrative does not impede the accuracy and rationality of her actual points, however. Certainly her situation is among the most dire presented in the collection; she claims that Naxos is essentially uncultivated:

Quid faciam? Quo sola ferar? Vacat insula cultu; non hominum video, non ego facta boum. (Ovid, Her. X.59-60)

What am I to do? Where am I to be taken, alone? The isle is bare of cultivation; I see neither the deeds of men, nor of cattle.

Additionally, as she points out immediately afterward in lines 62 through 66, she is known as a traitor, and has nowhere she could go even were she somehow to find a way off the island. Ovid’s Ariadne clearly does not know that a divine intervention is in store for her, so her fear is entirely reasonable and practical at this stage. Equally reasonable is her anger, given the vows Theseus made to her, if her claims in lines 73-

13 See Knox 1995, 234. In his introductory note to his commentary on Heroides X, expertly enumerates the scholarship on Catullus’ Hellenistic sources, and on the fragmentary lines of the Cypria in which Nestor makes a lengthy and digressive reference to the story, establishing an early tradition concerning the tale of Ariadne.

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74 are accurate. She sums up the falsehood with great clarity in those and subsequent lines:

Tum mihi dicebas: "Per ego ipsa pericula iuro te fore, dum nostrum vivet uterque, meam." Vivimus, et non sum, Theseu, tua, si modo vivit, femina periuri fraude sepulta viri. (Ovid, Her. X. 73-76)

You said to me then: “I swear through these very dangers That you will be mine, as long as either of us shall live.” We live, and I am not yours, Theseus, if after all one lives, As a woman buried by the treachery of a foresworn husband.

Insult is added to this injury by a quick examination of the rest of the collection, even if the reader is unfamiliar with the mythology surrounding Theseus: he will not only remarry, but his later wife will be Ariadne’s sister Phaedra, the heroine author of one of the tragic letters in the collection.14 Ariadne, like some of the other heroines in the collection, accepts her coming death, but rather than bringing it about deliberately like some of them, she sees it as an inevitable consequence of events that have already occurred.15 This is a reasonable interpretation on her part, and she lists a number of potential causes:

Iam iam venturos aut hac aut suspicor illac, qui lanient avido viscera dente lupos. Forsitan et fulvos tellus alat ista leones? quis scit an et saevas tigridas insula habet. Et freta dicuntur magnas expellere phocas; quis vetat et gladios per latus ire meum? (Ovid, Her. X. 83-88)

14 While Theseus is not the addressee of Phaedra’s letter, he is certainly complicit in the destructive nature of her story, as discussed in chapter 3.

15 This, too, may be a reference to prior literary traditions of her story, which do not include her rescue by Dionysus. Most of those versions do not list Naxos as the place of her death, but rather Dia. It is a typical Ovidian maneuver to combine them in such a fashion, leaving open to the reader’s decision whether his version of Ariadne will ever be rescued, or whether her death is actually as inevitable as she believes it to be.

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Now, now I think they come either from this direction or that, Wolves who will tear my entrails with greedy teeth. Perhaps also this land nourishes tawny lions? Who knows whether the island has also savage tigers? And the straits are said to cast out the great seals; Who prevents swords from going through my side?

It is noteworthy that suicide is not explicitly among this list, though the final couplet here can be interpreted to refer to it.16 Like Phyllis, she is a member of a ruling family, brought low by her abandonment, and is now in a position to fear the repercussions of that position.

The abandonment of Ariadne is not necessary to Theseus’ mission – his abandonment of the woman who helped him builds his character rather than his narrative arc, in whatever version of that narrative the abandonment takes place. Where some of the epic and tragic heroines experience abandonment in the name of a larger cause, Ariadne experiences abandonment for nothing in particular. She is a symbol of

Theseus’ failings – and unlike the other heroines in the collection, she embraces this role and draws it to the center of her anecdote in order to magnify it and give it greater attention. If she is to experience abandonment as a character, as authors generally write her more as a symbol than a psychologically whole person, she insists on being an important one, and her perspective gains a permanence through the text of the

Heroides that no other genre than epistolary could have offered. It is Theseus’

16 The standard interpretation, given the subsequent discussion of Ariadne’s fear of being sold into slavery, again a completely rational terror given her situation, is that the violence referenced here should be assumed to come from bandits or pirates, rather than from her own hand. I would point out that the discussion of slavery, and the degree to which Ariadne fears it, actually makes the interpretation of a suicide consideration even more plausible as a transition between a discussion of causes of her death and things that might happen to her if she does manage to survive.

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reputation, rather than Ariadne’s, that will suffer for this story, and this is specifically because of Ariadne’s insistence on telling her perspective.

Sappho’s Lyricism

In contrast with the source issues surrounding the other heroines, Ovid deliberately takes on a story in Sappho which has the most authoritative possible source: the heroine herself is a historical figure who wrote her own story long before anyone else. However, her tale as presented in the Heroides did not exist in her own poetry, but was rather an invention of Greek poets, particularly comedians, following her death. It is important to note that while this narrative is transplanted back from comedy to elegiac poetry, the character of Sappho herself is drawn much more from her original poetry, and therefore transplanted within lyric poetry, between the sub-genres of Greek lyric and Roman elegy.17

Sappho’s tale, as re-imagined by the Greeks to include Phaon and a suicidal leap into the ocean, re-presents her as a narrative failure in her own genre of lyric poetry, giving up her poetry and her love of life over the love of a man who is mentioned nowhere in her own poetry. In addition to being a failure in that she doesn’t achieve her desired ends, she is also a failure in that she does not fulfill the expectations of her audience as a character. This makes for all the more smooth a transition by Athenian men into the genre of comedy, where that kind of narrative failure is itself a genre staple.

17 The Heroides text therefore engages with two different characters of Sappho: the real, historical woman who existed and wrote poetry on Lesbos; and the creation of Greek middle comedy as written by men in Athens. Her transplantation is therefore double-layered as well: she is transplanted both from Greek comedy and from Greek lyric poetry, and Ovid allows her a chance to re-appropriate her story into its original genre.

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Through Ovid’s telling, Sappho is once again the protagonist of her own story, and reclaims her position: the songstress and narrator, the fictionalized narrator of love poetry she chose to be, rather than a character in someone else’s myth. Her love, rather than its target, is the focus and agency of the poem. In other words, Ovid writes

Sappho’s letter such that she reoccupies the central position of the narrative, in a way

Ovid can also identify with and respect in the poetic tradition, as it is the same position into which he chooses to place himself in the Amores, the love poetry in which he himself is the protagonist and narrator.

By selecting such an important model of feminine narrative in Sappho, a poet whom Roman audiences by Ovid’s time clearly knew and admired, as we can tell from the words of other poets such as Horace and Catullus, Ovid has created her character in a different way than many of the other men who carried on her narrative tradition.18 In

Greek comedy she was often an object of both pity and ridicule, yet Ovid clearly respects Sappho, and the dose of irreverence with which he regards everyone including himself does not reverse that fact. Her placement among mythological heroines clearly indicates this, particularly in the context of Ovid’s other mythical writings, as Jacobson points out: “The movement from Penelope and the other heroines to Sappho is a serious one, for it marks a passing from the world of myth into that of history (with mythic qualifications), a format that Ovid was to utilize again in the Metamorphoses.”19

18 Catullus poem 51 is a Latin-language adaptation of Sappho’s fragment 31, and his use of the name Lesbia for his inspirational lover is an homage to Sappho throughout his collection of poetry. A stanza in Odes II.13 is devoted to extolling Sappho and Alcaeus. The general popularity of Sapphic strophe in Roman poetry of the late Republic and early Empire, and its attachment by name to Sappho, indicate a general respect for her and for her influence as a poet.

19 Jacobson 1974, 409.

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The other remarkable point of focus here is that in reimagining the words of a female poet through his acknowledged male voice, Ovid also identifies a male audience as a potential part of the readership. Traditionally, in Greece, women’s literary tradition segregated women from men, primarily giving them a chance to speak only in all-female groups. While the heroines of these letters do form such a group, the presence of Ovid himself, inescapable but easily forgettable as he conceals himself in his own poetics, undercuts that societal model, while at the same time allowing Sappho her own primacy in the narrative: “Without the impediment of an ordering, external narrating voice that might accord her tale secondary status, curbing its length and de-accentuating its importance… each letter allows its writer to offer a self-portrait, a version of herself that she has carefully constructed and edited,” though she must, in order to write well, have regard for her audience – a regard shared by both Ovid and Sappho as artists.20

There is a faction of scholars who see Ovid as “perhaps the villain in the genesis and publication of the version of the immoral poetess.”21 This view, however, assumes that Ovid shares a certain set of moral views in common with Augustan and similar societies – views which are not borne out in Ovid’s other work. This also neglects the ancient prevalence of the stereotype of women of Lesbos as sexually immoral, which far

20 Lindheim 2003, 23. Also see Fulkerson 2005, which is entirely based on the concept of the women of the Heroides as a mutually influential community of writers.

21 Jacobson 1974, 292. Verducci 1985, Boyd 2010, Drinkwater 2007, Harvey 1996, James 2003, and Lindheim 2003 are often inclined toward the most negative possible interpretation of Ovid’s view of women: objectifying, sexualizing, and appropriating, with an agenda toward traditional models of masculine power. Myers 1999 reflects on a softening of this point of view from Verducci onward, but the generally negative view of Ovid’s women is still prevalent, possibly in particular because the collection purports to represent the female viewpoint.

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pre-dates Ovid and is not even of Roman creation, much less Ovidian.22 Even the degree to which this legend was fabricated in a deliberate attempt to discredit Sappho and subjugate her powerfully feminine self to male power, cannot reasonably be ascribed to Ovid in origin. As to whether Ovid can even be described as complicit in this potential tradition, the answer lies less in his own poetry and more in the tradition of

Augustan elegy in general.23 Additionally, as the heir to such a rich tradition yet telling each story in only a few hundred lines of poetry at most, he must make many choices as to where he will focus his material, and those choices are very revealing.

To summarize the basic structure of his storytelling in this single poem: Ovid focuses on the mythological affair between her and Phaon, an aged boatman of Lesbos who has received rejuvenation and extraordinary beauty from Aphrodite as a reward for ferrying her. After an affair which Phaon has ended in part out of dissatisfaction with

Sappho’s reputation exceeding his and in part out of dissatisfaction with her lack of physical beauty, she throws herself into the ocean from the cliffs of Leucas, which legend held to either drown lonely lovers or cure them of their passion should they survive, which Sappho does not. There is no evidence that this – or anything remotely related to this – is how the historical Sappho actually died, given that one of her poems, surviving in part as Fragment 58, is about reaching old age. The historical and legendary versions of her biography are not necessarily exclusive, but the story is

22 This stereotype is a staple of, in particular, the Greek comedies featuring Sappho (see notes 6, 17, and 28).

23 Miller, Platter, and Platter 1999, have discussed the role of Augustan elegy as “oppositional discourse, not so much because it represents a determined univocal opposition to a given set of values – Augustan or otherwise – but rather in the sense that it is constructed out of values whose inherent contradictions make the conflict between elegy and Roman ideology a necessary condition of the genre’s existence.” Miller, Platter, Platter 1999, 543-4.

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generally accepted as mythological rather than remotely factual. It was so prevalent by

Ovid’s time, however, that the poet could hardly reject it out of hand, and it does provide a perfect framework for Sappho’s inclusion in the collection of letters.

For the purposes of this story in particular, Ovid openly dismisses the love affairs

Sappho portrays in her own poetry, placing them firmly in the past as a story completed.

He writes Sappho as moving on to a new narrative and biographical phase. This is of vital importance because the main difference between metric genres, according to

Sappho as presented in this letter, is that elegy is the meter of sad love, already seen through to its bitter and unsuccessful end. Sappho, as a poet herself, could not but address this issue directly and in the most technical of terms, and Ovid presents her as doing so, in lines 5-8:

Forsitan et quare mea sint alterna requiras carmina, cum lyricis sim magis apta modis: flendus amor meus est; elegiae flebile carmen; non facit ad lacrimas barbitos ulla meas. (Ovid, Her. XV. 5-8)

And perhaps you ask why my verses are alternating, When I am more suited to lyric meters: My love is to be mourned; the song of elegy is that of weeping; No lyre is suited for my tears.

As much as lyric poetry may cover the difficulties of a love affair, there is always the possibility of success being achieved at some point in the future. It is therefore the placement of all of her love affairs in the past that makes the genre transplant possible and necessary. Indeed, this is the primary change Ovid makes to Sappho’s story as she presents it herself: he places all of her own poetry as occurring in the past. This has a triple effect: it places all of it in the realm of myth, tale, and legend; it places all of it in the realm of the nostalgic tales of an older woman speaking of her misspent youth; and

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it also puts the stories Sappho tells about herself into a position of historical fact, as per this narrator and in the mind of Ovid’s reader. To add further vividness and realism, they are referenced specifically, and by the names of the women to whom Sappho refers in her poetry:

Vilis Anactorie, vilis mihi candida Cydro, non oculis grata est Atthis ut ante meis atque aliae centum, quas non sine crimine amavi. Improbe, multarum quod fuit, unus habes! (Ovid, Her. XV. 17-20)

Worthless is Anactorie, worthless to me is fair Cydro, Nor is Atthis pleasing to my eyes as before, And a hundred others, whom I have loved not without censure. Sinful man, you alone have what belonged to many women!

Here we also have Ovid’s answer to the question of Sappho’s bisexual activities: his version of Sappho openly states that she has loved these women in a manner her society would consider sinful, and in fact reproaches Phaon for robbing the women of

Lesbos of Sappho’s love. In a fashion consistent with the morality of Ovid’s other love poetry, the true sin here is in bringing these vivid loves to such a tragic close, though of course many of the contemporaries of both poets would have felt quite differently.

Our historical evidence regarding Sappho is scanty and often untrustworthy.24

Other than Sappho’s own words, the earliest extant source is Herodotus, who wrote significantly after Sappho’s death.25 There is an additional set of vague sources in

24 Jacobson 1974 and Knox 1995, among Ovid scholars, and Ferrari 2010, Hallett 1979, Most 1996, and Prentice 1918, among Sappho scholars, have thoroughly traced the biographical and archaeological evidence relevant to this epistle.

25 “It is not probable that the poetess herself or any of her contemporaries left any written record of her life… If so, then nothing was known about Sappho or her family in Herodotus’ time or later, excepting what was derived from her own poems or through oral tradition,” the latter of which is notoriously unreliable for biographical purposes. Prentice 1918, 347. The Herodotus anecdote about Charaxus and the hetaera, named neither in his histories nor in Sappho’s poetry, occurs at II.135, and includes information that Sappho scolded him in poetry upon his return to Mytilene, which may refer to a fragment no longer extant.

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references made by earlier writers who did have access to more of Sappho’s poetry than we do today, who give us valuable information, though this information is often quite general, such as the fact that Sappho’s family was wealthy and influential in

Mytilene, referenced in passing in line 66 of this poem only vaguely in terms of the riches lost by Sappho’s brother Charaxus, “quasque male amisit, nunc male quaerit opes” – “those riches which he lost ill, he how seeks ill” (Ovid, Her. XV.66). The existence of Sappho’s daughter is a matter of contention, as this tradition in English is drawn primarily from a translation of a poem we no longer have in its entirety. Ovid, however, also mentions her, as do other ancient poets and biographers, so it is entirely possible they had access to information and more reliable sources which we are lacking. Ovid also includes, in lines 61-62 of his poem, the death of Sappho’s father when she was only six years old, the source of which anecdote is unknown, and he includes in 63-64 the impoverishment and shame of her brother at the hands of a prostitute, which is drawn from Herodotus. He uses these to identify Sappho’s previous encounters with the men of her family, and the idea that she has always been both piously dedicated to their well-being and willing to speak her mind when she felt it would benefit them – however much they might not appreciate it. When Ovid brings up

Sappho’s daughter, he uses her both as a reason for Sappho to have extra cares in her life – the care of children without a husband being what it was in the ancient world – and a reason to have others belittle Sappho’s grief at the loss of Phaon, because surely the only loss that should grieve someone to this degree should be the loss of a parent who outlives a child. Ovid describes her brother’s reaction in the poem: “utque pudenda mei videatur causa doloris, ‘quid dolet haec? certe filia vivit!’ ait.’” – “and as the cause of my

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grief seems shameful, he says, ‘why does this woman grieve? Surely her daughter lives!’” (Ovid, Her. XV.119-120). In other words, it is not the grief by itself which is shameful, or even its extent, but that such grief is displayed over such a cause.26 While

Ovid does not appear to have invented any particular part of Sappho’s family history, he has clearly omitted an important part of her social history: in line 52, he specifically portrays Sappho as not having particular attachment to Lesbos, which is probably not accurate to her life, given that she was apparently sufficiently involved in politics to be exiled at one point in her life. It is unclear, given this varied collection of details and the lack of clarity of our sources, exactly how much of the historical record Ovid had access to, and how much of this story was a matter of tradition by his time, but the careful selection of historical anecdotes and peripheral characters speaks to a deliberate creation of a biography to suit the purposes of the letter: drawing a detailed portrait of a wild and uncontrolled grief. There is an interesting point here: Sappho’s grief at losing

Phaon is extremely exaggerated, to a point that Ovid portrays the real people in her life as being incredulous and confused and sometimes mocking of her situation.27 She fails to express the decorum expected of a female, and certainly displays grief well beyond the self-control and articulation that one comes to expect from her given her poetry and the way she has lived the rest of her life.

Where, then, does this part of the story originate, since it seems to have so little resemblance to the historical Sappho? The answer lies in the Greek literary tradition. In

26 This reflects the Roman idea that while deaths in the family are perfectly legitimate causes for grief, the loss of a relationship, particularly an extramarital relationship, is not.

27 This is a reflection of Ovid’s Roman culture; the view that the supposed fragility of women’s bodies was related to the fragility of their minds was one Ovid and his readers would have been steeped in, making this reaction one his audience would expect to see.

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Greek literature after Sappho’s own lifetime, Sappho appears as a character in Greek comedy, always heterosexual, always voracious in her sexual appetites and over- exaggerated in her emotions.28 It is from these comedies that the anecdote of her love affair with Phaon is actually drawn. Ovid only rarely seems to draw directly on those comedies as source material beyond taking from them the actual story and the resulting emotional effects on Sappho’s character which are bound up in the Phaon anecdote. As demonstrated above, Ovid refers much more significantly and in much greater detail to

Sappho’s own historical biography, and to her poetry, referring to some of the Lesbian girls by name and frequently using feminine words to refer to Sappho’s former lovers.

He rejects the Greek reinterpretation – and, one could easily argue, reduction – of her character, and in fact deliberately moves in the opposite direction from comedy: a suicide letter, and the meter of weeping. The only other identifiable deliberate reference to Greek comedy is the reference to Thalia as Sappho’s “magistra” in lines 83-84 of the poem.

Scholars today believe, given the divergence between her own representation of her life and that which appears in the Greek comedies, that “within the two centuries that intervened between the death of the poet’s body in Lesbos and the beginning of her literary afterlife in Athens, any knowledge of the real circumstances of her life was entirely lost and even familiarity with her poems became rare, so that not much more

28 Among works of Greek Middle Comedy, six are titled Sappho: they were written by Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Diphilus, Ephippus, and Timocles. Another pair, one each by Plato and Antiphanes, are titled Phaon. Antiphanes also wrote a comedy entitled Leucadius. Additionally, Menander wrote a Leucadia. Only fragments, at most, survive of these plays.

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was known about her than that she was a great poetess from Lesbos.”29 By the time of

Ovid, the Romans seem to have more access to her work and the details of her life.

Ovid certainly seems to have much more than a passing familiarity with both her poems and her personal history, and this would explain his rejection of the Athenian model of

Sappho’s character, beyond the basic acceptance of the Athenian story of her love affair with Phaon. This is likely his attempt to integrate the ancient sources available to him, rather than either portraying Sappho as two people, which was not an uncommon practice in antiquity, or simply rejecting altogether one set of literary traditions.30

Lyric poetry as Sappho wrote it and probably performed it significantly pre-dates

Roman amatory elegy as Ovid wrote it, and Ovid draws on this tradition – indeed, this is crucial to explaining some of his anomalous language usage. Recent literary theory has re-defined lyric poetry as the general form of brief subjective poetry intended for performance: “The lyric poet absorbs into himself the external world and stamps it with inner consciousness, and the unity of the poem is provided by that subjectivity.”31 Within this, other genres, from panegyric to elegy, take their places. This is similar to classical genre theory except in terminology: Aristotelian and Platonic theory tends to refer to such genres as elegy under the heading of “genre” and such genres as “lyric poetry” under the heading of “form.” Modern theory holds that this dichotomy of form versus

29 Most 1996, 14. Most, along with Lindheim 2003, Jacobson 1974, and Hallett 1979, points out that this left a remarkable degree of leeway for the Athenians and others to rewrite Sappho’s story as they wished.

30 The tradition Ovid drew from was entirely Greek; Ovid’s version is the earliest cohesive narrative of Sappho in the Roman literary tradition. There is no earlier Roman version upon which he can draw. His rendition of this story also therefore determines much of the later history of her representation in Western Europe.

31 Culler 2009, 884.

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genre is false, and allows us to see that the letters of the Heroides and the letter from

Sappho in particular partake of multiple overlapping traditions for which the modern theory provides a useful framework.

Ovid draws equally on the tradition of Roman love elegy, which is why some of his language seems uncharacteristic of what Sappho might have actually written had she left such a letter before her death. Sappho also almost certainly wrote both elegiac poetry and other varieties of lyric poetry. There are enough references in her work to her writing elegiac poetry that it seems likely. Amatory elegy did not exist at her time or in her culture, so the blending of her different generic experiences comes from Ovid.

Thus “she” begins “her” letter with an acknowledgment of the generic changes that occur, and furthermore of the ways in which this makes the letter appear more Ovidian than Sapphic, and not immediately recognizable as coming from Sappho:

Ecquid, ut adspecta est studiosae littera dextrae, protinus est oculis cognita nostra tuis? An, nisi legisses auctoris nomina Sapphus, hoc breve nescires unde veniret opus? (Ovid, Her. XV.1-4)

Indeed, when the writing of an eager hand is examined is it indeed immediately known as mine to your eyes? Or, unless you had read the name of the author as Sappho, would you not have known quickly whence this work came?

The level of self-mockery here is purely Ovidian, as he plays with the levels of narration, and the fact that of course, this letter is not actually written by Sappho, and the reader would have no way of immediately knowing it is intended as a fictional letter of hers if

Ovid did not tell us so. This manipulation of and commentary upon the nature of reality and fiction in his poetry is characteristic of Ovid’s amatory works, as Ovid satirizes and examines the fictional nature of the elegiac hero and mistress throughout the Amores as

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well. Sappho may do much the same, as her poetry may or may not reflect the realities of her life.32 This is typical of the genre of Roman amatory elegy as established from

Catullus through Propertius and Tibullus as well, and the change from Greek lyric to

Roman amatory poetry does not necessitate any change in this quirk of poetic style, though Ovid clearly sees Sappho as less elegiac than lyric.

One genre that may not be transplanted here is that of epistolary poetry, which had a strong tradition in both Greek and Roman literature as a form of intimate communication of biographic episodes.33 This is in fact exactly what this letter purports to be: a letter to a loved one who is far away, informing him of the effects his departure has had upon her. Similar poems appear in the works of Catullus and others, and it is not difficult to see Ovid referencing the tradition here, as Sappho probably did. Genre usage here, including lyric poetry, amatory elegy, and epistolary poetry, reinforces the history of Sappho as a lover, and as a communicator through the written word directed at a lover who is often absent.

Both poets partake of this tradition in their love poetry to create a fictionalized version of reality. Sappho’s love poetry, if we accept the theory described above that it does not always represent the truth of her daily life, is semi-biographical in that it

32 Hallett puts it another way: “Sappho should not be read merely as a confessional poet who voices private feelings… she should be regarded as an artist voicing sentiments which need not be her own.” Hallett 1979, 450. Hallett correctly emphasizes the degree to which Sappho’s sentiments may be fictional, and to which her character as portrayed in her poetry may even be fictional. This is, of course, a feature she shares in common with Ovid, and which makes her appearance in the Heroides all the more appropriate, as Lindheim 2003 has commented. Additionally, Bowman 2004, deJean 1987, and Drinkwater 2007 see this as central to the creation of feminine narrative in the ancient world. Ferrari 2010 sees it as more unique to Sappho’s own situation, as does Yatromanolakis 1999.

33 Jacobson traces the roots of epistolary poetry in Greek literature: “On the Greek side epistolary poetry may have memories in Aeolian lyric, for many of Sappho’s poems look as if they could easily have been, loosely, letters to friends abroad.” Jacobson 1974, 340.

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represents her ideas and ideals and her inner landscape, but not necessarily the actual events of her external world. Ovid’s work is demonstrably similar to this, and far more candidly so.

The significance of this similarity to the inclusion of Sappho among the heroines of the Heroides cannot be overstated. Sappho is the sole natively lyric and elegiac figure among deliberately and overtly transplanted heroines from other genres.34 As such, she gets the last word on the significance of the heroine in her native genre, and on the significance of the female abandonment narrative and the roles of men and women. Her significance in literary history, which Ovid and his audience would have known, grants her an authority on the subject which readers should not overlook.

Because of her placement among the other narrators of the Heroides, the letter from Sappho must also be considered within the mythographic tradition, and in terms of the expectations of women and feminine narrative in the expression of Greek and

Roman myth. Ovid’s portrayal of Sappho and her story is startlingly subversive, in ways so complex that scholars cannot seem to agree upon precisely how. I now add my own view to the mix described below.

There are certain components one expects to see in tragic mythological love stories – ranging from the pathos-building exposition which makes the tragic conclusion inevitable, to the emotional farewell scene, to the divine intervention which just might be the figment of a mind driven mad with grief – and of course as erudite a heroine as

34 As Lindheim puts it, “Ovid playfully underscores the transposition of genres that the heroine has undergone in order to appear in his collection.” Lindheim 2003, 7. Lindheim correctly spotlights the genre transition – or in this case, lack thereof – as central to Ovid’s interpretation of each heroine in the collection.

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Sappho would be constantly aware of those components and of the tradition in which her story takes place. This self-awareness raises her letter to a level of mocking approaching self-parody, in true Ovidian style. In particular, she chastises Phaon for breaking genre convention, thus wronging her yet again on a literary level as well as an emotional one, when he leaves her as many of the other men in the Heroides, without even a goodbye: “Sappho complains that she has been cheated, deprived of that familiar scene properly due to the deserted heroine. Phaon could, at least, have had the courtesy to treat her according to the ‘rules’ of the genre.”35 Some feminist critics have seen in this an example of Ovidian appropriation and subjection of the female voice to male power.36 While the possibility of male appropriation of the female voice absolutely must be examined in cases such as this, I add the argument that such a philosophical interpretation is not consistent with the actual narrative or the text of the poem, in which the female narrator deliberately claims the right to a response:

Si tam certus eras hinc ire, modestius isses, et modo dixisses "Lesbi puella, vale!" Non tecum lacrimas, non oscula nostra tulisti; denique non timui, quod dolitura fui. Nil de te mecum est, nisi tantum iniuria. (Ovid, Her. XV. 99-103)

35 Jacobson 1974, 388. The rule which Jacobson refers to are those indicating that there should be a tearful farewell scene, such as we hear about in Heroides V between Paris and Oenone, or the scene referred to in epistle X – expressed more fully in Catullus 64 – wherein Ariadne calls to Theseus from the shore as he departs.

36 Harvey, for example, claims that Ovid, by taking on Sappho’s viewpoint in such a story, “divests Sappho of this potent metamorphic gift and borrows it for himself, making her subject to the power that was once hers,” and deprives her of the chance to respond to Phaon in any meaningful way. Harvey 1996, 86. Verducci 1985 sees things still more harshly, usually casting Ovid in a position of direct mockery of Sappho and the other heroines. Lindheim 2003 and Drinkwater 2007 are more in line with Harvey. All of this is a recent concern, primarily held by feminist scholars. Jacobson 1974, for example, barely acknowledges the appropriation of the female voice as an issue.

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If you were so determined to go from here, you should have gone more properly, And you should have at least said, “Girl of Lesbos, goodbye!” You did not take with you my tears, nor my kisses; In the end I did not fear because I was about to ache. Nothing of you is with me, except only wrongdoing.

In Athenian Middle Comedy, Sappho’s voice is certainly sublimated to the demands of the stage audience; by bringing her into Roman amatory form and allowing her to assert the demands of her genre to right the wrongs done to her, I maintain that Ovid in fact restores her to her rightful place at the center of the narrative, with the focus of her story where it belongs: on her emotions and desires rather than on those of the men around her.

Partly as a result of the above reclamation, Sappho also claims greater agency than many abandoned heroines, even in her chosen form of suicide: she chooses to follow Phaon into the sea. The ocean, much like the written word, is usually a male- dominated space, which carries men to and away from women, whose role is to wait and receive. Sappho declines to wait any further, and takes matters into her own hands, transgressing those borders. The result is her own death, but also her own refusal to accept her slow decline and subjugation to male decision-making. Hers is a brave action, and in her final moments she reclaims her own power to decide her fate. She knows that her death is a possibility, but accepts that. It is important to recall that even that intended suicide is accomplished in a place that, according to legend, will have one of two results: Sappho’s death, or her freedom from her love of Phaon; Ovid’s Sappho states outright in line 177 of the poem that she prefers either to her subjugation to her desire for this male figure invented by Greek comedians, “quidquid erit, melius quam nunc erit,” – “whatever shall be, it will be better than now.” Her suicide is not a rash

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move, made without awareness: Sappho is absolutely clear in the consequences of her actions, and makes her decision accordingly.

The realism of Sappho’s decision-making process serves to underscore the fact that she is a historical woman among mythological heroines. In writing this letter, Ovid takes a real woman and makes her one of his characters. This should not be mistaken for a diminishing of her person – he does this to himself in his Amores, making himself a fictional person, possibly in love with a fictional person. It does contribute to the ongoing mythologizing of Sappho’s story by men who perpetuate her story, but in a very different way than occurred in Athens. Sappho’s reinvented story, primarily in the genre of comedy, may very well have arisen in response to a perceived societal threat from her transgressive position within the literary canon and within society in general. Ovid’s poetry, as demonstrated above, is by nature transgressive, and the conclusion of Ovid’s own life shows that transgression is certainly not beyond his nature as well.

Powerful Women Re-Appropriating Narrative

The stories in this collection, in the versions told in previous texts written by men, all take away the agency of these women by stripping them of their power.37 These letters represent the women’s collective refusal to give up their power, bolstered by the presence of each other. The lyric heroines, more than any other group, speak with a knowledge of literary tradition up through Ovid’s time, including the existence of poetic authors as communities who reinforce ideas within them.38

37 This refers, therefore, not to Sappho’s writing, but to the versions of her story written by others after her death.

38 For more on the heroines of the colletion as an intertextually and mutually affirming community, see Fulkerson 2005. Her reading, as does mine, “suggests that the women of the Heroides have the power to change the way we understand their stories. Fulkerson 2005, 143.

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Phyllis’ Reclamation from Callimachus’ Aitia

Phyllis reclaims her position as a figure of political power and social power, and a part of her community. As lyric poetry bears a history of performance within community, particularly as written and told by women, this is entirely appropriate and would ordinarily constitute a reclamation rather than something brand new. Her origin text, the poetry of Callimachus, appropriates her story in service of male culture, which is why she is such a minor figure in that work.

Oenone’s Reclamation from Greek City Culture

Oenone reclaims her power over nature, over healing, and over prophecy, and claims a new power over poetry even as she discards the pastoral genre which has failed her. Her manipulation and knowledge of literature is a power she perhaps claims from Apollo in addition to the gifts he has given her. Where Oenone fails as a pastoral narrator, because she does not find healing through poetry and song, she finds success as an elegiac heroine, coming to a naturally elegiac conclusion with a raging expression of her mournful and somewhat dysfunctional conclusion. In my opinion, however, this does not make her a failure as a heroine: it merely makes her realistic. The women of epic, tragedy, and pastoral are less grounded in the reality of a woman’s situation than the protagonists of the Heroides; it is the elegiac genre play that lends itself so thoroughly to Ovid’s success in writing the voices of “real” women.

Ariadne’s Reclamation from Theseus’ Hero-Centrism

Ariadne’s case is not one that requires as much pleading, or as much political subtlety about it; her abandonment by Theseus is required for symbolic purposes, to reinforce the primary importance of his mission for Athens. As a symbolic figure rather than an actual character in most versions of the story, Ariadne is expected to just let

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Theseus go on his mission and wait for whatever is coming to her. Catullus, rather than

Ovid, is the first to reframe the story such that Ariadne’s plight takes center stage.

Ovid’s Ariadne takes it a step further in lines 125-130, however, in demanding that this version of the story not only be central to contemporary discussion of Theseus, but that her perspective remain so:

Ibis Cecropios portus patriaque receptus, cum steteris urbis celsus in arce tuae et bene narraris letum taurique virique sectaque per dubias saxea tecta vias, me quoque narrato sola tellure relictam; non ego sum titulis subripienda tuis!

You will go to the port of Cecrops and having been received by your fatherland, When you have stood on high in the citadel of your city And you have told of the death of the bull-and-man And of the roads of hesitation through a palace cut from rock, Tell also of me, left in a lonely land; I am not to be cut out of the list of your conquests!

Her description of herself as one of Theseus conquests is double-edged here. She has been taken from her home by stealth, and therefore can be considered a captive and a conquest on the part of Athens, particularly given the degree to which she contributed to his victories on Crete. However, her abandonment is symbolic both of his utter preoccupation with his mission and his complete lack of human consideration. Ariadne here reframes a heroic virtue as a human flaw, and demands that this remain part of the historical record on the subject of one of Greece’s most important heroes.

Sappho’s Reclamation from Greek Middle Comedy

The magnitude of Sappho’s influence in creating women’s poetic narrative is attributable to the way in which Sappho creates herself as a fictional heroine in a male- dominated literary world. She focuses in her fragments on the content and nature of her own feelings, rather than on the object of those desires. She is a figure of agency even

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as she is a figure of torment who is rendered weak by the power of her own emotions, a duality recognizable throughout erotic poetry. Sappho, by creating herself as this fictional character, is able to provide a voice for women throughout the world, who were usually rendered voiceless by both the society in which they live and the literary tradition by which they are confined.

Though Ovid, by appropriating this voice and even taking the process a step further in creating a fictional character out of a historical personage, may appear disrespectful and even contributive to a new form of marginalization, it is important to recall that Ovid gives himself the same treatment in his own love poetry. While the duality of fiction and reality, text and intertext, is in fact unresolvable in some of the letters of the Heroides, it is resolvable in the epistula Sapphus by the fact that Sappho’s own poetry contains a “doubleness” referred to by Lindheim and it is a distinguishing feature shared by both poets, both by the nature of the writers as individuals and by the nature of the genres in which they write.39

The Heroides carry on this model, in a manner described by Lindheim: “The writer of each letter receives the long deferred chance to occupy center stage, possessing, as every letter writer does, the opportunity to narrate her own story from her own subjective perspective.”40

39 As Lindheim points out, the perspective of the women is an illusion created by the author: these narrators are characters, created by others (or historical in Sappho’s case) and reimagined by the poet to suit his own purposes: “In the heroines’ laments the reader constantly trips over a disjunctive, often unresolvable doubleness: in each letter’s two addressees, the internal and the external reader, in the textual illusion of twinned authorship (heroine and poet), in the counterpoint between Ovidian epistle and its ‘source text’ and in the heroine’s own self-depiction.” Lindheim 2003, 7.

40 Lindheim 2003, 31.

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Ovid, then, who habitually created himself as a fictional hero, restores Sappho to her position by doing the same for her as a character, as she had done in her own poetry. Rather than exclusively carrying on the tradition of her characterization in the terms set by the writers of Greek comedy, he transplants the mythologized version of her story created by the Athenians back into the framework created by Sappho herself, and frames a response to it in terms much more similar to those of Sappho’s own work.

To answer the question, then, of whether Ovid, as a male author, appropriating the role of a female narrator, is making a gesture of subjugation or an expression of admiration, is a complex endeavor. One possible answer lies in the fact that although elegiac women are often in a position of power – the ability to grant or deny the male narrator’s desires – they are usually not given the ability to speak for themselves, only the male lovers are given direct quotations. Ovid’s use of female narrators becomes all the more striking in this context. The roles are reversed, but women are given the chance to determine the reader’s viewpoint. While they are stripped of their power to achieve their desires by the course of the story, here they are given a power women almost never have in ancient literature: the power to tell their own stories.

Both poets are therefore at home in the realm of gender-fluidity; Sappho is often regarded as writing in a masculine fashion, while Ovid is frequently described as effeminate and negating of the traditional Roman model of masculinity.41 Both defy the expectations of their genders, and in the Heroides Ovid takes this one additional step in

41 In the early twentieth century, this was the prevailing view, as visible in scholarship from Pemberton 1931 and Rand 1904 and 1907. In later scholarship, Jacobson 1974 makes passing references to this view, as does Knox 1995. More focus is given to the issue recently by Miller, Platter and Platter 1999, and also by Morgan 2003. Myers 1999 chronicles the trends in this, as serious Ovidian scholarship has gained a foothold in classical studies over the last two decades.

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actually adopting the persona of a female heroine. Many feminist scholars in particular believe that Sappho created a multifaceted vision of women, while Ovid’s fantasies, both in the Heroides and elsewhere, are monochrome, and the product of a male mind which makes generalizations about women (or perhaps about womankind).42

I argue that in fact part of what is happening is that Ovid’s writing is inexorably influenced by Sappho’s representations, as all of the facets found in Sappho’s poetry are found in each of Ovid’s heroines. He sees each heroine as containing within her all of these potentialities, which were never allowed to be expressed in the original texts. In the Sappho poem in particular, she shows up as similar to the other heroines precisely because she is the inspiration for so many of them – hence, why she gets the last word among the single Heroides. Since her lifetime, Sappho has always been the last word in literature on what it means to be female. Ovid, with his knowledge of literary history and his love of play with text and intertext, would be constantly aware of and acknowledging of this, and it stands to reason that writing Sappho would be the culmination of his heroines, even as he writes her in a fashion which is not always positive or admiring.

“We can be fairly sure that Ovid did not write this poem to denigrate the Greek poetess, for whom he probably had sincere admiration. It is, I submit, not the poet Sappho who is being mocked, but the persona of the lover-poet of which Sappho is… the emblem.” 43

Ovid, of course, has one major societal advantage which Sappho did not, in terms of the court of public opinion: he is in fact male. As such, he could be accepted examining certain attitudes which in Sappho would be greeted with a very different

42 See chapter 1 for discussion of feminist scholars and their views on Ovid’s characterization of women.

43 Jacobson 1974, 297.

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attitude. The same would have been true of male poets in Greece. The pervading view toward female homosexuality and bisexuality in Hellenistic times was one of extreme negativity, and in Rome it was a topic usually avoided in polite company and erudite writing. This affects not only Sappho as a real woman but the representation of all women, historical and fictional. This is demonstrable in the fact that Ovid’s heroines are

“traditionally figures with very little authority in the societies within which they operate; yet in these verses they have the opportunity to craft an argument of reason and emotion and, occasionally, set in stone their final words.”44 This is particularly true if one takes Sappho’s society to be the literary society in general, which is dominated by men, as evidenced by the Athenian reinterpretation of her story after her death. Ovid, because of his gender, can address the topic of sexuality and sexual activity, and does so in the Heroides, but chooses to cross that line of propriety by doing so through the persona of a female poet.

A Nod to Tradition: Defeat as Narrative Denouement

The disempowering element of each heroine’s narrative is clearly the events of their conclusions: three of the four heroines commit heartbroken suicide in the end, and

Ariadne clearly expects to die. Ovid makes the decision not to change these outcomes; however, each carries out her conclusion in the Heroides text in a way that actually increases her own power over the story itself, through the fact that each leaves behind an epitaph or inscription of some kind. Through this mechanism, three of the heroines are given a very definitive last word on their stories, and in a very permanent form: each writes her own epitaph. As Ramsby discusses at length, epigraphy, even in ancient

44 Ramsby 2007, 114.

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Greece, was a literary form traditionally allowed to women, and therefore this is a place in which these heroines’ authority would be automatically and instinctively recognized by readers of Ovid’s time.45 Ariadne, the sole heroine who is not given the chance to write a physical epitaph, is given the last word on the most significant of the four myths to Athenian historical legend.

In Phyllis’ case, she leaves behind the end of the story, in her own writing, in the final four lines of the poem:

Inscribere meo causa invidiosa sepulcro. aut hoc simili carmine notus eris: Phyllida Demophoön leto dedit hospes amantem. Ille necis causam praebuit, ipsa manum. (Ovid, Her. II. 145-148)

On my tomb, you shall be inscribed as the hateful cause, In this or a verse like it, you will be known: Demophoön, as a guest, gave Phyllis, his lover, to her death. He provided the cause of her death; she herself the hand that brought it.

In some versions, Demophoön later returns to discover Phyllis’ death, and himself commits suicide upon discovering the truth, at which point conjoined plants spring from their tombs and they are together at last: Phyllis, through her epitaph, has reached Demophoön at last, and has achieved her narrative goals for eternity. In other versions, this is merely the key plot point that is remembered: Demophoön’s abandonment of Phyllis, for unknown reasons, his failure to return, and Phyllis’ death as a result. Phyllis is, unusually, portrayed as the sympathetic party in every version of this story. Her version has in fact become the story people know, even in the modern world.

She has successfully taken control of the narrative, as her epitaph becomes the permanent version of the narrative.

45 See Ramsby 2007.

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An additional point of interest in Phyllis’ letter lies in a powerful strike at

Demophoön’s permanent reputation, in that she writes not only her own epitaph but his as well. Her final curse is not for death, pain, bereavement or any other such ills to befall Demophoön; rather, she continues along the path of power where she is already headed for success: writing and epigraphy. Before writing her own epitaph in the final lines of the epistle, she decrees:

Hoc tua post illos titulo signetur imago: Hic est, cuius amans hospita capta dolo est. (Ovid, Her. II. 73-74)

After those, let your image be inscribed with this epitaph: Here lies one, whose lover and hostess was captured by his treachery.

It is noteworthy also that the epitaph she leaves behind for the hero is entirely about her, rather than about any of his own achievements. Phyllis claims an incredible amount of power here, and in a way that was traditionally granted to women.

The inscription Oenone leaves behind is one written well before her suicide, according to the text of Epistle V, and, like Phyllis’ implicates Paris in the epigraphy, and possibly even in the act of carving:

Populus est, mimini, fluviali consita rivo, est in qua nostril littera scripta memor. Popule, vive, precor, quae consita margine ripae hoc in rugoso cortice carmen habes: "Cum Paris Oenone poterit spirare relicta, ad fontem Xanthi versa recurret aqua." (Ovid, Her. V. 27-32)

There is a poplar, I remember, seated on the river bank, It is the one on which there is writing in memory of us. Poplar, live, I pray, seated on the edge of the bank As you have this verse in your ridged bark: “If Paris is able to breathe, after leaving Oenone, The water of the Xanthus will run backwards to its source.”

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It is difficult to tell whether the “nostri” in line 28 is a poetic plural, implying that

Paris and Oenone left this inscription collaboratively, or whether Oenone wrote it herself. In any case, it is clearly meant to be a memorial of Paris’ vows to her, left, appropriately enough, in the bark of a poplar tree.46 Paris’ faithlessness is memorialized for all to see, possibly with his own hand implicit in making the inscription. It is unsurprising to those who know his story well, and Oenone describes later in the poem that in retrospect it fits with the rest of his behavior, but at the time only Cassandra knew, according to her warnings:

Hoc tua (nam recolo) quondam germana canebat sic mihi diffusis vaticinata comis: "Quid facis, Oenone? Quid arenae semina mandas? Non profecturis litora bubus aras! Graia iuvenca venit, quae te patriamque domumque perdat! Io prohibe! Graia iuvenca venit! Dum licet, obscenam ponto demergite puppim! Heu! Quantum Phrygii sanguinis illa vehit!" (Ovid, Her. V. 115-122)

This once your sister sang, for so I recall it Thus prophesying to me with scattered hair: “What are you doing, Oenone? What seeds are you planting in sand? You plow shores with oxen that will accomplish nothing! A Greek heifer comes, who will bring you and your fatherland and your home Destruction! Io drive her away! A Greek heifer comes! While you may, sink the obscene ship in the ocean! Alas! How much Phrygian blood she carries!

Cassandra’s curse, however, prevents Oenone from believing these words until she discovers their truth later – much like the rest of Troy, who eventually discover that

46 Ovid goes on to describe the inscription growing as the tree grows, which, horticulturally, is an error. More likely the bark of the tree would cover the inscription. This is a common pastoral trope, however, and given that Oenone is a nature goddess, I believe we are to take the fact presented in the poem at face value, scientifically incorrect though it may be.

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Cassandra’s prophecies that Paris will bring their ruin were entirely correct. Oenone can clearly not be blamed for this.

Ariadne’s mark on Theseus’ story is more metaphorical than those left by any of the other lyric heroines, but given the significance of Theseus to the Athenian national mythos, it is not to be disregarded. Ariadne has obviously given up on achieving her relationship, which is a reasonable thing for her to do in her position. There is no real chance that her letter will actually reach its addressee. She sees herself as a conquest and a victim, but as discussed above, she finds triumph in her open demand that her story should remain a permanent stain upon Theseus’ record, rather than a necessary step in his heroic mission.

Sappho’s epitaph is also an opportunity to get the last word on her place in the literary tradition. Through Ovid’s work, then, Sappho gets the last word on elegy – and poetry – as women’s narrative space. This brings about a certain symmetry, since in terms of literary history, she also got the first word. She is certainly correct that her fame will last long after her death, whatever its manner, and her bitter accusation that causing the death of Sappho will be all that Phaon is really known for certainly bears fruit. Her anger and her desire for overcoming him is another gender reversal of the elegiac anger of the jealous lover found in earlier love poetry by Ovid and other authors. Likewise,

Phaon’s subjugation to Sappho’s narrative, literary, and historical importance is a reversal of the standard elegiac puella, whose role is to be the object and recipient of the author’s desires and words. It is also worth noting that Phaon is given no chance to respond in this genre, when in comedy he would likely have had a speaking part. Ovid

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has deliberately chosen to import both characters, in such a fashion that only the woman has an actively communicative role.

Sappho’s epitaph as it is presented in the epistula Sapphus is notably different from other epitaphs by women, in that it discusses the female view of women, rather than the female view of men. While women were, in Roman society, often allowed to make inscriptions, and epigraphy remains one of our most important sources for the female viewpoint, almost all of the extant inscriptions are extolling the virtues of men or of women’s worth as equivalent to their relationships to men. It is also, unlike some of the other epitaphs found in the Heroides – Dido’s in poem VII for example – not simply a suicide note: “We are better off assigning Sappho’s letter and her inscriptional desires as communicative of her creator’s admiration and aspirations than making sense of the epitaph within the context of the intended suicide.”47 The fact that her epitaph in lines

183-184 is entirely about her, and Apollo, and poetry, and makes no mention of the story of Phaon or the leap from the cliffs of Leucas, is key here:

"Grata lyram posui tibi, Phoebe, poetria Sappho: convenit illa mihi, convenit illa tibi." (Ovid, Her. XV. 183-184)

“I have placed this lyre for you, Phoebus, I the grateful Poet Sappho: It is suited to me, as it is suited to you.”

Because the story of Phaon will not be what remains in the permanent text of inscription, just as it is not in the text of Sappho’s own poetry, this epitaph encapsulates at least one purpose of the letter in its entirety, and that both the letter and this statement within it also serve to restore Sappho’s place in literary history and in the

47 Ramsby 2007, 120.

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history of women and women’s narrative. 48 The placement of her letter at the conclusion of the single Heroides bears this out. Ovid has placed significant stories at the conclusion of his other works. At the end of the Amores, he immortalizes himself. At the end of the Metamorphoses, he does the same, alongside such luminaries as Julius

Caesar. To do the same for Sappho here, fits cleanly into this pattern. “The epic concludes with the apotheosis of both Caesar and Ovid; the elegy finds appropriate conclusion in Sappho, the concrete embodiment of the union of mythology, poetry, and love.”49 As Jacobson’s comment points out, these also take into account the placement of Julius Caesar at the conclusion of a grand schema laid out in epic form, in which the genre is appropriate to the story, a concern which Ovid takes care to acknowledge in lines 1-2 of Amores I.1: “Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam edere, materia conveniente modis.” – “I was preparing arms and violent wars in a grave meter for publication, with the material suited to the meter.” The placement of Sappho at the conclusion of a series of poems about women’s narrative, and specifically women’s love poetry, could hardly be a material more fitting for its placement, and in Roman genre and form, for its meter.

Transplantation to Richer Soil

Where the epic heroines seek to place the moral burden on the heroes as discussed in chapter 2, and the tragic heroines place it on the audience as discussed in chapter 3, the lyric heroines reject the moral model of narrative analysis altogether.

48 As Ramsby puts it in her discussion of the epitaph, “Sappho’s epitaph in poem 15 likewise ushers in all the considerations of authority, choice of self-memorialization, and agency, but adds the aspect of her actual authorial persona… Her epitaph seeks to restore her place among Apollo’s ministers.” Ramsby 2007, 118.

49 Jacobson 1974, 409.

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None of their stories contain larger moral causes for their abandonment; where explanations do exist, they are simply a function of cause and effect based on the choices of the heroes, choices made for their own personal reasons.

Phyllis points out that Demophoön was not on any kind of grand quest, he was merely on his way home when he got shipwrecked.50 She took him in, and he abandoned her for no reason that is known. There is no grand cause for his abandonment of Phyllis, in any version of the story. There are versions in which he has died, but none specify any great sacrifice made that would make his death worthwhile: it is a random sad occurrence which happens as a result of Demophoön’s own choices.

At most, his death occurs because he fails to trust in Phyllis’ warnings, and opens the container she gives him and dies from the curse within. It is his own emotional abandonment of Phyllis which leads him to his doom. In the versions where he has not died, he has simply failed to return for undisclosed reasons, making Phyllis’ abandonment one of the least clearly resolved stories in the Heroides.

For Paris to claim any kind of moral supremacy is downright ridiculous. He has rejected a union with a goddess, which, as Oenone points out, is one above even his station as a prince, in order to break up another legitimate marriage, at the eventual cost of his own city, for the purpose of fulfilling his own sexual desires. While he can claim that he has another goddess on his side, as he does in the paired letters, his cause is utterly selfish, in contrast with the reasoning of the heroes of the epic stories,

50 According to some sources such as Hyginus, Demophoön was actually on his way home to rescue his father, but this is not mentioned in Phyllis’ letter and therefore does not appear to be a part of Ovid’s version of the story – or if it is, Phyllis is unaware of it.

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and he is entirely in control of his actions, in contrast with the heroes of the tragic stories.

Phaon’s reasons for leaving Sappho are simply that he doesn’t find her sufficiently beautiful. Sappho is unclear that he is even leaving her for someone else, or what exactly his reasons are, except that he is concerned that she is aging, and possibly upset that her fame outshines his. Of all the heroes in the collection, Phaon has both the most shallow and the most readily identifiable in the everyday woman’s experience, reasons for leaving the heroine of this epistle. As the woman abandoned by the shallowest of the heroes, and also as the sole historical figure among the heroines, and of course as such a generally important figure in the history of women’s narrative voice, Sappho appropriately gets the last word about what is appropriate to put into poetry, and what women can do with it.

Each of these heroines is transplanted to Roman elegy from one of the sub- genres of lyric poetry, and from a version of lyric poetry as narrated by men. This is a particularly interesting example of generic enrichment, as these are the letters in which lyric poetry enriches itself through the variety of sub-genres it encompasses. Through this mechanism, Ovid explicates the experiences of these heroines through their own viewpoints, and because their stories fit within the rules and expectations of Roman elegy, validates both their expressions of rage and the choice of poetry as a valid place for women to express such emotion.

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CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION: GENERIC ENRICHMENT AND NARRATIVE RECLAMATION

While I have based my understanding of the intertextual relationships present in the Heroides upon Harrison’s work, my focus has been on the actual characters, who have been transplanted from an earlier genre. This is part of the process of enriching the entire text of the collection, but refers to the effects upon the characters and our perceptions of them rather than upon the text as a whole. As discussed in earlier chapters, the heroines of the Heroides have been transplanted by Ovid from three deliberately selected genres: epic poetry, stage tragedy, and Greek lyric poetry. I prefer the term “transplantation” for this process rather than others I could have used, because

I believe that these effects on the heroines as characters and as exempla for the female experience deserves that focus. I therefore use the language of horticulture, in which origin and resulting texts are environments for the characters to live and grow in, and in which characters who are languishing and failing in one genre do so because some important requirement for that character’s success is missing. Ovid, in his generic transplantation of these heroines, moves each from an environment in which these women were bound to fail and had no real chance to do otherwise, to a new genre in which they are given actual chances at success.1

Necessity of Generic Enrichment in the Heroides

Having examined the effects of generic transplantation on each heroine individually, and on the groups of heroines from each origin genre, it is now appropriate to address the larger question of why Ovid might have decided this particular genre

1 See Chapter 1 for the definitions I have used for “failure” and “success” concerning these heroines.

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combination, a mix of amatory elegy and epistolary, was the most appropriate tool for his use. The final question at hand in this research is why Ovid chose to use this particular vehicle to tell the stories of these women, whose narratives had been as neglected as they were prior to the text of the Heroides.

Ovid takes advantage of the illusion in published letters that these poems are private correspondence, and also with the inherently personal and intimate nature of elegiac poetry. Each heroine addresses a hero, but at the same time each group of heroines engages on a different level with the audience, giving her a chance to publicly reclaim her narrative from a tradition that neglected her. Each group also engages with the moral nature of the tale in a different way, based upon the genre of origin of each heroine.

The epic letters are primarily concerned with reputation of both hero and heroine, and about the repudiation of a public narrative. The existing narrative is sufficiently authoritative that this repudiation can only happen in public, if it is to be effective. Each epic heroine rejects the burden of moral failure, claiming in a very public fashion that it belongs on the shoulders of the abandoning hero. This is particularly revolutionary because epic heroes are so frequently paragons for the societies in which they were written.

The tragic letters are all formulated as monologue in front of an audience, as a way of inserting missing oratory into a narrative – missing oratory which is public by the very nature of stage drama. The tragic heroines identify ways in which women’s tragic denouement is a social expectation, but not necessarily one that is required by common sense, logistics, or even good storytelling. Each heroine uses her public platform to

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reject the idea that her tragic outcome was inevitable, instead placing a new moral responsibility on the hero, and upon the audience, as both are guilty of having maintained these expectations for the heroines.

The lyric letters all engage with the tradition of lyric poetry, and question the commonly held views of lyric poetry as a man’s purview. Though lyric poetry is often intensely emotional and personal, it was also a form of poetry which was always intended for public consumption in the ancient world, as it had a performative aspect as well as a written one. The most important difference between lyric poetry and the other two genres used in the Heroides, I argue, is one of scale: where epic poetry concerns grand stories of heroes, and tragedies concern interwoven relationships, and both always involve forces beyond the control of an individual, lyric poetry is about the performance and public persona of the individual poet narrator. As a result, these heroines are able to reject entirely the idea that love stories have a basis in morality, engaging directly with both Greek and Roman societal expectations of individual women rather than of women as a group. They insist that their stories be viewed as individual episodes, separate from one another yet exemplifying the same problems.

The illusion of privacy is also present in the structure of the collection, in its programmatic first and last letters. Beginning with Penelope’s letter in the programmatic position, she outright announces that she’s delivering these letters into the hands of random strangers to be distributed far and wide. Ending with Sappho’s letter, going back to the roots of Greek and Roman amatory poetry that would go on to become elegiac poetry of Ovid’s time. Each epistle has an addressee, but they are also meant for a wider audience than that one addressee.

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In order to achieve a diverse and realistic collection of heroine narrators, Ovid had to draw them from a diverse set of genres, each of which had to treat its women in differently toxic and hostile ways. Each group of heroines needed a different target, to keep the poems of the collection from all being essentially the same. This is particularly important because there is already a “sameness” to the poems as a result of each being a love story about an abandoned heroine. The Heroides are variations on a theme, namely that of female abandonment in the name of male heroic stories.2

Roman Elegiac Poetry as Multi-Media

The fact that Roman elegiac poetry was meant to be both read on paper and heard recited aloud is key to the interpretation here.3 Roman amatory elegy was effectively multi-media, intended for consumption in multiple ways. The poems were read on paper by numerous individuals, and also recited in public places as a form of entertainment. No other genre has this degree of inherently multi-sensory experience as part of its cultural milieu. This gives the heroines of the collection multiple levels on which they can work to reclaim their narratives.4

The epistolary aspect of the collection lends realism to the reading, as the audience is drawn into the narrative, as part of the public consumption of the letters.

Letters were, and continue to be, regarded as authoritative primary sources on any

2 There is considerable research to be done on the way classical versions of this trope have been received, embraced, and adapted in modern literature around the world, but this is beyond the purview of this paper.

3 See Cunningham 1949 for more on the performance history of the Heroides.

4 As Curley says, “A bifurcated take on Roman tragedy, therefore, needs a third prong, one that considers tragedy experienced as text, in addition to rhetoric and spectacle.” Curley 2013, 51. This three-pronged approach is a natural fit for Ovid’s multimedia endeavor. Note that Curley’s definition of tragedy is not the ancient one, but a modern one, referring to content as well as form – he explicitly encompasses epic and elegy within tragedy, and therefore this is an excellent description of the Heroides.

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series of events, if the reader needs information about the participants’ experience of those events. At the same time, the elegiac aspect of the poems is equally necessary in order to directly confront an oral tradition for some of these stories, going back, as of

Ovid’s time, eight hundred years. These letters confront the authority of that pre-existing narrative in every aspect. The heroines of the collection state that, as participants in the events of these myths, they are in a position to have authority regarding interpretation and recording of those stories. The fact that these supposedly private letters are being consumed publicly, because they are also elegy, allows the heroines the freedom to make their statement just as publicly.

As part of their quests to have their voices and stories heard, the women of the

Heroides engage in different dynamic relationships with their audiences, which themselves are enriched by the relationship between character and audience in those source genres. It can be expected that Ovid’s readers would be familiar with those source texts – indeed, the success of the Heroides depends upon such familiarity – and therefore would be equally familiar with the expectations of the audience.

Since epic was a recitative genre as well as a textual one, the narrator of an epic story is given a unique opportunity to address the audience directly, without being crowded or interfered with by other voices. It is the heroes rather than the heroines who traditionally benefit from this setting, and this is part of why the female characters of ancient epic are reduced to sideline observers and plot devices with infamous frequency. The Heroides reverses this trend, granting the central voice to the heroines and giving the audience a traditionally one-sided view, from the opposite side to which that audience is accustomed. The expectation that, in such a one-sided narrative, the

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epic audience will be sympathetic with the storyteller, serves to assist the heroines in their endeavor for the first time in Latin literature.

The tragic audience is a more literal one than in the other genres addressed here; the characters of stage drama frequently address them in a form of poetic apostrophe unique to that medium. The actors delivering the story are more absorbed by the personas they adapt than those delivering the story of epic, without the illusion found in lyric poetry that these characters are contemporary people. As a result, tragedy is a social genre, in which characters discuss not only the narrative itself but the issues which make that narrative relevant to the audience. The Heroides takes advantage of this to insert a missing perspective on both; Ovid allows his female narrators to have a greater and more direct discussion of their stories, as protagonists rather than secondary characters. At the same time, this places the female experience in consideration as a societally relevant issue, in a way that is only today beginning to become commonplace.

Lyric poetry as practiced in Greece was a genre in which a single individual recited verses alongside music, taking on a poetic persona; this practice is received directly into Roman amatory elegy, as observable in Ovid’s Amores, among others. It is therefore less unusual that a single narrator should be given the opportunity to control their own story, but that this narrator should be female is extremely rare. Of the female poets in ancient Greece and Rome, only Sappho retains her position as a household name in modern society, and by Ovid’s time the docta puella, the “learned maiden,” is primarily a stereotype applied to a specific subset of wealthy and powerful women. The

Heroides are notable, therefore, in their use of female narrators, a point Ovid drives

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home by his use of Sappho as one of the group. Women’s narrative in the Heroides is thus given a primacy lacking elsewhere in lyric and elegiac poetry. In lyric performance, including that of Roman elegy, the audience is expected to suspend whatever disbelief is necessary in order to accept the facts of the narrator’s words, and the importance of

Sappho having the last word directly contributes to this.

The Literary Authority of the Heroides

While Ovid is necessarily applying a male voice to female narrative, I argue that his decision to combine elegiac and epistolary poetry results in a facilitation of women taking back their narratives from the long literary tradition owned by male voices, rather than a continuation of male voices appropriating female narrative. I have discussed this concerning individual poems in the collection in previous chapters, but the collection as a whole bears similar analysis.

Numerous feminist scholars have accused Ovid of appropriating female voices for his own masculine purposes, and it is an important possibility to consider.5 These accusations include: the glorification and proliferation of texts exulting in the pain and defeat of women (Verducci); subtly claiming that all women are the same, denying the individuality of women’s experiences (Lindheim); subjugating women’s stories in importance to male views of those stories (Boyd, Lindheim, and Verducci).6

5 Verducci 1985 and Lindheim 2003 are two of the least sympathetic to him on this front, concerning the Heroides in particular. Boyd 2010 varies in her discussions of this issue. Jacobson 1974 also identifies Ovid as a potential invasive force in women’s narrative, but mostly cites other scholars rather than specifically endorsing this view.

6 Harvey 1996, James 2003 and 2010, and Spentzou 2003 all also claim these items regarding individual letters, but do not expand their judgments to the entire collection.

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The glorification of women’s pain is seen less in the Heroides than in texts such as the Metamorphoses, which is infamous for the prevalence of rape and other violence toward women in its stories, and many scholars generalize from that text to Ovid’s entire oeuvre.7 I strongly believe this is a mistake, as the women of the Heroides are carefully selected to be those whose experiences had previously been subjugated to men’s in importance, and their viewpoints now take the central role in a way that does not occur in the narratives of the Metamorphoses or other poetry by Ovid.

Amatory elegy, both before and during Ovid’s time, already included the abandonment narrative as a central aspect of its genre requirements, but this was always discussed from the perspective of men. It required the enrichment of the epistolary genre, in order to tell the abandonment narrative from a woman’s perspective, and to render a woman’s perspective and narrative and experience valid. Epistolary writing was the one form of journalism open to women, because of its openly declared personal nature.8 This did not deny it authority, as the form was also practiced by historians and philosophers.

Ovid and Feminism

There is a temptation, when refuting scholarship that places Ovid in opposition to women’s causes and women’s voices, to attribute some kind of egalitarian viewpoint to the poet. This is a serious error in historical thinking: Ovid, like any other writer, is a product of his culture, and egalitarianism is not a part of that. Being a part of an ancient

7 Boyd 2010 addresses this practice, but the trend continues particularly in further discussion of classical pedagogy and the works of Ovid. An example is found as recently as Beek 2017.

8 Ramsby 2007 identifies physical writing of letters and inscriptions as a female sphere of influence, and oral poetry as a primarily male one. Ovid has merged the two in such a way that the previously male narratives are able to be part of women’s purview because of the epistolary aspect.

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patriarchal culture does not, however, preclude having either a respect for women or compassion for the worst that world had to offer women. Ovid, as discussed in earlier chapters, makes his respect for some of his heroines quite clear, and given the inclusion of others in the same collection, it is a reasonable assumption that he found all fifteen of the heroines in the single Heroides interesting and worth discussing. It seems highly unlikely that he would have held the work in the high regard he did if he did not appreciate the characters who were his subject matter.

What Ovid was, therefore, includes being one of the first male poets to identify women’s experiences as interesting. As an artist, he is interested in all things that might relate to his expression of emotion and art in his poetry, and the presence of powerful and intelligent women in his world necessitates an examination of their viewpoint. If nothing else, Ovid’s eclectic, subversive writing career would necessarily have included women as part of his transgressive artistic methodology. This is not the same as being a feminist in any modern sense, but lends itself to an interpretation of Ovid as “rooting for” his heroines, an idea which is also supported by his clear delight in Sabinus’ efforts to bring the heroines successful closure, as found in Amores II.18. Ovid’s delight is expressed here in his whimsical adherence to the conceit that Sabinus has personally traveled to the places where these letters would have been written. It is probable that

Sabinus was actually traveling, but Ovid playfully adds a mythological twist to his actual exploits:

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Quam cito de toto rediit meus orbe Sabinus scriptaque diversis rettulit ille locis! Candida Penelope signum cognovit Ulixis; legit ab Hippolyto scripta noverca suo. Iam pius Aeneas miserae rescripsit Elissae, quodque legat Phyllis, si modo vivit, adest. Tristis ad Hypsipylen ab Iasone littera venit; det votam Phoebo Lesbis amata lyram. (Ov. Am. II.18.27-34)

How quickly my dear Sabinus returned from traveling over the whole world And brought back writings from various places! Fair Penelope recognized the seal of Ulixes; The stepmother read writings from her Hippolytus. Now pious Aeneas has written back to poor Elissa, And what Phyllis might read, if only she lives, has arrived. A sad letter has come to Hypsipyle from Jason; The woman of Lesbos, beloved, gives her lyre as an offering to Apollo.

The above lines describe the work of one of Ovid’s personal friends, who crafted potential responses to the letters, an effort which may have inspired the writing of the paired Heroides. Ovid does not tell us the conclusions of any of these stories, and most readers assume that they take place within the narrative framework with which we are familiar from other texts. There are sufficient ironic references to later events in the stories to support this assumption. It is worth noting that Sabinus, who knew the poet personally, does not make this same assumption, and Ovid seems happy with a new degree of narrative success as one possible outcome for these heroines.

Success from the Jaws of Failure

The experience of reading the Heroides is carefully tailored by the poet, and relies on the reader being at least moderately familiar with the myths themselves. When

Ovid speaks of his innovations in the creation of the collection, he is not referring to making up stories out of whole cloth; he is referring rather to the use of those stories in a new context and from a new viewpoint. In this regard, nothing like them had been written before, and female success stories on the backs of male failure are incredibly

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subversive and transgressive, and predictably rare even today. A history of female narratives based upon traditionally male stories would be an interesting project for further research.

Until the Heroides, elegiac, epic, tragic, and lyric poetry had almost exclusively been focused upon the experiences of men. Though the aspects of the Heroides which are enumerated in chapter 1 are groundbreaking in their own right, each of those could have been applied to male experiences and psychology. However, the Heroides are rightly prized for their psychological portrayals of the poems’ heroine narrators.

Psychology in poetry is not new to Ovid; many of the best poets of Greece and Rome created characters with astounding complexity and realism. What truly makes the psychological portrayals of the Heroides unique is the focus on the psychology of women, and on telling for the first time the kinds of stories about women which had been written and accepted about men throughout history.

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APPENDIX A SOURCE TEXTS OF THE HEROIDES

In the table below, the epistles are grouped by source genre: the first five letters listed are those derived from epic sources; the next six from tragedy; the last four from lyric poetry.

Table A-1: Source Texts for the Individual Heroides Number Heroine Addressee Source Text I Penelope Ulixes Homer’s Odyssey III Briseis Achilles Homer’s Iliad VI Hypsipyle Jason Apollonius’ Argonautica and similar Greek epic sources VII Dido Aeneas Vergil’s Aeneid XIII Laodamia Protesilaus Homer’s Iliad IV Phaedra Hippolytus Euripides’ Hippolytus, Sophocles’ Phaedra VIII Hermione Orestes Various Greek tragic sources other than Euripides’ Andromache IX Deianira Hercules Sophocles’ Trachiniae XI Canace Macareus Euripides’ Aeolus XII Medea Jason Various tragedians’ Medea productions, probably including Ovid’s own XIV Hypermnestra Lynceus Danaid tetralogy by Aeschylus, of which only The Supplicants is now extant II Phyllis Demophoön Callimachus’ Aitia V Oenone Paris Greek pastoral tradition X Ariadne Theseus Various lost and fragmentary Greek sources, via Catullus 64 XV Sappho Phaon Sappho’s own lyric poetry

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APPENDIX B SUMMARIES OF THE EPISTLES

Epistle I: Penelope to Ulixes

Background Narrative: Homer’s Odyssey, the source text for Epistle I, is primarily about the ten-year-long return of Odysseus from the ten-year-long Trojan War. He makes stops both voluntary and otherwise in an attempt to return to his wife and son, at first leading his men through dangers such as the island of the Cyclops, and eventually losing all of them before reaching the palace at Ithaca disguised as a beggar. Meanwhile, his son Telemachus engages in a parallel journey seeking information about his father, while Penelope waits at home and foils the expectations and desires of suitors who attempt to convince her that Odysseus is long dead, and therefore she should marry one of them. The epic concludes with Odysseus massacring the suitors and being reunited with his family.

Summary of Epistle: Waiting at home for her husband’s return, Penelope has been writing numerous letters and passing them to strangers who stop by the palace at Ithaca, instructing that they be passed to Odysseus should the opportunity arrive. In this particular letter, she describes her fear that Odysseus would be harmed in the Trojan War, her joy upon learning of the vanquishing of Troy by the Greek army, and her subsequent worry at Odysseus’ failure to arrive home. She entreats him to hurry, warning him of the danger posed by the suitors, and describing her own faith to him in spite of her troubles.

Epistle II: Phyllis to Demophoön

Background Narrative: Demophoön, prince of Eleusis, married the Thracian princess Phyllis while stopping in her city on his way home from the Trojan War, during which time she showered him with both gifts and aid such as refurbishing his ships. Shortly after their marriage, Demophoön left for Eleusis, promising to return. In some versions, Phyllis gave him a cursed box or casket, instructing him not to open it unless he decided not to return to her, though this is not mentioned in Ovid’s letter. In some versions, he either forgot Phyllis and settled in Cyprus, or opened the casket, was driven mad, and fell to his death. In all versions, Phyllis eventually despairs of his return and commits suicide. In a few versions, Demophoön returns to find her dead, kills himself as well, and the two are buried together.

Summary of Epistle: Phyllis is reaching a point of madness in her grief over Demophoön’s failure to return to her, as it is past the point when he swore he would be back. She describes her fears for him, her resentment that she has been taken advantage of, and her regret that she ever loved him. She lays out her plan for suicide, considering several methods as per various traditions, and finishes with a dying wish that her death be the fault for which Demophoön is remembered.

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Epistle III: Briseis to Achilles

Background Narrative: In Homer’s Iliad, the clear single source for this text, Briseis is a Trojan maiden captured and initially given to Achilles as a war prize. However, Achilles is forced to give her to Agamemnon, high commander of the Greek army at Troy, when Agamemnon’s own war prize, the daughter of a Trojan priest of Apollo, is returned to Troy upon the orders of the god. Achilles withdraws from the fight in a rage, nearly allowing the Greeks to be defeated. He returns to the battle only when his best friend Patroclus is killed by Hector while wearing Achilles’ armor as a disguise. At this point, Agamemnon returns Briseis to Achilles, swearing that he never took her to bed. Achilles kills Hector, whose funeral ends the Iliad.

Summary of Epistle: Briseis languishes in the tent of Agamemnon, though she wishes always to return to Achilles. She berates Achilles for having done nothing except withdraw from the war in an attempt to win Briseis back, claiming to have overheard gossip among those in the camp that might damage Achilles’ reputation for valor. She argues that Agamemnon is, at this point, wiling to return her to Achilles, and that therefore his withdrawal must be based on his own pique rather than a desire to have Briseis back, contrasting this with her own views of Achilles as her lawful husband and her single-minded desire to be with him. She begs him to take action to bring her back to him as soon as possible.

Epistle IV: Phaedra to Hippolytus

Background Narrative: Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, falls in love with her stepson, Hippolytus, who is the son produced by Theseus’ earlier marriage. Her advances are rejected soundly by the young man, who is devoted to Artemis, including embracing her ideals of virginity. He despises all women, but Aphrodite intervenes, causing this illicit love on Phaedra’s part, as vengeance for his refusal to acknowledge her power as a goddess. Upon being rejected by Hippolytus, Phaedra writes a suicide note claiming that Hippolytus raped her, and hangs herself. Theseus discovers the note and in a rage expels his son from his family. Hippolytus dies in a chariot accident as a result, completing Aphrodite’s vengeance.

Summary of Epistle: This letter can be reasonably interpreted to be either Phaedra’s confession of love to Hippolytus, or an entreaty to rescind a rejection of an earlier such confession. Phaedra makes numerous arguments for their relationship: she offers explanations as to why her love for Hippolytus should not be considered among the many faults Hippolytus sees in all women; she explains her feelings for him, couching them in terms of admiration and respect for his ideals; she pleads for mercy from him, explaining that her current marriage to Theseus is a loveless one; she explains why there is no danger in their love. She summarizes by asking him to make an exception in her case to his determination to avoid women and relationships.

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Epistle V: Oenone to Paris

Background Narrative: Oenone is the first wife of Paris, a forest nymph who falls in love with him before his rise to prominence in the court of Troy. After being raped by Apollo and given the gifts of prophecy and healing in recompense, she chooses a relationship with the young mortal man, teaching him the arts of hunting and trapping. Paris leaves her for Helen, whose hand in marriage he is promised as a result of his judgment in the beauty contest among the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. After being grievously wounded in the Trojan War, he leaves Helen, returns to Oenone, and begs her for healing; she vengefully rejects him, leaving him to die of his injuries. She then commits suicide herself in regret for her actions.

Summary of Epistle: Oenone expresses her resentment that Paris has left her for Helen of Sparta. She explains that after all she has done for Paris, she deserves better from him than such abandonment. She describes the vows exchanged between herself and him, including a promise upon his departure for Sparta that he would return to her. She warns Paris that a relationship with Helen can and probably will bring ruin upon Troy, while a relationship with her would have no such consequences. She looks back upon warnings from Cassandra indicating that Paris was always going to be unfaithful to her, and also that a Greek woman would bring ruin to the city; she regrets having disbelieved the prophecies. She claims that she still loves Paris, and will accept him if he would only return to her quickly.

Epistle VI: Hypsipyle to Jason

Background Narrative: Hypsipyle, queen of Lemnos, hosts Jason and the Argonauts shortly after the murder of almost all the men on the island. The heroes remain on the island for as long as two years in Ovid’s version, and Hypsipyle pursues a relationship with Jason, from which she bears him two sons. Though the two in some versions exchanged marriage vows, Jason sails away to complete the rest of his adventures, eventually taking up with Medea in Colchis. In some versions, Hypsipyle’s story continues as she is taken prisoner and sold into slavery after fleeing from Lemnos and the anger of the women because she spared her father.

Summary of Epistle: Hypsipyle has been hearing tales of Jason’s exploits, after his return to Thessaly, and is annoyed that he has not seen fit to even send her a letter after their relationship together. She is particularly aggravated by tales of Jason’s new love interest, Medea, and she accuses Jason of violating marriage vows he shared with Hypsipyle. She argues that, after assistance rendered on the voyage of the Argo, she is owed better treatment than this. The fact that Medea is from a foreign land rather than a prominent city-state in Greece adds insult to injury. Hypsipyle is concerned, given how dangerous Medea has already proven herself to be. She alerts Jason to the births of his two sons by Hypsipyle, and shows fear that Medea could seek to destroy her and her

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children, and then vengeful hope that Medea will harm Jason and his family in the future.

Epistle VII: Dido to Aeneas

Background Narrative: Dido, after the murder of her husband Sychaeus at the hands of her older brother Pygmalion, sails from Tyre to northern Africa, where she founds the city of Carthage. While the city is still being built, she hosts Aeneas and his men, who are all refugees from the destruction of Troy, on their way to Italy. She rebuilds their wrecked ships, lavishes them with gifts, and carries on a relationship with Aeneas in spite of her earlier decision to never be with another man after the death of her first husband. This earns the ire of local warlords, in particular Iarbas of Libya, whom she had tricked out of the land used for the city of Carthage. Aeneas is instructed by the gods to set sail again for Italy, though Dido threatens suicide if he departs. He leaves in secret, and Dido follows through on her threat, leaving Aeneas with a final curse that he should never live to see the civilization he will establish.

Summary of Epistle: Dido opens with an announcement of her impending suicide, and laments that Aeneas has abandoned her in her time of need. She raises a number of concerns for Aeneas’ upcoming journey: the difficulties of obtaining land even should he reach Italy; the possibility of Aeneas requiring a loveless marriage in order to complete his mission; further storms to be encountered on the Mediterranean Sea; the fact that he is departing in the wrong season to be sailing to Italy because he refuses to wait until spring; the danger posed by Aeneas’ insistence to his young son Ascanius. She berates herself for even worrying about someone who has betrayed her, and scolds Aeneas for his cruelty and his infidelity. She looks forward to being reunited with her first husband in death, seeing it as fitting punishment for her own betrayal of her vows to him. She wishes further hardships upon Aeneas, as he is so foolish as to give up ready-made opportunity found in Carthage for nebulous promises and orders from the gods. Dido returns to the subject of her determination to kill herself, if Aeneas does not listen to her pleas and arguments, leaving behind for her sister final instructions regarding her funeral.

Epistle VIII: Hermione to Orestes

Background Narrative: Hermione, daughter of Helen and Menelaus of Sparta, is promised during the Trojan War to Orestes, at the word of her grandfather. However, also during the war, Menelaus promises her to Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, unaware of the previous promise. Neoptolemus claims Hermione as his wife after the conclusion of the war. Conflict arises between Hermione and Neoptolemus’ captured Trojan concubine Andromache, the widow of Hector. Hermione eventually flees from Neoptolemus’ household, in some versions after attempting to have Andromache killed, and rejoins Orestes as his wife.

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Summary of Epistle: Hermione believes that the promise from her grandfather is the one which determines her lawful marriage. She describes the horrors of her kidnapping by and forced marriage to Neoptolemus, but remains hopeful that Orestes will be able to rescue her from this situation. She points out that her family has a sordid history of kidnapping and marriages ruined by conflicting promise, and wonders if perhaps her current misery is a result of a family curse. She reiterates her determination to one day return to Orestes, with or without his assistance.

Epistle IX: Deianira to Hercules

Background Narrative: Deianira, wife of Hercules, is the object of an attempted kidnapping by the centaur Nessus while crossing a river. Hercules kills the centaur with his poisoned arrows; as the centaur dies, he offers to Deianira the information that his blood is a powerful potion, and she should take some and use it if she ever fears that Hercules’ attentions have wandered from her. She follows the advice, and uses it to soak a robe meant as a gift years later when Hercules brings home Iole as a captured concubine. The blood turns out to be a deadly poison, bringing about Hercules’ death; Deianira as a result kills herself in guilt.

Summary of Epistle: Though she is the envy of many because of her husband’s fame, Deianira’s marriage to Hercules is an unhappy one, as he spends most of his time away from home completing various heroic exploits and conquering foreign lands. He has now brought home a concubine named Iole, who seems confident enough in Hercules’ affections that she is acting more like a queen than a slave, posing a threat to Deianira’s position within the city. Iole’s presence in the city means that Deianira can no longer deny the rumors that Hercules has lost interest in his marriage to her. In spite of this, she regrets having accidentally brought about Hercules’ death with the poisoned robe from Nessus, to a point that she is determined to die in penance for her actions.

Epistle X: Ariadne to Theseus

Background Narrative: Theseus arrives on Crete as one of fourteen human sacrifices owed to the Minotaur, as part of an annual payment from Athens. He plans to kill the monster and prevent future sacrifices; he is aided in his plan by Ariadne, princess of Crete, when she falls in love with him. He succeeds in killing the Minotaur with her help in solving the Labyrinth in which the Minotaur is imprisoned, and takes her with him upon departing Crete. However, when the two stop for supplies and rest on the island of Naxos, he sails away without her. In some versions, this is because he is simply forgetful or callous; in others, he is ordered to do so by the god Bacchus, who pursues a relationship with Ariadne after Theseus’ departure.

Summary of Epistle: Ariadne is unsure as to why Theseus has abandoned her on the uncultivated island of Naxos. She describes the experience of waking up in the morning to discover that Theseus has sailed away, and attempting in

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vain to call him back. She considers her lack of options: if attacked by bandits, she is unable to defend herself; she has no way of contacting anyone for help or of escaping the island on her own; even if she finds someone friendly who is willing and able to help her, her betrayal of her father in helping Theseus defeat the Minotaur means she has nowhere to go. She expresses regret that a situation ever arose that would bring Theseus to the shores of Crete in the first place, her own love for Theseus, and, failing the prevention of those situations, her inability to wake up and find Theseus before he could leave her behind. She prays to the gods for aid, and that Theseus be remembered for his cruelty to her as much as for any heroism he has displayed.

Epistle XI: Canace to Macareus

Background Narrative: Canace and Macareus are two of the children of Aeolus, king of the winds, and they pursue an incestuous relationship which is kept secret and which results in her pregnancy. Upon the birth of the child, Aeolus discovers the relationship while Canace’s nurse attempts to smuggle the baby to safety, and compels Canace to commit suicide as punishment, also exposing the infant. In some versions, he changes his mind upon discovering that Macareus is the father of the child, but Macareus arrives too late to prevent Canace’s death, subsequently killing himself as well.

Summary of Epistle: Canace prepares to carry out her father’s orders and commit suicide, wishing that at least her father might be present for her death in the hope that his cruelty might be softened at the sight. She regrets having ever loved her brother, and recounts the events that brought the two together: her love was noticed and possibly encouraged by her nurse, who later attempted to aid Canace in aborting her child, but the herbs failed to do this. Canace nearly died in childbirth anyway, having given up her will to live, but was saved by Macareus’ encouragements. She tried to save the child as well by ordering her nurse to carry him to safety, but they were caught by Aeolus. She mourns the death of the child, who is to blame for none of these events. Canace holds no hope for survival for either herself or the infant, but requests that Macareus live on and remember them both.

Epistle XII: Medea to Jason

Background Narrative: When Jason and the Argonauts arrive in Colchis to steal the Golden Fleece, Hera intervenes on their behalf by arranging for the princess Medea to fall in love with Jason. A powerful witch, she aids Jason in completing various dangerous tasks, including the theft of the Fleece itself. A traitor to her city, she then accompanies him home to Greece. She aids Jason in murdering his uncle Pelias, at whose behest he had initially sought the Fleece, in order to gain his rightful place as king. He then abandons her and their two sons to marry a local princess of Corinth; in some versions he makes plans to sell his sons by Medea into slavery. Medea murders Jason’s bride with a gift of a poisoned robe, and then murders her two sons, before fleeing to Athens, where

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she remains until a plot to murder Theseus is exposed and she flees again, in some versions eventually returning to Colchis.

Summary of Epistle: Medea regrets that Jason and his crew ever arrived in Colchis, that she ever betrayed her city and saved his life, and that she left with him to return to Greece. She looks forward to venting her frustrations with him in the remainder of the letter. Medea then describes a few of the ways in which he prevailed upon her to help him, after discovering that she was in love with him: she assisted him in plowing a field with bulls belonging to Mars; she helped him vanquish the warriors who rose up out of the field when it was planted; she murdered her brother to save Jason and his crew; she tricked Pelias’ daughters into killing their father. Jason and Medea exchanged marriage vows in a shrine of Juno, as part of his deception towards her. She bore him two children. After all of this, Jason has abandoned her for Creusa, a princess from Corinth. Medea envisions Jason and Creusa laughing and joking over Medea’s foolishness in trusting Jason, and in her rage determines to destroy the two.

Epistle XIII: Laodamia to Protesilaus

Background Narrative: Protesilaus, king of Phylakos, hears along with the rest of the Greeks a prophecy that the first soldier to set foot on the shores of Troy will also be the first to die in the Trojan War. Against the protests of his wife Laodamia, Protesilaus deliberately becomes that first soldier, in order to prevent Achilles from doing so and potentially dooming the Greek war effort in the process. As a reward for his bravery, the gods allow his spirit to visit Laodamia to say farewell, bringing him from the Underworld for the purpose. She at first believes he has returned alive, contrary to rumors, only to lose him a second time. She goes mad with grief, building a bronze statue of him and pretending it is her husband. When her father burns the statue in a fire, she throws herself in the fire with it.

Summary of Epistle: Laodamia has heard rumors of the prophecy concerning the fate of the first Greek soldier to reach the shores of Troy, and exhorts her husband Protesilaus to hang back and let someone else complete this necessary task. She is already heartbroken at being without Protesilaus for as long as it will take to complete an obviously lengthy military endeavor, and resentful that her marriage suffers this interference, since her marriage to Protesilaus is a faithful one on both their parts, in contrast to that between Helen and Menelaus. She encourages Protesilaus to take measures to keep himself safe, avoiding Trojan heroes on the battlefield, rather than sacrificing himself for a marriage which has already been violated. She has dreams of his death, which give her the sense that all of her pleas to him are in vain. She wishes that, like the women of Troy, she could at least see him off to battle every day, and explains that if he wishes it, she will come join him at the battlefront.

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Epistle XIV: Hypermnestra to Lynceus

Background Narrative: Hypermnestra, one of the fifty daughters of Danaus, is betrothed along with her sisters to one of the fifty sons of Aegyptus. When the women are ordered by their father to murder their husbands on their wedding night, she chooses to disobey the order, instead sparing Lynceus and agreeing to live as his wife. Her father, enraged, throws her in prison for her disobedience and throws her to the mercy of the courts in Argos. She is saved through Aphrodite’s intervention, and Hypermnestra and Lynceus become the progenitors to a line of Argive kings.

Summary of Epistle: Hypermnestra languishes in prison because she chose to value her marriage to Lynceus over the orders of her father, and because she refuses to publicly repent her actions. She describes the way in which she and her sisters drugged their grooms at the wedding, and her sisters carried out the order to murder Lynceus’ brothers in their sleep. Hypermnestra, in contrast, decided that the cruelty of the order was too great and that she preferred not to be a part of it, instead helping Lynceus to wake up and escape from the palace. She then compares her situation to that of Io, the maiden turned into a heifer because she had attracted Zeus’ attentions, as both of Io and Hypermnestra seem to suffer the wrath of Juno. Io is also a relative of Lynceus’, and Hypermnestra entreats him in Io’s name to come to her rescue, or at least to make sure she is given proper burial if he fails to rescue her.

Epistle XV: Sappho to Phaon

Background Narrative: In a mythologized finale to her historical life, Sappho, famed poet from Lesbos, falls in love with Phaon, an old boatman who was granted renewed youth and incredible beauty by Aphrodite as reward for a favor. In some versions Phaon rejects her because she is not as physically attractive as he is; in some versions the two do have a sexual relationship, and he then leaves her because he resents that she is more famous than he is. In all versions, Sappho throws herself from the cliffs of Leucas, following the advice of a legend that those who do so will either be cured of their love or will drown. Sappho dies in the fall.

Summary of Epistle: Sappho forsakes her famous female lovers on Lesbos, entirely fascinated with Phaon, though he has rejected her. She knows that he is far more physically attractive than she, but she is far more famous and would therefore increase his reputation by association. She theorizes that she looks sufficiently different from women of the Greek mainland to be considered ugly, but points out that the women beloved by Greek heroes such as Perseus were similarly exotic and still worthy of their heroes’ love. Phaon has also already agreed, she points out, that her intelligence, talent, and possibly her voice make her seem considerably more attractive when she recites her poetry, and that she is sexually skilled. In spite of all this, Phaon has abandoned her for the women of Sicily, and Sappho wishes she could be one of them, as she has been exiled there anyway. She describes her personal and familial troubles, as part and

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parcel of an unhappy life: the death of her father, the ruin of her brother, and the loss of her own reputation both from her exile and from her overly dramatic love for Phaon. She berates Phaon for not even speaking to her properly about his rejection, but merely leaving her in silence. She is unable to leave behind the memories of their relationship, and is unable to recover from the loss. Sappho’s only hope lies in an apparition of a nymph, telling her the legend of the Leucadian cliffs: if Sappho jumps from them and survives, she will be cured of her love; she decides it is worth the risk, as she would rather perish than continue in her current despair.

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APPENDIX C MANUSCRIPT TRADITION AND THE QUESTION OF AUTHENTICITY

Ovid’s Indices

In Amores II.18, Ovid describes how his inspiration has been drawn repeatedly away from genres other than amatory elegy and back toward matters of love, and refers not only to the Amores themselves but to the Heroides as a way in which even his interests in other genres are expressed through the lens of amatory elegy.

He refers directly to a number of the poems in the collection in this poem. The first long segment, from lines 19 through 26, is comprised entirely of a poetic catalogue of poems he has written in this vein – all poems included in the Heroides collection. The second segment, from lines 27 through 34, describes the poetic efforts of Ovid’s friend Sabinus, who seems to have conceived the idea of the paired letters by writing responses to Ovid’s existent poems. The last segment, from line 35 to the end of the poem in line 40, refers specifically to the more warlike settings of certain poems in the collection, as he sends a warning to Macer, the actual addressee of Amores II.18.

Identifying the descriptions in this poem in terms of which poems they refer to is a process important to the tradition of the Heroides and post-Ovidian interpretations concerning the collection’s contents, because these are the poems which Ovid himself claims to have written as part of the collection.

Quod licet, aut artes teneri profitemur Amoris— Ei mihi, praeceptis urgeor ipse meis!— aut, quod Penelopes verbis reddatur Ulixi, scribimus et lacrimas, Phylli relicta, tuas, quod Paris et Macareus et quod male gratus Iason Hippolytique parens Hippolytusque legant, quodque tenens strictum Dido miserabilis ensem dicat et Aoniae Lesbis amata lyrae. (Ov. Am. II.18.19-26)

I do what is permitted, either I proclaim the arts of tender love – Alas for me, I myself am driven by my own teachings! – Or, that which Penelope sends to Ulixes in words, I write, and your tears, abandoned Phyllis. Which Paris and Macareus and what ungrateful Jason And the father of Hippolytus and Hippolytus read, And what miserable Dido holding the drawn sword Says, and the woman of Lesbos, beloved of the Aonian lyre.

Lines 19 and 20 refer to the Amores and other love poetry, possibly including the Remedia Amoris. The subsequent lines all refer to poems within the Heroides collection. Line 21 refers to Epistle I, written by Penelope to Ulixes, as both are identified by name. Line 22 names Phyllis, and is therefore presumably a reference to Epistle II.

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Line 23 names Paris. Paris is the recipient of one of the paired letters, but given how recently Sabinus, according to the lines below, has just given Ovid the idea of the paired letters, it seems more likely that this refers to Epistle V, the only unpaired letter whose recipient is Paris. Line 23 also names Jason, which can be read as either a reference to Epistle VI or Epistle XII, or possibly both. Line 24 refers to the “parent of Hippolytus,” which, though without context could be read to refer to Phaedra, since it discusses readers rather than writers in this line, can only refer to Theseus, hence why I have translated parens as “father.” This therefore must be Epistle X, the letter from Ariadne to Theseus. Hippolytus himself is also named in this line, indicating Epistle IV. Line 25 names Dido and describes the letter as a suicide note – the only time when Dido draws a sword is at her death – and this is therefore an apt description of Epistle VII. Line 26 refers to a “woman of Lesbos,” and makes a reference to Aonian lyric performance, which means this can only refer to Sappho, describing Epistle XV.

Quam cito de toto rediit meus orbe Sabinus scriptaque diversis rettulit ille locis! Candida Penelope signum cognovit Ulixis; legit ab Hippolyto scripta noverca suo. Iam pius Aeneas miserae rescripsit Elissae, quodque legat Phyllis, si modo vivit, adest. Tristis ad Hypsipylen ab Iasone littera venit; det votam Phoebo Lesbis amata lyram. (Ov. Am. II.18.27-34)

How quickly my dear Sabinus returned from traveling over the whole world And brought back writings from various places! Fair Penelope recognized the seal of Ulixes; The stepmother read writings from her Hippolytus. Now pious Aeneas has written back to poor Elissa, And what Phyllis might read, if only she lives, has arrived. A sad letter has come to Hypsipyle from Jason; The woman of Lesbos, beloved, gives her lyre as an offering to Apollo.

Lines 27 and 28 are a whimsical description of Sabinus’ addition to Ovid’s work, and possibly an actual description of the circumstances under which the new poems were written – the conceit is that Sabinus has traveled the world collecting the responses to the single Heroides. Line 29 again refers to Penelope and Ulixes, duplicating the reference to Epistle I. Line 30 similarly refers again to Epistle IV, this time specifically describing Phaedra’s relationship to Hippolytus, distinguishing a stepmother from a mother by blood and lending further weight to the identification of parens, above, as a reference to Theseus. Line 31 names both Dido and Aeneas, borrowing common Vergilian epithets for each character and thus placing Epistle VII within Book IV of the Aeneid. Line 32 names Phyllis again, referring to Epistle II.

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Line 33 specifically refers to Jason’s letter from Hypsipyle, rather than from Medea; if the earlier reference to Jason was meant to refer to this letter, this duplicates the reference. Given the other duplications, this is entirely plausible and therefore likely means that the previous reference was to Epistle VI rather than Epistle XII. Line 34 again refers to Sappho, and in fact refers specifically to some of the text of Epistle XV – though the reference is not particularly appropriate, as the text in question is Sappho’s potential epitaph.

Nec tibi, qua tutum vati, Macer, arma canenti aureus in medio Marte tacetur Amor. Et Paris est illic et adultera, nobile crimen, et comes extincto Laodamia viro. Si bene te novi, non bella libentius istis dicis, et a vestris in mea castra venis. (Ov. Am. II.18.35-40)

Nor for you, Macer, as far as is safe for a bard singing of arms Is golden love silenced in the midst of war. Both Paris is there and the adulterous woman, an illustrious crime, And Laodamia accompanying her dead husband. If I know you well, you do not more gladly speak of wars Than of those things, and you come from your camp into mine.

Lines 35 and 36 are an introduction to this listing of epic love stories, appropriate since Macer is a writer of warlike poetry. This is then concluded with lines 39 and 40; it is the lines between this frame which describe poems in the Heroides collection with which Macer might have subject matter in common even though they are love stories. Paris is referred to again in line 37, this time in conjunction with Helen, which argues that the prior reference may in fact refer to Epistles XVI-XVII among the paired letters. Laodamia is named in line 38, cementing her place among the epic heroines; this is also the first reference in this poem to Epistle XIII.

In summary, lines 19 through 40 of Amores II.18 include what appear to be references to the following Epistles: I, II, IV, V, probably VI, VII, X, possibly XII though it seems unlikely, XIII and XV. We can therefore assume that Ovid wrote poems that match the descriptions of those epistles.

Manuscript Tradition

There are five Latin manuscripts of the Heroides, one Greek translation, and a collection of later Latin fragmentary manuscripts which have been discredited and heavily amended.

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Table C-1: Latin Manuscripts of the Heroides Name Date Epistles Contained Other Notes Codex Parisinus 8242 11th c., II (incomplete), III, Considered the corrected IV (incomplete), V authoritative 12th c. (incomplete), VI manuscript of all (incomplete), VII- letters included XIV, XVI-XIX, XX (incomplete), XXI- XXI Codex Guelferbytanus 12th c., XVI-XXI, but XVII- Considered to have corrected XX almost illegible little value 13th c. Codex Etonensis 11th c. I-VI, VII Inferior in quality to (incomplete) Parisinus Schedae Vindobonenses 12th c. X-XIV Confirms Parisinus (fragmentary), XVI- XX (fragmentary) Codex Francofurtanus 13th c. XV The authoritative manuscript of XV

In the thirteenth century, a Greek translation was produced by Planudes, from a Latin manuscript now lost but presumed based on the Greek to have been very similar to the Parisinus but with greater completion. This Greek translation contained all twenty- one letters.

Based on these manuscripts and the Planudes translation, two Latin editions were produced in 1471, one in Rome and one in Bologna, and another in Venice in 1491, all independently of one another and with very similar text. All other editions, which begin to appear in the early seventeenth century, are based upon these. [FOOTNOTE: Further discussion of these editions can be found in Knox 1995 and in Showerman 1986.]

More recently, the definitive modern definitive edition was produced in 1898 by Arthur Palmer at Oxford, which includes both the Latin text of all twenty-one letters and the Greek translation by Planudes.

Narrowest Estimations

A description of the narrowest estimations of which letters are actually authentic: those which are both included in Ovid’s indices and included in non-problematic manuscripts. A discussion of when these estimations were popular among scholars. These estimations are now outdated and have been replaced in popular theory. I have likewise discarded them.

There are three narrow estimations of which letters in the collection are authentic, based on the information above:

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1. Those letters which are included in the Parisinus manuscript and no others 2. Those letters which are referenced specifically in Amores II.18 and no others 3. Narrowest of all, those which are included in both of the above two options, excluding any letters which are found in one but not the other.

Option 1 would include II-XIV and XVI-XXI; in other words, it would exclude only I and XV. I reject this model because it does not include Epistle I, which is both characteristically Ovidian in style and which is specifically referred to by Ovid himself. The idea that someone other than Ovid created a letter from Penelope to Ulixes in perfect Ovidian style and that it was inserted into the manuscript tradition in place of the letter we know Ovid wrote, seems unnecessarily internecine. Scholars have been virtually unanimous in rejecting this option for this reason. I argue that similar reasoning should apply to Epistle XV, since the somewhat anomalous language found in the epistle can be traced to Ovid’s familiarity with Sappho, whose style is mimicked by the stylistic quirks in question.

Option 2 would include, as described above, Epistles I, II, IV, V, VI, VII, X, XIII and XV. Given the degree to which the Codex Parisinus is confirmed by other manuscripts, it is highly unlikely that for example, Epistle III is inauthentic while Epistle I is authentic. Additionally, since Hinds 1993, it has been accepted that as a poetic catalogue, the set of references in Amores II.18 need not be considered a complete list. Lastly, Ovid’s apparent fascination with the idea of responses to the heroines’ letters lends credence to the idea that he would have written the paired letters himself at a later date than the original set; the Amores give precedent for major revisions which add or remove entire books of poems. Knox 1995 and Thorsen 2014 discuss the chronology of editions, which is a matter of debate, and both argue that the Heroides in their original were composed between the two editions of the Amores, but that another edition was likely produced after Ovid read and commented on Sabinus’ work, placing the paired letters and possibly other revisions after the second edition of the Amores.

Option 3 would include most of the epistles above, but excludes I and XV from that list, leaving the modern world with only II, IV, V, VI, VII, X, and XIII. There are virtually no scholars in the twenty-first century who follow this model. This excludes too many of the letters whose subjects we know interested Ovid, and disregards both the most likely accurate manuscripts we have and the words of the poet.

Broadest Estimations

The broadest estimation of which letters are authentic is that all twenty-one were written by Ovid, though the paired letters were probably added in a second edition. Since Rand 1981, most scholars have adopted this theory, and it is what I follow in this paper. It is a common philosophy, and one that I share, that if there is reason to believe a manuscript is authentic, robust reasons should be required to disprove the authenticity.

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As a result, I believe that we should reverse the process used to derive Option 3 among the narrowest estimations, and proceed as if any letter which appears either in the Parisinus manuscript or in Ovid’s own words is authentic, not requiring the presence of both. Exceptions to this would include only letters for which the reasons for doubt cannot easily be explained by the nature of the text itself. Our most trustworthy sources concerning Ovid’s work are the best manuscript we have, and Ovid’s own testimony.

The Parisinus manuscript excludes only Epistle I and Epistle XV, and both of these are listed by Ovid in Amores II.18. Between the two, all twenty-one letters are included.

Of the entire collection, the only letter with concrete reasons for exclusion is Epistle XV.

Before proceeding further, it is therefore appropriate to address the question of the poem’s authenticity, as Heroides XV is the most disputed letter in the collection. There are three sets of views on this Epistle: first, the premise that the poem is inauthentic and written by someone other than Ovid; second, the idea that the poem is correctly included in a full edition of Ovid’s Heroides; third, the view that the poem is in fact a composition of Ovid, but was either not part of the Heroides or was deliberately removed from the collection by Ovid himself.1

The two primary challenges to Ovid’s supposed authorship come from the manuscript tradition, described above, and some anachronistic verbal and metrical choices. The latter in particular, which would be the more compelling of the two challenges, is easily explained through the connections with Sappho’s own poetry; as described in chapter 4, Sappho’s own narration is central to the letter. Numerous scholars worldwide have debated for centuries the differences and similarities between the style of epistle XV and the remaining fourteen solo letters, and have generally concluded that overwhelming similarities in overall narrative style, which are harder to explain away than intertextually-obligated anomalies in verbiage, are sufficient evidence for Ovid’s authentic authorship of the epistula Sapphus.

The manuscript tradition would present a compelling argument if not for the existence of the Planudes translation. The translation appears to come from a manuscript almost identical to the Codex Parisinus; the greatest exceptions are the inclusion of Epistles I and XV, which seem to largely match Etonensis and Francofurtanus respectively.

In addition, as described above, the argument that Ovid wrote a letter for inclusion in the collection, but it has been replaced in the manuscript tradition by another letter of

1 Rand 1904, is the earliest scholar to take the view of Ovidian authorship with any degree of certainty. All three views are referenced in Knox 1995, who lists the poem as “Epistula Sapphus Incerti Auctoris,” while acknowledging in the introduction that Ovid is the probable author and its placement at the end of the collection is sensible, though unverifiable. Jacobson 1974 discusses all three as well, and concludes that Ovid is the author and the placement is correct.

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other authorship which resembles Ovid’s style strikingly enough for confusion, has been rejected by the vast majority of scholars as overly serpentine and vanishingly unlikely.2

The question of the inclusion of the poem in the collection most commonly referred to as the Heroides is much more ambiguous, but as even the skeptics assume that it was originally part of the collection before its removal by Ovid, the poem deserves consideration both individually and as part of the group of unpaired letters.

For purposes of this paper, I have therefore fully accepted the broadest viewpoint, and assume Ovid’s authorship of all twenty-one letters, with the double Heroides added as a later edition by the poet.

Other Estimations

There are two other estimations which appear in the tradition of scholarship with which this paper engages, and it is appropriate to list them here.

The first estimation is that all the poems except Epistle XV are authentic, including an acceptance of the double letters as a later addition by the poet. This seems extremely unlikely for the reasons articulated above; it seems far more likely, if Epistle XV was removed from the collection, that this was done at the same time that the double letters were added. This is far more plausible than the complex chain of events that would be necessary for a forgery to gain such traction in the manuscript tradition.

The second estimation is that the paired letters are spurious, but the single letters are all authentic. The authenticity of the double letters is somewhat beyond the scope of this paper, but I believe that the manuscript tradition makes clear that, at least as a separate book, the double letters are part of the Ovidian oeuvre.

2 Rosati 1996 details the chronology of the debate, and the recent general conclusions of the scholarly community.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Irina began studying Latin in 1992, and first became interested in the Heroides as a literary text soon after. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Latin at Bryn Mawr

College in 2002, followed by a Master of Arts in Teaching in Latin and Classical

Humanities in 2003. She taught Latin for eleven years at both middle and high school levels at public schools in northern Virginia, and also for two years to undergraduates at

Goerge Mason University. When not studying Latin, she engages in online advocacy for intersectional feminism and disability rights, as well as indulging her passion for science fiction, fantasy, and myth in all media. She performs mythology-related music with the

Pegasus Award-nominated a cappella group Sassafrass. She has been excited to bring her interests together to complete her Ph.D. at the University of Florida in 2017.

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