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drew freely on myth and legend. In the Heroides the material is taken entirely
from this sphere; and in this sense they may be seen, not only as important
poetry in their own right, but also as foreshadowing Ovid's chefd'oeuvre, the
Metamorphoses.
2. THE 'HEROIDES'
The first series of Heroides consists of letters from famous women of Greek
legend to absent husbands or lovers. For this new genre there was no single
Greek or Roman model. Its originality, however, as with love-elegy itself,
consisted in the blending of existing elements from the literary and rhetorical
tradition. Catullus, Propertius and Ovid himself had already handled erotic
themes from Greek mythology in the new 'subjective' style. Separation from
the beloved, and attendant ideas of infidelity and betrayal, played a prominent
role in love-elegy. Several of the Amores are essentially semi-dramatic monologues;
and Ovid's early training in declamation was calculated to foster his
predilection for this type of composition. Monologues by wronged or abandoned
or suffering women were to be found in more than one existing genre,
but the monologue as such was not a recognized literary form or genus; it
required a setting such as that provided by a play or epyllion (e.g. Ariadne in
Catullus' Peleus and Thetis'). Ovid legitimated, so to say, his heroines' soliloquies
by couching them in the form of letters. Strictly speaking the letter was
not a genre in the full sense, but as a literary form it was as old as Plato, and it
had been naturalized in Latin poetry by Lucilius and Horace. The convention
could be, and by Ovid was, handled with considerable freedom. Unlike real
letters the Heroides are self-contained works of art, neither needing nor indeed
leaving room for an answer. The idea of the letter-form seems to have come to
Ovid from Propertius' epistle of 'Arethusa' to 'Lycotas' (4.3); the scale on
which he exploited this modest hint strikingly illustrates his powers of
reception and re-creation.
The material of the Heroides comes principally from Greek epic and tragedy;
the exceptions are the epistles of Dido (7), where his only source was the
Aeneid, and Ariadne (10), where he drew extensively on Catullus. Given the
fundamental identity of theme, monotony could be avoided only by the greatest
possible variety of treatment and tone. About this undertaking there is an
obvious whiff of the tour deforce: to write no fewer than fourteen substantial
poems of this sort in itself smacks of bravado. One limitation which at best
could only be palliated was inherent in the letter-form itself, its basically static
and undramatic character. Apart from the perhaps doubtful case of Deianira, 1
Ovid respects the rule that nothing affecting the course of events is allowed to
happen during the writing of the letter. The heroine's situation is given; the
1 Her. 9.143; see Appendix.
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