Heroides

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.

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 Amatoria 3.345–6: "Or let an Epistle be sung out by you in practiced voice: unknown to others, he [sc.

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.

[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.

The quotations highlighted are the opening couplets of each poem, by which each would have been identified in medieval manuscripts of the collection: 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.

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.