Durham E-Theses Critical studies in Ovid's Heroides 1, 2, 7 Fear, Trevor How to cite: Fear, Trevor (1993) Critical studies in Ovid's Heroides 1, 2, 7, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/5747/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk TREVOR FEAR CRITICAL STUDIES IN OVID'S HEROIDES 1, 2, 7. M.LITT., 1993 ABSTRACT The thesis consists of three full-length studies of individual poems in Ovid's Heroides. A preface establishes the current trend of modern scholarship (particular attention is paid to the book-length studies of Howard Jacobson and Florence Verducci) and suggests the basis of my own critical approach. Chapter One is a study of Heroides 1 (Penelope to Ulysses). Stress here is placed on how Ovid has adapted the Homeric epic figure to his own elegiac context. Penelope appears not as the magnanimous heroine of epic but as the peevish lover of elegy. We are presented with a Penelope who finds her sexual deprivation hard to endure, who alludes disingenuously to Calypso and who is not above using Ulysses' family as a means of emotional blackmail. Chapter Two deals with Heroides 2 (Phyllis to Demophoon); emphasis here is placed upon the problems arising from our ignorance of Ovid's source material and how the poet has adapted the myth to the exigencies of the epistolary form. In this instance the letter format will be seen to be admirably suited to the reflective character of the heroine. The Phyllis of the Ovidian epistle is not so much the precipitate lover as the ruminant moralist. Chapter Three concentrates upon Heroides 7 (Dido to Aeneas). The discussion here centres upon how the poet has allowed his heroine a free hand rhetorically to adapt the details of the Virgilian text. The possibility of this epistle being a political diatribe on Augustanism is denied. A short postscript suggests the direction that future studies of the Heroides may take and expresses the hope that the poetry of Ovid will continue to be read as something more significant than mere verbal display. The material contained in this thesis has not been submitted for any previous degree in any academic institution. "The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged." ACKNOWLEDGMENT I should like to thank my supervisors Dr. J.L. Moles and Professor A.J. Woodman for their assistance in the production and completion of this thesis. I should also like to express my gratitude to all members of the Durham Classics Department (staff and postgraduates) for their support over the years. CRITICAL STUDIES IN OVID'S HEROIDES 1, 2, 7. A thesis submitted by Trevor Marc Fear for the degree of Master of Literature. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. CLASSICS: UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM 1993. CONTENTS Page PREFACE. 1-6 CHAPTER 1: HEROIDES 1: PENELOPE TO ULYSSES. (i) . INTRODUCTION. 7-8 (ii) . MAIN TEXT. 9-79 (iii) . EPILOGUE. 80-84 CHAPTER 2: HEROIDES 2: PHYLLIS TO DEMOPHOON (i) . INTRODUCTION. 85-93 (ii) . MAIN TEXT. 94-148 (iii) . EPILOGUE. 149-155 CHAPTER 3: HEROIDES 7: DIDO TO AENEAS. (i) . INTRODUCTION. 156-158 (ii) . MAIN TEXT. 159-228 (iii) . EPILOGUE. 229-231 POSTSCRIPT. 232 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 233-238 PREFACE APPROACHING OVID'S HEROIDES The revival in Ovidian studies has been continuing for some thirty years. Recently, however, the poet's works have received even more intense attention. This situation, its motivation and aims, has been neatly summarized by Joan Booth: 'Much recent scholarship has made a determined assault on Ovid's lingering reputation for showy brilliance, but little subtlety or intellectual depth. The new Ovid is a complex poet who uses his flippancy as a smoke-screen for profound artistic and cultural aspirations (M. Myerowitz, Ovid's Games of Love (Detroit, 1985)), who is committed to intricate and creative echoing of his own and other poets' work (S. Hinds, The Metamorphosis of Persephone. Ovid and the self-conscious Muse (Cambridge, 1987) and 'Generalizing about Ovid', Ramus 16 (1987), 4-31), and who constantly indulges in learned 'etymologizing', i.e. play on the alleged derivation of words (J.C. McKeown, Ovid, Amores; Vol. I, Text and Prolegomena, ARCA 20, (Liverpool, 1987), pp. 45-62'.1 As this quotation demonstrates, scholars have been increasingly concerned to rid Ovid of his reputation for witty superficiality and to rehabilitate him into a poet of intellectual significance. This critical stance is apparent in the two book-length studies of Ovid's Heroides that have appeared in the last twenty years, Howard Jacobson's Ovid's Heroides (Princeton 1974) and Florence Verducci's Ovid's Toyshop of the Heart: Epistulae Heroidum (Princeton 1985). Both these scholars have taken pains to stress the poet's serious intentions. Jacobson sees the significance of the Heroides as residing in their apprehension of individual psychology: Joan Booth in her 'Addenda' (1991) to Ovid by John Barsby, Greece and Rome, New Surveys in the Classics, No. 12. 1 v "The Heroides are not rarely praised as acute portraits of the female psyche ... That they are indeed studies, so to speak, in psychology cannot be reasonably denied'. Moreover, the poems are seen as a comment on the relative nature of reality: 'But in the Heroides Ovid radically transformed it [elegy] into a mirror of the relative nature of reality. The world of myth is no longer reality or a symbolic reflection of reality, but to a large degree projections or extensions of individual minds.' Florence Verducci also views the Heroides as convincing psychological studies: 'Perhaps the greatest, and surely the most orginal achievement of Ovid's letters is the impression they create of psychological authenticity, of convincing fidelity to the private perspective of a speaker caught in a double process of intentional persuasion and unintentionally revealing self-expression'. Yet the two scholars in their attempts to elucidate the value of the poet's work come to somewhat different conclusions over Ovid's habitual use of wit. Jacobson finds the wit of the Heroides an unequivocal failing: "The faults which detract from the achievement of the Heroides are generally those which seem, one might say, congenital to Ovid and are recurrent in most of his work. ... The wit and the humor that now and Jacobson, Ovid's Heroides (Princeton 1974) 371. 3 Jacobson, 349. 4 Florence Verducci, Ovid's Toyshop of the Heart: Epistulae Heroidum, (Princeton 1985) 4. 2 then are present in the Heroides degenerate at times into little else than cleverness, sometimes rather ludicrous cleverness'. 'But when points of language take precedence over points of sense, when plays on words prove no more than a substitute for substance, then his failure is manifest.' Verducci, however, attempts to incorporate the wit inherent in the poems into her over-all interpretative position. She sees wit as the agency through which the poet forces upon the reader an awareness that s/he is being compelled into sympathy for an idiosyncratic perspective: "The women of Ovid's Heroides are convincing as psychologically "real" characters precisely because they are not indentured to Classical Decorum. The sensibilities they reveal are convincing insofar as their characters become coherent but autonomous forces defiant of the categories to which tradition assigns them. They are convincing sensibilities insofar as their utterances force us to deviate from our own preconceptions of them, to endure the dissolution of their conventional "meaning." ... The rule of Ovid's Heroides is the rule of indecorum, of wit in conception no less than in language, a wit which is not his heroine's own but the token of the poet's creative presence in the poem. Its dispassionate, intellectual, emotionally anaesthetizing presence is a constant reminder of how far we, in our sympathy for a heroine, have departed from the traditional view of her situation, and it is a constant goad to the dissociation of emotional appreciation from formal articulation.' According to Verducci the poet induces us to sympathize with a portrait of the heroine that is quite different from her usual presentation in the classical tradition. However, to enable the reader to be cognizant of how their preconceptions are being def amiliarized, Jacobson, 7-8. 6Jacobson, 8. 7Verducci, 31-32. 3 the poet intrudes his own presence through the medium of verbal wit." In this instance wit is seen not as frivolous verbiage but as a means of keeping the reader informed of the poet's intentions. Thus we can see how these two scholars have reacted quite differently to L.P. Wilkinson's famous criticism of the Heroides, 'The heroines are not too miserable to make puns'. Jacobson concedes that the use of wit in the Heroides is a failing, whilst vigorously maintaining the worth of the work as a whole, whereas Verducci attempts to confront the habitual criticism of the poet's wit by assigning to its practice a serious intention.