Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

THE HEROIDES
Dido threaten; the destinies of Rome and Carthage are nothing to her. All
she asks is that Aeneas should be a little kind to her.
In this portrait of a highly un-Virgilian Dido Ovid deliberately draws
heavily on the Aeneid. By doing so he directs attention to what he is doing and
challenges his readers to compare the two interpretations of the story. It was
the essence of school declamation to devise colores 'colours', new and ingenious
(often perversely so) interpretations of the given data; but there is more than
declamatory ingenuity here. In presenting Dido as a woman pure and simple
rather than a queen Ovid declares himself. He instinctively rejected the Augustan
myth, whatever lip-service he might on occasion pay it, and with it much of the
literature in which the myth found expression. He did not much believe in
divine missions, excepting that of the poet; for a man to betray a woman was
inhuman and wrong. Virgil had pleaded for the worse cause, even if he had
shown some, perhaps involuntary, sympathy for the better. Compared with the
subtle ambivalence of Virgil's treatment Ovid's is bound to appear simplistic,
even crude; but the case that he argues is not an ignoble one. Faced with the
choice of deserting his country or his beloved, is it beyond question which
a man should choose? A critic should be very sure of his own position before
he ventures to say that Ovid's was untenable.
The more carefully the Heroides are read, the more differences of intention
and treatment between the different epistles will be found to emerge. Nevertheless
the single letters cannot be altogether rescued from a charge of monotony.
But Ovid had by no means finished with the genre. Some years later,
stimulated we may guess by the action of his friend Sabinus in equipping some
of the single letters with answers (Am. 2.18), he published three pairs of epistles
in which a man wrote first and a woman answered him. These are considerably
more ambitious compositions; the combined total of lines in each pair (646,
428, 490; average length of Her. 1—14 c. 150) amounts to that of a short libellus. 1
In each case the situation and the poetic treatment are carefully differentiated.
The correspondence of Paris and Helen (16—17) is a highly entertaining jeu
d'esprit in the spirit of the Ars amatoria. That of Acontius and Cydippe (20—1)
is a study in obsession. For Paris and Helen he drew on several sources, the
background to the Trojan War being common mythological property. For
Acontius and Cydippe he used Callimachus' Aetia, but altogether transformed
the story by endowing the protagonists, especially Cydippe, with new personalities
and presenting the situation as a clash of wills, male against female,
strong against weak. 2 The story of Hero and Leander (18—19) cannot have been
long familiar when Ovid decided to use it. Its first appearance is in the Georgics,
by way of passing allusion (3.257—63). Evidently the legend had come to notice
» See above, p. 18.
1
Kenney (1970*). Callimachus' story had already inspired Propertius (1.18) and possibly Gallus
(Ross (1975a) 89).
425
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008