Heroides by Ovid

First transcribed: Before 8 c.e. (English translation, 1567)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

In the Heroides or Letters of the Heroines, the Roman poet Ovid composed a series of dramatic letters in elegiac verse, alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter. “Elegy,” writes one of Ovid’s heroines, “is the weeping strain,” and indeed the mood of most of these letters is that of sadness. Most of the heroines have been rejected by famous heroes: Dido by Aeneas, Ariadne by Theseus, Hypsipyle by Jason, Oenone by Paris. Some are apprehensive of coming death either for themselves or for their lovers; Canace, Dejanira, Sappho, and Dido are about to commit suicide. Medea is about to kill the new wife of Jason and her own two children.

Almost all of the heroines are in hopeless, pitiful situations, caught at a turning point in their lives. However, in these turning points there is conflict, both internal and among several people, a reminder that Ovid was also a dramatist, though his play Medea (probably before 8 b.c.e.) is no longer extant. The letters are the ancestors of the familiar dramatic monologues of Robert Browning and also of the interior monologue as it was used by James Joyce and Fyodor Dostoevski, for in their writing the heroines reveal their inmost thoughts. Moreover, what the heroine says usually sets the scene for the reader: Through reminiscence, she tells the events of the past that led up to her present woe. Sometimes Ovid transports the reader directly into the mind of the heroine, as she shifts rapidly from one association to another, or from a past memory to the present. In telling the different stories dramatically, Ovid remains in the background, almost out of sight.

The Heroides have inspired different generations of English poets, from Geoffrey Chaucer, who felt deep sympathy for Canace, and his contemporary John Gower to John Donne, who imitated several of the letters in his own poetry, and Alexander Pope, who wrote one of his finest poems, “Eloisa to Abelard,” in imitation of the verse epistles.

Ovid’s “Canace to Macareus” is one of the finest short dramatic poems in classic literature. As it opens, Canace is telling her brother and lover Macareus that she has been ordered by their father, Aeolus, to kill herself as punishment for having had a child by her brother. She tells in close detail how she had become pregnant by Macareus, how her sympathetic nurse had tried unsuccessfully to induce an abortion, and finally how the newborn baby had betrayed itself by crying as the nurse was trying to carry it past Aeolus, wrapped in a bundle of sticks. Aeolus, the household tyrant, paradoxically able to control the four winds but not his own passion, is the inflexible villain of Canace’s letter. Ovid succeeds in getting his readers to sympathize with the incestuous couple and to question any sort of inflexible legal or moral code.

A poet can, however, say only so much on the theme of rejected love. Ovid sometimes seems bored with his subject matter, especially when he takes his material from another poet. When he borrows Dido from Vergil, for example, his poem becomes only a good, but obvious, imitation; and Ovid’s “Dido to Aeneas” adds almost no new detail to Vergil’s story in the Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.).

Although many of the letters seem sentimental or mawkish to later perception, Ovid’s power as a storyteller and dramatist is obvious, and many of the characters he depicts seem “true” or “real.” Some of the unforgettable scenes and figures in the Heroides include the indulgent nurse and the petty tyrant Aeolus in “Canace to Macareus”; Ariadne lying on the rocks of her island watching Theseus’s sails disappear in the distance; and Paris flirting with Helen at the table of her husband, Menelaus. The realism in the Heroides is psychological: What Ovid’s characters think and do seems natural even in later times. Ovid also writes sympathetically about the social outcast and the mentally sick; he shows understanding for Dido and Medea, both close to insane, and for the incestuous Canace and Phaedra.

Ovid’s verse is artificial, and he makes no effort to give his heroines an individual style or poetic voice; all sound similar. However, they retain their psychological individuality, which Ovid shows through their actions and their thoughts. Despite the fact that the poet relies on his readers’ acquaintance with the stories—he often builds his poems dramatically on allusions that have in later times become obscure and puzzling—Ovid presents the physical and psychological details of his stories with vigorous and compelling power.

Bibliography

Fulkerson, Laurel. The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the “Heroides.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Fulkerson maintains that the female letter writers in Heroides are not abandoned victims but an astute community of women who have fashioned themselves as authors who allude to, and are influenced by, their readings of the poem.

Hardie, Philip. The Cambridge Companion to Ovid. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Collection of essays examining the historical contexts of Ovid’s works, their reception, and the themes and literary techniques of his poetry. The numerous references to Heroides are listed in the index.

Knox, Peter E., ed. Oxford Readings in Ovid. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Collection of twenty influential scholarly essays published since the mid-1970’s that provide a range of interpretations of Ovid’s poetry. Duncan F. Kennedy’s paper, “The Epistolary Mode and the First of Ovid’s Heroides,” analyzes this work.

Lindheim, Sara H. Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s “Heroides.” Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Lindheim applies feminist and psychoanalytic theory to explain why all of the heroines in Heroides tell their stories in a similarly disjointed fashion.

Mack, Sara. Ovid: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988. An elegant introduction to the poet that will persuade even the general reader to explore Ovid further. Presents often subtle analysis of individual passages. An intelligent, often original, and always firmly grounded study. Includes a useful bibliography.

Martindale, Charles, ed. Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Discusses the extent to which Ovid’s work permeated the European tradition of literature and the visual arts. Includes essays that trace Ovid’s influence in writers ranging from Geoffrey Chaucer to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).

Williams, Gareth. “Ovid’s Canace: Dramatic Irony in Heroides.” Classical Quarterly 42, no. 1 (January-July, 1992): 201-210. Analyzes the literary background of the story of Canace’s death as told by Ovid. Concludes that Ovid probably drew on Euripides’ “Aeolus.”