Front matter of Boswell's copy of the 1732 edition of the Heroides, edited by Peter Burmann. Note the title Heroides sive Epistolae, The Heroides or the Letters.
The Heroides (The Heroines),[1]orEpistulae Heroidum (Letters of Heroines), is a collection of fifteen epistolary poems composed by OvidinLatinelegiac couplets and presented as though written by a selection of aggrieved heroinesofGreek and Roman mythology in address to their heroic lovers who have in some way mistreated, neglected, or abandoned them. A further set of six poems, widely known as the Double Heroides and numbered 16 to 21 in modern scholarly editions, follows these individual letters and presents three separate exchanges of paired epistles: one each from a heroic lover to his absent beloved and from the heroine in return.
The Heroides were long held in low esteem by literary scholars[2] but, like other works by Ovid, were re-evaluated more positively in the late 20th century.[3] Arguably some of Ovid's most influential works (see below), one point that has greatly contributed to their mystique—and to the reverberations they have produced within the writings of later generations—is directly attributable to Ovid himself. In the third book of his Ars Amatoria, Ovid argues that in writing these fictional epistolary poems in the personae of famous heroines, rather than from a first-person perspective, he created an entirely new literary genre. Recommending parts of his poetic output as suitable reading material to his assumed audience of Roman women, Ovid wrote of his Heroides: "vel tibi composita cantetur Epistola voce: | ignotum hoc aliis ille novavit opus" (Ars Amatoria3.345–6: "Or let an Epistle be sung out by you in practiced voice: unknown to others, he [sc. Ovid] originated this sort of composition"). The full extent of Ovid's originality in this matter has been a point of scholarly contention: E. J. Kenney, for instance, notes that "novavit is ambiguous: either 'invented' or 'renewed', cunningly obscuring without explicitly disclaiming O[vid]'s debt to Propertius' Arethusa (4.3) for the original idea."[4] In spite of various interpretations of Propertius 4.3, consensus nevertheless concedes to Ovid much of the credit in the thorough exploration of what was then a highly innovative poetic form.
The exact dating of the Heroides, as with the overall chronology of the Ovidian corpus, remains a matter of debate. As Peter E. Knox notes, "[t]here is no consensus about the relative chronology of this [sc. early] phase of O[vid]'s career," a position which has not advanced significantly since that comment was made.[5] Exact dating is hindered not only by a lack of evidence, but by the fact that much of what is known at all comes from Ovid's own poetry. One passage in the second book of Ovid's Amores (Am.) has been adduced especially often in this context:
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.†
I do what I may—either profess the arts of tender love (Alas! I'm beset by my own teachings!)
Or write what's rendered in the words of Penelope to her Ulysses, And your tearful tale too, forsaken Phyllis—
That which Paris and Macareus, and that also which oh-so-ungrateful Jason, And Hippolytus's sire, and Hippolytus himself may read—
And what pitiable Dido, holding now the blade unsheathed, Might say, and so too †that woman of Lesbos, beloved of the Aonian lyre.†[6]
Knox notes that "[t]his passage ... provides the only external evidence for the date of composition of the Heroides listed here. The only collection of Heroides attested by O[vid] therefore antedates at least the second edition of the Amores (c. 2 BC), and probably the first (c. 16 BC) ..."[7] On this view, the most probable date of composition for at least the majority of the collection of single Heroides ranges between c. 25 and 16 BC, if indeed their eventual publication predated that of the assumed first edition of the Amores in that latter year.[8] Regardless of absolute dating, the evidence nonetheless suggests that the single Heroides represent some of Ovid's earliest poetic efforts.
Questions of authenticity, however, have often inhibited the literary appreciation of these poems.[9] Joseph Farrell identifies three distinct issues of importance to the collection in this regard: (1) individual interpolations within single poems, (2) the authorship of entire poems by a possible Ovidian impersonator, and (3) the relation of the Double Heroides to the singles, coupled with the authenticity of that secondary collection.[2] Discussion of these issues has been a focus, even if tangentially, of many treatments of the Heroides in recent memory.
As an example following these lines, for some time scholars debated over whether this passage from the Amores—corroborating, as it does, only the existence of Her. 1–2, 4–7, 10–11, and very possibly of 12, 13,[10] and 15—could be cited fairly as evidence for the inauthenticity of at least the letters of Briseis (3), Hermione (8), Deianira (9), and Hypermnestra (14), if not also those of Medea (12), Laodamia (13), and Sappho (15).[11] Stephen Hinds argues, however, that this list constitutes only a poetic catalogue, in which there was no need for Ovid to have enumerated every individual epistle.[12] This assertion has been widely persuasive, and the tendency amongst scholarly readings of the later 1990s and following has been towards careful and insightful literary explication of individual letters, either proceeding under the assumption of, or with an eye towards proving, Ovidian authorship. Other studies, eschewing direct engagement with this issue in favour of highlighting the more ingenious elements—and thereby demonstrating the high value—of individual poems in the collection, have essentially subsumed the authenticity debate, implicating it through a tacit equation of high literary quality with Ovidian authorship. This trend is visible especially in the most recent monographs on the Heroides.[13] On the other hand, some scholars have taken a completely different route, ascribing the whole collection to one[14] or two[15] Ovidian imitators (the catalogue in Am. 2.18, as well as Ars am. 3.345–6 and Epistulae ex Ponto 4.16.13–14, would then be interpolations introduced to establish the imitations as authentic Ovid).
The paired letters of the Double Heroides are not outlined here: see the relevant section of that article for the double epistles (16–21). The single Heroides are written from the viewpoints of the following heroines (and heroes). The quotations highlighted are the opening couplets of each poem, by which each would have been identified in medieval manuscripts of the collection:
Haec tua Penelope lento tibi mittit, Ulixe; nil mihi rescribas attinet: ipse veni!
This your Penelope sends to you, too-slow Ulysses; A letter in return does me no good; come yourself!
II. Phyllis, the daughter of Lycurgus, writes to her lover Demophoon, the son of Theseus, king of Athens, after he fails in his promised return from his homeland.
Hospita, Demophoon, tua te Rhodopeia Phyllis ultra promissum tempus abesse queror!
I, your hostess, Demophoon—I, your Phyllis of Rhodope— Complain: you're gone far longer than you promised!
III. Briseis, the daughter of Briseus, writes to Achilles, the central hero of the Trojan War and focal character of Homer's Iliad, urging him to accept her as part of a package-deal from Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces at Troy, and to return to battle against the Trojans.
Quam nisi tu dederis, caritura est ipsa, salutem mittit Amazonio Cressa puella viro.
What well-being she herself will lack unless you give it her The Cretan maiden sends to the man born of an Amazon.
V. The nymph Oenone, by Hellenistic tradition Paris' first wife, writes to Paris, son of Priam King of Troy, after he abandoned her to go on his famed journey to Sparta, and then returned with the abducted Helen of Sparta as a wife.
Illa relicta feris etiam nunc, improbe Theseu vivit. Et haec aequa mente tulisse velis?
Even now, left to the wild beasts, she might live, cruel Theseus. Do you expect her to have endured this too, patiently?
XI. Canace, daughter of Aeolus, to her brother and lover, Macareus, before killing herself following the death of their baby at the hands of their father
The Heroides were popularized by the Loire valley poet Baudri of Bourgueil in the late eleventh century, and Héloïse used them as models in her famous letters to Peter Abelard.[18] A translation, Les Vingt et Une Epistres d'Ovide, was made of this work at the end of the 15th century by the French poet Octavien de Saint-Gelais, who later became Bishop of Angoulême. While Saint-Gelais' translation does not do full justice to the original, it introduced many non-Latin readers to Ovid's fictional letters and inspired many of them to compose their own Heroidean-style epistles. Perhaps the most successful of these were the Quatre Epistres d'Ovide (c. 1500) by André de La Vigne [fr], a friend and colleague of Saint-Gelais. Later translations and creative responses to the Heroides include Jean Lemaire de Belges's Premiere Epître de l'Amant vert (1505), Fausto Andrelini's verse epistles (1509–1511; written in the name of Anne de Bretagne), Michel d'Amboise's [fr]Contrepistres d'Ovide (1546), and Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara's Bursario, a partial translation of the Heroides.[19]
Classics scholar W. M. Spackman argues the Heroides influenced the development of the European novel: of Helen's reply to Paris, Spackman writes, "its mere 268 lines contain in embryo everything that has, since, developed into the novel of dissected motivations that is one of our glories, from La Princesse de Clèves, Manon Lescaut and Les Liaisons Dangereuses to Stendhal and Proust".[20]
^The reader is to understand that the letters read by Paris, Macareus, Jason, Hippolytus's father, and Hippolytus himself were written by (respectively) Oenone, Canace, Hypsipyle (and possibly also Medea), Ariadne, and Phaedra. The "woman beloved of the Aonian lyre" refers to Sappho.
^Knox (1995) 6. He also provides (p. 6, n. 9) a cautionary note, with references, on the use of modern terminology such as publication to refer to "the circumstances of ancient book production and circulation."
^Like many other aspects of Ovidian studies, what is known about the publication of multiple editions of the Amores is derived almost solely from Ovid himself, who opens those early poems with the epigrammatic preface:
Qui modo Nasonis fueramus quinque libelli,
tres sumus; hoc illi praetulit auctor opus.
ut iam nulla tibi nos sit legisse uoluptas,
at levior demptis poena duobus erit
We who were (not so long ago) the five little books of Naso
Are now three; their author preferred his work this way over that.
Though even now you may take little pleasure in reading us,
With two books swept away your pain will be lighter
With Ovid's word as the only viable evidence on the matter, the existence of a second edition of the Amores is widely regarded as potentially questionable (cf. the arguments of, e.g. Holzberg [1997]).
^For a fuller overview of the authenticity debate than can be offered here, see, among others, Lachmann (1876), Palmer (1898), Courtney (1965) and (1998), Anderson (1973), Reeve (1973), Jacobson (1974), Tarrant (1981), Knox (1986), (1995, esp. the introduction), and (2002), Kennedy (2002), and Lingenberg (2003).
^Am. 2.18.38 reads et comes extincto Laodamia viro ("and Laodamia, companion to her deceased husband"), which could refer solely to a subject of the poetry of Macer, who is addressed in Am. 2.18, or could as easily be relating Macer's works to Ovid's own compositions, serving as evidence, therefore, for the authenticity of Her. 13.
^Some critics have argued that the passage in cruces in line 26—together with its partner at line 34 (det votam Phoebo Lesbis amata lyram – "the woman of Lesbos, loved in return, might offer Phoebus the promised lyre")—is in fact an interpolation.
^Hinds (1993) 30 f., a suggestion cited by scholars since almost as a matter of reflex. Cf. also, on Her. 12, Knox (1986) and Heinze (1991–93). For a more recent discussion of the broad implications of this passage from the Amores, see Knox (2002) 118–21.
^Cf. in particular the recent dissertations-turned-published-monographs of Lindheim (2003), Spentzou (2003), and Fulkerson (2005).
^Lingenberg (2003) regards the single letters as a coherently structured work by one author, published some years after Ovid's death at latest and believed to be authentic Ovid already by Seneca; the double letters are by a different author, but probably roughly contemporary.
^Peter Dronke, "Heloise," in Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1984).
^Yvonne LeBlanc, "Queen Anne in the Lonely, Tear-Soaked Bed of Penelope: Rewriting the Heroides in Sixteenth-Century France," in The Late Medieval Epistle, ed. Carol Poster and Richard Utz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), pp. 71–87.
^On the Decay of Humanism (Rutgers University Press, 1967), p. 96.
Fulkerson, L. (2005) The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides (Cambridge).
Heinze, T. (1991–93) "The Authenticity of Ovid Heroides 12 Reconsidered", Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London (BICS) 38: 94–8.
Jacobson, H. (1974) Ovid's Heroides (Princeton).
Kennedy, D. F. (2002) "Epistolarity: The Heroides", in P. R. Hardie (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cambridge): 217–32.
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___. (2002) "The Heroides: Elegiac Voices", in B. W. Boyd (ed.) Brill's Companion to Ovid (Leiden): 117–39.
Lachmann, K. (1876) Kleinere Schriften zur classischen Philologie, Bd. 2 (Berlin).
Lindheim, S. (2003) Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid's Heroides (Madison, WI).
Lingenberg, W. (2003) Das erste Buch der Heroidenbriefe. Echtheitskritische Untersuchungen (Paderborn).
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Reeve, M. D. (1973) "Notes on Ovid's Heroides", Classical Quarterly (CQ) 23: 324–338.
Rosenmeyer, P. A. (1997) "Ovid's Heroides and Tristia: Voices from Exile", Ramus 26.1: 29–56. [Reprinted in Knox (ed.) (2006): 217–37.]
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Spentzou, E. (2003) Readers and Writers in Ovid's Heroides: Transgressions of Genre and Gender (Oxford).
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Westerhold, Jessica A. (2023). Ovid's tragic heroines: gender abjection and generic code-switching. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN9781501770357.
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___. (2001) Speaking Volumes: Narrative and Intertext in Ovid and Other Latin Poets, eds. and trans. M. Fox and S. Marchesi (London):
"Continuities", 9–28. [Translated and reprinted from Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici (MD) 16 (1986).]
"Narrativity and Convention in the Heroides", 29–48. [Translated and reprinted from Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici (MD) 19 (1987).]
"Future Reflexive: Two Modes of Allusion and the Heroides", 105–28. [Reprinted from Harvard Studies in Classical Philology (HSCP) 95 (1993).]
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Fulkerson, L. (2002a) "Writing Yourself to Death: Strategies of (Mis)reading in Heroides 2", Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici (MD) 48: 145–65.
___. (2002b) "(Un)Sympathetic Magic: A Study of Heroides 13", American Journal of Philology (AJPh) 123: 61–87.
___. (2003) "Chain(ed) Mail: Hypermestra and the Dual Readership of Heroides 14", Transactions of the American Philological Association (TAPA) 133: 123–146.
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___. (1992) "L'elegia al femminile: le Heroides di Ovidio (e altre heroides)", Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici (MD) 29: 71–94.
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Heroides public domain audiobook at LibriVox
