The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides

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THE OVIDIAN HEROINE AS AUTHOR

Ovid’s Heroides, a catalogue of letters by women who have been deserted, has too frequently been examined as merely a lament. In a new departure, this book portrays the women of the Heroides as a community of authors. Combining close readings of the texts and their mythological backgrounds with critical methods, the book argues that the points of similarity between the different letters of the Heroides, so often derided by modern critics, represent a brilliant exploitation of intratextuality, in which the Ovidian heroine selfconsciously fashions herself as an alluding author influenced by what she has read within the Heroides. Far from being naı¨ve and impotent victims, therefore, the heroines are remarkably astute, if not always successful, at adapting textual strategies that they perceive as useful for attaining their own ends. With this new approach Professor Fulkerson shows that the Heroides articulates a fictional poetic mirroring contemporary practices of poetic composition. is Assistant Professor of Classics at the Florida State University. She is the author of various articles on Greek and Latin poetry.

LAUREL FULKERSON

THE OVIDIAN HEROINE AS AUTHOR Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides

LAUREL FULKERSON The Florida State University

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521846721 © Cambridge University Press 2005 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2005 - -

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For Rhesa: my heroine, but not an abandoned one.

Contents

Acknowledgments

page viii

List of abbreviations

x

Introduction

1

1 Reading dangerously: Phyllis, Dido, Ariadne, and Medea

23

2 Reading the future?: Hypsipyle, Medea, and Oenone

40

3 Benefits of communal writing: Canace and Hypermestra

67

4 A feminine reading of epic: Briseis and Hermione

87

5 Reading magically: Deianira and Laodamia

107

Reading like a virgin: Phaedra and Ariadne

122

7 Caveat lector : thoughts on gender and power

143

Appendix: The authenticity (and ‘‘authenticity’’) of Heroides 15

152

Bibliography

159

Index

171

Index Locorum

179

6

vii

Acknowledgments

I am grateful and amazed at the number of people who have supported me in the writing of this book. First of all, I thank Michael Sharp for the patience and good humour with which he replied to my abundant queries, lengthy screeds, and increasingly manic requests. The readers for the Press have offered numerous helpful criticisms on both individual points and larger methodological issues, and I greatly appreciate their help even where I have ignored it; in many cases they have caused me to refine my own thinking. The Florida State University provided financial assistance in 2001 in the form of a FYAP grant. I acknowledge the following journals for permission to rephrase previously published material: the American Journal of Philology 123 (2002: 61–87), Materiali e Discussioni 48 (2002: 145–65), and the Transactions of the American Philological Association 133 (2003: 123–45). Gareth Williams painstakingly nurtured what he was kind enough to call ‘‘ideas’’ into a dissertation, and then stood out of the way; he also read a more preliminary version of the manuscript and has offered advice throughout. Peter Knox read an earlier version of the entire manuscript, correcting me in several points of fact and with an indulgence that those who know him will hardly find plausible. Effie Spentzou made available the proofs of her Heroides book at a crucial stage; her writing and charitable comments on my own writing have caused me to rethink several of my most-cherished assumptions about the Heroides. I thank also the many people who have read or listened to pieces of this work in its earlier stages: Alessandro Barchiesi, Rachel Brem, Francis Cairns, Megan Drinkwater, Elaine Fantham, Stephen Hinds, John Marincola, Sara Myers, Kathryn B. Stoddard, Sarah C. Stroup, W. Jeffrey Tatum, the Columbia University Classics Department Raving Bitches (Sulo Asirvatham, Naomi Finkelstein, Susana Martinez, and Ellen Thomas), and audiences at the 1999 APA meeting, Bard College, The Florida State University, and Georgetown University. My dissertation committee (Gareth Williams, Jim Zetzel, Helene Foley, Tally Kampen, and Kristina Milnor) has been viii

Acknowledgments

ix

more help than they know, giving advice and providing a variety of models of what I want to be when I grow up. Mark Petrini first introduced me to the Heroides, and also to the scholar’s life (and to sushi, an important part of the scholar’s life). Alessandro Barchiesi and Alden Smith offered much needed encouragement at an early stage, and Martin Kavka was always willing to talk about theory and the minutiae of academic life, as Christopher Pfaff was about everything else. Thanks also to my Heroides classes at Drew University and FSU, especially Wayne L. Rupp. To my family I owe an obligation I cannot repay. To my relief, they have been very lenient in seeking its return. I thank them for helping to make me the person and scholar I am; any remaining flaws remain my own responsibility. My final debt cannot be measured or even fully expressed. John Marincola has long suffered my unhealthy fascination with abandoned and suicidal women, and has fixed more computer problems and read more versions of the text than either of us can bear to remember; his patience is exemplary, and far superior to mine. Most importantly, he has always been on my side, even when he suspected it was the wrong side to be on.

Abbreviations

A&A A&R Aevum(Ant) AJP ANRW ASNP BAGB BICS C&M CJ ClAnt. Comp.Lit. CP CQ CR CW G&R GRBS Gymn. HSCP ICS JHS JRS LCM MD PCPS PP REL RhM RPh

Antike und Abendland Atene e Roma Aevum Antiquum American Journal of Philology Aufstieg und Niedergang der ro¨mischen Welt Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa Bulletin de l’Association G. Bude´ Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Classica et Mediaevalia Classical Journal Classical Antiquity Comparative Literature Classical Philology Classical Quarterly Classical Review Classical World Greece and Rome Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies Gymnasium Harvard Studies in Classical Philology Illinois Classical Studies Journal of Hellenistic Studies Journal of Roman Studies Liverpool Classical Monthly Materiali e Discussioni Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society La Parola del Passato Revue des E´tudes Latines Rheinisches Museum fu¨r Philologie Revue de Philologie x

List of abbreviations SO TAPA WJA YCS

xi

Symbolae Osloenses Transactions of the American Philological Association Wu¨rzburger Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r die Altertumswissenschaft Yale Classical Studies

Abbreviations and editions for ancient sources follow those in the Oxford Classical Dictionary 3, and where the author is Ovid I do not cite him by name; similarly, references to the Heroides I do not typically cite as such. The only exceptions are for the following authors, whose standard editions are given with the fragment and who appear in the bibliography: Callimachus (Pfeiffer), Laevius (Courtney), and Sappho (Voigt).

Introduction

Scholarship on the Heroides generally characterizes them as more-orless ineffectual letters written by abandoned women to the men who abandon them. Yet this characterization, while not wholly incorrect, is limited; not only do some of the letters fall outside of this description, but to look at the women who write the individual letters as only abandoned deprives them of much of their authorial power. For the Heroides, despite their unpopularity in recent centuries, have been immensely influential on other authors.1 And, as my Chapter 2 epigraph from the Lettres Portugaises suggests (below, p. 40), a reading of the Heroides that judges solely on the basis of whether the man to whom each letter is addressed returns to the author of that letter reinscribes the tiresome equation of women’s personal and professional lives that will be familiar to students of other female artists. More importantly, it misunderstands the aim of poetic composition.2 The Heroides are epistles putatively designed to persuade, but although they often fail to persuade their mythological addressees, they have persuaded countless generations of their actual readers to view them as works of literature worthy of imitation. The women of the Heroides are successful in the same way as other elegiac Augustan poets – they may never ‘‘get their man’’ but they create intricate personae and lasting poetry. In fact, the heroines are, because of their very abandonment, perfectly situated to become (like) male Augustan elegists: for both, desire creates 1

2

And readers (Kennedy 2002: 222). Exemplary studies of Heroidean influence include Hexter 1986 and McKinley 2001 on Heroides commentaries, Brownlee 1990 (on the Spanish novela sentimental ), Winsor 1963 and Dean 1967 (both on Chaucer), Harvey 1989 (on Donne), and Kauffman 1986 (on the epistolary novel). See Boym 1991: passim on texts read metonymically for poets and Hardie 2002: 36–7 on how Ovid himself provokes this reading. My refusal to focus on the heroes should not undermine the usefulness of earlier studies like Jacobson; his conception of the letters as ‘‘psychosynthesis’’ is very influential upon my own (indeed, upon most) readings of the Heroides (1974: 374).

1

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The Ovidian Heroine as Author

poetry.3 Indeed, my focus on how the heroines attempt to refashion their stories because of their membership in a poetic community – the fictional community created by their shared presence in a poetic book – is predicated upon the notion that they themselves create influential texts. This book, which focuses on issues of communal reading and writing, explores the ways in which the Ovidian heroines – puellae doctae – are excessively literary and so self-consciously fashion themselves as alluding authors influenced by what they read.4 Yet the heroines’ ‘‘source-texts’’ are often within the Heroides themselves, and it is therefore difficult if not impossible to determine who references whom. This suggests that the abandoned women may usefully be compared to the masculine elegiac community, composing their texts together and with reference to the poetic issues of that community (among which are prominently featured a limited/limiting set of scenarios, played out to exhaustion). At the same time, the heroines curtail themselves even more significantly than their male elegiac counterparts, focusing almost exclusively on the poetics of abandonment.5 Further, the heroines’ poetic affinity seems predicated more on genealogy or other superficial factors – since they often adopt and adapt the stories of their family members – than on conscious choice.6 So, restricted by their sex and the circumstances that surround it, they are perhaps less adventurous than male elegists. My view of the Heroides is thus substantially different from those who see them as failures of communication because they do not effect the returns of their addressees. While the heroines’ struggle to rewrite their own destinies is indeed, as many note, circumscribed by their own limitations, as well as their textual pasts and futures, I choose to focus on the struggle itself, unsatisfying and limited as it may sometimes seem, rather than on its outcome. The success of the heroines’ efforts should not be judged solely in terms of erotic 3

4

5

6

Cf. Hardie 2002: 30–1 and 50–2 on the portrayal of desire in the Ovidian corpus, who notes that (amatory) elegy predicates itself upon an ‘‘absent presence’’; this is particularly the case in a letter (34). On intertextuality ‘‘within a literary coterie,’’ see Edmunds on the neoterics (2001: 20). Of the ever-growing bibliography on allusion and intertextuality in Latin poetry, Conte 1986, Lyne 1994, Hinds 1998, and now Edmunds are essential reading; the latter notes that the term was originally coined to explain how a text comes into existence (2001: 1; see too his formulation of the difference between the Contean and the Kristevan views of intertextuality on 9). For the Heroides, see Jacobson on the ‘‘relationships’’ and ‘‘cross-referencing’’ between individual poems (1974: 376, 379). On intratextuality see Miner (1986: passim) and Sharrock in Sharrock and Morales (2000: 1–39). But see Rosenmeyer, who notes of the Heroides and the exile poetry that the repeated act of writing serves to emphasize the isolation of the writer; she sees this ‘‘community’’ as necessarily failed (1997: 39). Cf. the stimulating discussion of ‘‘poetry of abandonment’’ in Lipking 1988: 23–31. On a circle of poetic friends similarly invoked in Ovid’s poetry, see Citroni 1995: 433. As Larmour notes in a discussion of the contaminatio of tragic texts into the Metamorphoses, this crossinfluence is particularly effective when it stems from genealogical roots (1990: 140).

Introduction

3

persuasiveness; more importantly, it is also not clear to me that ‘‘success’’ is the most useful way of reading: what is gained by ascertaining that Penelope’s letter (e.g.) is better than Laodamia’s? As a prelude to this study of the heroines as authors who affect the women in their environments, let me draw the reader’s attention, if only in passing, to a peculiar sentence in Plutarch: the Life of Theseus, after detailing Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne, notes that the women of Naxos forged and delivered letters from Theseus to Ariadne (20.5); Plutarch does not speculate on their motivation. Let us conceive, for a moment, of these women as writing in response to a letter from Ariadne herself (perhaps even Heroides 10). We can then, metaphorically, imagine them as the ‘‘first readers’’ of the Heroides. If Ariadne’s letter, unsatisfactory as it is to many modern readers, is capable of generating a response – not from Theseus, but from other women, who are familiar with the standard plot about abandoned heroines – then she will have been powerful indeed. I do not suggest that Plutarch was alluding to the Heroides in this passage, but the fact that his anecdote features women responding to a female-authored text opens up a space for the model of reading that will be the focus of this book: we will search through and beyond traditional narratives in order to recuperate a feminine poetics of abandonment that bears both resemblances to and startling differences from the masculine elegists’ pose of servitude.7 Master narratives therefore play an important role in my study, but they will be given second place to the heroines’ use of material from one another. The heroines frequently find themselves in similar situations; their letters therefore share many common features, a fact that has led some readers to label them monotonous.8 Yet this repetition brings us to the heart of what many find both fascinating and frustrating about the Heroides. Much Heroides scholarship sees this feature of the poems – and, indeed, of elegy as a whole – as an elegiac kind of ‘‘repetitioncompulsion,’’ suggesting that Ovid is communicating something about 7

8

Spentzou similarly notes, ‘‘each heroine’s struggle for control over her own gloomy destiny is also a female artist’s effort to (re)write her story against the will of the classical authorities’’ (2003: 11). For a summary, see Kennedy (2002): 219–20, and cf. (famously) Wilkinson 1955: 106, Jacobson 1974: 65 and 381–404; even Verducci, generally sympathetic, notes the ‘‘disconcerting elasticity’’ with which heroines are assimilated to one another (1985: 245). On my reading, this is precisely the point; I leave aside the question of whether ‘‘monotony’’ is necessarily displeasing. Lindheim too seeks to recuperate this sameness, viewing the heroines as trapped within a masquerade of their own making. Jolivet’s formulation of the Heroides as ‘‘voracious’’ vis a` vis myth is a helpful way to resolve the differences (2001: 3–4).

4

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

the (necessarily?) endless reiteration of love in an elegiac milieu,9 or, alternately, that the reduplication is designed to undercut sympathy for the women who write; we may be less tolerant of the flaws of the last letter than of the first. As with much of Ovid’s oeuvre, however, ‘‘repetitive’’ themes show themselves, on careful examination, to differ in subtle but crucial ways. The women of the Heroides, like Odysseus in the Ars Amatoria, are accustomed to saying the same thing in different ways (referre aliter saepe solebat idem, 2.128), an ability which in the Ars is seen as the height of erotic skill. Further, the scenarios in each letter are quite different, despite the fact that Ovid often seems to have altered them to accentuate similarities. Most importantly, the stories are so much alike not because Ovid repeated himself (although there is no doubt that he did), but because he seems to have conceived of his heroines as sharing not only the situation of abandonment and the use of the epistolary form, but also common vocabularies and sets of poetic influences.10 This is a move that should not surprise us, both because poets traditionally conceive of women abandoned by their lovers as variations on a single theme, and because these particular women have renowned literary genealogies (with which they often seem familiar).11 Where Ovid innovates is in letting the women share in the knowledge of their entwined filiation. What Kauffman terms the ‘‘correspondences between the correspondents’’ (1986: 42) are key to understanding the poetics of the Heroides, and repetitiveness is not a flaw of the collection but rather constitutes the women as members of the same authorial circle. I will argue throughout this book that Ovid conceived of his literary creations as incorporating prior and contemporary texts into their poetry and that, like himself, some of them are remarkably sophisticated and astute readers. Often, however, inexperience and a tendency to privilege family connections lead them to allude to texts dissimilar to their own in key respects or to construe literature in dangerous and misleading ways. Reading, then, figures centrally in the corpus insofar as the heroines base their own words on their interpretations of the stories of other abandoned 9

10

11

Barchiesi 1992: 12 on the heroines’ composition by ‘‘analogia’’; Lindheim 2003: passim. See Fulkerson 2004: passim on the inescapability from elegiac love portrayed in the didactic works. Conte 1996, building on Slater, sees Petronius’ Encolpius as a character who, given a few similar external circumstances, cannot resist fashioning himself as an epic hero. Wilamowitz first noted that Seneca’s Phaedra was conscious (as is his Medea) of her literary predecessors (1906: 10). See below for other ancient fictional characters who read and Rabinowitz on literature’s presumption that its reader knows the rules (1986: 121). The most famous example is the Vergilian Dido, who depends on Euripides’ and Apollonius’ Medea, Catullus’ Ariadne, and perhaps Callimachus’ Phyllis (Barchiesi 1993a: 352).

Introduction

5

women in their community. To this extent they read ‘‘resistantly,’’ seeking from canonical poetry information it does not offer.12 Yet at the same time, to use a different critical vocabulary, they also ‘‘misread’’ (a Bloomian sign of the powerful poet).13 The heroines’ ways of reading can be seen as illustrating a ‘‘feminine’’ way of reading and writing, for in the Heroides, women of mythology are finally given a chance to tell their side of the story, and it is man-centered only on the surface. The Heroides present a fiction of the female voice that cannot but be provocative in light of the women’s distinguished history as characters in (male-authored) master narratives. I return to the women’s own voices, mediated as they inevitably are by Ovid, precisely because his ‘‘female voice’’ has seemed so authentic to so many of his readers.14 Before that underexplored and fascinating female space is foreclosed in the interests of biological accuracy, it deserves to be the center of attention; in keeping with the dictates of embodied authorship, however, the final chapter will bring us back to Ovid’s own role in the creation of female poets and female poetry, and there I will offer my answers to the questions theoretically minded readers will have been asking themselves throughout. It will be obvious by this point that to the feminist question ‘‘can/does Ovid write like a woman?’’ my answer would be yes, precisely because he has seemed to do so to many of his readers throughout the ages, both male and female. I am simultaneously aware that devoting further attention to a ‘‘gender-troubled’’ male poet at the expense of women writers can be seen as a step in the wrong direction. This work is, and must be, post-feminist; I remain unconvinced by claims that biological women (itself an increasingly disputed category) have a monopoly on the feminine.15 At the same time, while gender concerns will necessarily play a major role in my interpretations – indeed, I see gender and authorship in the Heroides as not fully distinguishable – I read the heroines’ writing as a function of the choices they exercise rather than deriving simply from their femininity. That is, 12 13

14

15

See Fetterley 1978, who offers a way for women to read ‘‘male’’ literature through a feminine lens. Bloom’s ‘‘anxiety of influence’’ has been criticized for being too psychological; while I do not dispute this, it is nevertheless useful shorthand for many of the issues involved in studying the Heroides. Spentzou 2003: 53–60 is good on the heroines’ ‘‘troubled rite of passage into writing,’’ but sketches an overly pessimistic portrait of the consequences of literary skillfulness. Kauffman 1986: 44 is key on underreading and overreading in the Heroides. The poems have been viewed by some readers as ‘‘case studies’’ in female psychology come to life; Ovid’s skill at ‘‘female ventriloquism’’ and the difficulties this creates for feminist readers have been well studied by De Jean 1989, Harvey 1989, and Rimell 1999. See too the 1990 Helios volume devoted to the issue of whether feminists should eschew Ovid in favor of material realities. On these issues, see Spentzou 2003: 1–3 and 25.

6

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

I am interested in how gender plays into the construction of (authorial) power rather than in gender for its own sake (Kennedy 2002: 226–8). A main advantage of my approach is that it offers a way out of certain critical impasses that often preclude an understanding of these letters: accepting the ‘‘community’’ model and viewing one heroine as reading the text of another first allows the reader to grant these women an all-too-rare moral agency16 and, on a metapoetic level, it dispenses with the need to condemn Ovid for contaminatio of plot. On the contrary, Ovid has articulated a fictional poetics that mirrors contemporary practices of writing poetry; the writing of the heroines may serve as a microcosm for contemporary Roman authorial communities, as the final chapter will discuss. In fact, my reading of the women of the Heroides as authors offers a way of understanding Ovid’s own relationship to his poetry and to his reader. Their struggles for authorial voice may be less successful than his, but they do not differ in kind. Because of my interest in reading through traditional stories, each chapter begins by outlining the standard mythological background; this provides a starting point for my own readings, which are less comprehensible without the context of secondary literature. This background should also help the reader to understand why viewing the women as a metaphorical community is fruitful: several of the poems that have been seen as critical failures can be shown to be quite the contrary once they are read in light of the other poems of the collection; rhetorical moves and ‘‘misinterpretations’’ become explicable. At the same time I am wary of giving too much authority to those stories; one of the main goals of this book will be to explore what happens if we do not assume that, where master narrative and heroine diverge, the latter must be getting it wrong (or that Ovid is taking this opportunity to mock the heroines). Because of our tendency to stick to the version of the myth we already know – this despite the necessarily unstatic nature of myth and mythmaking – we regularly refuse to the heroines the opportunity to create a different ending. I am not suggesting that we begin teaching mythology differently, making the story of Briseis and Achilles end with a wedding and return to Phthia. My point is that by our knowledge (knowledge that, like the heroines, we have gained by reading) we limit the possibilities of these women, foreclosing their ‘‘happy ending.’’17 Like several recent feminist-oriented studies of the Heroides, I tire of criticism that makes the women inferior to poet and reader. Yet even those most willing to listen to the heroines will not grant them the power to affect 16 17

See Foley 2001: passim, but especially chapter 3, on women in tragedy as moral agents. The case of Sappho is perhaps most interesting in this light; her letter gives no clues to its end.

Introduction

7

their worlds (Barchiesi 1992: 19, Spentzou 2003: 29, 31). This study will do so, leaving the ‘‘end’’ more open-ended than it usually is. For instance, what makes us so sure that Penelope’s letter to Odysseus, a brilliant example of intertextuality (Kennedy 1984), has no effect on our reading of Homer? Listening to Penelope, granting the possibility that she may know more than Homer, adds to the portrayal of the reunion scene in Book 23 of the Odyssey. The Homeric Odysseus’ acceptance of Penelope’s claim that, because she has not moved the bed, she has been faithful to him, is peculiar. In fact, she has proved nothing, but if Odysseus has already read Heroides 1 (or one of the many other letters Penelope has written, 1.61–2), he will understandably have fewer doubts about her fidelity. This study builds upon much inspiring and careful work, and I trust that my vast intellectual debts will be apparent.18 At the same time, there has been no systematic treatment of the mechanics of how the women of the Heroides, as a whole, engage with each other’s writing. By reading the poems of the Heroides in light of one another, I aim to show that their remarkable similarities of content derive not (or not significantly) from Ovid’s habit of repeating himself, but primarily from the mythological women’s duplication of the poetic principles and literary community of their creator. I will further argue that the Heroides can be seen as Ovid’s meditation on the dangers (to him and other authors) inherent in assuming an authorial role. RECENT APPROACHES TO THE HEROIDES

As scholars of Ovid and other Augustan poets have documented, the poetry of this period is not only steeped in the poetry of prior and contemporary authors, but also requires from its readers a close familiarity with that tradition. This polymathy does not conflict with the oral performance context of most poetry; Augustan poetry presupposes a reader who is capable of paying attention to an entire collection of poetry at once, even if that (ideal/idealized) reader has never existed.19 The composition of the ‘‘poetic book’’ has been explored to good effect, but such studies have not 18

19

See, most succinctly, the groundbreaking statement in Barchiesi that ‘‘Ovid’s heroines . . . are conditioned by an intertextuality which is not simply mythological, but is specifically literary’’ (1993a: 346). Lindheim’s reading of the ‘‘repetitiveness’’ of the heroines as rooted in their need for rhetorical self-presentation is immensely influential upon my own. On ‘‘literary competence’’ (the rules the reader must bring to bear in making sense of a text), cf. Culler 1975 passim and Rabinowitz 1986: 121–4. Fantham notes that the existence of a poetic book presupposes an expert readership with continued access to the poems (1996: 64). Winkler illustrates the vital importance of readership in ancient texts, and Edmunds offers powerful arguments for assuming a text-based audience for much Roman poetry (1985: 95–107; 2001: 108–16). See too Conte

8

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

been done on the Heroides. This book innovates in its introduction of community to the model of learned allusiveness, insofar as the heroines seem to create for themselves a shared space of poetic composition that is parallel to but different from the mythic world they inhabit. Perhaps the clearest example of their departure from the world of reality is the difficulty of putting the letters in order of relative composition: notions of chronology external to the poems do not apply within them – the heroines write in a timeless (Irigarayan?) continuum of female authorship.20 In the masculine world, wars happen and heroes go on quests, but in the ‘‘feminine space’’ in which these poems are composed, nothing ever changes: women are always being left, but more importantly, are always reading and writing the same texts. The prior scholarly neglect of the Heroides’ complex blend of the elegiac, the epistolary, and the mythic has amply been rectified, as the depth and breadth of recent work on the corpus demonstrates. The best of the new scholarship examines individual poems (rather than approaching the collection with a monolithic understanding),21 explores issues of irony, gender, genre, and intertextuality within individual passages, and mirrors the move in classical studies as a whole toward approaches that incorporate multiple methodologies. Yet some of the Heroides remain understudied, and scholarly concentration on individual, well-known poems often precludes an understanding of the whole. More work is needed to map patterns of allusive irony throughout the collection. Without such studies, the understanding of even the most frequently studied poems cannot be complete, since the poems are in constant dialogue with one another. Literary studies of the Heroides tend to concentrate on three aspects of the poetry. The first seeks to explore the intertexts of the corpus, to find verbal or situational parallels in other poems outside the collection.

20

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1986: 61 and Smith 1994 (both key) on readership within the Heroides. In this book I privilege ‘‘reading’’ over ‘‘performance’’ (although the two are not truly distinguishable in antiquity; Gamel 1998: 87) because the Heroides are letters and not simply poetry. There is some debate about whether the Heroides were themselves performed (Cunningham 1949: 100), and a performance-based study of them would doubtless yield useful results. On performance in elegy, see Quinn 1982 and Gamel 1998 (the latter on gendered performance). For the ways the ‘‘doctitude’’ of elegiac poetry (especially epistolary) presumes a community, see Habinek 1998: 12, 152–4, 163–4. A brief summary of Irigarayan (feminine) language: it is private, coopted from public discourse and so sharing certain elements of it; more importantly, it is a language that particularizes women as it essentializes Woman, emphasizing both the difference between women and difference of Woman. See, most concisely, Moi 1985; Chapter 7. For instance, the notion that the Heroides are suasoriae has, thanks to Oppel 1968, been replaced by a much more profitable exploration of how the rhetorical elements of individual poems (drawing upon suasoriae and ethopoiiae) contribute to their effectiveness. See too Von Albrecht 1981: 207–8 on the importance of communication (and thus, to the Roman mind, rhetoric) in readership.

Introduction

9

The second approach consists of genre studies, explorations of the epistolary22 or elegiac23 aspects of the poems. The third approach, perhaps the single most promising way to read the Heroides, discusses individual poems within their mythological context and explores the ensuing results. Each of these three methods is fruitful, but in order to be most useful, they are best integrated. One of the long-favored ways of reading the Heroides is an examination of their ‘‘source-texts’’ because each poem seems designed to refer the reader to a specific literary predecessor. The intertextual ironies explored by this process have provided much of the meat of Heroides scholarship in recent years; interesting work has also been done on the (probable) source-texts we do not have. Much of the older scholarship on the Heroides had assumed their status as letters to be an extraneous (and unfortunate) complication,24 but recent studies have placed the letter squarely back into the equation.25 Indeed, on my reading, the letter form is appropriate even when it seems most inappropriate, because the women who write do so, in a sense, to and for one another (and are themselves voracious and highly suggestible readers of texts). The mechanics of composition and transmission are clearly not meant to be closely examined:26 as is often pointed out, Ariadne would have had trouble finding a mailbox on the apparently deserted island of Naxos. Further, it might have made more sense (and, I shall suggest, preserved her own life) if Canace were to have spoken to her brother instead of laboriously writing to him in elegiac couplets, pen and sword in hand. Yet the fact that these women write poetic letters serves not only Ovid’s needs but also their own, and reinforces the desirability of a study of 22

23

24

25

26

E.g. Kauffman 1986: 30–61, Kirfel 1969: 11–36, Rahn 1958, Rosati 1992; see Malherbe 1988: 12ff. on ancient epistolary theory in general. Hintermeier details epistolary, elegiac, and dramatic elements of the double letters (1993: 152–89). Spoth’s 1992 study is fundamental. The best of this work studies how certain of the heroines manipulate (or fail to manipulate) elegiac conceits to serve their own ends or the ways they betray their ‘‘truly’’ tragic, epic, or pastoral nature. Labate captures the paradox of Ovidian elegy, noting that the poet insists on the unique character of her love while simultaneously placing herself into a network of generic convention (1984: 107). An aspect of this topic that has been touched upon by many but not well explored is elegy’s connection with ‘‘plaintive lament and pity’’ (Hinds 1987a: 104). But cf. Barchiesi 1992: 21–2 on ways the Heroides are not typically elegiac. Despite the fact that Ovid himself calls attention to their epistolary nature, not only in the corpus itself, but also in Am. 2.18, where the terminology is specifically epistolary. See, e.g., Bradley 1969: 159 on the fruitlessness and sterility of the letters qua letters, and Vessey, who thinks that in Heroides 9, the epistolary form is ‘‘thrown away’’ (1969: 355). Kennedy draws attention to the epistolarity of the corpus, but suggests that Heroides 1 is a nearunique case (1984: 416–17). Lindheim focuses on the rhetorical aspects of the letter form. See, e.g., Vessey on the implausibility of Briseis’ writing in a pre-literate society (1976: 91). On the other hand, Ovid himself is not interested in these mechanics; cf. Ars. Am. 3.617–30, which insists that letters will always find a way to reach their addressees.

10

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

them as not simply women who are unhappy in their personal lives, but as authors. Their status as letters, then, is key to a nuanced understanding of the Heroides. Epistolarity most profitably takes into account the situations of the heroines as they compose, asking why they write letters and exploring their relationships to their readers and intended addressees (not necessarily the same people). Some of the letters draw attention to their own epistolarity or to the physical circumstances of their composition, but critics often neglect the epistolarity of the remaining poems.27 Perhaps one of the most important aspects of the Heroides, intimately related to the fact that they are letters, is the authority they grant to their reader, whether that reader is their addressee, who is given innumerable choices, about whether to read and how to read, or the external reader, who must decide whose version of events to believe – the traditional story or the new ‘‘feminine’’ reading offered here.28 In the first of two basic ways of conceptualizing reading, the author is seen as superior or aggressive and the reader is compelled to enact an already written script (so Svenbro 1993 and, for instance, Acontius [see below, pp. 135–7]), while the other entails the reader’s active creation of meaning (a meaning that may or may not correlate with the meaning the author was hoping to generate). As Gamel and other students of performance have shown, the latter model is closer to how antiquity viewed reading (1998: 89 and passim); indeed my final chapter will discuss precisely the issue of authorial inability to control meaning. In addition to focusing on epistolarity, recent scholarship has also – often disturbingly – implicated the external reader in the troubled world of readership in these poems. If it is improbable that the letter Ariadne writes on Naxos will reach Theseus, how much more unlikely is it to reach us, who hold it (or, as I will suggest it does, to reach Phaedra)? Multiple layers are created in the Heroides by the fact that we, as external readers, intercept the letters and thus eavesdrop on a conversation clearly marked as private.29 Further, the fact that the heroines draw attention to properties of their 27

28

29

Her. 1–5, 7, 10–15 contain reference to their own ‘‘writtenness.’’ The letters themselves seem at times to ignore their own epistolary composition (as the Amores sometimes ignore their status as written poems), but the critic can never do so. Lindheim 2003 too is concerned with the power the heroines give away; for them writing often becomes yet another method of submission. Spentzou, by contrast, sees the heroines as ‘‘circumventing’’ the model of the powerful reader (2003: 39–40). Farrell 1998: 315–16, 334–6. Cf. Carson 1986: 97 and Rosenmeyer 2001: 67 and 95 on the inherently erotic nature of all letters and the wooing of the eavesdropping external reader in fictional letters. Spentzou well observes that the text’s precarious journey from heroine to us emphasizes the possibility of ‘‘interceptive readings’’ and the ‘‘collection’s eager need for intermediaries’’ (2003: 28).

Introduction

11

letters (blood, tears, poor command of Greek, etc.) that are not on the copies we see also highlights – within the text – the distance between the reader and the poem.30 We are therefore necessarily excluded from this community as we are simultaneously invited to imagine ourselves a part of it. Recent studies have also found Ovidian poetry to be written from the inside out; psychologically plausible and emotionally identifiable characters abound throughout his work.31 These characters are also frequently anachronistic; if the heroines of myth seem on occasion to be Roman dominae, that only adds to the pleasure of the text.32 With the growing interest in the ‘‘inner world’’ of the (fictional) protagonist that has characterized scholarship on Ovid for the last thirty years or so, critics of the Heroides are beginning to think not about what literary sources Ovid was reading before he wrote, but about what (e.g.) Phaedra might have read before composing Heroides 4. This opens up a vista of ways to interpret the Heroides: if the authors of the Heroides have a literary technique that is in any way similar to Ovid’s, our study of them may help us to understand him. It is a commonplace to say that Ovid wrote with careful attention to his literary predecessors; what has been less studied and what will be the focus of this book is the ways in which some of his fictional creations followed suit, incorporating not previous authors but one another into their texts. Because of the way the Heroides present themselves as avenues into the emotional state of the heroines who write them,33 my approach is based on textual and linguistic analysis, locating itself in the Pisa and Cambridge schools of Ovidian intertextuality while also drawing from modern criticism about the constitution of poetic identity through language. This way of examining the Heroides interests itself in the heroines’ influences and motives, concentrating on the choices they make as lovers and as authors. Although this methodology will entail certain assumptions unpalatable to some (namely, that it is possible to ‘‘get into the head’’ of a fictional character), it has proved immensely fruitful, changing the way the Heroides

30

31

32 33

Farrell 1998: 334–5. See too Castle on the way letter writing in Richardson’s Clarissa is ‘‘shockingly compromised (and compromising)’’ (1982: 20). Williams 1996 on the pathological persona of the Ibis is a recent and fascinating example. As Jacobson notes of the Heroides, ‘‘the poet does not read his character’s mind, he becomes it’’ (1974: 6). Wilkinson 1955: 96, who finds this phenomenon less pleasing. See Kauffman on the similarities between Heroidean intertextuality and psychoanalysis; both involve an ‘‘effort to interpret, to account for repetitions’’ (1986: 43). Kennedy notes that in elegy, ‘‘erotic experience becomes a web of intertextual allusion’’ (1993: 81).

12

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

are read, and so I adopt it through the first six chapters, returning to the ‘‘larger’’ world in the last.34 I posit, for the purposes of this study, that the women of the Heroides are conceived of as having gained access to one another’s words, whether through a kind of ‘‘virtual’’ poetry book, or because they are psychologically similar, or even because abandoned women must inevitably draw upon a limited store of vocabulary and rhetorical devices. In effect, the Heroides seek to create from scratch a tradition of women’s writing (in direct competition with men’s writing).35 This conceptual space in which the heroines compose together cannot be submitted to the constraints of the real world (just as Ariadne cannot ‘‘really’’ be expected to send a letter to Theseus). Indeed, reading the Heroides involves a suspension of disbelief like that inherent in reading any fiction.36 If we are willing to grant that the pre-literate Briseis can write a letter (in Latin) apologizing for her poor Greek, it is not much more of a stretch to envision that Hermione has read that letter, or that Hermione writes herself into Briseis’ position, seeking to create a place for herself in the world through emulation of Briseis. It is common in more recent works of literature to find characters explicitly reflecting on their own relationship to previous literature; this is often seen as a peculiarly modern concern with the nature of truth or the power of storytelling.37 Yet even in the ancient world, fictional characters are sometimes influenced by what they read in other texts. Ovid’s heroines are constructed in this way; each is enabled or (more often) crippled by her prior experience with literature. Ovidian characters are thus, like Apuleian, concerned with the truth of the stories they tell and with issues of interpretation internal to the text.38 Petronius too has been seen as presenting characters steeped in their own literarity to an excessive degree,39 and even the Odyssey engages in the retelling of a codified body of material (which 34 35 36 37 38

39

See Henderson 1991: 38–9 (on Am. 2.7–8) on the implications of the ‘‘close reading.’’ I owe the formulation of this point to an anonymous reader for the Press. In what language, for instance, are we to imagine Briseis and Achilles communicating? Don Quixote, Emma Bovary, and Borges’ Pierre Menard spring immediately to mind. Cf. Winkler 1985: 212ff., which notes that internal audiences of the Golden Ass provide interpretations of events that are often shown to be wrong. Quintilian notes that myth is not only untrue, but that it does not even seem true (2.4.2). See too O’Hara’s ‘‘interpreter in the text’’ who serves to show the reader how to understand the work (his case, Dido, who fails in interpretation (1993: 109), is paradigmatic for the Heroides) and Slater on the ‘‘reader in the text’’ (1990: 21–2). Cf. Slater 1990: 33 on Encolpius’ ‘‘highly literary imagination’’ and the ways the Satyricon demands rereading (ibid. 3, 138). Conte’s reading of Petronius is also useful, especially the notion of Encolpius as a ‘‘victim’’ of his own reading (1996: 2–3). The situation in the Heroides is even more disturbing because there is no generic switch; the women who think about women of myth are themselves part of that group (Stephen Hinds: per litteras). Barchiesi’s formulation of the heroines as prisoners of

Introduction

13

recognizes itself as a retelling).40 The women of the Heroides are similarly literary, and they base their writing not only on the versions of their stories as told by previous poets, but more significantly, on the stories of the other women to be found within the collection of Heroides.41 The heroines’ self-revision is a complex phenomenon, since they are fictional characters as well as authors. The process of gathering information about the world through literature is, despite several famous male acolytes, most often figured as a feminine strategy.42 In the case of the women of the Heroides, the ‘‘oppressive burden’’ of literature (Conte 1996: 53) is both disconcerting (because, unlike Petronius’ Encolpius, they are themselves paradigmatic literary figures) and deadly (because the models available to women are very limited in scope).43 In addition to literary concerns, the mythological aspect of the Heroidean corpus has justifiably been of primary interest to scholars. The fact that the reader of these poems already knows (or thinks she knows) a great deal about the characters upon discovering their names adds a level of meaning to the poem that is wholly absent from the probably earlier and influential Propertius 4.3.44 Engagement with mythology brings with it several theoretical assumptions: most significantly, that each poem situates itself within a fixed narrative moment in the myth as told in a previous source.45 The reader’s familiarity with that point provides information essential to a fuller understanding of the poem; the Heroides cannot be understood without reference to their literary predecessors.

40 41 42

43

44

45

excessive literature (1994: 112) is central to my own reading; at the same time, I would like to provide them with a way out of their prison. See too Spentzou, who casts the heroines as victims of erudition but also seeks to recuperate a space for them (2003: 59). See, among others, Pucci 1987 on the ways the Odyssey engages with the Iliad. Spentzou 2003: 5 suggests that reading oneself into literature aids in engaging with the Heroides. Brownstein 1982: xxiv. Women who read too much: Jane Austen’s Catherine, who tries to write herself into a Gothic romance in Northanger Abbey because she has read too many of them; Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, which features a character who has read too many chivalrous novels and maps them onto her life. Even Chaucer’s Wife of Bath has read much about women’s behavior. See Chelte 1994: 1–5 on the development of women’s voices from silence, as well as on the ‘‘silent sisterhood’’ of fictional characters. Russ notes that fictional heroines seem to be limited to falling in love and killing themselves (1973: 9). Most heroines who write, write themselves to death (Brownstein 1982: 75). See Farrell 1998: 336 on Heroidean writing as suicide and Bronfen on the ways in which, for Emma Bovary, reading prefigures suicide because she reads instead of living (1992: 157). Contra, Kauffman and Flaherty suggest that women’s writing is life (because it delays the suicide) (1986: 37 n. 15; 1994: 195–7). See Jacobson 1974: 347–8 on the relative unimportance of Propertius 4.3 to the Heroides; contra, Baca 1971: 33 on the significance of Propertius’ alteration of prosaic epistolary form to poetry. Cf. also Merklin 1968 on 4.3 and Heroides 13, as well as Do¨rrie 1972: 28–9 and Knox 2002: 126 on the relative dating of Propertius’ fourth book and the Heroides. Rosati offers a discussion of Propertius 4 (1992: 71–2), and shows the ways in which the Heroides are indebted to Propertius 1 (ibid. 86–9). Formulated by Kennedy 1984. See Reeson 2001: 1 on the impact of this seminal article.

14

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

A focus on the mythological histories of the heroines brings with it the necessity of concentrating on intertextuality. Because these heroines exist prior to the Heroides in various textual incarnations, it is impossible to avoid comparing the characters in the poems to their predecessors, even when those predecessors exist only in fragments. But, while prior mythological versions will prove useful in making sense of the Heroides, the reader should not expect them to be of primary importance here because of our focus on the heroines’ voice and agency. Furthermore, although it would be easy to blame (e.g.) Briseis for getting her ‘‘facts’’ wrong about the Trojan War, this book will not automatically make that assumption; it will, on the contrary, suggest that Briseis may have privileged information not available to Homer. Intertextuality, then, is central to the issues of this book. Indeed, Barchiesi’s statement that ‘‘arte allusiva’’ is the single most important aspect of the Heroides, that they are incomprehensible without it (1992: 10), could easily serve as the motto for most Heroides criticism of the last decade. This book will introduce the critical apparatus of intratextuality to this equation, for if everyone reads the Heroides in the context of poems about abandoned women, why not the women themselves? The Heroides are obsessively self-referential, a fact that suggests that the heroines should not be viewed merely as incompetent writers; they are rather staking a bold claim about the power of words – their own and each other’s.46 Irony47 is a frequent companion of inter- and intratextuality; Ovidian works often concern themselves with surface appearances belied by reality (and indeed, with the problem of defining the difference between the ‘‘real’’ and the ‘‘apparent’’). I therefore sometimes focus on the situational ironies available to the external reader who knows both the intertexts (previous poetry about deserted women) and the intratexts (the other poems of the Heroides). This reader, a puella docta like the heroines, understands that the women often re-envision or ‘‘correct’’ previous versions of their stories, but can also see that they sometimes do so to their own detriment; the suicidal heroine proves to be a compelling but dangerous model.

46

47

This extreme literarity, focused on the power of the author’s own words, is quintessentially Ovidian; Reeson 2001: 7 has a concise discussion of the phenomenon. Spentzou sees the women as ‘‘writing against Homer, Euripides, Virgil’’ (2003; my italics). Heroidean irony is primarily situational and manifests itself in various ways, the simplest of which stems from the fact that Ovid and the external reader each know more than does the fictive author; Barchiesi’s ‘‘future reflexive’’ is of vital importance to this concept (1993a: 334). Fyler long ago noted, ‘‘it is now common – and will soon be commonplace – to say that the elements of Ovid’s comic irony are juxtaposition and an untrustworthy narrative persona’’ (1971: 196); these features make it difficult to interpret tone and emphasis.

Introduction

15

In recent years it has become clear that the gender of the poems’ real and putative authors must play a role in the interpretation of the Heroides. The deceptiveness and apparent ineffectiveness of the Heroides are intimately related to the gender of their purported authors. There is a recognizable difference between the ways women and men read and write within the Heroides.48 The women fashion themselves by sophisticated use of rhetorical ploys, but often seem to surrender the critical distance that is a key to success in Ovid’s world. The male characters, on the other hand, are seemingly placed in a position of immense power, since they can either accede to their lovers’ requests or refuse them. Yet I shall argue that the women’s powerlessness is only apparent; it will become evident that while they may not always affect their own stories, they possess the ability to alter the stories of other women. My concern with such issues will place this book in a position to participate in contemporary debates about the performative constitution of gender and power, here, through writing. I should perhaps mention the two most recent books on the Heroides, by Spentzou and Lindheim, both published in 2003; each is much like my own in its focus on the women of the collection at the expense of the men. Spentzou’s book steps back from close readings and canonical predecessors in order to concentrate on the middles of the stories, that is, on the heroines’ words rather than others’. We share similar theoretical underpinnings, but she is more interested than I in the gendered aspects of the women’s writing space, and her notion of writing as ‘‘fixing’’ the women complements my own dynamic readings. Lindheim concentrates on what the women’s self-fashioning tells us about them as women, but also on the larger question of what Ovid’s writing ‘‘in the female voice’’ means for his own views of femininity. Her recuperation of the repetitiveness of the heroines as a rhetorical ploy is key to my own formulation; indeed, two of her case studies (of Medea and Hypsipyle and of Phyllis, Dido, and Ariadne) offer inspiration for two of my chapters. I differ from these studies in a number of places. First, I am interested specifically in authorship, and so my readings of the poems are more textually based than either of the other two. A second important point of divergence is our aims: I look at the material differences the notion of ‘‘reading’’ makes in the heroines’ stories – or in our understanding of them. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I utilize models of community and authorship as a way to 48

Farrell 1998 discusses this most thoroughly; see especially 318 and 328–9 on the writing of the heroines as ingenuous, and 323 on speaking vs. writing. See too Ducheˆne 1998 (with bibliography) on the letter as a uniquely feminine genre in later literature.

16

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

Ovidian poetics rather than to notions of ‘‘the feminine,’’ while both Spentzou and Lindheim read the heroines as essentially univocal, as expressing some ‘‘thing’’ about women (or about male constructions of women). READING AND WRITING WITHIN A COMMUNITY

Ancient thought seems to have viewed writing as inherently duplicitous; it was – perhaps consequently – often linked with the female, despite the limited literacy of women in all periods of antiquity.49 Yet the Heroides seem to reverse that equation (Farrell 1998), suggesting that men are dishonest. A clear gender boundary is being drawn, and the reader is inevitably tempted to choose sides.50 At the same time, even in the Heroides, neither men nor women, but rather writing itself is deceitful. The ambiguity of writing – indeed, of language – inheres in the nature of the word. The poems of the Heroides can therefore be viewed as unintentionally ambiguous messages, with the women forced by the complexity of writing into conveying information they do not intend to audiences they do not foresee. At the same time, as I have suggested, the usual notion of the women of the Heroides as sentimental and ineffective poetasters is misguided,51 since their poems have substantial effects in the poetic worlds that they create and inhabit. As we shall see, there are varying degrees of effectiveness, and the women’s apparent lack of control over their writing masks their ability to affect their world in powerful but unforeseen ways.52 The fact that most of the women’s stories do not have ‘‘happy endings’’ does not make them bad poets; indeed the topos of the suicidal or miserable poet, both male and female, has long been a compelling one.53 We can understand the complex status of the word in the Heroides as deriving from the gender (or inexperience) of its authors, but we shall see that Ovid himself faced similar difficulties in controlling the interpretation 49

50

51

52

53

There is little information available on female literacy in the ancient world: see Harris 1989: 22–4, 252–3, and 328–30. Cf. Hemelrijk 1999: 47–53 on what upper-class Roman women might read (primarily erotic poetry of the sort to get them into trouble). See Rosenmeyer on the ways letters, treachery, and the feminine are linked from the time of Homer (2001: 13–14, 42–4, 70). But for writing as ‘‘masculine’’ (with orality as ‘‘feminine’’), see Gamel 1998: 80. Spentzou well notes that the reader may be tempted to choose sides between the heroines and Ovid (2003: 15–16, 180): it is difficult to preserve both appreciation for the poet’s cleverness and sympathy for his characters. See Barthes 1978: 14 for the notion that waiting and love itself are ‘‘something feminine.’’ Although this is itself a vast improvement upon scholarship that viewed Ovid as incompetent simply because the Heroides are often repetitive or illogical (e.g. Vessey 1969: 355). This powerlessness may itself be a literary device; compare Ovid’s exilic pose of decline, discussed in Williams 1994. Boym 1991: 12–16, especially 13 on the ‘‘‘literariness’ of life and the transgressive vitality of texts.’’

Introduction

17

of his texts, so I prefer to read it as an innate pitfall of assuming authorial power. The possibility of misinterpretation is a constant danger; where gender may play a role is in the heroines’ inability to refrain from putting all of themselves into their letters. (The poetry of Sulpicia has similarly been analyzed; ‘‘woman’’ is seen as inherently duplicitous and, simultaneously, incapable of dissimulation.) Yet these women are vulnerable whether they write or not: we have already exposed them by our familiarity with their stories. In a sense, then, they have nothing to lose. I focus on reading, writing, and community out of a conviction that the Heroides themselves deliberately provoke questions about their own textual status. They are written – but by whom: a man or a woman, an author or a character? We read them – but how did they get to us?54 As many have noted, reading and writing within a community are key issues in Ovidian poetics; this study will offer a metapoetic reading of community that simultaneously broadens its parameters and shows its inner workings. I will therefore be concerned with the ways in which the poems set themselves up against one another, demand to be read and reread, in order and out of order, and constantly allude not only to the canonical versions of their own stories, but also the stories of other heroines and the actual texts of the other poems in the collection. In certain cases, I will examine how an understanding of both internal audience (the mythological characters envisioned as likely to receive and read these letters) and the heroines’ own anxieties about reading and writing can affect the reader’s comprehension of the poems. As the following chapters show, the heroines often arrive at the crisispoint that provokes their letters because of the complexities of reading and writing, which are highlighted – even exacerbated – by their exemplary status within the community of mythical characters. Everyone knows their stories, and the fact that they themselves seem not to has too often made them seem like puppets rather than manipulators of a literary tradition. The heroine is seemingly given the power to refashion her story, but the (privileged?) external reader already knows the end, so any rewriting will be merely cosmetic: her freedom is only apparent. Or is it? For me, the Heroides provoke the metapoetic question of whether we might be willing to take Briseis’ word (Ovid’s word) over Homer’s, Ariadne’s (Ovid’s) over Catullus’.55 How wedded are we to the stories we know; how unwilling to 54 55

See Farrell on how the Heroides thematize their transmission as problematic (1998: 308–9). Spentzou too accords the women of mythology both status as ‘‘speaking subjects’’ (2003: 23) and (authorial) power. Yet she seems to see writing as the necessary signifier of a loss of innocence (ibid. 29, 53–59, 144). Indeed it may be, but it is also the marker of the women’s first attempt to regain control over their narratives, and as such is not wholly negative.

18

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

view them differently?56 How far will we follow Ovid? The rethinking of traditional texts, and with it, the displacement of authorial authority are central to Ovid’s poetic project, as we shall see. In fact, the voraciousness of the heroines’ reading is paralleled by Ovid’s own Hegelian drive to rework all of previous literature in order to show that it leads directly to him. Ovid’s own fear of being forgotten is much like the women’s, and in a sense, both write to create community. This focus on the present necessitates attention to the ‘‘middle’’ of the story: the reader of the Heroides too often concentrates on the ‘‘end,’’ but the women’s own narratives offer an opportunity to look at the middle (Spentzou 2003: 10 and passim). That middle will, if we let it, revise the way we see the ending. Each of the women of the Heroides has been given the authority to rewrite her story, but not all use this power. Some refuse to make themselves the center of their tales and refer responsibility to a man. Some accept the challenge of reading and rewriting themselves as subjects, but even so select literary models that are inappropriate or even deadly.57 As a result, they are often unable to predict how their letters will be read – and by whom.58 It would be very easy to find these women foolish; we have in some cases hundreds of years of more canonical texts insisting that they must be mistaken to think that they can assume subjectivity, can write elegiac couplets that change the story. These are the very challenges that face a Roman author of Ovid’s time; if they are more acute because the authors are not men, that merely emphasizes the difficulty. Those less comfortable with the concept of fictional characters ‘‘reading’’ one another may find the treatment of intratextuality in this study more useful. One avenue of approach presupposes characters so true to life that they not only experience the (textual) world but are also influenced by it; the other examines the ways different parts of texts relate to one another. Because the Ovidian corpus is interested precisely in psychological verisimilitude, but also constantly refers to various parts of itself (this suggests that its psychological profile of ‘‘the abandoned woman’’ is designed to become more plausible with increased familiarity – and indeed it does), I will throughout this book read in both ways, but primarily use the vocabulary of reading and influence. 56

57

58

The reader’s inability to rewrite the stories is similar to the desire of the beginning student of mythology to know the ‘‘true’’ story about Helen. Remedia 757–66 (a key passage) discusses the dangers of reading the wrong things when you are trying to fall out of love. The dangers of reception, ironically, will plague Ovid in his later career. Cf. Casali 1997b (on the exile poetry) and Gibson 1999 on Tristia 2, with Chapter 7, below.

Introduction

19

OUTLINE OF CHAPTERS

Chapter 1, focusing on Heroides 2, raises fundamental questions about how similar the women of the collection really are. Phyllis, seduced by her reading of the letters of Dido, Ariadne, and Medea, conceives of herself as a betrayed elegiac heroine. Other versions of her tale suggest that she dies prematurely; we can now see that it is because she has been reading the ‘‘wrong’’ kind of poetry. Given Phyllis’ elegiac understanding of the world, the fact that Demophoon departs from her must mean that he will never return. She may well be mistaken, and the external reader who finds Heroides 2 repetitive and derivative replicates her reading mistakes: by insisting that she must die, we show ourselves to be as naı¨ve as Phyllis. Penelope, author of Heroides 1, provides a useful contrast to Phyllis. She waits for Odysseus for significantly longer than Phyllis waits for Demophoon, but without losing hope. At the same time, although she writes elegy, Penelope refuses to sacrifice herself to her Heroidean models and adapts only certain elegiac strategies. The second chapter falls into two parts. The first engages with Heroides 6 and 12, the letters of Hypsipyle and Medea to Jason. The two women actively rewrite their stories based on each other’s letters, demonstrating Jason’s power to turn any woman into Medea; in their quest to become each other, the women lose sight of Jason’s nature. The second part adds Oenone to the mix. Heroides 5 shares significant similarities with the letters of Medea and Hypsipyle; primary among them is that Oenone’s rival Helen is also a Heroidean author. I suggest that Oenone has learned from Medea and Hypsipyle to ‘‘read’’ Paris as another Jason, and so adopts their textual strategies in her own letter. What critics see as Oenone’s epistolary incompetence is in fact a careful skewing of the generic boundaries within which she writes. Paris has moved on to greater things, and Oenone tries to show that she can follow. Helen, writing in the double Heroides, similarly seeks to portray herself in the mold of Oenone, the previous woman who has appealed to Paris. Chapter 3 illustrates the ways in which not reading can be just as dangerous as reading, while also showing that sometimes the heroines have the power to affect their stories in positive ways through their absorption in one another’s texts. The similarities in the situations of Canace and Hypermestra do not lead, as with Medea and Hypsipyle, into mutual self-fashioning, but rather cause Hypermestra to avoid Canace’s suicidal letter writing strategies in favor of a more nuanced selfpresentation, one that (according to all versions of her story) brings her

20

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

lover to her rescue. Canace, on the other hand, uses her letter to her brother to show her father the mistakes he has made; an apologetic letter to her father would have been of greater practical efficacy, but, as this does not seem to have been her goal, it is not fair to make it ours. Canace’s situation is made more poignant by the fact that previous versions of her story suggest that her life was unnecessarily ended, and Heroides 11 might in fact have worked to preserve it had she not committed suicide. The fourth chapter further explores the issue of misreading within families, showing how Heroides 3 (seen by most readers as Briseis’ attempt to rewrite the Iliad to her liking) influences Hermione into finding her own situation intolerable. Hermione, already traumatized by her mother Helen’s abandonment, believes Briseis’ woman-centered version of the events of the Trojan War. She therefore fashions herself as a new version of Helen, of Briseis, and even of the now-captive Trojan Andromache, each of whom seems to her to have a life preferable to her own. At the same time, Hermione may be less passive a recipient of literary tradition than has usually been thought, and so Hypermestra reappears in this chapter as a model for Hermione’s conscious and rhetorically sophisticated re-presentation of herself. Chapter 5 compares Laodamia, who writes a letter full of superstition and hints of magic, to the murderous Deianira. The model here offered is a variation on the theme of community, insofar as Heroides 13 seems to suggest that Laodamia has little control over the implications of her writing. As a result, she is susceptible to recreating Deianira’s quasi-magical murder of her husband and subsequent suicide detailed in Heroides 9. After outlining the ways in which Laodamia’s letter repeatedly but unwittingly invokes supernatural forces, the chapter concludes with speculation about other causes for the presence of the supernatural in the two women’s letters, returning to the figure of Medea as potential ghostwriter. Chapter 6 begins with the suggestion that Phaedra extrapolates the character of her husband Theseus from her sister Ariadne’s letter. As Theseus abandoned Ariadne, so too, contrary to other versions of the story, Phaedra sees herself as abandoned by Theseus. Yet, entranced by her sister’s story, she seeks to reenact it with Theseus’ son Hippolytus; her letter thus substantially alters the Heroidean paradigm in the service of making her more like her sister. In the process, she writes in a way traditionally seen as ‘‘masculine,’’ duplicating key features of Acontius’ letter in the double Heroides. The second portion of the chapter explores Ariadne’s self-appointed status as model-text for the heroines: she explicitly claims that Heroides 10 contains all the necessary generic materials for

Introduction

21

a letter from a deserted woman, not merely those that pertain to her. While she competes with her Catullan counterpart, she also learns from her that writing a letter is more efficacious than speaking, a lesson she will teach her sister Phaedra (most famously, in Euripides’ second Hippolytus). The final chapter broadens the discussion to include Ovid among the poets, investigating questions of gender and power that the Heroides provoke, particularly when read in light of Ovid’s other poetry. Here I am interested in what the Heroides might have to tell us about Ovid’s poetry as a whole, particularly in the ways Ovid sometimes portrays himself as a female author, but also the ways in which the Heroidean Ovid suggests that poetry is a female act. More important, however, to my interpretations of the Heroides is the issue of authorial power when it is combined with ‘‘feminine’’ authorship, so the final chapter concentrates on this question. A few last points: first, the majority of Heroides scholarship has concentrated on the authenticity of parts or wholes of certain of the letters; as the question is not central to my reading of the collection, these debates will be discussed individually as necessary.59 The issue of whether the collection has been written by a single author or several does not affect my understanding of the poems: one heroine can react to the words of another even if both poems are not written by the same person. And, although it is impossible for two heroines to ‘‘read’’ each other’s writing if one is written several generations later, it is possible to write a text that appears to predate one which is in actual fact its predecessor. Two quick examples should suffice: the way Ovid (Met. 14.527–65) makes Vergil seem ‘‘metamorphic’’ in his description of the Trojan ships that turn into nymphs (Aen. 9.107–22) and the way Catullus 65.39 (Invita, o regina, tuo de vertice cessi) may seem a parody of questionable taste of Aeneid 6.460 (Invitus, o regina, tuo de litore cessi) despite the fact that each of the two logically ‘‘derivative’’ texts is chronologically earlier than the one it ‘‘copies.’’ Eco calls this phenomenon the ‘‘post hoc, ergo ante hoc effect’’ (1992: 56). Second, I sometimes discuss the placement of poems within the collection; there have been several studies on the Heroides’ arrangement and division into books, but no consensus has been reached.60 As Barchiesi 59

60

On Heroidean authenticity in general see Goold 1965 and 1974, Courtney 1965 and 1998, Casali 1997: 305 and, for an overview of the early history of the question, Koltowski 1960: 178–80. Kenney 1979: 394–6 and Courtney 1998 offer a series of guidelines for determining authenticity. Pulbrook, Stroh, and Do¨rrie suggest three books of five poems each (1977: 35; 1991: 204; 1972). Holzberg also divides the letters into three books, discussing common mythological threads (1998: 90–1). This tripartite division is not inherently implausible, but there is no evidence for it. If the poems were a single book, it would be one of the longest books from antiquity (over 2,400 lines);

22

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

notes, the standard order of the poems is not certain, but the burden of proof is on those who would alter it (1993a: 51).61 Patterns of similarity appear within the corpus, but the poems’ responses to one another seem more important to many readers – myself included – than their individual placement. The free interaction between letters eclipses a fixed order of reading; this fluidity differs significantly from the practice of other Augustan poets but is in keeping with Ovidian practices elsewhere.62 And, as is the case with the later Metamorphoses and Fasti, the reader who seeks order must create it. The poet’s refusal to impose an order on the chaos is in itself a bold statement of the complex relationship between reader and author, in which the reader is given a significant amount of power. This book will thus offer synchronic readings of the letters, but occasionally refer to their relative placement. The so-called double Heroides are not the focus of this book, as they engage with a different set of issues. Yet, although they are not based on the same kind of community, and although they feature letters from men as well as women, they will provide useful comparison to the single Heroides. The letter of Acontius engages with issues of reading and writing and offers useful comparison to Phaedra’s letter, and, since the figure of Helen, author of Heroides 17, proves a compelling model for two of the heroines of the single letters, we will also treat parts of Paris’ letter to her and her response. Abbreviations for ancient sources follow those in the Oxford Classical Dictionary3, and where the author is Ovid I do not cite him; similarly, references to the Heroides I do not typically cite as such. The only exceptions are for the following authors, whose standard editions are given with the fragment and who appear in the bibliography: Callimachus (Pfeiffer), Laevius (Courtney), and Sappho (Voigt). Journal titles follow the format of L’Anne´e Philologique with the customary American adaptations (most significantly, omission of second letters; so CP rather than CPh). The titles of those journals not appearing in L’Anne´e are given in full. Finally, Heroides quotations come from Goold’s 1977 revision of Showerman’s Loeb, the most reliable complete text available. I differ from Goold in certain places; these are detailed in notes to the text. Translations are mine, and are intended to be as literal as possible without, I hope, being too ungainly.

61

62

Van Sickle has suggested that even Catullus’ 2,300 lines could have been one roll (1980: 16). Birt 1882: 401–13 and Knox 1995: 11–12 argue against the plausibility of a single book. W. S. Anderson 1986 offers a useful study of book arrangement in antiquity. See Goold 1965: 45, Do¨rrie 1967: 45, Pulbrook 1977, and Jacobson 1974: 407–9 (a summary) for some earlier thoughts on the order of the poems. The order is also discussed at Barchiesi 1992: 245–8, and Arena argues for a political aspect to their organization (1995: 839). Cf. the 1980 issue of Arethusa on the organization of the book of poetry as a central concern of Augustan poetics, especially Zetzel 1980: 89.

CHAPTER

1

Reading dangerously: Phyllis, Dido, Ariadne, and Medea

‘‘Had not the lady died, would there have been half so much said of it, as there is?’’ (Samuel Richardson, Clarissa)

We begin our study of the Heroides with Phyllis, the author of Heroides 2. In this chapter I shall suggest that, like a number of the heroines, she finds herself seduced by the stories of other women into rewriting her own. As an inexperienced heroine, she learns about the world from reading, and her reading leads her to an inescapable – and unfortunately incorrect – conclusion. For she will determine that she is an abandoned heroine, and will therefore needlessly commit suicide. At the same time, she displays a surprising degree of control over her material, marshalling literary heavyweights like Dido, Ariadne, and Medea in the service of forcing her story into a new mold. Phyllis is a mythical character about whom little is unambiguously known, despite her frequent appearance in mythology. She is a Thracian princess, seduced and abandoned by Demophoon, her faithless Athenian guest. In every version of the tale available to us she kills herself: the story is a not untypical tale of unhappy love, similar in outline to the stories of many other women in the Heroides. It is, in fact, precisely Phyllis’ similarities to other women that form a key feature of her poem; the interpretation of Heroides 2 here offered suggests that Phyllis’ empathetic familiarity with these other stories causes her to refashion herself in their image. Phyllis’ story, which seems so typical at first sight, is not necessarily the story of an abandoned woman. Heroides 2 constructs a Phyllis who is similar to Dido, Ariadne, and Medea, women who were abandoned by their lovers. Some of the prior versions of Phyllis’ story, but not all, cast her in this mold; others tell of Demophoon’s return to Phyllis, who is prematurely dead by her own hand. This chapter will suggest that this Phyllis, as in the latter version, kills herself too early and does not allow 23

24

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

Demophoon the time to return to her because of her insistence upon her own reading of the situation.1 SOURCES AND BACKGROUND

Although we have only one line from Callimachus’ treatment of Phyllis, we can assume that the Hellenistic poet, as so often, had a significant influence on Ovid.2 The tale survives in three main versions, each of which varies the basic theme only slightly.3 Demophoon came to Thrace and married the princess Phyllis, receiving the kingdom as a dowry. He then left for Athens, his home, swearing to return. Phyllis walked with him to the Nine Ways,4 gave him a casket that she said held a sacrament of Rhea, and instructed him not to open it until he had abandoned hope of returning to her, which was to happen by a specified day. When the appointed time had passed, Phyllis cursed Demophoon and hung herself; a leafless almond tree grew at Phyllis’ tomb. The sources about Phyllis differ after this, and in an important way. One version says that Demophoon opened the casket, was struck with fear, and accidentally impaled himself on his sword. In the other version, he returned to Phyllis, but too late: she had already committed suicide in despair and been turned into an almond tree; this version also provides an aetiology for phylla, leaves, from her name, because the tree comes into leaf at his return.5 Critics generally see Ovid’s Phyllis as excessively naı¨ve because she has waited a full three months after Demophoon’s promised return date to write Heroides 2. This interpretation is based on an erroneous understanding of the context in which she writes. An emendation has been suggested in line three that would substantially change its meaning.6 According to this view, Phyllis, driven by her impatience to assume the worst, writes her letter the very day Demophoon is due back. If this reading is adopted, it 1

2

3

4

5

6

See too Am. 2.18.32: quodque legat Phyllis, si modo vivit, adest (There is a letter which Phyllis could read, if only she lives), which may suggest that Ovid saw Phyllis as dying prematurely. Pfeiffer inserts F 556 into his incertae sedis section; it probably belongs in the Aetia because of Phyllis’ traditional metamorphosis into an almond tree. Barchiesi 1992: 123 notes that this line is paralleled in Heroides 2.1. Apollod. Epit. 6.16–17, Hyg. Fab. 59, Serv. ad Ecl. 5.10; Tuscus wrote a Phyllis (Pont. 4.16.20) of which we know nothing. The story provides the aetiology of the Nine Ways, generally so named because Phyllis went to the shore to wait for Demophoon nine times. Heroides 2 collapses her trips into a single day. Schol. Pers. 1.34 tells the story in detail; it is also in Servius, ad Ecl. 5.10. As Barchiesi notes, Ars. Am. 3.38 (Depositis silvas Phyllida flesse comis) makes clear that Ovid knew this tree version (1992: 124). It has generally been assumed that Ovid used the other version in Heroides 2. See Fulkerson 2002b: 149–51 for more detailed discussion of the manuscript issues.

Reading dangerously: Phyllis, Dido, Ariadne, and Medea

25

becomes clear that Phyllis is far from naı¨ve in trusting Demophoon; she is in fact precisely the opposite, and is premature in her despair. Heroides 2, in this view, portrays Phyllis as keeping careful track of time during Demophoon’s absence: Hospita, Demophoon, tua te Rhodopeia Phyllis, Ultra promissum tempus abesse queror. Cornua cum lunae pleno quater7 orbe coissent, Litoribus nostris ancora pacta tua est – Luna quater latuit, toto quater orbe recrevit; Nec vehit Actaeas Sithonis unda rates. Tempora si numeres – bene quae numeramus amantes – Non venit ante suam nostra querela diem. (2.1–8)

I, Phyllis, your Rhodopeian hostess, complain that you are away longer than the promised time. When the horns of the moon had met to form a circle four times, your anchor was due on our shores; the moon has hidden four times, and it has grown again four times, and the waves haven’t brought an Actaian ship to Sithonia. If you measure time the way we lovers do – carefully – my complaint does not come before the appointed day.

If indeed the text in 2.3 reads quater rather than the semel of the manuscripts, Phyllis writes on the very day Demophoon is due back in order to remind him of his promise. Phyllis’ stress in line 8 on the fact that as a lover, she has been counting the days (so she knows exactly how much time has passed) reinforces this interpretation. That Phyllis writes now, after the full four months have passed, suggests that Demophoon has just become late, or she would not need to justify her epistle. Phyllis, on this view, is a nervous lover and conceives of herself as abandoned without any evidence beyond Demophoon’s slight tardiness, and so she writes this letter immediately after Demophoon has failed to arrive. By accepting the emendation quater, we can assume that (as in Hyginus’ telling of the story) Phyllis intends to die immediately after Demophoon’s promised and unfulfilled return. Given that in the second version of the myth outlined above, Demophoon returns to Phyllis after she is dead, there may be an unnoticed irony in this poem: Phyllis has perhaps killed herself prematurely, despairing for no reason. Instead of believing Demophoon, Phyllis is seduced into killing herself by what she thinks she knows, by the weight of literary suggestion that presses upon her from the other members of her community, to whom we now turn. 7

semel Goold with mss.

26

The Ovidian Heroine as Author A SECOND DIDO

8

Phyllis views her own life in light of several Heroidean authors whose stories parallel her own. As we shall see, her status as an overactive reader actually causes her own destruction, for she is, in effect, seduced into the fictional world. Far from being a naı¨ve victim of her lover Demophoon, as she has often been seen, she is a victim of her own belief in the potential of poetry to serve as a model for life. Like other women of the Heroides, she creates her own reality through her reading and rewriting of previous poetry. Phyllis privileges her empathetic tendency to identify with the heroines over her own trust in Demophoon. Her tendency to recreate mythic tales dooms Phyllis to write her story in tragic ways. It is not simply that she is prone to suicide and looking for an excuse to kill herself; rather she lets her reading of other stories persuade her that she has no reason to live. Phyllis engages with the poetry of the Heroides, actively seeking a story that will fit her perceptions and changing her own world in the process; as a result she makes herself into an author, but with a Heroidean twist. Several literary figures influence the way Phyllis views her story; the most obvious is Dido, both Vergil’s and Ovid’s.9 The parallels between Dido and Phyllis have therefore received significantly more scholarly attention than those between Phyllis and other women. Yet, as critics have shown, Heroides 2 draws in many particulars not only on the Dido of Aeneid 4 and Heroides 7, but also on the stories of Medea and Ariadne.10 While this is customarily seen as the result of Ovid’s intertextual leanings, my interpretation locates this habit of reading appropriatively in Phyllis. The benefits of this approach will best be seen if we first discuss the parallels between Phyllis and Dido, then move on to Medea and finally, Ariadne. Dido is one of the more famous women of the Heroides; before she appears in Vergil’s Aeneid, she has already figured in a variety of sources.11 Traditional Heroidean scholarship has been interested in comparing Ovid’s Dido to Vergil’s – not surprisingly, the former almost inevitably comes up short.12 Desmond, however, has recently suggested (1993) that 8 9

10

11

12

Restat altera Dido, another Dido awaits (7.17). Jacobson 1974: 62 sees Heroides 2 as a sophisticated game Ovid plays with Vergil’s Aeneid, and critics writing after him agree (Barchiesi 1992: 108, Knox 1995: 130, Lindheim 2003: 105). Outlines in Della Corte 1969; sustained argument in Barchiesi 1992: 108–9, Jacobson 1974: 65, Knox 1995: 127 and 130, Lindheim 2003: 105. Ennius, fr. 269, Timaeus, FGrHist 566 F 82, Trogus (Just. Epit. 16.4–6). Critics are generally in agreement that Vergil is Ovid’s primary if not sole source. On the ‘‘inferiority’’ of Ovid’s Dido, see Wilkinson 1955: 93, Means 1929: 41–4, Jacobson 1974: 76 and 90, and Adamietz 1984: 123–6.

Reading dangerously: Phyllis, Dido, Ariadne, and Medea

27

Ovid’s Dido is not a Vergilian heroine manque´e, but rather a character who has read the other stories in which she appears and who therefore offers her own radical and often hostile revision of Vergil and of Aeneas. My own interpretation of Phyllis develops this notion, seeing Phyllis as a reader not of her own story, but of Dido’s. Phyllis’ letter is, as many have noted, carefully modelled on Dido’s story – but not on Phyllis’ own story as other sources report it.13 Critics cite among the innovations in this version of Phyllis’ myth the following: Demophoon’s shipwreck; Phyllis’ status as queen instead of princess and her consequent freedom to select her own husband; her offer of Thrace to Demophoon; and her belief (2.81–4) that she needs to be married to preserve authority over her subjects.14 Many of these alterations seem designed to force comparisons to the story of Dido. Following Phyllis’ lead, critics also read her marriage prospects in the light of Dido’s. According to Phyllis, Demophoon is her fiance´; according to Dido, Aeneas is her husband. Because in the Aeneid there is considerable doubt as to whether Dido’s characterization is correct, most readers of Heroides 2 assume that Phyllis is similarly incorrect in thinking she is betrothed. Barchiesi thinks Phyllis is deluded in this belief but later notes that they are in fact affianced (1992: 108, 123). Yet the phrase Phyllis uses to describe their relationship, sponsor coniugii, 2.34, is treated by Servius (ad Aen. 10.722) as the step immediately prior to marriage (Treggiari 1991: 138). In the Aeneid, the legal aspect of the relationship remains unclear so that the reader, after hearing both Dido and Aeneas’ arguments, may choose between their competing claims. Dido assumes they are married; Aeneas contradicts her only as he is leaving, noting that no marriage ceremony occurred (Aen. 4.338–9).15 In the case of Phyllis and Demophoon, however, most texts indicate that they are indeed betrothed, so the confusion is likely to derive from the conflation of Phyllis and Demophoon with the story in the Aeneid. This is the first, but by no means the most dangerous, example of how the external reader may be limited by canonical myth. We prefer to believe what we ‘‘already know’’ rather than listening to Phyllis. There is another significant parallel between the stories of Demophoon and Aeneas: according to Hyginus (108), Demophoon had to rush to Athens to help his father Theseus regain his kingdom; duty similarly calls 13 14

15

Knox states the case most succinctly (1995: 130). Cf. Jacobson 1974: 60 and 62, Oppel 1968: 95, Barchiesi 1992: 138 and 149, Knox 1995: 112; cf. Jacobson 1974: 63, who cites Verg. Aen. 4.36–8, 320–1, 534–6 as parallel passages. See Monti 1981: 30–6 on Dido’s marriage.

28

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

Aeneas away from the woman he loves. Like Vergil’s Dido, Phyllis refuses to see a legitimate reason for her lover to depart; each prefers instead to focus on his treachery. While Demophoon’s willingness to help his father bespeaks filial piety, it may alarm Phyllis by suggesting that father and son are fundamentally similar; this is problematic because Theseus is notorious (especially in the Heroides) for abandoning women. Finally, Aeneas and Demophoon have each met their respective lovers because they have been stranded on foreign shores. As a result, Phyllis worries that Demophoon may be shipwrecked again, and Ovid’s Dido threatens Aeneas with further shipwreck (7.53–64). Beyond these general parallels, the rhetorical approach of the two women is similar: both list the help they have provided and both promise royal power in an attempt to make themselves more attractive (Barchiesi 1992: 108, Lindheim 2003: 99–102 and passim). Critics point to the similar tone of each heroine’s self-portrayal. But the guilt Phyllis expresses over her behavior, as Jacobson observes, is significantly more appropriate to Dido, who has broken her vow to Sychaeus by becoming involved with Aeneas (2.63; cf. Barchiesi 1992: 108, Knox 1995: 118–19). Vergil’s Dido provides for herself a quasi-epitaph (Aen. 4.655–6), which, as Knox notes, becomes a staple of the elegiac heroine’s lament, appearing not only in Heroides 2 but also in 7, 14, and 15.16 The lines immediately following Dido’s epitaph express the wish that she had never met Aeneas, another topos of elegiac lament (Aen. 4.657ff.). Dido, then, provides a specific example for Phyllis even as she establishes many of the topoi for later laments of abandoned women; it is precisely the pervasiveness of these themes that makes them so interesting for our purposes. There are numerous specific parallels between Phyllis and Vergil’s Dido including the fact that Phyllis calls herself infelix (103; cf. Knox 1995: 130; Aen. 4.68, 450, 596, 6.456, etc.). Critics have collected a variety of phrases common to the two women’s stories.17 There are also verbal echoes between Heroides 2 and 7 in precisely those parts of the story in which Ovid’s Phyllis innovates. I mention the most telling here: the spurning of each woman’s offer of her kingdom;18 the use of vela to talk about how the hero has cheated her;19 the figuring of the affair as a 16

17 18

19

As well as at Am. 2.6.61–2, Tr. 3.3.73–6, Tib. 1.3.55–6, 3.2.29–30, Prop. 2.13.55–6, 4.7.85–6 (Knox 1995: 139). See Fulkerson 2002b for full citation of parallels from the Vergilian and Ovidian Didos. 2.89 nec te mea regia tanget (nor does my kingdom affect you)  7.11–12 nec nova Carthago nec te crescentia tangunt / moenia nec sceptro tradita summa tuo (neither New Carthage nor the rising walls or the supreme command handed over to you touch you). 2.25 ventis et verba et vela dedisti (you have cast your words and your sails to the winds)  7.8 idem venti vela fidemque ferent (the same winds will carry your sails and your promise).

Reading dangerously: Phyllis, Dido, Ariadne, and Medea

29

crime.20 Jacobson (1974: 62–4) astutely compares the final distichs of each letter, both epitaphs: PHYLLIDA DEMOPHOON LETO DEDIT, HOSPES AMANTEM; / ILLE NECIS CAUSAM PRAEBUIT, IPSA MANUM (2.147–8, Demophoon the guest gave Phyllis his lover to death; he provided the reason for her death, she the hand to do it) is much like: PRAEBUIT AENEAS ET CAUSAM MORTIS ET ENSEM; / IPSA SUA DIDO CONCIDIT USA MANU (7.197–8, Aeneas provided the sword and the reason for death; Dido herself fell using her own hand). Phyllis’ address to Demophoon as perfide (2.78) is paralleled in Dido’s letter (7.79, 120). Each woman suggests that her perjured lover will suffer retribution from angry numina (2.43–47.87). Like Phyllis, who repeatedly looks for Demophoon at the shore (121–30), Dido goes four times to the grove she has built for Sychaeus (7.101). It is at this point that each woman makes clear her determination to die and her lover’s responsibility for that death. Those who read this concerted series of correspondences as a learned game are surely correct. In fact, Dido offers to Phyllis the materiam curae she herself seeks from Venus and Eros (7.34). As noted in the introduction, the women of the Heroides may seem very similar to one another. Yet perhaps we look too quickly behind the mask of Phyllis to find Ovid, for she can be seen as the alluding author, even altering her own story to fit better into the mold of the abandoned woman; she belongs in the Heroides simply because she has already decided she has been abandoned. Phyllis, then, is not similar to Dido solely because Ovid sees her that way,21 but because Ovid has constructed a Phyllis who sees herself that way. Ovid has supplied the background story, making her a queen instead of a princess and creating a shipwreck reminiscent of Aeneas’. Yet within the story, Phyllis chooses the salient facts. For instance, there is no reason why she requires a husband, still less a foreign one, although she worries that her kingdom will be taken away from her without Demophoon (2.81–4). Phyllis also suggests that guilt inheres in her behavior, but she does not explain why. She is too empathetic a reader of Dido’s story, and, given a few external similarities, cannot help but insert herself into it. That is why she uses vocabulary similar to Dido’s, and why she so easily convinces herself to commit suicide. Phyllis, like other women of the Heroides, reads the poems of the corpus, and bases her reading – and writing – of the events in her own life on them. 20

21

2.27–8 dic mihi, quid feci, nisi non sapienter amavi?/ Crimine te potui demeruisse meo (tell me, what have I done except love foolishly? For that reproach I ought to have deserved you)  7.164 quod crimen dicis praeter amasse meum? (what do you say is my crime except to have loved?). He does, of course, as evidenced by Rem. Am. 55ff., which notes that Phyllis, Dido, and Medea all died because of erotic ineptitude.

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The Ovidian Heroine as Author BECOMING MEDEA

22

Because Phyllis is in certain respects so ‘‘mythomaniac’’ (Conte 1996: 2), she accuses herself of crimes she has not committed, thereby assimilating herself to another heroine. Throughout Heroides 2, Phyllis shows her absorption in the world of writing; more importantly, she shows her eagerness to take her place as one of the famous abandoned women of mythology. It is therefore not surprising that Medea also serves as a tempting model, although Phyllis is less concerned with Medea’s punitive aspect than are other heroines: At tu lentus abes; nec te iurata reducunt Numina, nec nostro motus amore redis. Demophoon, ventis et verba et vela dedisti; Vela queror reditu, verba carere fide. Dic mihi, quid feci, nisi non sapienter amavi? Crimine te potui demeruisse meo. Unum in me scelus est, quod te, scelerate, recepi; Sed scelus hoc meriti pondus et instar habet. Iura, fidesque ubi nunc commissaque dextera dextrae, Quique erat in falso plurimus ore deus? Promissus socios ubi nunc Hymenaeus in annos, Qui mihi coniugii sponsor et obses erat? (2.23–34)

But you, sluggard, are absent, and the gods you swore by do not lead you back, and you do not return, moved by our love. Demophoon, you have cast your words as well as your sails to the winds. I complain that your sails lack return, your words faith. Tell me, what have I done except love foolishly? For my reproach I ought to have deserved you. There is only one crime in me, criminal, the fact that I welcomed you. But this crime has the weight and appearance of a favor. Where now are the oaths and the faith and the right hand pledged to right hand, and the god who was so often in your false mouth? Where now is Hymenaeus, promised for years together, he who was the guarantor and surety of my marriage?

Phyllis, it seems, is not only Dido, but also (far less probably) Medea. She refers to her crimen and then confesses that she has done nothing wrong (2.28–9; cf. Palmer 1898: ad loc.). Although Phyllis seems here to appropriate the story of Medea, the only charge that could be made against her, loving Demophoon, is comparable to Medea’s crimes (betraying her father, stealing, running away from home and, most egregiously, killing her brother) in Phyllis’ imagination but not in any version of the story that has come down 22

Medea forem, I would be Medea (6.151).

Reading dangerously: Phyllis, Dido, Ariadne, and Medea

31

to us. Phyllis’ sole crime, as she realizes, is to love unwisely (2.27).23 She does in fact love unwisely but not in the way she thinks; her foolishness is to be overly suspicious of Demophoon because she views him in the context of foreign men who seduce and abandon young women. It is this context that makes her into an overly impressionable reader of stories superficially like hers. In 2.31–2, Phyllis claims that she and Demophoon are bound by iura, fides, and dextera commissa dextrae. The assertion that Demophoon not only promised Phyllis to return to her but swore an oath is reminiscent of the Euripidean formulation (Med. 20–3 etc.), but the specific gesture is also found in Heroides 12: dextrae dextera iuncta meae (the right hand joined to my right hand, 12.90); these are the only places in the Heroides in which hands clasped together sanctify an oath. Other intratextual passages reinforce the similarities between the two women’s letters:24 both Medea and Phyllis worry that they will no longer be recognized by their former lovers;25 both women claim that they were easily deceived (2.63–4  12.89–90; 2.25  12.19);26 both blame themselves for being fooled by deceitful tears (2.51–2 and 12.91) and taken in too quickly;27 both mourn the loss of their virginitas (2.115–16 and 12.111) and wish they had died before meeting their faithless lovers.28 Medea is traditionally a powerful witch; one may imagine that Phyllis’ curse of Theseus and not Demophoon29 (2.13, discussed at greater length below, pp. 35–6) parallels Medea’s attempt to destroy Theseus once she reaches Aegeus in Athens.30 Yet Phyllis chooses precisely the least empowering

23

24

25

26 27

28

29

30

Cf. Her. 12.119–20, in which Medea claims credulitas as her only crime (see Ch. 5 n. 31). Medea seeks to portray herself as an innocent (like Phyllis). It could prove interesting to read Heroides 2 as influential upon Medea, who writes her letter in part as an apologia pro vita sua. Heinze 1997: ad 15–16 thinks that both Medea and Phyllis (at 2.50) use patronymics ironically (see below, pp. 33–4, on Demophoon as Thesides). 2.105 iamque tibi excidimus, nullam, puto, Phyllida nosti (and now that I am gone from you, I think, you recognize no Phyllis)  12.71 Noscis? An exciderunt mecum loca? (do you remember? Or have the places left you along with me?) (Bessone 1997 and Heinze 1997: ad 12.71). Each man also swears by his grandfather (2.37 and 12.78; Heinze 1997: ad loc.). 2.65 sum decepta tuis et amans et femina verbis (I, a lover and a woman, was tricked by your words)  12.92 sic cito sum verbis capta puella tuis (thus I, a girl, was quickly captured by your words) (Bessone 1997 and Heinze 1997: ad 12.92). 2.59–60 quae fuit ante illam, mallem suprema fuisset / nox mihi, dum potui Phyllis honesta mori (I could wish the night before that one had been my last, when I, Phyllis, was able to die honorably)  12.3–5 tunc quae dispensant mortalia fila, sorores / debuerant fusos evoluisse meos. / tum potui Medea mori bene! (then the sisters who measure out mortal threads ought to have spun out my spindle, and then I, Medea, was able to die well) (Bessone 1997 and Heinze 1997: ad 12.5). Cursing Demophoon would have guided Phyllis’ story more firmly into the (Ariadne-)version of the abandoned woman involving revenge upon the faithless lover. In one of the previous versions, Phyllis curses Demophoon; commentators often note the oddity of the switch here to Theseus. Medea is generally said to have tried to poison Theseus (Call. Hek. 232–3). See Sourvinou-Inwood 1979: 55–8 on the literary treatments of Medea’s hostility to Theseus.

32

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

aspects of Medea to imitate – Medea can certainly be seen as a woman who has loved and lost, but generally it is her supernatural powers and brutal revenge that characterize her, except in Heroides 12, which offers a revisionist version of Medea’s story that Phyllis seems to find overly convincing. FAMILY AFFINITIES: ARIADNE AND PHYLLIS

31

Finally (and most significantly, in my interpretation), Phyllis compares herself to Ariadne. Ariadne is another famous deserted woman who is also an author in the Heroides; her tale appears in many places, but critics are generally agreed that Catullus 64 is a major source-text for Ovid’s Heroides 10.32 Her story, briefly, is as follows: Ariadne’s father Minos, the ruler of Crete and a vast sea empire, demanded a tribute of seven young men and women each year from Athens to feed the Minotaur. The Athenian king Aegeus’ son Theseus insisted on going, and slew the Minotaur, finding his way out of its labyrinth with Ariadne’s help. He then took her on his ship, stopping at Naxos on the way home. Unfortunately, he did not remember to take Ariadne with him when he left Naxos, so she, in both Catullus and Ovid, laments his departure and begs for salvation. In Catullus’ version, Dionysus comes to Ariadne’s rescue and they marry and live happily ever after. Heroides 10 seems to presuppose this version as well, since it contains a reference to Dionysus.33 But this happy ending does not interest Phyllis, who focuses rather on the dual abandonment by father and son: De tanta rerum turba factisque parentis Sedit in ingenio Cressa relicta tuo. Quod solum excusat, solum miraris in illo; Heredem patriae, perfide, fraudis agis. Illa – nec invideo – fruitur meliore marito Inque capistratis tigribus alta sedet; (2.75–80)

Out of such a crowd of accomplishments and the deeds of your father, the abandoned Cretan has settled in your mind. The only thing he explains away is the only thing you admire about him. You play the heir, faithless one, of the treachery of your father. And she (I am not jealous) enjoys a better husband, and sits high upon enchained tigers. 31 32

33

4.65 Thesides Theseusque duas rapuere (Theseus and his son captured two women). Even if, as Knox 1998 persuasively argues, there was a previous Hellenistic version used by Catullus and Ovid (and Nonnus). Ovid’s poetics do not preclude reference to multiple tellings of the same story. Schmidt 1967: 495–9 and passim is useful on the differences between Catullus and Ovid’s treatments. See Jacobson 1974: 213–15 and below, pp. 124–5, on the sources for the Ariadne myth. Her. 10.47–8; see too Met. 8.174–8.

Reading dangerously: Phyllis, Dido, Ariadne, and Medea

33

Phyllis accuses Demophoon of taking only his father’s treatment of Ariadne as an exemplum, and of ignoring the rest of his father’s heroic life. Heroides 2 is obsessively – and here explicitly – concerned with Ariadne; Phyllis only raises suspicion when she insists that she does not begrudge Ariadne her divine husband (2.79). Yet Phyllis is wrong in her interpretation: it is not Demophoon who is fixated upon his father’s dastardly behavior toward women, but Phyllis herself (Barchiesi 1992: 108). Phyllis, not Demophoon, lists a catalogue of Theseus’ deeds,34 and Phyllis fashions Demophoon as a fitting son to his father. Phyllis has read enough poetry to know not to trust men, but has not read the sort of poetry that could help her to distinguish one who might be truthful. Yet, in spite of his lineage, Demophoon may indeed be telling the truth. We know nothing of Demophoon; we have only Phyllis’ portrait, and to her, he is the like-minded son of a man who abandoned a woman. Theseus is traditionally addressed as perfide; the transference of this epithet to Demophoon suggests that Phyllis may not be able to distinguish between the two men.35 During Demophoon’s absence, Phyllis is seemingly drawn to reflect on possible similarities between father and son, out of a (typically Heroidean) belief that the same things tend to recur in successive generations. Convinced that she, like Ariadne in that other story, has been abandoned, Phyllis then begins to see the (to her, overwhelming) parallels between herself and other abandoned women. We will see that family relationships regularly prove crucial to the heroines’ selffashioning. Indeed, it is unclear who Demophoon’s mother is; she is variously named as Antiope, Phaedra, or even Ariadne.36 If Theseus and Ariadne are Demophoon’s parents, it is no wonder that Phyllis thinks of Ariadne’s story as she attempts to make sense of her own. Phyllis notes that public inscriptions of Theseus’ accomplishments will be read (lectus, 69), which will include his abandonment of Ariadne; this will, in Phyllis’ view, inevitably cause Demophoon to abandon her. Her words here make clear her belief that the impressions formed by reading have an exceptionally powerful influence on the conduct of the reader. Once Demophoon has read about the actions of his father, he must replicate them. Because Phyllis passes over Theseus’ other famous deeds to focus on Ariadne, 34 35

36

2.69–72: Sciron, Procrustes, Sinis, the Minotaur, Thebes, the Centaurs, and his trip to Hades. See Knox 1995: 127, Williams 1996: 62–3, and Hross 1958: 114–15 on perfidus/periurus in general. In the Heroides it appears at 2.26, 31, 78, 102, 141; 4.59; 6.41 and 146; 7.8, 18, 30, 55–6, 77, 110, 118; 10.58, 78, 116; 12.19, 37, 72, 194, 210. See too Wills’ brilliant reading of perfide in Aen. 4 and Catullus 64 (1996: 18 and 26–30) and p. 133, below on Theseus as perfide. Antiope: Pind. fr. 176; Phaedra: Apollod. Epit.1.18W, Diod. 4.62; Ariadne: Tib. 3.6.39 and Schol. Od. 11.321 (which adds Akamas as another son).

34

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

she fears that Demophoon will read similarly. She thus illustrates the way she reads – to know about Ariadne necessitates recreating her story. This is a key point for my understanding of the Heroides : in the ancient world, reading means enactment and every woman who reads literally places herself in the position of those she reads about.37 Because of her reading practices, Phyllis is doomed to be abandoned and she dooms Demophoon by extrapolating his behavior from her own. In Phyllis’ imagination, the Thracians suggest that she follow Demophoon to Athens, letting someone else reign in her stead (2.83–5); Athens is significantly characterized as doctus, learned, which hints at Phyllis’ view of herself: she, a well-read lover, belongs in learned Athens. Similarly, Ariadne (10.63–9) realizes that she has nowhere to go if not Athens because she has betrayed her people.38 Each woman sees Athens as her only hope, but each has no way to get there and little confidence in her welcome upon arrival. Yet whereas Ariadne is truly abandoned on an island, and has no sanctuary even if she finds a rescuer, Phyllis is still a queen, and has done nothing that necessitates her departure from Thrace. Yet Phyllis reads her prospects in light of Ariadne’s rather more dim chances of survival.39 The departure of the two women’s lovers is unmotivated: Theseus left Ariadne for no discernible reason; Phyllis similarly offers no explanation for Demophoon’s departure.40 The lack of motive given for either man’s action makes each seem arbitrary and cruel. Why, Phyllis thinks, would Demophoon return when his father did not? Again, however, there is a key distinction. Theseus and Ariadne were on their way to Athens; their stay on Naxos was merely temporary. Demophoon, on the other hand, was Phyllis’ guest and wanted to visit his home. Instead of wondering whether it is reasonable to expect his return, Phyllis immediately envisions him with another woman: Quid precor infelix? Te iam tenet altera coniunx Forsitan et, nobis qui male favit, amor; Iamque tibi excidimus, nullam, puto, Phyllida nosti. Ei mihi! si, quae sim Phyllis et unde, rogas – (2.103–6)

Why do I, ill-starred, pray? Perhaps another wife holds you already, and another love, which treated me badly. And now that I am gone from you, I think, you recognize no Phyllis; poor me, if you ask who I am and from where! 37 38 39 40

I owe the formulation of this point to an anonymous reader for the Press. Cf. Catull. 64.177–82. Ironically, of course, Phyllis’ life will end and Ariadne will be rescued. According to Hyg. Fab. 59, he had to return to Athens to help his father fight against a usurper, but Phyllis makes no mention of this.

Reading dangerously: Phyllis, Dido, Ariadne, and Medea

35

Phyllis’ reaction is surely irrational, but it has a plausible motivation: Demophoon is the son of Theseus, who left a woman on an island and remarried, having, according to the dominant tradition, forgotten her very existence. Thus Phyllis suspects that Demophoon will forget her because this kind of ‘‘amnesia’’ runs in his family. The possibility of ‘‘another wife’’ fits in well with Phyllis’ view that this story of abandonment and betrayal will be replayed endlessly, as it is in her mind – and in the Heroides. Both Ariadne and Phyllis tend to repeat a few characteristic rhetorical gestures: Phyllis is fond of tricola, while Ariadne indulges in a great deal of wordplay.41 Each uses adamanta to refer to the harshness of the man who has abandoned her (2.137 and 10.109); the word appears only here in the Heroides. Further, Knox notes that the alba vela of 2.12, while a conventional phrase, may suggest the story of Theseus’ forgotten white sails (1995: 115). Each woman mentions Theseus’ accomplishments only by contrast with his abandonment of Ariadne; Phyllis characteristically offers expanded treatment (2.67–78, 10.130). Finally, Ariadne’s pereundi mille figurae are wholeheartedly adopted (and elaborated) by Phyllis (10.81 and 2.133–42).42 Even the landscape that the two women see is similar (cliffs and mountains), for each woman wanders the shore in search of her lover (2.121–2 and 10.26–8), looking out over the sea (prospicio, 2.124, prospiciens, 10.49). Finally, and importantly, Phyllis curses Theseus: Thesea devovi, quia te dimittere nollet; / Nec tenuit cursus forsitan ille tuos (2.13–14, I cursed Theseus as being unwilling to let you leave: but perhaps he did not prevent your journey); her words could well be Ariadne’s, since the latter famously utters a curse against Theseus.43 Phyllis’ curse of Theseus draws attention to the fact that she has not cursed Demophoon, as she does in one variant of the myth.44 It was suggested above that Medea’s hatred of Theseus might have influenced Phyllis; here it becomes obvious that, given both Ariadne and Medea’s presences in Phyllis’ story, the impetus to curse Theseus is overwhelming. Phyllis may suggest that she, like Medea and like Dido, possesses magical powers;45 she would then be issuing a veiled threat to Demophoon. In the case of Dido, magic is not effective in helping her to 41

42 43 44 45

Nullus erat 10.11, nisi in 10.17 and 18, voce voco 10.34, verbera cum verbis 10.38, acceperat, acceptos 10.51–2, duo, duos 10.56, ambo 10.57, etc. See below, pp. 137–40, on the ways Ariadne asks to be read as a model text. Barchiesi too notes Ariadne’s curse of Theseus in Catull. 64.135 (1992: 128). In Apollod. Epit. 6.17, Demophoon is cursed by a kı´ stZ. Cf. Knox 1995: 115 and above, p. 24. Cf. Am. 3.7.27 and 80, Tib. 1.8.18.

36

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

regain her love, but it may put a curse on Aeneas.46 This suggests that Phyllis has learned from her reading that curse magic is the most efficacious kind.47 HOW LONG IS TOO LONG? READING PENELOPE

Phyllis’ inexperience in love leads her to look for models, but the models she chooses are abandoned women, who evoke only despair. Her copious reading makes her aware that love (at least in poetry) does not often bring happiness to those involved. Yet Phyllis’ monolithic way of reading is highlighted by the fact that in previous tellings, her story is not similar – in many of its details – to Dido’s, to Ariadne’s, or to Medea’s.48 What is the reader of the Heroides to do with this endless catalogue of female abandonment and misery? One strategy, of course, is to read like Phyllis, to conclude that the stories are the same and women must inevitably lose. But there are other models in the Heroides, and it is time to examine what might have happened to Phyllis had she chosen to model herself on Penelope. We do not have enough of her story to know for certain, but I have raised the possibility that we are to imagine Phyllis, despite her belief to the contrary, not as abandoned by Demophoon; rather, he is in the process of returning to her (but too slowly) as she despairingly commits suicide. The story of Phyllis was famous, even overworked, apparently serving as a model for stories of female abandonment. So the ideal reader of Heroides 2 already knows what will happen, but the Ovidian version contains a twist: Phyllis, possibly an original prototype for Catullus’ Ariadne and Vergil’s Dido, may here be influenced by them into giving up her own story. That is, Heroides 2 offers the opportunity to watch Phyllis as she makes her story into the story we know. The disjunction between Phyllis’ interpretation and the larger context leads to a number of questions that have implications for the Heroides as a whole. If we read the Heroides as if they are universally about female abandonment, we may overlook a further irony in Phyllis’ story. To view her as correct in assuming her abandonment risks falling into the same trap as she has done. At the time of writing Heroides 2, Phyllis has waited four 46

47

48

On magic elsewhere in the Heroides, see below, pp. 107–21. On Dido as a magician, see Pichon 1909, Eitrem 1941: 61–2, Tupet 1970, and Austin 1955: ad Aen. 508, and, contra, Goud and Yardley 1988. Barchiesi notes that the repetition of per- in lines 35ff., suggests the verb periurare (1992: 135). Euripides’ Medea called Jason an oath-breaker as well (492ff.). For instance, Aeneas left after making it clear that he would not return to Dido, and Theseus set sail while Ariadne slept. Jason simply disappeared, and only upon hearing the news of his new wedding did Medea realize the truth. Demophoon, by contrast, assures Phyllis of his return.

Reading dangerously: Phyllis, Dido, Ariadne, and Medea

37

months for Demophoon’s promised return. Four months is not an exceptionally long time to wait; but lovers are notoriously impatient. How long should she have waited before losing hope? Certainly, if Phyllis had waited a year, or two, for Demophoon to come back to her, we could reasonably characterize her as over-credulous and naı¨ve. Or could we? The fact that Phyllis’ despairing letter is immediately preceded by Penelope’s epistle suggests that even this is a dangerous assumption.49 Penelope is offered up as a model of chaste womanhood throughout Greek and Roman literature.50 Her story, told in its fullest form in the Odyssey, is one of very few ancient myths in which women are viewed in a positive light. In the second half of Homer’s Odyssey, the focus turns to Penelope’s struggle to preserve Odysseus’ home for him during his twenty-year absence. Although Ithaca is now in crisis and Penelope seems likely to give in to the overwhelming pressure to marry, she herself shows little sign of dubious fidelity.51 As the first and second poems of the collection, Phyllis’ letter and Penelope’s may be read in close conjunction; although they are rarely treated together, the two stories share key similarities. Like Phyllis, Penelope had no idea when or if her lover would return and no idea of his whereabouts. Like Phyllis, Penelope was forced to assume solitary rule over her people. Yet, unlike Phyllis, Penelope did not kill herself or threaten suicide. Penelope manages to preserve herself as an epic heroine despite being placed into an elegiac poem (an example of how she ‘‘saves herself’’ for the epic Odysseus).52 Although she is now a pseudo-elegiac figure, Penelope utilizes only those elegiac conventions she deems suitable: she accuses Odysseus of dallying with a rival, and even imagines that he tells this rival how simple his wife is (rustica, 1.77). At the same time, she does not seem to find this potential rival threatening. She mentions that she too has admirers, but (in unelegiac fashion) she makes clear that she is faithful to Odysseus (1.84). These topoi are appropriate to Penelope, but she does not overuse the conceits of elegy.

49 50

51

52

Alessandro Barchiesi has suggested this avenue of exploration to me per litteras. Jacobson calls this characterization ‘‘the Homeric Penelope’’ (1974: 243). See ibid. 245–9 on the numerous sources about Penelope, some of which may have had an influence on Heroides 1. Critics of Ovid’s Penelope have focused on a variety of aspects of the poem: many readers were interested in the places where it differed from the Odyssey (Palmer 1898: ad loc., Baca 1971: 6–10, Jacobson 1974: 250–76, Kennedy 1984: 418–22). Kennedy has identified the ‘‘moment of writing’’ of the poem, locating Heroides 1 within the Odyssey (ibid. 417–18); Barchiesi’s commentary concentrates on the elegiac nature of Penelope’s epistle (1992). See Barchiesi 1992: passim and Spoth 1992: 46–9 on Penelope’s use of elegiac topoi. The issue of generic blurring within the Heroides is a complex one; Casali and Rosati are exemplary on Heroides 4 (Casali 1995b, Rosati 1985), 9 (Casali 1995a), and 13 (Rosati 1991).

38

The Ovidian Heroine as Author

I offer a single example of Penelope’s potential to disrupt the reading of Phyllis as foolish: Phyllis describes Demophoon as lentus at 2.23; the word is used throughout elegiac poetry to indicate dilatoriness, particularly in a lover who is not as amorous as one might like. Yet, reading Heroides 2 in light of Heroides 1 (1 and 66) suggests that here it has a non-amatory meaning. Penelope sends a letter to lentus Ulixes, who takes a full ten years to reach home (Barchiesi 1992: ad loc.). Demophoon, who is gone a mere four months, is simply too slow to save Phyllis. Penelope, too, differs from Phyllis not only in her waiting but in her repetitive writing: as she notes, she has written not only the letter we have as Heroides 1, but other letters, each given to any stranger who appears in Ithaca in case he may run into Odysseus (1.59–62). Penelope has a great deal of practice writing letters, but perhaps not much experience of reading them, and these two factors may augment her epistolary skill. Even her famous weaving, long seen as an analogue to writing, is an active rather than passive activity. This particular letter makes it directly into Odysseus’ hands (Kennedy 1984), and Penelope gets what she wants. Yet the fact that there are so many letters out there, each penned by Penelope, opens up the question whether Odysseus has received other missives from his wife. Our reading of the Odyssey may change significantly if we insert periodic, Ovidian communications from wife to husband throughout his long journey. Penelope is not necessarily the passive character some readers of the Odyssey envision. The juxtaposition of the letters of Penelope, little affected by meter, and Phyllis, who reads and so writes herself as an abandoned heroine of elegy, suggests that the reader of (and in) the Heroides must be very careful when appropriating or comparing texts. Indeed, unlike Penelope, Phyllis seems to assimilate everything she has ever read; instead of absorbing some elegiac trappings, she becomes a veritable elegiac cliche´. Phyllis’ choice of Dido, Ariadne, and Medea as models (peculiarly, since, like her, none of them is originally elegiac) influences her writing, causing her to read only despair into her own story. Penelope may in fact be the most apt literary parallel to Phyllis, although Phyllis does not see this. Nor do most readers. Seduced into believing that elegy necessitates abandonment, Phyllis assimilates Demophoon to abandoning heroes and herself to abandoned heroines.53 53

Phyllis’ confusion over the similarities of heroines is not dissimilar to the situation in the Odyssey, in which many of the characters wonder if Penelope will turn out to be Clytemnestra, or Helen, or whether she is in fact as faithful as she seems. Yet in the Odyssey and Heroides 1, Penelope knows who she is whereas in Heroides 2, Phyllis does not.

Reading dangerously: Phyllis, Dido, Ariadne, and Medea

39

CONCLUSION

Since the Heroides often concentrate on how familial relations affect the situations of the heroines, it is significant that Phyllis’ father is not mentioned in her letter. The lack of even a patronymic may suggest that Phyllis does not belong to any family. Perhaps it is because Phyllis has no family that she creates one for herself through literature. Indeed, the sisterhood of miserable women who write the Heroides have, in general, poor relationships with their families, often because they have run away from their families (Ariadne, Medea, Dido) or because their relatives have left them (Hypsipyle, Hermione). Thus each woman may write, in part, to create the family for herself that she no longer has. Heroides 2 is important to an understanding of the Heroides because it prefigures what happens to the genre Ovid created; within the corpus, individual poems are seen as a monotonous retelling of the same story. Yet Phyllis’ reading is, like that of several other heroines, dangerous. She presages the fate of all the heroines – the typical fate of women in poetry – simply by reading herself in(to) their texts. Phyllis, then, makes it conventional for women to be abandoned and provides a model of how (not) to read the Heroides. At the same time, viewed in a different light, Phyllis’ active manipulation of literary texts bespeaks a powerful authorial voice, one that alters her story even if it does not do so to her liking. The community of the Heroides can be detrimental to its participants. Because women are given so few plots within which to work, the authors of the Heroides are forced to choose from a series of limiting narratives. While Augustan authors are free to remodel their texts on each other’s without consequence to their lives, the heroines’ attempts at sophisticated poetry leave them trapped in the suicidal world of abandoned women (unless, that is, they are as canny as Penelope, a model for wiliness ever since her deceitful speech to Odysseus about their bed). Yet subsequent chapters will show that the women of the Heroides may sometimes help one another to change their stories for the better.

CHAPTER

2

Reading the future?: Hypsipyle, Medea, and Oenone

‘‘J’e´cris plus pour moi que pour vous, je ne cherche qu’a` me soulager, aussi bien la longueur de ma lettre vous fera peur, vous ne la lirez point!’’ (Lettres Portugaises)1

The relationship between Hypsipyle and Medea, the authors of Heroides 6 and 12, has been much considered by critics working on the Heroides; the letters are clearly in dialogue with one another, sharing narrative material, addressee, and even specific incidents.2 Because of the obvious similarities between them, the two poems are rarely compared to other poems. Hypsipyle and Medea, the two women abandoned by Jason, and the two who address their letters to the same man, do indeed form a diptych. Yet this juxtaposition is by no means canonical: unlike Medea, the pre-Ovidian Hypsipyle does not seem to have considered Jason the great love of her life; quite the contrary. Because of its very novelty, we can therefore conclude that the inclusion of both women, who will surely be compared by their readers, has significance for the poetics of the collection. As with the resemblances between Heroides 2 and 7, discussed above, the obvious parallels here may mask other, more interesting parallels. Thus, once we have surveyed the comparisons between the Medea and Hypsipyle letters, exploring their fascination with the world of myth and text (like Ovid’s, but more subjective), we will look at what happens when Oenone reads both poems. Hypsipyle, Medea, and Oenone each carefully present themselves in their letters as a certain kind of character, actively refusing particular parts of their traditional depiction that they see as detrimental 1

2

‘‘I write more for myself than for you – I seek nothing but solace for myself, even if the length of my letter frightens you. You may not read my letter at all!’’ (Letter 4). Critics since Jacobson 1974 have read the two letters in light of each other. Exemplary studies include Verducci 1985 and Lindheim 2003: 114–33, the latter very influential on my reading. See Hinds for the possibility that Ovid draws attention to the letters as a pair in Am. 2.18 (1993: 34); Jacobson 1974: 377–8, Maurer 1990: 144, and Heinze 1997: 38–9 on the similarities between the letters.

40

Reading the future?: Hypsipyle, Medea, and Oenone

41

to their aims, and this chapter will suggest that they contrive this strategy in tandem. SOURCES AND BACKGROUND

Hypsipyle appears in the Euripidean play that bears her name, in Apollonius’ Argonautica (1.609ff.), and in a number of other sources; most of them tell the story briefly or exist in fragments.3 In the Apollonian version of her story, Hypsipyle, after discussion with the Lemnian women, hosts the Argonauts who are journeying to Colchis to retrieve the Golden Fleece. She and Jason begin an affair, but neither she nor Jason appears to regard their liaison as a permanent one; although she offers him the opportunity to remain on Lemnos and rule with her, he is able to refuse without causing offense. He suggests that she send any children by him to his father in Argos, which implies that he does not intend to return to Lemnos (Arg. 1.904–8). Indeed, Hypsipyle and her subjects (particularly the nurse, Arg. 1.674–96) seem to view Jason and the Argonauts as a convenient way for the women of Lemnos to start anew, even if they do become genuinely fond of the men (Arg. 1.890–7). Apollonius seems to have been the primary influence on Ovid’s treatment (Zoellner 1892: 7–23), although the alterations from this model are significant and may suggest that Hypsipyle has been reading other texts.4 Euripides’ Hypsipyle takes as its subject a later part of the heroine’s story, her life as Opheltes’ nurse in Nemea after being expelled from Lemnos because she secretly spared her father during the massacre of the men by the women of Lemnos (cf. below, pp. 51–2, for her description of the events). It is not clear what, if anything, Ovid drew from the Euripidean heroine, although there are many ironies available to the reader of Hypsipyle’s letter who presumes this background; perhaps Hypsipyle’s expulsion from Lemnos, her servitude, and her eventual reunion with her children would have seemed poignant to the reader of Heroides 6, especially given the curse

3

4

Aeschylus and Sophocles each wrote a tragedy about Jason and Hypsipyle (TrGF 247–8 Radt and 384–9 Radt); see too Il. 7.467–71, Pindar Pyth. 4.251ff., Herodorus FGrHist 31 F 6, Asclepiades FGrHist 12 F 14, Kaukalus FGrHist 38 F 2, Myrsilus FGrHist 477 F 1a, Theolytus FGrHist 478 F 3, Callimachus frr. 226 and 668 Pf., Apollod. Bibl. 1.9.17, and Hyg. Fab. 15.254, and the various comic Lemniae (which may tell parts of the story). Jacobson notes the changes in Heroides 6 but does not take into account that they may be the heroine’s changes rather than Ovid’s (1974: 96). Knox suggests that Varro’s Argonautica may have provided the particulars in which Ovid differs from Apollonius (1995: 171).

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The Ovidian Heroine as Author

she utters against Medea, which will come true for Medea but also for Hypsipyle.5 The story of Medea, on the other hand, survives in two full versions, the Euripidean and the Apollonian; here (almost alone in the Heroides) we have an embarrassment of riches. We are, however, hampered in the study of this Medea by the complete or partial loss of (among other things) the Ennian and Ovidian tragedies about her; they would surely alter the way we view all later treatments.6 Yet the two Medeas we do have delineate the range of options available to a later poet. Medea’s self-portrayal in Heroides 12 adds irony to irony; much of the interest of Apollonius’ Medea derives from audience familiarity with her (mythically later but chronologically earlier) behavior after Jason’s abandonment as told in Euripides’ Medea. Her Vorleben raises the philosophical question of character mutability: was she always the kind of woman who could kill her children, or did her circumstances force her to it? Any post-Euripidean Medea engages with this issue, whether explicitly or implicitly. There are thus (at least) two kinds of Medea portrayed by ancient authors. The first, epitomized by Euripides’ Medea, is an evil witch who has been betrayed by her husband and will soon seek a violent revenge. The second, treated by Apollonius, is the young and naı¨ve Medea seduced by Jason into betraying her family.7 This Medea often ironically foreshadows her future self, as in Seneca, where she threatens to become [the Euripidean] Medea (Med. 171; see Spoth 1992: 205), or, for that matter, in Heroides 12, where she fears her future actions (12.212).8 What will occupy us in this chapter is how Ovid’s Medea selects from the body of material available to her a character that is not unlike her previous portrayals, but which also bears a strong resemblance to Hypsipyle’s character.

5

6

7

8

Eur. Hyps., Stat. Theb. 4.715ff., Apollod. Bibl. 3.6.4, Hyg. Fab. 74. See Bond 1963 for a discussion and text of the Euripidean fragments. The OCD suggests that these Hypsipyles are originally two different women; while this is certainly possible, antiquity seems to have known them as a single character and to have created for her a coherent life story. Cf. Jacobson’s caveat on the vast number of other Medeas that are no longer extant (1974: 109–10, with footnotes). Clauss and Johnston’s recent volume offers several useful studies and bibliography (1997). On Ovid’s tragic Medea, see Bessone 1997: 14 n. 7, Hinds 1993, and now Curley 1999: 8–51 on the ways the Ovidian Medeas interact with one another. Significantly, as Hunter 1989 ad loc. notes of the Apollonian passage, Medea is (even before her stage debut in Euripides) already steeped in intertextuality – Jason tells her the story of Ariadne in order to gain her help. See Hunter 1993: 14–5 on Jason’s deployment of Ariadne. On this phenomenon, see Barchiesi 1993a: 335, who notes that the innocence of the characters ‘‘provokes a reading which is absolutely not innocent.’’ The reader of the Heroides forces Medea to become Medea by refusing to forget her tragic future.

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Heroides 12 has come under frequent suspicion of inauthenticity, most recently and convincingly by Knox 1986, who concentrates primarily on verses 115–27.9 Among the troubling aspects of the letter is the frequent repetition of events at Colchis from Hypsipyle’s letter. Hinds has addressed many of Knox’s objections, suggesting that poetic texts about Medea are so difficult to authenticate precisely because her story is so well known and so often repeated (1993: 46).10 What Knox sees as evidence of borrowings from Metamorphoses 7 and from Ovid’s tragic Medea, others see as Medea’s recognition that she is a tragic figure trapped in an elegiac corpus. The issue is still an open one; it adds interesting but not insurmountable complications to our understanding of the two letters if they are written by two different authors (see above, p. 21).11 While some scholarship finds Medea’s letter ‘‘suspiciously’’ like Hypsipyle’s (so Knox 1986), this chapter, building upon Hinds 1993 and especially Lindheim 2003, suggests that the common elements are the point of the two letters. Repetition becomes expected, since the women read one another’s texts and use them to fashion their own self-presentation. SEEING DOUBLE: JASON’S RECIDIVISM

Since Hypsipyle and Medea write to the same man, it is not unreasonable that their letters might share certain similarities; Jason’s relationship with Hypsipyle is likely to be much like his relationship with Medea (especially given his status as ‘‘love-hero’’12). In addition to sharing an addressee, we might thus expect the two letters to share a similarity in content. And indeed this is the case: topoi and vocabulary repeat themselves, suggesting that Jason’s taste in women is remarkably unvaried, or that the two women compose less artlessly than might at first seem (or both). As this material has been well treated by many, I summarize it briefly.13 9

10 11

12 13

Heroides 12 also repeats certain details found in Heroides 6, a fact that, as Hinds 1993 notes, does not necessitate the assumption of inauthenticity. The parallels with Heroides 6 can in fact be viewed as strong evidence in favor of Ovidian authorship (Bessone 1997: 18). Indeed, many of the difficulties of the Heroides are resolved by assuming that the heroines are intensely aware of their own positions as innovators in a poetic tradition. See Landolfi 2000: 129 and 132 for other arguments in support of authenticity. Two recent commentators seem to take the issue as resolved: Bessone 1997 discusses it at 15–19 and sporadically throughout the commentary (Index, s.v. ‘‘autenticita` dell’epistola [argomenti di Knox]’’), and Heinze 1997 similarly has little to say, relying upon the arguments of Hinds 1993 (listed at 55 n. 266); see too Heinze’s 1993 article on the poem’s authenticity. See Beye 1969: passim, on Jason’s peculiar brand of heroism. The commentaries of Heinze 1997 and Bessone 1997 on Heroides 12 are particularly interested in parallels with Heroides 6; they are not cited for every instance below.

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The Ovidian Heroine as Author

First, thematic similarities: each letter contains attacks on Jason (6.5–18, 40–2, 95–8, 105–6, 12.1–2, 21–2, 71, 89–90, 111, 131–4), reminiscences about their time together (6.55–72, 111–12, 12.23–92), threats (6.141–50, 12.175–82, 207–10), and concerns about Jason’s safety (sospes, 6.147, 12.127). Finally, each woman represents Jason’s wooing of her in precisely the same way: he promises to remain hers forever (6.60 and 12.82) – with a lying tongue (6.63 and 12.11–12) – and weeps upon departure.14 There are furthermore numerous verbal parallels between the two women’s descriptions of Jason’s tasks,15 which are told in extended indirect discourse, and even the taking of the fleece is repetitive;16 the two women refer to it in strikingly similar terms. Hypsipyle speaks of aries villo spectabilis aureo (6.49, a ram noteworthy because of its gold), while Medea reminds Jason of her role in obtaining aureus ille aries villo spectabilis alto (12.201, That golden ram, noteworthy for its deep wool). While some of the multiple similarities of expression may be attributable to coincidence – there are, after all, only a limited number of ways to denote a golden fleece – the letters of Hypsipyle and Medea share so many commonalities that the reader begins to wonder if one woman has copied the other (Heinze 1997: 105). But how, and why? It would assuredly make the most sense for Hypsipyle to get her information about the events of Colchis from Medea, who was there, but it is also possible that both women write in tandem, or even that Medea writes her eyewitness account to ‘‘correct’’ Hypsipyle’s version of events or to emphasize her own centrality to them.17 The latter is in some ways the least plausible supposition, but offers the best chronological fit. Be that as it may, the constraints of chronology, here as elsewhere in the Heroides, are stressed to the breaking point (see above, p. 8, on the paradoxical way time is portrayed in the letters). 14

15

16

17

6.58 inplesti lacrimis talia verba suis (you matched such words with their tears), 6.63 lacrimis in falsa cadentibus ora (with the tears cascading down your lying face)  12.91 vidi etiam lacrimas – sua pars est fraudis in illis (I even saw your tears: they too have their own part in your treachery). The boves (6.10 and 32 and 12.16 and 40), which are aenipedes (6.32 and 12.93; see too aere pedes at 12.43), do not always belong to Mars; they do here (6.10, 6.32, and 12.41). The isse of 6.10 is matched by isset of 12.15. Each woman refers to the dragon’s teeth (dentes 6.33 and 12.95) as semen (6.11, 33, 12.17, 45 and 95), placed into the humus (6.33, 12.94); the men are born suddenly (subito 6.34; subitos 12.98), in both cases with a collocation of a gen- root and populos (terrigenae, 6.35, 12.99, genitura, 12.45) and later described as nati (6.34, 12.47). The dragon is vigil (12.101), pervigil (6.13, 12.60) and insopor (12.101), but Hypsipyle’s version does not describe him as fully. 6.13, rapta tamen forti vellera fulva manu (Nevertheless, the golden fleece was stolen by your strong hand)  12.108, et tibi, quae raperes, vellera tuta dedi (And I gave the fleece safely to you, so that you could steal it). Landolfi observes that there is no reason for Medea to describe to Jason the capturing of the fleece (2000: 128); it is equally odd in Hypsipyle’s letter.

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It is perfectly reasonable in the world of the Heroides for Hypsipyle to know the story of the Golden Fleece from Medea’s letter (despite the problems of chronology and communication this entails). But in addition to Hypsipyle’s rendition of Jason and Medea’s meeting and escape from Colchis, which she may have learned from the messenger of 6.23, the former also concentrates on her own similarities to and key differences from Medea. Both women focus on Medea’s (un)suitability for Jason: again Hypsipyle seems to be reacting to Medea’s master text (or the other way around). Hypsipyle calls Medea barbara at 6.19 and 6.81; this is ironically paralleled by Medea at 12.70 and 105. (Perhaps, in fact, it was Hypsipyle who reminded Jason – and Medea – that Medea is generally considered a barbarian.) In their treatment of the life of Medea the two women share much. Medea briefly summarizes her own history: Proditus est genitor, regnum patriamque reliqui (12.109, My father was betrayed; I left my kingdom and home). Hypsipyle, using the same verb, gives the same events two lines. She highlights by contrast her own moral superiority to Medea: Prodidit illa patrem: rapui de clade Thoanta; / Deseruit Colchos: me mea Lemnos habet. (6.135–6, She betrayed her father: I saved Thoas from the slaughter. She deserted the Colchians: my Lemnos has me). Both women characterize Medea’s loss of virginity as illegitimate,18 Hypsipyle contrasting this with her own lawful betrothal to Jason, and each woman alludes to Medea’s slaughter of her brother, although Medea naturally downplays it in lines that have received a great deal of (mostly negative) attention.19 Yet the fact that Medea mentions this incident at all may be due in part to Hypsipyle’s influence – if it has already been brought up, her decision to treat the murder becomes more reasonable. There are further verbal echoes. Both women refer to their personal enemies as hostis (12.182  6.82), a word not otherwise used in the Heroides in this way.20 Both women discuss their and Jason’s parenthood 18

19

20

6.133–4, turpiter illa virum cognovit adultera virgo; me tibi teque mihi taeda pudica dedit (She, an adulterous virgin, shamefully knew a man: a chaste torch gave me to you and you to me)  12.111 virginitas facta est peregrini praeda latronis (My virginity was made the booty of a foreign robber). 12.115–16, quod facere ausa mea est, non audet scribere dextra / sic ego, sed tecum, dilaceranda fui (What my right hand dared to do, it does not dare to write: thus I should have been torn apart, but with you)  6.129–30, spargere quae fratris potuit lacerata per agros / corpora (She who was able to scatter the body of her mangled brother through the field). Contra Heinze 1997: ad 12.182, who thinks it the regular word in elegy; the uses in Heroides 3.18, 150, 152; 4.6; 7.116, 155; 9.25, 36; 12.17; and 13.44, 75–6, 79, 138 refer to military enemies, while Dido’s use at 7.62 (of Aeneas) prefigures the enmity between the Carthaginians and the Romans; Hermione refers to Pyrrhus as her hostis (8.110) because she wishes to portray herself as a prisoner of war; Canace’s use of hostis at 11.44 (she is the enemy of her unborn child) is designed to show the lengths to which her father has driven her. No other woman uses hostis of an erotic rival.

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(cum . . . parente . . . parens, 12.198; simus uterque parens, 6.62)21 and take pride in their two children (termed pignora, 6.121–2 and 12.192) who look like Jason;22 they show their maternal instincts by expressing fear that a stepmother (noverca, 6.125–6 and 12.187–8; see Rosati 1988: 305 n. 3) will mistreat their children (Medea much more ironically given her textual future). Each woman expresses her horror at unfeminine behavior on the part of her substitute23 and hopes to be returned to her proper place in Jason’s bed (torum, 6.19–20, 131–2, and 12.193). Each woman reminds Jason that he gave himself freely to her,24 draws attention to her ‘‘dowry’’ (dos, 12.199–204, 6.117–18, and 6.137–8), refers to Jason as sceleratus or as having committed a scelus (6.145, 12.19, 12.141)25 and expresses disgust at Jason’s embrace (amplector, 6.95, 12.173) of her rival. Finally, each woman refers to the ‘‘fates’’ which have caused her misery in a remarkably similar way.26 Even when the heroines talk about dissimilar things, they use similar grammatical structures: Hypsipyle describes herself listening to the messenger studio cursuque loquendi (in the eagerness and flow of speaking, 6.39), while Medea tells of her son watching Jason’s new wedding iussus studioque videndi (at my order and with eagerness to see, 12.149).27 And each woman appeals to Jason on different grounds but using the same format of a conditional sentence: si te nobilitas generosaque nomina tangunt (6.113, If nobility and well-born names appeal to you)  quodsi forte preces praecordia ferrea tangunt (12.183, But if perhaps prayers appeal to your iron heart). When Medea speaks of her dolor, she suggests that it has made her speechless: Iusto desunt sua verba dolori (12.133, The proper words are lacking to my justifiable pain); Hypsipyle claims that her misery too is inexpressible: Cor dolet, atque ira mixtus abundat amor (6.76, my heart is in pain, and love, mixed with anger, overflows), and, prefiguring Medea, that 21 22

23

24

25 26

27

Hypsipyle here has the rhetorical advantage insofar as she attributes this sentiment to Jason. 6.123, si quaeris, cui sint similes, cognosceris illis (If you ask whom they resemble, you are recognizable in them)  12.189, et nimium similes tibi sunt (And they are too similar to you). 6.83, nec facie meritisque placet, sed carmina novit (nor is she pleasing in appearance or for her deeds, but she knows spells)  12.177–8, in faciem moresque meos nova crimina fingas. / rideat et vitiis laeta sit illa meis (You can make up new reproaches against my appearance and behavior: let her laugh, and let her be happy with my flaws). 12.197, te peto, quem merui, quem nobis ipse dedisti (I seek you, whom I deserve, whom you yourself gave to me)  6.134, me tibi teque mihi taeda pudica dedit (a chaste torch gave me to you and you to me). Interestingly, Hypsipyle also refers to Medea in this way (6.128, 137). 6.51, sed me mala fata trahebant (But evil fates dragged me)  12.35 et me mea fata trahebant (And my fates dragged me); see Knox 1986 and Hinds 1993: 28–9 on this correspondence. I accept the text of Bessone 1997 for 12.149.

Reading the future?: Hypsipyle, Medea, and Oenone

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she will not simply remain a victim: Quamlibet ignavis ipse dat arma dolor (6.140, pain itself gives weapons to even the fainthearted).28 The parallels outlined above are unlikely to derive from the mere fact of Jason’s presence in both women’s lives; there are also other similarities that point to Medea and Hypsipyle’s intimate knowledge of each other’s texts. For example, each letter begins in mediis rebus, unlike any of the other Heroides, most of which contain some kind of introductory remark.29 Medea is angry with Jason for having ruined her reputation, while Hypsipyle, according to Jacobson, is primarily distressed by the thought that Jason’s actions reflect badly on her (1974: 98–9). Jacobson’s notion makes Hypsipyle even more like Medea in her concern for her public image. Hypsipyle is in a peculiar position: not only has she been abandoned for another woman (a situation she shares with many of the heroines), but her rival is the infinitely more famous Medea. This situation explains her letter’s focus: she seems to suspect that not only Jason, but her larger reading public, may be more interested in reading about Medea than about Hypsipyle. Thus, while Medea not unnaturally tells the story of how she and Jason met, the appearance of the same events in Hypsipyle’s letter – that is, the meeting of Jason and Medea – is decidedly odd. Lindheim has shown the ways in which Hypsipyle’s adoption of the particulars of Medea’s story is part of her larger strategy: wherever possible (even if implausible), she will strive to seem like Medea, since Medea is the kind of woman Jason now finds appealing (2003: 117 and passim). To this I would add Hypsipyle’s recognition that she must compete with Medea on several levels – including, because of Heroides 12, that of author. Hypsipyle seems overwhelmed by Medea’s literary history, which she reads in such a way as to highlight Medea’s own power. For instance, she represents the messenger as telling Jason’s deeds in a peculiar fashion: apart from tua facta of 6.31, Jason’s accomplishments are not treated as if they are his – bulls plow, seeds are thrown, men are born, and then they die, but it is nowhere clear that this is Jason’s doing.30 Jacobson suggests that Hypsipyle, who ‘‘wields a sharp pen’’ (1974: 100), hereby conveys her opinion that Medea actually performed Jason’s heroic deeds, that Jason’s story is really Medea’s story (115–16; see too Knox 1995: ad 6.10). More generally, the comparative brevity of Hypsipyle’s tale (two passages in thirteen lines as 28 29

30

I retain the mss ipse for Goold’s iste. Bessone 1997 views the opening of Heroides 12 as interpolated. At is in fact especially appropriate as an opening word to Heroides 12 if Medea writes immediately after reading Heroides 6. See too 6.101–4, where Hypsipyle warns Jason that it is generally believed that Medea performed his heroic deeds.

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compared to Medea’s three passages totalling twenty-eight lines) mirrors her complaint – unlike Medea, she knows only the general outline of recent events in Jason’s life. Or Medea may tell the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece so many times in order to emphasize her own role in it, to show that Hypsipyle has got it wrong; what Hypsipyle has to hear from a messenger (not even Jason; 6.3–4), Medea saw and can describe in three different ways. The preponderance of similarities that cannot be directly traced to Jason, then, suggests that the two letters have in common not only the fact that they are written from women in very similar situations to the same man, but also that they may have been composed in tandem, as it were. Medea’s text seeks to show Jason that she is like his new wife Creusa (12.53), but also the ways in which she is similar to his former love Hypsipyle, who is assimilated by Medea to Jason’s new wife (Lindheim 2003: 126). Medea adapts information gleaned from Hypsipyle’s story to recapture her lost youth and reputation, stressing her innocence, her love for Jason, and her willingness to behave in uncharacteristic ways to improve his status (ibid. 128). Medea portrays herself, in fact, as more like Hypsipyle than Hypsipyle herself is (particularly the ‘‘new’’ Hypsipyle of Heroides 6). Hypsipyle, on the other hand, seemingly realizes that she might seem more attractive to Jason if she were like his current wife Medea, and so deliberately fashions herself in Medea’s image in sharp contradistinction to her portrayal in previous literary sources (see below, p. 50, on Hypsipyle’s Heroidean fascination with witchcraft). The notion that these two women read one another’s letters adds much to the traditional scholarly focus on complex allusiveness in the Heroides. For instance, the start of Medea’s letter, memini, ‘‘I remember’’ (12.1), signals an ‘‘Alexandrian footnote’’;31 Medea remembers not only what she has lived, but also her previous reading of the story of Medea and Jason in Euripides, Apollonius, and others. At the same time, memini may here signify a particularly Heroidean kind of footnote: she remembers Jason’s behavior not only from reading about the stories of Medea, but also from its parallel in her recent reading of Hypsipyle’s story in Heroides 6. Her letter may therefore respond both to her own multiple literary incarnations and to her Heroidean experience of reading Hypsipyle’s letter, of recognizing that both women share a common experience. 31

See Hinds 1998: 1–5 for a history of the term and Verducci 1985: 71–2 and Bessone 1997: 20 on its use in Heroides 12.1. Here the verb may also be threatening, suggesting that Medea knows the unpleasant truth about Jason (and will soon divulge it).

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Indeed, both Verducci 1985 and (more thoroughly) Lindheim 2003 discuss how the two heroines seem to play with the attributes of each other; Verducci sees this as a ‘‘peering through’’ the text by Ovid, who thereby accomplishes an ironic distancing from the women. Lindheim, more fruitfully for my reading, suggests (passim) that both women attempt to refashion themselves into the kind of woman Jason likes through their understanding of his past and present lovers. I suggest that each of these readings is fundamentally correct – Ovid is both operating intertextually for the amusement of the reader and displaying the women’s own attempts to verbally represent Jason’s desires. The ‘‘cross-fertilization’’ of Heroides 6 and 12, including familiarity with mythic events and even specific literary predecessors, is not unique to these two letters; it is part of what makes the Heroides such a fascinating series of poems. What is peculiar in this case, however, is that each woman seems to have been influenced by the other (rather than, as elsewhere in this study, the less complicated case of one woman reading another). Medea and Hypsipyle are presented in other sources as very different kinds of characters, so their reliance on one another’s traits is especially marked.32 Each woman then, despite her apparently different character, has adopted essentially the same strategy – since she was not able to keep Jason, she will form herself into the other kind of woman who seems to appeal to him (here I am in complete agreement with Lindheim’s reading). Medea’s traditional portrait, however, is twofold, and this will complicate a reading of Heroides 6 and 12. As Medea shows herself to be like Jason’s previous and current partners in her naı¨vete and blamelessness, she also disturbingly but inevitably reminds the reader of herself before Jason’s arrival in Colchis. Bessone’s commentary on Heroides 12 focuses on the ways in which Medea rewrites herself as an elegiac figure, thereby drawing attention to the tensions between this new elegiac Medea and her traditional tragic portrayal (1997: 5, 66, and passim). At the same time, in keeping with my focus on what the women gain by their authorial self-fashioning and what is at stake for the reader and for Ovid in this transaction, I want to look at how the results of Medea and Hypsipyle’s reading of one another’s stories may in fact change our understanding of them. Neither letter alters the received myth – at least on the surface: Jason leaves Hypsipyle, never to return, and later does precisely the same to Medea, who is more effective in avenging herself. Both letters thus 32

And has been noticed by many. See especially Barsby 1978: 17, Winsor 1963: 437 and Hinds 1993, who finds point in the repetitiveness: ‘‘It is always the same story with Jason and his women’’ (28).

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The Ovidian Heroine as Author

fit into the traditional Heroidean paradigm of being ultimately fruitless in terms of the traditional story. Yet my reading will suggest that Heroides 6 may play a significant role in determining that myth. We shall see that Hypsipyle, by successfully reinventing herself as a Medea-figure, can be seen as directly responsible for the events that precipitate Heroides 12.33 LOVE HURTS: HYPSIPYLE’S CURSE

One of the things Hypsipyle has learned from her reading is that Medea is a witch; she discourses on Medea’s magical abilities for ten lines (6.83–93) and ends her list of Medea’s powers with et quae nescierim melius (and [she knows] other things which I would be better off not knowing, 6.93). This line is traditionally read as an indication of the difference between the two women: Hypsipyle is squeamish even thinking about the nasty things Medea does. Yet the perfect subjunctive implies differently, suggesting that Hypsipyle does know much about witchcraft (but would prefer not to under different circumstances). In no extant source does Hypsipyle appear as a practitioner of magic; it is only with reference to Medea’s story that her newfound supernatural expertise makes sense. According to Lindheim’s reading, this expertise is a masquerade: if Jason now likes evil sorceresses, Hypsipyle will study to become one (2003: 124). On this view, Hypsipyle misinterprets the situation; by assuming that Jason will permanently remain with any woman, she shows that she has fundamentally not understood him. She has furthermore misunderstood the nature of love: while Hypsipyle thinks Medea has won Jason by magic, Medea denies that this is so (in fact, she appears to be directly answering Hypsipyle’s charge, especially given the igitur of 12.163).34 Similarly, Medea’s repeated reference to her merits (meritum, 12.21, 82, 192 (the second occurrence in the mouth of Jason), merui, 12.197) may seek to answer Hypsipyle’s indignant question whether Medea has merited (emeruit, 6.138) Jason by her deeds (Heinze 1997: ad 12.21). I will suggest below that Hypsipyle may be more cunning than she seems. 33

34

As Jolivet notes, what happens in Heroides 6 has a real influence on the myth; in effect, Hypsipyle brings on Medea’s tragedy (2001: 283). 6.97–8, Scilicet ut tauros, ita te iuga ferre coegit, / quaque feros anguis, te quoque mulcet ope (I suppose just like the bulls, she forced you to bear the yoke, and she charmed you with the same resources as she did the savage snakes)  12.163–4, Serpentis igitur potui taurosque furentes, / unum non potui perdomuisse virum (Well then, I was able to tame snakes and raging bulls, but I was not able to tame a single man). Both women use the plural for ‘‘snakes,’’ although they refer to the dragon (Knox 1995: ad 6.98).

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More important than the effects these letters have on Jason (or the lack thereof) is what they tell us about the assumption of the challenge of authorship in the Heroides. We return briefly to the canonical versions of Medea and Hypsipyle in order to see how different these portrayals really are from what we might expect. Heroides 12 succeeds in describing a Medea who is innocently Apollonian and yet frighteningly Euripidean; even as the poem makes Medea guilty from her own pen, she is exculpated by Heroides 6, which suggests that this is what Jason does to women.35 This enlarges fruitfully on what many have seen as the essentially sympathetic nature of Euripides’ Medea – reading ‘‘in between’’ that story, we may have greater sympathy for Medea than before. If we can believe her (and the portrayal of her in the Argonautica, seen as prefiguring the Euripidean version rather than in competition with it, suggests that it is not an unreasonable thought), Medea herself was once like Creusa in her innocence (12.25–6). Whereas Medea’s revenge against Jason is a watchword for barbarousness and evil (and is hinted at in most versions even when the killing is not yet conceived), most readers of the Heroides find to their surprise that the ‘‘Medea’’ of the collection is really Hypsipyle (Verducci 1985: 66); this twist opens up several interesting ways to read the two letters together. Indeed, the Heroidean Medea seems relatively innocent, particularly when her threats are compared to Hypsipyle’s murderous rage.36 While Medea is still in the early stages of effecting her revenge and coyly refuses to divulge her plans – if in fact she has made them – Hypsipyle has her actions planned to the last detail: if she ever sees Jason and Medea again, she will spare Jason’s life but drench herself in the blood of Medea: Paelicis ipsa meos inplessem sanguine vultus, / Quosque veneficiis abstulit illa suis (6.149–50, I myself would have filled my face with the blood of your mistress and the face [i.e. yours] that she took away from me by her poisons). This couplet appears immediately after Hypsipyle claims to be mitis, gentle (6.148). Hypsipyle’s villainousness under the influence of Jason (and Medea) is especially surprising given that she is known for her piety (6.137; cf. Hyg. Fab. 254.2). Yet she now claims to understand why her countrywomen killed all the men of Lemnos: Lemniadum facinus culpo, non miror, Iason (6.139, Jason, I blame the crime of the Lemnian women, but I do not 35

36

Pace Jacobson 1974: 117–18, which presumes slavish reliance upon Apollonius. But see Jacobson, especially at ibid. 111–13, on the murder of Apsyrtus (in Ovid by Medea and in Apollonius by Jason). Cf. Newlands 1997: 179 on the benevolent portrayal of Medea in Heroides 12 and Jacobson 1974: 104 on Hypsipyle’s indecency as compared to Medea. Contra, Bessone 1997: 13 (who calls Medea the ‘‘most aggressive’’ of the heroines).

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The Ovidian Heroine as Author

wonder at it). Significantly, the offense of the men of Lemnos was sexual, and their wives killed them for it.37 Hypsipyle’s words leave open the possibility that murderous jealousy is simply a defining characteristic of her people; more importantly, they suggest that her courageous decision to save her father can be attributed rather to her inexperience with men than to her famed piety. Until Jason’s arrival (or more properly, departure), she did not know what men were like. It is only now, under the tutelage of Medea and the rest of the heroines, that Hypsipyle realizes that all men are, like the men of Lemnos, susceptible to other women. The similarities between the two women’s situations upon their abandonment by Jason are indeed striking. Yet there is even more to the story. Hypsipyle curses Medea in a way which is not only immensely nasty, but also happens to prefigure down to the most precise detail what will happen to Medea once Jason loses interest in her:38 Quod gemit Hypsipyle, lecti quoque subnuba nostri Maereat et leges sentiat ipsa suas; Utque ego destituor coniunx materque duorum, Cum totidem natis orba sit illa viro!39 Nec male parta diu teneat peiusque relinquat – Exulet et toto quaerat in orbe fugam! Quam fratri germana fuit miseroque parenti Filia, tam natis, tam sit acerba viro! Cum mare, cum terras consumpserit, aera temptet; Erret inops, exspes, caede cruenta sua! Haec ego coniugio fraudata Thoantias oro. Vivite devoto nuptaque virque toro! (6.153–64)

What Hypsipyle mourns, let too the pretender to my bed also bemoan, and let her feel her own laws: just as I, a wife and mother of two, am deserted, may she be bereft of a husband along with so many sons. May she not keep for a long time the things she has unfairly obtained, and may she give them up in a worse way; may she be an exile and seek flight in the whole world. The kind of sister she was to her brother and daughter to her poor father, may she be so cruel to her sons and husband. When she has used up the sea and the land, may she try the air; may she wander, resourceless and without hope, bloody with the killing of her own family. I, the daughter of Thoas defrauded of a marriage, pray for this. May you – wife and husband – live in a cursed bed! 37 38

39

On the Lemnians, see especially Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1.609–39. See Rosati 1988: 305. Heroides 6 is one of the few poems in the corpus that Jacobson reads ironically because it presupposes knowledge of other stories of Hypsipyle and Medea (1974: 102). Reading, with Knox 1995, cum for a.

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Hypsipyle’s curse is not merely a wish that Medea suffer a fate similar to hers; it is also an impossibly accurate rendering of the events of Medea’s later life. Critics generally read this as Ovid’s (intrusive) inability to resist a joke, an interpretation that obfuscates more than it clarifies.40 Even if this passage is evidence of Ovid’s excessive playfulness, why is it Hypsipyle, rather than Phaedra, who knows the future? We will soon see that her powerful curse affects not only Medea, but perhaps also Oenone, the author of Heroides 5 (see below, p. 64). I suggest that, instead of blaming Ovid, we can understand Hypsipyle’s new Medea-image as the impetus for her schooling in magic, and that we can take her seriously. We do not have a version of Jason’s story in which he and Medea land on Lemnos. But are we really so sure that Hypsipyle is faking it? For my purposes the important question is not how Hypsipyle knows so much about Medea’s future, but whether we can imagine her as causing it by this very curse.41 The Hypsipyle who was so charming in Apollonius has turned herself (or has been turned by Jason?) into a witch, capable of uttering a curse as powerful (and deadly) as anything Medea could do.42 Watching Hypsipyle react to Medea puts the latter in a new light. Once the two women’s stories have become linked by being in the Heroides, it is easy to view Medea as getting what she deserves for stealing another woman’s husband. This is surely how Hypsipyle sees it. This very linkage, however, makes it concomitantly difficult not to view Medea as the victim of her own naı¨ve trust in Jason. Perhaps Medea even kills her children because of Hypsipyle’s curse. Taking this notion into account, however briefly, will indeed change the way we read Euripides’ Medea. Rather than colluding with Hypsipyle (and other women of the Heroides) in blaming everyone but the man who is responsible, perhaps we should reflect on Hypsipyle’s uncharacteristic behavior in the light of her usual piety. Jason, by his endlessly repetitive cycle of seduction and desertion, makes women into evil sorceresses. If the innocent Hypsipyle reacts this way to Jason, how culpable can we find Medea, particularly given our previous reading of Apollonius’ Medea, swept off of her feet by Jason’s charms, and even more particularly if she has been cursed by

40 41 42

Cf. Jacobson 1974: 103 and Verducci 1985: 59 on Hypsipyle’s ‘‘reading list.’’ For another example of magical causation in the Heroides, Fulkerson 2002a and below, pp. 119–21. Palmer notes that Hypsipyle was traditionally the granddaughter of Ariadne (ad 6.114). This fact, overlooked by many, might explain why her curse against Medea is so efficacious, since the Ariadne of Catullus 64 utters one of the most famous – and effective – imprecations of antiquity. See Chapter 6 for other eruptions of Ariadne into the corpus of the Heroides.

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Hypsipyle to behave as she does in Euripides?43 Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of Ovid’s Hypsipyle is her movement from innocent daughter to vicious would-be killer of her enemies. Jason, it seems, has the power to turn any woman into Medea; the fact that Hypsipyle is a kinswoman of the murderous Lemnians perhaps provides a genealogical disposition for her ‘‘barbarousness’’ in Heroides 6, but Jason is the catalyst. The influence of Medea and Hypsipyle on each other has larger implications for a study of the Heroides. The victimization of the authors of the Heroides by the men in their lives is a factor in their epistolary self-portrayal, but once they have been given the opportunity to tell their own stories, they also actively remake their traditional images, trying out alternate, contingent identities for themselves. To return to specifics: Medea and Hypsipyle are demonstrably familiar with the traditional poetic narratives of their own and each other’s stories, but they often seem to reject those stories as not truthful enough or as no longer fulfilling their proper function. Medea has grown weary of being a guilty witch, and so attempts to rewrite her story; Hypsipyle is no longer convinced that her perpetual goodness brings her any real benefit and so, for the space of a single poem, explores an alternate identity. It is precisely this play with the fluidity of identity (even in a story as ‘‘fixed’’ by mythic retelling as that of Medea’s) that signals the authorial power of the women who write the Heroides at the same time as it enables the reader to trap them in their canonical narratives. Although I will not explore them here, there are also interesting connections to be made between Hypsipyle and other women. Both Hypsipyle and Dido draw (too late) the obvious conclusions from the ‘‘serial monogamy’’ exhibited by their lovers. Dido realizes that the story of the abandoned Creusa should have alerted her to beware of Aeneas, and Hypsipyle now suspects that Jason’s behavior may be characteristic.44 This conclusion is all the more plausible for the reader of Medea’s letter, who knows that Jason has left her for another woman, coincidentally (?) also named Creusa. Hypsipyle shares too with Dido and Phyllis many of the features outlined above (pp. 27–9): all three women have political authority and welcome strangers 43

44

Jacobson and Verducci believe that Jason gets two Medeas (1974: 118; 1985: 63–5; the latter sees Heroides 6 as the exposure of Hypsipyle’s true personality). My reading rather suggests that Jason’s behavior turns all women into Medeas. Others have seen this tendency in the Apollonian Jason; see especially Clare 1995: 67 and 84 n. 25, Hunter 1989 ad 997–1004 and Dyck 1989: 460, who note the significance of Medea’s assertion that she is not Ariadne. Leigh 1997: 606 and Dyck 1989: 455 note how the Apollonian Medea has been carefully constructed to foreshadow her Euripidean counterpart. 7.17, alter habendus amor tibi restat et altera Dido (Another love remains to be had by you, and another Dido).

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to their shores; all three expect their liaison to remain permanent. There are, finally, obvious similarities between the tales of Hypsipyle and Hypermestra (although they are not at the same point in their stories; this in fact offers fruitful complications to a reading of the two stories in conjunction). Hypsipyle’s refusal to commit an impious murder is in Hypermestra’s immediate past (and she is still facing its consequences); perhaps one of them influences the other.45 Medea too shares a variety of similarities with women other than Hypsipyle. I will suggest (below, pp. 119–21) that her magical powers, like Hypsipyle’s, have effects elsewhere in the corpus. The remainder of this chapter will turn its attention to another woman who seems very much influenced by the Hypsipyle/Medea paradigm and who, I will suggest, adopts their strategies to her detriment. Attention to Oenone will help to place Heroides 6 and 12 into the context of the rest of the poems, for the women of the Heroides, as we have seen, read widely within their corpus. PERLEGE: HOW

(NOT)

TO READ THE HEROIDES

Oenone, the author of Heroides 5, writes to Paris, who has since his departure from her taken up with Helen. Critics of the poem often blame Oenone for, in effect, failing to be either Helen or some more interesting mythic incarnation of herself, notably a vengeful one (see below, pp. 64–5) – although some of these same critics also see Ovid’s Oenone as filled with hate. Yet this letter, written so much in the shadow of Helen, is sophisticated despite Oenone’s apparent ingenuousness, as recent scholarship has shown. Just as Hypsipyle and Medea each play a role in the other’s letter, so too does Helen feature in Oenone’s – and vice versa. I suggest that Oenone borrows the idea of writing her letter with an eye to her rival (and so remaking herself) from Hypsipyle and Medea. While other heroines mention potential rivals, only Medea, Hypsipyle, and Oenone know that they have been replaced – and by whom.46 At any rate, Oenone (perhaps because of the similarities between Paris and Jason, both notorious for amatory fickleness) follows Hypsipyle and Medea in reinventing herself as her rival in order to be more seductive. We shall see that Helen too employs a similar strategy in her letter.47

45 46 47

See Jacobson 1974: 105 n. 26 on the similarities between the Lemnians and the Danaids. Deianira, author of Heroides 9, merely suspects that Iole will take her place. See Hintermeier 1993: 41 on the variety of Helens presented in the Heroides.

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We begin with the outlines of Oenone’s story, which comes to us in a few sparse versions.48 Oenone is a seer and a healer, and also Paris’ wife. She tells him his future: he will be discovered to be the son of Priam and will abandon Oenone for another woman. Significantly, Heroides 5 seems to present an Oenone without prophetic abilities (Casali 1992: 86–8; Landolfi 2000: 56–62). After his Judgment, Paris leaves for Greece and returns with Helen. During the ensuing Trojan War, a wounded Paris begs Oenone (through their son Corythus) to save his life. She refuses, but then relents, and rushes to his side only to find that she is too late. Most of the treatments of her story focus on Oenone’s refusal to heal Paris and subsequent mourning. As is the case with many of the Heroides, we are hampered by not knowing Ovid’s primary source for this poem; scholars speculate that it was the Cypria or, more likely, Parthenius. Prior texts, however, hold less importance, as we will here concentrate on Oenone’s use of Heroides 6 and 12 in an attempt to make sense of her own world. Scholars of the Heroides tend to concentrate on Oenone’s apparent incompetence, erotic or generic. As was the case with Phyllis above (pp. 33–4), Oenone’s inexperience manifests itself in a desire to learn from literature how to behave. Bradley sees her letter as an ineffective tragic lament (1969: 161–2). Jacobson notes Oenone’s anger (1974: 179) and her grandiose self-image (ibid. 181), both of which lead her to glorify herself and belittle Paris (ibid. 182).49 Casali (1992: 85 and passim) suggests that the reader is given a view of the future (which happens in spite of Oenone’s inability to predict it); this knowledge offers the reader a vantage point from which to look down upon Oenone. Furthermore, he suggests that Oenone becomes an elegiac figure by the act of writing (ibid. 89). According to Lindheim, however, who reads the letter in light of Eclogue 10, Oenone is cast into an elegiac mold, but in fact belies it and fails to overcome her pastoral roots.50 Her failure to win Paris back can thus be attributed to her inability to fashion herself as an elegiac heroine; Oenone and Paris are ‘‘not generically compatible’’ (2000: 90).51 Oenone, who knows that Paris wants a princess, suggests that her status as 48

49 50

51

As Palmer notes, Oenone is first attested in the Hellenistic period, although her story may well be earlier (1898: 315). It appears in Lycoph. Alex. 57–68, Bion 15.10, Apollod. Bibl. 3.12.6, Conon Narr. 23, Parth. IV, Rem. Am. 457, Prop. 2.32.35ff., Strab. 596, Anth. Pal. 2.215–21, Luc. 9.973, and Quint. Smyrn. 10.259–489. A Hellenistic narrative poem about Oenone has been suspected but Knox 1995 finds this implausible. Contra this, see Jolivet 2001: 19, who notes that in Parthenius at least, Oenone is famous. Landolfi’s reading is similar to Lindheim’s, focusing on Oenone’s ‘‘elegiac conversion’’ (2000: 46). See too Jolivet 2001: 24 and passim on Propertian intertexts with the poem. See too Pearson 1980: 122–5 and Rosati 1992: 126–7 on the bucolic aspects of Oenone’s letter but also Casali 1992: 89 and Knox 1995: 146 on Oenone’s elegiac characteristics.

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nymph makes her an appropriate choice; indeed, in her view, she was generous to marry him while he was a lowly shepherd (Jacobson 1974: 182). Ottone has recently expanded upon this notion in important ways, suggesting that Oenone consciously fashions herself as the best of both worlds; she is not only a pastoral figure, she is also elegiac and even, if Paris likes, epic (2003: 102 and passim). Before discussing Oenone’s ‘‘source-text’’ from within the Heroides, it is important to note that Oenone herself draws attention to the difficulties of writing and being understood. The majority of the Heroides suffer from a problem with communication; indeed, as my introduction notes, these letters can (paradoxically) be characterized not as messages but rather as profound failures in that direction. Despite (or perhaps because of ) Oenone’s facility in reading (for instance, about Helen’s life prior to Paris), Heroides 5 stands out because of Oenone’s anxieties about the effects of written communication. Oenone shows herself to be anxious about this from the very start of her letter; in fact her nervousness is appropriate, for she will prove herself unable to convey a convincing message to Paris, however much she may have to say to us and to her female readers: Perlegis? An coniunx prohibet nova? Perlege – non est Ista Mycenaea littera facta manu! Pegasis Oenone, Phrygiis celeberrima silvis, Laesa queror de te, si sinis ipse, meo. (5.1–4)

Do you read this all the way through? Or does your new wife forbid? Read it through – this letter is not written by a Mycenean hand. I, Pegasian Oenone, wellfamed in the Phrygian forests, since I have been harmed by you (mine if you yourself allow it), complain.

As she writes, Oenone is not even confident that Paris will read her letter in its entirety;52 interestingly for our purposes, she sees access to readership as controlled by a woman. Oenone’s anxiety about communicating her message is emblematic for the Heroides.53 Like other women of the Heroides, Oenone has a tendency to believe what she reads and so to draw conclusions about the world from her reading material. As will be discussed throughout this book, the heroines seem to find literature compelling, thinking that if something is 52

53

Cf. the opening four lines of Heroides 4, in which Phaedra is hesitant because she proposes incest (with discussion below, p. 141). And fits in well with Ovid’s own anxieties: see below, pp. 149–51, on the always present possibility of being misunderstood.

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written it must be true. In Oenone’s case, this unfortunate tendency is not only evinced by my exploration of her potential use of Medea and Hypsipyle but, within Heroides 5, by a key passage, in which she draws Paris’ attention to the beech tree he has incised with her name: Incisae servant a te mea nomina fagi, Et legor OENONE falce notata tua, Et quantum trunci, tantum mea nomina crescunt. Crescite et in titulos surgite recta meos! Popule, vive, precor, quae consita margine ripae Hoc in rugoso cortice carmen habes: CUM PARIS OENONE POTERIT SPIRARE RELICTA, AD FONTEM XANTHI VERSA RECURRET AQUA. Xanthe, retro propera, versaeque recurrite lymphae! Sustinet Oenonen deseruisse Paris. (5.21–32)

Beeches, inscribed by you, preserve my name, and I, Oenone, am read, marked by your scythe. And as much as the trunks grow, so much does my name: grow, and rise straight up for my reputation! Poplar, I beg, live, you who set on the edge of the bank, have this poem on your rough bark, ‘‘When Paris is able to breathe with Oenone deserted, the waters of the Xanthus will rush, turned back, to their source.’’ Xanthus, rush backwards, and you waters, once turned, run back! Paris endures to have deserted Oenone.

Oenone’s trust in the written word is peculiar, yet not misplaced, for Paris’ prophecy is fulfilled in the Iliad when the river Xanthus runs backwards because of Achilles’ interference (21.305–84). As several have observed, this tree scene is key to an understanding of the gendered aspects of writing in the Heroides.54 Women, as Farrell notes, tend to believe writing and men (especially in elegy) use it to deceive (1998: 328 and passim). Writing is thus a doubly untrustworthy medium for women. At the same time, reading (and the writing it inevitably provokes) can provide benefit; as subsequent chapters will suggest, it sometimes saves the heroines’ lives. ‘‘ R U S T I C I T Y , ’’

OENONE’S AND HELEN’S

As the summary of critical views above will make clear, there is indeed much to disappoint the reader who seeks in Oenone a powerful literary 54

Jacobson, on the other hand, reads it as part of Oenone’s self-glorification at Paris’ expense (1974: 182). On the (surely crucial) Gallan/Acontian intertexts of the tree-inscription, see Barchiesi 1993a: 361. Spentzou notes that this writing (which she too sees as key to the Heroides) ‘‘is an unmistakable arrest of [Oenone’s] vitality’’ (2003: 86).

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voice. But before Oenone is dismissed for poor poetic composition and failed subjectivity, let us explore what her poem accomplishes in light of Medea and Hypsipyle’s letters. For she does indeed offer an alternative to the elegiac world of the Heroides by appropriating its models. As several critics have noted, Oenone seems to realize that she is no longer suitable for Paris, and hence attempts to fashion herself as her rival Helen (Pearson 1980: 120, Knox 1995: 156, Lindheim 2000: 101). It is here that one may best see the ‘‘influence’’ of Heroides 6 and 12, since Oenone may learn from the letters of Medea and Hypsipyle to see both Paris and Jason as ‘‘serial monogamists.’’ Once she has seen the (superficial but significant) similarities between the two men, Oenone structures her letter using principles she has gained from Medea and Hypsipyle. Such manipulation of the literary tradition shows a high level of sophistication. Oenone offers a vision of love that is surprisingly mature, particularly in contrast with the typical elegiac view. She spends a portion of her letter asserting her superiority over Helen; this is, to many readers, a self-evidently fruitless task given Helen’s status as the most desirable woman ever: Sit facie quamvis insignis, adultera certe est: / Deseruit socios hospite capta deos (5.125–6, However lovely she is in appearance, she is certainly an adulteress. Taken with/by a guest, she deserted the gods allied to her). In Oenone’s world, fidelity matters, and while it is certainly possible to ridicule her for her rusticity, her point – that beauty is not the only desirable characteristic in a mate, indeed may not be desirable at all – is a good one. Oenone continues in a similar vein, reminding Paris of her loyalty to him: At cum pauper eras armentaque pastor agebas, Nulla nisi Oenone pauperis uxor erat. Non ego miror opes, nec me tua regia tangit, Nec de tot Priami dicar ut una nurus – Non tamen ut Priamus nymphae socer esse recuset. Aut Hecubae fuerim dissimulanda nurus; Dignaque sum fieri rerum matrona potentis; Sunt mihi, quas possint sceptra decere, manus. Nec me, faginea quod tecum fronde iacebam, Despice; purpureo sum magis apta toro. (5.79–88)

But when you were a pauper and, as a shepherd, you led the flocks, nobody but Oenone was the wife of the pauper. I am not impressed by wealth, nor does your palace touch me, nor is it that I want to be called one of the many daughters-in-law of Priam: not, in any case, that Priam would refuse to be the father-in-law of a nymph, and not that I would be a daughter-in-law for Hecuba to be ashamed of. I deserve to become the wife of a powerful man: I have hands that could adorn a

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The Ovidian Heroine as Author

royal scepter. And don’t look down upon me because I lay with you upon beechfronds; I am better suited to a purple couch.

Many readers of this passage conclude that Oenone makes a tactical error in reminding Paris of his previous life, a life he is evidently eager to forget. Oenone’s statement that she is uninterested in marrying royalty has also come under attack: critics find it either true (but irrelevant to Paris’ wishes), or decide that she is lying. At the same time, Helen makes a similar claim, a fact that may alter our reading of Oenone: Helen is not unimpressed by Paris’ riches and power but asserts that he himself is more interesting (17.65–74).55 Both women insist that Paris himself is the prize, and any regal accoutrements are unnecessary. Oenone’s words also state the truth, that she has always loved Paris and that this devotion should mean something. To put it generically, she attempts to follow him from the pastoral to the epic world while drawing attention to her status as pastoral heroine (Ottone 2003: 127 and passim). Her love is ‘‘safe’’ (5.89).56 As many note, this view is not an elegiac one, but Oenone is not a typical elegiac heroine. Neither, for that matter, is Helen, who uses the same strategy in Heroides 17. As Cucchiarelli and others note, Helen portrays herself as rustica (17.143), despite Paris’ attempts to assert that she is not. To Paris, rusticitas has a negative valence, but Helen coyly glories in her simplicity, and may do so because of Paris’ previous attachment to the rustic Oenone (17.12–13, 186 – where she tells Paris to overcome her rusticitas by force if need be). And Helen may deliberately echo Oenone’s georgic metaphor comparing love of Paris to a fruitless plowing of the seashore in an attempt to further highlight her pastoral status.57 There are other similarities between the two women: both draw attention to their birth (5.3–4, 17.51). Both refer to Helen’s affair with Paris as externus amor, only here in the Heroides (5.102, 17.96). In their description of the Judgment, each woman draws attention to the fact that the goddesses appeared nude to Paris (5.35–6, 17.116), a fact he omits in his own version of the tale (16.72).58 55

56

57

58

On Heroides 16 and 17, see especially Belfiore 1980–1, Cucchiarelli 1995, and Kenney 1995 and 1996: 5–8. At the same time, Jolivet well notes that Oenone’s love is neither as simple nor as safe as she claims – she will, after all, refuse to save Paris’ life (2001: 49). Helen too is dangerous: the two women bring about Paris’ demise. 5.115–16, spoken by Cassandra (‘‘quid facis, Oenone? Quid harenae semina mandas? Non profecturis litora bubus aras,’’ what are you doing, Oenone? Why do you plant seeds in the sand? You sow the shore with oxen who will not succeed)  17.139–40 (quid bibulum curvo proscindere litus aratro, spemque sequi coner quam locus ipse negat?, why should I try to work the thirsty shore with a curved plow, and to pursue a hope which the location itself refuses?). See too Helen’s georgic comment about the premature harvest at 17.263. On the vexed 16.39–144, see especially Kenney 1979.

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Helen is perhaps more successful in her generic play; according to most critics, Oenone gets into trouble when she adopts the code of elegy. She describes to Paris the other men who have found her desirable in lines that are frequently athetized as otiose:59 At manet Oenone fallenti casta marito – Et poteras falli legibus ipse tuis! Me Satyri celeres – silvis ego tecta latebam – Quaesierunt rapido, turba proterva, pede, Cornigerumque caput pinu praecinctus acuta Faunus in inmensis, qua tumet Ida, iugis. Me fide conspicuus Troiae munitor amavit, Ille meae spolium virginitatis habet. Id quoque luctando; rupi tamen ungue capillos, Oraque sunt digitis aspera facta meis; Nec pretium stupri gemmas aurumque poposci: Turpiter ingenuum munera corpus emunt. Ipse, ratus dignam, medicas mihi tradidit artes. (5.133–45)

But Oenone remains chaste to her deceitful spouse: you yourself could have been cheated by your laws. The swift satyrs (a lustful band) have sought me with rapid foot – I hid, covered by the trees – and Faunus, girded on his horned head with sharp pine, where Ida swells into vast slopes. The guardian of Troy, famous for his lyre, loved me: he has the spoils of my virginity, and that too with a struggle – I rent his hair with my nails, and his face was made raw by my fingers. Nor did I seek gems or gold as a price for my defilement: it is shameful for gifts to purchase a freeborn body. He, thinking me worthy, handed over to me his medical arts.

In an attempt at sophisticated (Helenic?) game-playing,60 Oenone suggests that, since Paris has cheated on her, she has every right to cheat on him; but she has immediately before this assured him that this will not happen. While her threat to become unfaithful is a statement rather of the urban world than the rustic,61 her discomfort and hesitancy place her firmly outside of the elegiac demi-monde. Critics have observed that being chased by the Satyrs and even Faunus is hardly a testament to Oenone’s desirability, given their notorious lasciviousness; their status as 59

60 61

Merkel first proposed the deletion of 5.140–45 on the grounds that they are grotesque and was followed by Palmer and many editors since, including Goold. See Knox 1995: ad loc. for an argument for their retention. Casali 1997a, on the other hand, would delete 5.139–46. See Belfiore 1980–1 on Helen’s rhetorical strategy in Heroides 17. Jacobson 1974: 186 sees Oenone as a (failed) altera Helene. Lindheim, who uses the distinction elegiac/pastoral instead of urban/rustic, reads this as part of Oenone’s unsuccessful struggle to compete with the (elegiac) Helen (2000: 96–100).

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rustic divinities also undercuts Oenone’s pretensions to sophistication. Oenone, who lost her virginity to Apollo after much hesitation (in fact, she was raped, which is a peculiar event to boast of), draws attention to the dichotomy between her modus vivendi and Helen’s: in the very act of attempting to emulate Helen, she shows herself to be utterly different.62 But let us return to Oenone’s failure to be Helen: is this really so great a failing? Helen is hardly an ideal wife. In the very lines that some see as evidence of her naı¨vete, Oenone effects a subtle and even urbane rupture of the elegiac code. Perhaps anticipating those readers who find the world of the Heroides (or of elegy) tiresome, Oenone refuses to play by the rules: she is willing to pretend to be Helen, if Paris would like, but she wants to make clear that she knows it is a role (cf. 5.85–6, in which Oenone ‘‘tries on’’ the royal scepter). More than that, Oenone seeks to offer to Paris genuine emotion; this is a strategy comparable to Penelope’s in Heroides 1, who flirts with the code of elegy but then declares herself utterly faithful to Odysseus (see above, pp. 37–8). While Oenone has generally been seen as innocent of urbanitas, her strategy of playing generic modes against one another shows that she is not wholly naı¨ve and, in fact, is similar to what Helen does in her letter. I suggest that the structuring principle of Oenone’s letter, the explicit comparison of herself to Helen, is based on an appeal to the literature of the past (and present), Heroides 6 and 12 in particular. Oenone’s erudition is explicitly evidenced by her in-depth knowledge about Helen, even down to the tale of Theseus’ kidnap of Helen in her youth:63 Illam de patria Theseus – nisi nomine fallor – Nescio quis Theseus abstulit ante sua. A iuvene et cupido credatur reddita virgo? Unde hoc conpererim tam bene, quaeris? Amo. (5.127–30)

Someone named Theseus (if I am not mistaken about the name) once took her from her homeland. Can it be believed that she was returned a virgin from someone so desirous and young? You ask how I have verified this thing so well? I love.

This piece of information is unexpected coming from a river-nymph that some see as uneducated. It may suggest that Oenone has indeed been 62

63

Cassandra too is a role model for Oenone; the story she tells about Apollo sounds more like Cassandra’s than her own. (Might she be ‘‘borrowing’’ it?) Landolfi sees Oenone as a Cassandra who (either voluntarily or unconsciously) distorts her prophecies to reflect her desires (2000: 59). Casali wonders, ‘‘Where did she read this?’’ (1995b: 8).

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reading famous love stories in her quest to win Paris back, a fact that increases the likelihood that she has read the Heroides.64 Amo, then, becomes the signifier of literary experience. Yet Helen, who claims not to be in love, knows about Oenone too. In his letter, Paris claims that she is second only to Helen herself (16.95–8). But Helen has gathered further information elsewhere: after drawing attention to Hypsipyle and Ariadne (Heroidean figures) as textbook examples of the dangers of trusting handsome guests – the former especially noteworthy because not canonical – Helen mentions Paris’ abandonment of Oenone: tu quoque dilectam multos, infide, per annos / diceris Oenonen destituisse tuam (17.195–6, You too, faithless one, are said to have deserted your Oenone, beloved for many years).65 From this she draws the conclusion that Oenone too will reach, that Paris is incapable of constancy in love (17.199–204). Helen’s complaint about chronic male infidelity will prove to be untrue in her own case, but, not coincidentally, it brings the reader back to the dominant paradigm of the single Heroides; Paris is, like Jason, Theseus, and others, a faithless guest (16.159–62). Paris, Oenone, and Helen all mention the Theseus incident in their letters, and, while Helen may be answering Paris’ suggestion that she was not returned a virgin (159–62), she may equally well respond to Oenone when she insists that she was both a victim and a virgin (17.21–34). Oenone, on the other hand, finds it implausible that Helen was faithful, and so impossible that she will be so to Paris (5.99–106). Helen too raises the specter of her unfaithfulness; perhaps both women allude to the version of this story in which she abandons Paris for Oenone’s son (17.213–14). As I have discussed above (pp. 21–2), it is difficult to discern a recognizable pattern for the order of the Heroides. I believe, however, that certain letters are deliberately juxtaposed to others. Here it may be significant that Hypsipyle (Heroides 6) seems to have the clairvoyant abilities generally given to Oenone (Heroides 5) who, in Ovid’s version, shows no knowledge of events she might well be expected to know. Their presence next to one another in the corpus may have caused the boundaries between the two stories to diffuse, rendering Oenone capable of cursing Helen.

64

65

My reading here supports Lindheim’s thesis that Oenone attempts to become elegiac; in her quest to be a puella, Oenone reads elegiac poetry, notably the Heroides (2000: passim). See too Casali on Oenone’s citations of Tibullus and Propertius (1992: 91–4). Jolivet calls Oenone’s logic here scientific as well as but also poetic; she chooses the most elegiac traditions (2001: 224). Helen later mentions Medea as an example of male faithlessness, 17.229–30.

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The Ovidian Heroine as Author

We will return to this curse in more detail, but first, I detail a number of the words and concepts common to the three letters.66 Paris, like Jason, is quick to tears (5.43–6, 6.58, and 12.91). Hypsipyle, Medea, and Oenone are angry that someone else will enjoy the efforts they have made on their lover’s behalf (5.57–60, 6.73–8, and 12.173–4), and the latter two bewail the fact that their abilities with magical/medicinal herbs do them no good in love (5.149–50 and 12.167–8, 171–2).67 Hypsipyle and Oenone bemoan the flightiness of their lovers – each with pastoral metaphors (5.109–11 and 6.109),68 and invoke the leges that should either free them or punish their rivals (5.134, 6.154). They are three of the six women in the Heroides who refer to a littera (5.2, 6.9, 12.114). More significantly, all three women hope that their rival will weep (5.75, 6.153–4, and 12.180) and utter imprecations against her. There is a further, unnoticed similarity: all three women have borne children to the men they loved. Although Oenone’s son Corythus is not here mentioned, we learn from Parthenius, 34 that he plays a role in the later story, attempting to seduce Helen. Thus both Oenone and Medea may use their children to effect revenge, albeit in a different way.69 The notion of revenge brings us back to Oenone’s letter, which, like Hypsipyle’s, contains invocations of magic: Sic Helene doleat desertaque coniuge ploret, Quaeque prior nobis intulit, ipsa ferat! . . . Nec tibi, si sapias, fidam promitte Lacaenam, Quae sit in amplexus tam cito versa tuos. Ut minor Atrides temerati foedera lecti Clamat et externo laesus amore dolet, Tu quoque clamabis. nulla reparabilis arte Laesa pudicitia est; deperit illa semel. (5.75–6, 99–104)

May Helen grieve in this way and, deserted by her husband, may she weep, and may she herself bear what she has first brought upon me. . . . And, if you are wise, don’t count on Lacaenian Helen being faithful, she who has been turned so quickly to your embrace. As the younger son of Atreus, harmed by a foreign 66

67

68

69

Torum (three times in each: 5.14, 5.88, 5.106, 6.20, 6.132, 6.164, 12.30, 12.52, 12.193), virgo (5.129, 6.133, 12.81, elsewhere in the Heroides only at 14.55), paelex (5.60, 6.81, 6.149, 12.173), facies (5.125, 6.83, 12.177; see above n. 23), dos (5.92, 6.117, 12.103, 12.199, 12.202–3), saucius (5.152, 12.57), semen 5.115, 6.11, 6.33, 12.17, 12.45, 12.95 (only here in the single Heroides) and various forms of desero (5.32, 5.75 [reading, with Palmer, deserta instead of Goold’s defecta], 5.126, 6.136, 12.52, 12.161). Casali notes the ironies inherent in Oenone’s claim to be incurable by medicine: Paris (who is not incurable) will shortly need her help, and because she will refuse it, he will die (1992: 91–3). Rosati 1992: 82. Hypsipyle may have picked up this tendency toward natural metaphor from Oenone, the rustica of the collection. See Landolfi 2000: 48, 60 and nn. on Oenone’s similarities to Medea.

Reading the future?: Hypsipyle, Medea, and Oenone

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love, shouts aloud the laws of his desecrated bed and grieves, you too will shout: chastity, once it is destroyed, cannot be repaired by any art – she has lost it once and for all.

Like Hypsipyle after her (6.153–64, quoted above, p. 52), Oenone delivers a curse on her rival. Yet, as has been noted (Jacobson 1974: 189), Helen neither mourns because her lover has abandoned her nor does she desert Paris. He is in fact killed in the Trojan War and Helen is given to Deiphobus, another son of Priam (Od. 4.276, 8.518). After the fall of Troy, Menelaus takes her back to Sparta with him; in sharp contrast to Oenone, Helen is never without a man. But, at the same time, Oenone is not wrong: Parthenius, 34 suggests that ‘‘Lacaenian Helen’’ is not especially faithful, since she welcomes Oenone’s son Corythus filofro´ no", with open arms. Rather than displaying her naı¨vete, Oenone may here hint at the revenge she effects against Paris through her son (see Jolivet 2001: 48). If so, she is more like Medea than she had at first seemed. More importantly, despite scholarly reluctance to see Oenone as anything but kind,70 this curse and Oenone’s assurances to Paris of his lonely future are unparalleled in the Heroides – except by Hypsipyle and Medea.71 Scholars have noted the intertextual ironies inherent in Oenone’s selfportrayal in Heroides 5; Oenone, traditionally a prophet and healer, here knows nothing about her future, and in one view is barely able to derive logical conclusions from the events around her (Jacobson 1974: 178). Yet, in contrast to this view, Oenone is able to deduce the future accurately the instant she espies Helen on Paris’ ship (Jolivet 2001: 41). Oenone mentions Cassandra’s frenzied prophecy about her own fate, a prophecy that she cannot interpret until it is too late (5.113–24). But this is hardly Oenone’s fault, as Cassandra is cursed to be incomprehensible. Like Medea, who laments that her magical arts have failed her (but still uses them), Oenone will remain powerful in her artes – she has the skill to cure Paris but refuses to use it. It is all-too-easy to withhold sympathy from Oenone, whose story (as we write it from our literary knowledge) will not have a happy ending. Yet the very possibility that a (pastoral) river-nymph would insert herself into the worlds of elegy and epic bespeaks a degree of authorial (Ovidian?) self-confidence that should be welcome to readers who find the Heroides’ defeatist attitude wearisome. 70 71

Jacobson sees the first two couplets as ‘‘delectably nasty’’ (1974: 180). Even Phyllis, Dido, and Ariadne, who traditionally utter curses against their faithless lovers, do not do so in Ovid’s version (see above, pp. 35–6, on Phyllis’ curse of Theseus). Dido, instead of cursing Aeneas, notes that he deserves to be punished by the gods (7.71–2, 87–8). Medea’s statements in 12.177–82 and 207–12 are perhaps better read as threats than curses.

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The Ovidian Heroine as Author CONCLUSION

In their use of similar vocabulary, themes, and content, Medea and Hypsipyle show that writing in the Heroides is inextricably linked with reading and with rhetorical self-fashioning. By rewriting themselves as each other, they do not succeed in winning Jason back, but they do demonstrate their mastery of the incorporation of prior poetic texts into their own. Indeed they both manage to affect their stories in significant ways, effecting role reversals; some critics have seen Hypsipyle as a more convincing Medea than Medea, and others have suggested that this Medea is fundamentally innocent (despite the fact that she will shortly take vengeance upon Jason). Oenone, on the other hand, is faced with the difficulty of competing with Helen, a task that even an author with formidable rhetorical skills might find daunting. Yet she does not fail as completely as most critics would suggest, first toying with the notion of presenting herself as Paris’ other love (a strategy duplicated by Helen herself), and then offering to Paris a way out of the elegiac world of deception. Her use of Medea and Hypsipyle as models may indeed cause her letter to seem peculiar, but through reading their texts she develops her own voice, and the selfexpression afforded to her by following their example is nothing to be denigrated.

CHAPTER

3

Benefits of communal writing: Canace and Hypermestra

The previous two chapters have attempted to reframe the charges of reiteration and ineffectiveness of traditional Heroides scholarship by suggesting that the first is part of what makes the Heroides such a compelling text and that the second is true only in terms of larger public discourse (and not always there); the effect of women’s writing on other women, and sometimes on their own stories, by contrast, has been underappreciated. This chapter continues the study by discussing significant but unnoticed similarities between Heroides 11 and 14: each of their heroines writes her letter believing that her father wants her dead, in each case because she has undertaken an illicit or unsanctioned relationship with a family member. I argue that Hypermestra, the author of Heroides 14, may have read Canace’s letter and used it to her advantage. Indeed, her letter is one of the few in which my model of community brings material benefit to the heroines, and in fact, my portrait of a Hypermestra with the power to positively affect her own story is unparalleled in the Heroides. Canace’s letter, similarly, persuades one of her readers to do her bidding, and simultaneously offers a compelling image of Canace as of tremendous intratextual influence. I first explore the contexts of each woman’s story, which play a vital role in understanding them, and then outline the duplicity inherent in both letters. I continue with a discussion of Hypermestra’s possible reliance on Canace’s letter, in general if not in particular, in order to help her fashion her own story. As throughout this book, I am not primarily interested in the success or failure of the heroines to persuade their lovers to return to them; the fact of Hypermestra’s rescue by her husband will prove important to us only insofar as she may bring it about based upon her reading of Canace’s letter; if this is so, it will be a nearunique occurrence in the Heroides of communal composition leading to life rather than death. 67

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The Ovidian Heroine as Author SOURCES AND BACKGROUND

Canace, one of the Aeolidae, was seduced by her brother Macareus and gave birth to a child. Macareus persuaded her to keep the child and then persuaded their father to allow his seven sons to marry his seven daughters; lots were drawn to determine the marriages. Macareus did not draw Canace, but (apparently) successfully convinced their father to let him marry Canace anyway. In the meantime, Aeolus had discovered Canace’s son and, ignorant of his paternity, ordered his death; he also sent Canace a sword for her own use. Canace killed herself and, when Macareus found her body, he killed himself too. The son born to them seems to have been the only one of the three to survive (Casali 1995c: 508). According to a recent interpretation of the myth, most versions of the tale do not find the question of incest its most problematic issue;1 Aeolus is primarily concerned with the defilement of his daughter, and once he discovers that the father of the child is Macareus, his outrage subsides. The story, then, is a tragedy of poor timing (Philippides 1996: 434–5). As is often the case with the myths treated in the Heroides, we have only scattered sources for Canace’s story. Euripides’ Aeolus, of which we have the hypothesis2 and twenty fragments (TGF 14–38), is the only version that comes to us in a comprehensible form, and it is likely that it was Ovid’s main source.3 The story was apparently a popular one; in addition to the Euripidean tragedy, it is attested in a variety of sources.4 Among Ovid’s innovations seem to be the mutuality of the feelings of Macareus and Canace; it is not clear what diafyei
ro of the Euripidean hypothesis (31–2) implies: was Canace raped or seduced (Jacobson 1974: 162)?5 Canace’s letter does not fully resolve the question, but does suggest that she was in love with her brother (11.32–4).6 1

2 3

4

5 6

Philippides 1996: 426–7 and passim; Reeson 2001: 7; contra, Spoth 1992: 108–10 and Verducci, who bases her discussion of the epistle on its incest (1985: 211 and passim). It is difficult to judge the importance of incest given the state of the fragments. The marriage of Canace’s sisters to her brothers, however, suggests that it is (to Aeolus) not an insurmountable objection. P. Oxy. 2457; see Lloyd–Jones 1963: 443–5. Jacobson’s (1974: 160–1) caution about Ovid’s use of Euripides, is, as Williams 1992: 201–5 has shown, unfounded. See Verducci 1985: 201–3 for a discussion of the fragments in light of Heroides 11 and Webster 1967: 157–60 for a likely reconstruction of the play. These include an Aeolus by Lycophron, Plutarch’s Moralia (312c), Stob. Flor. 64.35, Ar. Nub. 1371 and Schol. ad loc., Call. Hymn 6.98–9, Hyg. Fab. 242.2, Apollod. Bibl. 1.7.4, Ovid. Ib. 355 and Tr. 2.384, Pl. Leg. 8.838c and Schol. ad loc., and Dion. Hal. Rhet. c.9.22. See too Palmer 1898 ad loc. and Jacobson 1974: 160–1. See Philippides 1996: 428–9 and Labate 1977: 589–90 on Canace as playing an active role. Casali 1998b suggests that the mutuality of the relationship depicted in Heroides 11 serves as Canace’s retrospective justification of her brother’s actions.

Benefits of communal writing: Canace and Hypermestra

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Critics have generally liked this letter (once they have disposed of their discomfort with its incest; see Jacobson 1974: 159 for a summary), perhaps because Canace is less hostile to her addressee than many of the other heroines (ibid. 174–5). Verducci, on the other hand, finds the letter ‘‘banal’’ (1985: 207) and overdramatic. Many have seen Canace as an inge´nue; she in fact calls herself new to love and its aftereffects (11.31–2; cf. 11.48). Unlike Verducci’s, which blames Canace for her inexperience, my reading returns to the heroine her agency; her text is efficacious in an unexpected way. For indeed, what her letter seeks is the survival of her son, which it brings about by telling her father of his grandson’s parentage. We move to Hypermestra’s letter, Heroides 14: a number of sisters (the Danaids) are supposed to kill their cousins (the Aegyptids) on their wedding night,7 and one of them (Hypermestra) refuses to commit the murder. As soon as the motive or even outcome of the murders is examined, the story becomes immeasurably more complicated. Much of the trouble arises from the diversity and fragmentary nature of the sources; our most complete surviving treatment of the myth, Aeschylus’ Suppliants, is the only extant play of a trilogy comprising itself, the Aegyptoi, and the Danaids.8 Other sources tell various parts of the story; most are either so incomplete as to be useless or do not add significant details.9 Hypermestra’s motives for sparing the life of her husband Lynceus change from author to author; while they are not generally a significant feature of the myth, they will prove vital to an understanding of Ovid’s poem. Most versions follow Aeschylus in the Prometheus Vinctus in suggesting that Hypermestra spared Lynceus because she was in love with him.10 The other version claims that she saved him because he spared her virginity. The events subsequent to the murder are unclear; for our purposes, a brief summary will suffice. In some versions, Lynceus

7 8

9

10

See Fulkerson 2003: 124–6 for details of the different treatments of the marriage. Johansen and Whittle 1980: 40–55 offer a plausible reconstruction of the trilogy. It is likely that Aeschylus was Ovid’s main source (Wecklein 1893: 411ff., Ehwald 1900: 2–7, and Ja¨kel 1973: passim). Of the epic Danaids, only one fragment survives, from which little can be inferred (fr. 1 PEG). Other treatments include: three tragedies, one by Phrynichus (frr. 1 and 4 TGF, see too Schol. Eur. Orest. 872), and two by Timesitheos; three comedies, one by Aristophanes, one by Nicochares, and one by Diphilus, and a fifth-century dithyramb by Melanippides (Ath. 14.651). Pindar’s Olympian 9 details the footrace by which the Danaids found new husbands. Hypermestra and the Danaids also appear in Latin poetry, primarily in Horace’s Odes 3.11. 7 ( mi
an de pai
don
imero" ye
lxei to` mZ kte inai su
neunon (Aes. PV 865–6). Of Heroides 14, critics think either that love is primary (Oppel 1968: 73) or that Hypermestra is too cowardly ( to kill (Jacobson 1974: 131–32). See Ehwald on the nuances of
imero"; it is not necessarily erotic (1900: 7).

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kills Danaus (and sometimes the Danaids except Hypermestra),11 while in other versions, Lynceus and Danaus are reconciled. In all tellings of the myth, Hypermestra and Lynceus remain married and found a royal line at Argos that leads ultimately to Herakles. DADDY’S GIRL: AEOLUS’ ROLE IN HEROIDES

11

Several scholars have suggested that Heroides 11 contains a confusion of intended addressee and nominal recipient; parts of Canace’s letter are addressed to Macareus, her brother, but seem designed for Aeolus, her father (Jacobson 1974: 163–7, Verducci 1985: 209).12 Critics have also shown how Canace’s decision to address herself to her father throughout Heroides 11 derives from her ambivalent feelings about him. He is not only the person she considers responsible for her premature death, but a major figure in her life and, since she has disappointed him, her letter seeks both to blame her father and to excuse herself for her actions (Verducci 1985: 209–10). The notion that Heroides 11 is, in some sense, designed to be read by Aeolus will prove central to my interpretation of both letters, as I see Hypermestra’s letter as sharing a similar double focus, but to very different effect. Since focusing on the ways the Heroides can be imagined as delivered and read has proved useful elsewhere, a brief examination of the intertextual context of Heroides 11 therefore follows. The most likely possibility for the aftermath of this letter (or at least the most dramatic if we assume a Euripidean framework) is that Canace’s brother comes in to tell her the good news about their father’s change of heart only to find her dead, whereupon he too commits suicide with the same sword (Williams 1992 and Casali 1995c). Heroides 11 will be found with at least one dead body and probably two (depending upon where Macareus ends his life). Who is likely to read the letter after its addressee does? None other than Aeolus, whose reading of the letter will be all the more poignant because he is not nearly so harsh as his daughter claims (see below, p. 84). Canace’s letter, then, may well be read by father in addition to lover. Yet, although Canace has no way of knowing this, her letter focuses on the figure of Aeolus and manages to convey her last wishes to him.

11

12

Serv. ad Aen. 10.497, Schol. Eur. Hec. 886. Paus. 2.25.4 notes that Lynceus shone a beacon to let Hypermestra know he was safe, and she responded in kind. See too Heroides 8, which features a long excursus on Hermione’s mother Helen; Williams 1997 persuasively analyzes this as indicative of Helen’s key role in Hermione’s view of herself and the world. Cf. pp. 97–9, below.

Benefits of communal writing: Canace and Hypermestra

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Heroides 11 is likely to prove quite distressing to Aeolus, insofar as in it Canace dwells on the loss of her virginity, the very fact that caused her father to order her suicide (needlessly, as he will now know; see Casali 1995c). Her letter discusses her realization that she was in love and her pregnancy (11.21–44), and devotes a great deal of attention to her son, who has also been condemned to death because of Aeolus’ anger. Moreover, she reflects several times on her father’s cruelty and injustice. Yet Heroides 11 becomes tragic when we realize that by the time Aeolus reads this letter, he will have already faced the deaths of his daughter and son. Whereas most of the heroines write letters to men who seem no longer to love them, Canace shares with Hypermestra (and Hermione, author of Heroides 8) a different situation: all three women write to men they assume feel affection for them and desire those men to perform certain actions for them. Yet Canace, who might well have used the textual strategies adopted by either woman, seems rather to posit herself as a model for them.13 At the same time, Canace seems to have a generalized knowledge about the sorts of things contained in the corpus, which may suggest her (limited) perusal of the Heroides. She wonders: Quid iuvat admotam per avorum nomina caelo / Inter cognatos posse referre Iovem? (11.17–18, Why is it pleasing for one elevated to heaven through the names of her ancestors to be able to mention Jupiter among her relatives?). Critics have long had difficulty interpreting these lines. Several cite Prop. 4.11.11–13, which is parallel but does not explain anything.14 Perhaps Canace wonders what good famous or divine ancestry does a heroine because she is familiar with the letters of Penelope (1.81), Briseis (3.45–50), Phaedra (4.55–60, 157–62),15 Hypsipyle (6.113–6),16 Hermione (8.27–32, 43–8, 65–74, 121–2),17 Ariadne (10.91), Medea (12.78–80, put in Jason’s mouth), and Hypermestra (14.85–110) who detail theirs with varying degrees of completeness (and 13

14

15 16

17

It is also possible that Canace adopts her reading strategy from Hypermestra, but her explicit formulation of herself as a model author – like Ariadne – causes me to read in the other direction. Palmer 1898, Labate 1977, and Knox 1995: quid mihi coniugum Paulli, quid currus avorum / profuit aut famae pignora tanta meae? / non minus immitis habuit Cornelia Parcas. (What good was my marriage to Paullus to me, what good were the chariots of my ancestors or the numerous pledges of my good name? Cornelia nonetheless had ungentle Fates.) Knox also, more helpfully, connects the lines to TGF 22, in which Canace scorns her father’s boasting about his lineage (1995b ad loc.). Casali 1998: 709 notes that Jupiter would in fact have been quite useful to Canace as an incestuous forefather had she been writing a Phaedra-like letter. See p. 137 for a discussion of the furst passage. Hypsipyle notes that she provides this information si te nobilitas generosaque nomina tangunt, if nobility and well-bred names appeal to you (6.113). Apparently Canace is not alone in wondering at the efficacy of noble birth. See p. 91 for a discussion of Hermione’s near-obsessive focus on her family.

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persuasiveness).18 Hypermestra, who like Canace, notes that this is a silly practice, discourses on her ancestors, Jupiter and Io, for nearly thirty lines. Canace draws attention to the fact that she knows (she has read that?) other people engage in this kind of behavior, and even that it may somehow benefit them; but she does not understand it herself. Yet Canace still shows herself willing to partake in the community of the Heroides – perhaps it is all she has, given the isolation in which she finds herself at the end of her life. Indeed, like prior generations of critics, who characterize the Heroides as ‘‘suicide letters,’’ Canace, guided by her Euripidean incarnation and by the preponderance of death in the Heroides, does not envision the possibility of rescue (see below, pp. 83–5, for an exploration of Canace’s unnecessary death). Yet her death is redemptive in a certain sense: it enables Hypermestra to preserve her own life. And even within her own text, Canace’s words preserve the life of her son, as we shall see. HYPERMESTRA’S DOUBLE WRITING

19

Like Heroides 11, Hypermestra’s letter, despite the fact that it is nominally written to Lynceus, contains significant material seemingly designed for her father. I suggest that Hypermestra, perhaps like Canace, has foreseen the likelihood that her father will read her letter. Reading Heroides 14 in this light will alter its traditional interpretation, since it may mean that Hypermestra writes for both her husband and her father. She addresses this letter to her husband to plead for her rescue. Her action is a natural one under the circumstances, and Heroides 14 has generally been read as a straightforward example of the pleas of a frightened woman; critics are even willing to forgive Hypermestra for not writing Lynceus a love letter because she is in such terror for her life. As will become clear, however, much of Hypermestra’s letter, although addressed nominally to her husband, does not seem directed to him at all, and even in the portions where it does, Hypermestra has avoided the most effective methods of encouraging Lynceus to come to her rescue. My interpretation suggests that Hypermestra’s letter is not only rhetorically effective, but also masterfully executed within the 18

19

See too Oenone in 5.81–8, who attempts to assure Paris that nobility means nothing to her (because she does not possess it). Deianira, who portrays herself as inferior to Hercules in every way, discusses his noble ancestry at the expense of her own and notes that it is difficult to be married to a superior (9.9–32). I would read these references as suggesting that the heroines are conscious of their distinguished literary history. Full arguments for double readership – that is, that this letter is designed to be read by Lynceus, but also by Danaus – are found at Fulkerson 2003: 128–38.

Benefits of communal writing: Canace and Hypermestra

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limits of her situation. And, since the context in which she writes holds the key to understanding her composition, it is to this that we turn. Hypermestra’s refusal to murder her husband has placed her in physical difficulties: she is in prison and likely to be killed. She thus writes to her husband Lynceus, but uses language simultaneously designed to communicate certain information to her father, its most likely reader. Although many have decried Ovid’s lack of attention to the physical process by which the letters of the Heroides are written and, more importantly, are presumed to reach their addressees, this letter at least shows itself acutely aware of the problems of transmission. If Hypermestra is imprisoned, she has either bribed someone to deliver the letter to Lynceus, or she expects to place it somewhere for him to find. Neither of these options is foolproof; in each case the letter is far more likely to fall into Danaus’ hands than Lynceus’.20 Hypermestra’s attention to her peculiar context explains many of the incongruities between this letter and others. Our understanding of Hypermestra’s dual composition for both Lynceus and Danaus clarifies certain features of the letter. Hypermestra’s refusal to talk about love, for instance, can now be viewed not as indicating her shyness or disaffection, but rather as a clever ploy that enables her to have it both ways.21 Should this letter reach Lynceus, there is a small but unmistakable hint that Hypermestra is affectionately disposed towards him, but if (as is more probable) the letter is instead read by Danaus, he will find no evidence that his daughter has further betrayed him. The omission of Lynceus’ name until 14.123, only ten lines before the end of the poem (Jacobson 1974: 128), while her father appears early and often, is explained by Hypermestra’s situation. For she has not only foreseen the possibility that she may have a reader other than her addressee; she has structured her letter to appeal to both readers. Heroides 14 only sometimes makes sense if we read as Lynceus; the first forty lines of her letter, in fact, seem to be directed to Hypermestra’s father and, in distinction from most of the Heroides, which frequently refer to their addressees, Heroides 14 contains no direct address to Lynceus until well into the poem. Lynceus is not even referred to until 14.12, but Hypermestra mentions her father as early as line 7, showing that he is at 20

21

As Schmitz-Cronenbro¨ck astutely notes of 14.1–2 (mittit Hypermestra de tot modo fratribus uni – / cetera nuptarum crimine turba iacet), ‘‘zu ‘mittet’ ist hier Objekt der ganze Brief’’ (1937: 15). See Ehwald 1900: 10 and Palmer 1898: 411 on the lack of a direct object for mittere. Fra¨nkel claims that Hypermestra is ‘‘too bashful to betray her love’’ (1945: 191 n. 9). Cf. Jacobson, who too hastily assumes that because Hypermestra does not express love, she does not feel it (1974: 125). Ja¨kel notes that the lack of love surprises critics, who expect it to be Hypermestra’s primary motive (1973: 245). See too Ehwald, who suggests that love is transformed into pietas (1900: 2).

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the forefront of her mind and suggesting that she is anxious to portray herself as a good daughter (placuisse parenti, 14.7). In fact, until line 41, Hypermestra refers to Lynceus in the third person singular or (with his brothers) plural. When she finally addresses him, she tells him what happened while he slept: ipse iacebas. . . . Excussere metum violenti iussa parentis: Erigor et capio tela tremente manu; Non ego falsa loquar: ter acutum sustulit ensem, Ter male sublato reccidit ense manus. Admovi iugulo – sine me tibi vera fateri! – Admovi iugulo tela paterna tuo. Sed timor et pietas crudelibus obstitit ausis, Castaque mandatum dextra refugit opus. (14.41, 43–50)

You yourself were lying down . . . The commands of my violent father banished fear: I get up and I seize a weapon with my trembling hand. I will not tell lies: three times my hand raised the sharp blade, three times it fell back with the wrongly raised sword. I moved it to your throat – allow me to confess the truth to you – I moved my father’s sword to your throat. But fear and piety prevented the cruel action, and my chaste right hand recoiled from the ordered deed.

The circumstances surrounding Lynceus’ sleep are uncertain, but it is clear that Lynceus is very much unconscious as Hypermestra contemplates whether to kill him.22 Hypermestra describes herself as struggling with a momentous decision, yet no sooner does she lift the sword than it is characterized as male, wrongly raised. Although this happens three times, there is little sense that she ever intended to use the weapon, despite her claims of having attempted murder (14.45). The assertion that she is not lying combined with her plea to be allowed to speak the truth is peculiar, especially given that in a letter she is not likely to be interrupted. Here as elsewhere, Hypermestra shows a consciousness of herself as storyteller. Indeed, this device, while commonplace in rhetorical texts, is unparalleled in the Heroides and suggests Hypermestra’s sensitivity to her audience as well as underscoring the urgency of her situation. This is only the most obvious indication that her letter is written with considerable rhetorical skill, a fact that makes more plausible the possibility of her use of Canace’s letter.23 22

23

Reconstructing the circumstances surrounding Lynceus’ sleep has proved nearly impossible; as it has little effect on my interpretation, I pass over the details. See Fulkerson 2003: 129–32 for an extended discussion of the vexed line 42. Ehwald outlines the role rhetoric plays in this letter (1900: 2–3 and passim). For a different reading of Hypermestra (which also takes her rhetorical abilities into account), see Casali 1998a passim.

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Both Lynceus and Danaus could read this passage. The former will naturally be delighted to be alive no matter the reason, but may be somewhat disappointed to find that Hypermestra would have spared any one of his brothers in the same situation; he was simply lucky in his allotted bride. Danaus, too, is given little information: what he will want to know is why Hypermestra has disobeyed him, and he will not find out. For the reader of the Heroides this passage may come as a surprise, since whereas the other letters concern themselves with longing and desire, Hypermestra merely asserts that she does not approve of murder. If, as I think, Hypermestra feels the love she does not express, her control over her emotions is unique to this letter. There are many other peculiar passages in this letter. In her description of the night of the murders, Hypermestra claims that she was incapable of killing her husband: Cor pavet admonitu temeratae sanguine noctis, Et subitus dextrae praepedit ossa tremor. Quam tu caede putes fungi potuisse mariti, Scribere de facta non sibi caede timet! Sed tamen experiar. (14.17–21)

My heart is frightened at the recollection of the night desecrated with blood, and a sudden tremor impedes the bones of my right hand. She whom you might think was able to effect the slaughter of her husband is afraid to write about the slaughter done not to her advantage. But nevertheless I will try.

The recognition that Hypermestra writes for a dual audience explains the strange features of this passage, including her seemingly odd comment at line 19 that ‘‘you’’ thought ‘‘I’’ could kill ‘‘a husband.’’24 Like much of Heroides 14, this sentence is inappropriate in a letter to Lynceus. Lynceus never thought she would kill him; he was awakened only after the issue was resolved in his favor. The sentence is perhaps better read as directed to her father, the one who thought she was capable of murder. The lines that follow therefore tell Lynceus – but also Danaus – what happened on the fateful night, explaining Hypermestra’s side of the story. Hypermestra says she tried to kill Lynceus but was unable to do so because of her piety (14.49–50). Yet Hypermestra also claims that she refrains from killing her husband because she is a coward, strikingly suggesting that the refusal of murder is cowardice, after taking a moral stand against it. By so doing, she neatly avoids negative reflections on her father. She vacillates between claiming cowardice and piety 24

Jacobson too finds this line problematic, suggesting that ‘‘tu is vaguely general’’ and expressing a desire to emend ne for the mss tu (1974: 128).

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as her motivators – the first excuses her behavior to her father, and the second reassures Lynceus that she remains faithful to him. After her first abortive attempt to kill Lynceus, Hypermestra again tries to steel herself to the deed: ‘‘Saevus, Hypermestra, pater est tibi; iussa parentis Effice; germanis sit comes iste suis! Femina sum et virgo, natura mitis et annis; Non faciunt molles ad fera tela manus. Quin age, dumque iacet, fortis imitare sorores – Credibile est caesos omnibus esse viros! Si manus haec aliquam posset committere caedem, Morte foret dominae sanguinolenta suae. Hanc meruere necem patruelia regna tenendo; Cum sene nos inopi turba vagamur inops. Finge viros meruisse mori – quid fecimus ipsae? Quo mihi commisso non licet esse piae? Quid mihi cum ferro? Quo bellica tela puellae? Aptior est digitis lana colusque meis.’’ Haec ego; dumque queror, lacrimae sua verba sequuntur Deque meis oculis in tua membra cadunt. (14.53–68)

‘‘Hypermestra, your father is savage. Obey the commands of your parent. Let this one be a companion to his brothers. (But) I am a woman and a girl, gentle by nature and years; my soft hands do not take to fierce weapons. But come along, and, while he lies, imitate your brave sisters. It is possible that the husbands are slain by all! If this hand were able to commit any slaughter, it would be bloody with the death of its mistress. They have deserved this death for holding their uncle’s kingdom, while we, a troop without resources, wander with our resourceless elderly father. Pretend the husbands deserved to die – Why did we have to do it? Once I have committed the crime, am I not allowed to be pious? What have I to do with steel? Why warlike weapons for a girl? Wool and the distaff are more suited to my fingers.’’ That’s what I said, and while I complain, tears follow their words and fall from my eyes to your limbs.

This passage offers Hypermestra’s version of the tragic heroine’s monologue; faced with a difficult choice, she outlines her options in an attempt to make up her mind. Yet differently from most decision monologues, Hypermestra no sooner outlines one position than she immediately switches to the other.25 The conflict is resolved in her first word, saevus, 25

Housman believed that there was a lacuna before 63 which would have offered another argument for killing (1897). Reeson (2001: ad 14.114) more plausibly thinks that 114 has simply been displaced from its proper location.

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and her pretense of giving equal thought to each side of her dilemma emphasizes the dual nature of her letter. Although she pretends to consider the issue, her primary argument for killing Lynceus is an exhortation to herself to obey her father. The reader may supply the missing arguments (that it is always pious to obey a parent, etc.), but Hypermestra herself does not make them. Even the cautious statement that the Aegyptids may deserve to die (finge) only prefaces her refusal to accept responsibility for their death. This ‘‘monologue’’ then, is clearly one-sided, and it too does not give much information to either of her potential readers. Hypermestra shows herself willing to condone the slaughter of the Aegyptids, provided that she does not have to effect it. Hypermestra next tells of rousing Lynceus. Here too she is all business, and she repeats her speech to him: Iamque patrem famulosque patris lucemque timebam; Expulerunt somnos haec mea dicta tuos: ‘‘Surge age, Belide, de tot modo fratribus unus. Nox tibi, ni properas, ista perennis erit.’’ Territus exsurgis; fugit omnis inertia somni; Adspicis in timida fortia tela manu. Quaerenti causam ‘‘dum nox sinit, effuge,’’ dixi; Dum nox atra sinit, tu fugis, ipsa moror. (14.71–8)

And then I was fearing my father and his servants and the light; this my speech dispelled your sleep: ‘‘Hurry and get up, son of Belus, now the only one left of so many brothers. This night, unless you hurry, will be endless.’’ Terrified, you rise up; all the laziness of sleep flees; you see the strong weapons in the fearful hand. To you wondering why, I said, ‘‘while the night permits, run away,’’ and while the dark night permits, you run away, but I stay.

Again Hypermestra is afraid, both because of her disobedience and because her father may catch her husband before his escape. She describes how she saved Lynceus’ life, awakening him and hurrying him away, and ends with a reminder that he alone was saved (14.80). She was the only one of her sisters brave enough to disobey their father; Lynceus is reminded of how much she has done for him. Yet he may find this passage odd too; why does she repeat her speech verbatim (especially since he was present for the oral version)? My reading suggests that her words aim at communicating with her father, reminding him that she is still with him (ipsa moror). This section ends with a description of what she has suffered (14.83), and a reminder that she is in prison (14.84), surely designed to appeal to Lynceus’ sense of guilt.

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Yet even here, where Hypermestra outlines her defiant actions, her words are ambiguous. She states that she remained while Lynceus left (14.78); this is perhaps meant to reassure her father as it reminds Lynceus of her plight. She could have run away with Lynceus, but instead stayed. She therefore suggests, despite appearances, that she is really the good daughter. When she could have abandoned her father, she threw herself at his mercy. Unlike her sisters, who simply did what they were told, this Danaid has thought through the options and chosen to remain with her father. Thus even the portion of Heroides 14 that details Hypermestra’s explicit disobedience of her father attempts to reassure him of her loyalty. At the end of the poem, Hypermestra finally addresses her husband by name: En, ego, quod vivis, poenae crucianda reservor; Quid fiet sonti, cum rea laudis agar Et consanguineae quondam centensima summae Infelix uno fratre manente cadam? At tu, siqua piae, Lynceu, tibi cura sororis, Quaeque tibi tribui munera dignus habes, Vel fer opem, vel dede neci, defunctaque vita Corpora furtivis insuper adde rogis, Et sepeli lacrimis perfusa fidelibus ossa. (14.119–27)

Lo, I am held to be tormented by a punishment because you live. What will happen to the guilty, when I am accused of a praiseworthy deed, and ill-starred, I, once one hundredth of a related sum, shall fall with only one cousin remaining? But you, Lynceus, if you have any care for your pious cousin, and if you are worthy of those gifts which I bestowed upon you, either bring help, or give me to death, and cover over my body, devoid of life, with a secret pyre, and bury the bones sprinkled with faithful tears.

Hypermestra suffers as a direct result of having saved Lynceus (14.119). By foregoing any claim of affection, perhaps because she, coming fourteenth in the corpus, realizes that amatory affection is not a binding tie in the world of the Heroides, she leaves obligation as her husband’s primary motivation to rescue her (cura, 14.123). She even refers to herself as crucianda, subject to torture (however metaphorical, it is a vivid usage), to underscore the urgency of her situation, and ends with a final reminder that she has saved his life (14.124). But she does not ask for rescue, or at least not only for rescue. She asks him to bury her corpse if he should happen not to rescue her in time, which suggests that she fully expects to die should Lynceus neglect his duties to her, but is also plausibly read as highlighting

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the urgency of her pleas. As a final impetus to action, she orders him to inscribe an epitaph that memorializes her sacrifice for him (14.130).26 Hypermestra demands public acknowledgment of her suffering in a way that implicates her addressee. If Hypermestra needs an epitaph, it will be because Lynceus, who owes her his life, has failed to protect her; her fama is predicated on his infamia. Since Hypermestra’s life is physically endangered, she leaves the nature of her relationship to Lynceus unclear. Although many of the Heroides are love letters, Hypermestra does not write about love because she is more concerned with her own life. If she spared Lynceus out of love, as in many versions, she certainly does not want her father to suspect this even more significant betrayal. Should this letter fall into her father’s hands, as she imagines likely, it will contain nothing to be used against her. Danaus may punish Hypermestra if he discovers her sending a letter, but with the evidence of this letter, he cannot punish her for falling in love with his enemy. We now turn back to Canace to see how Hypermestra may have developed this strategy. READING HYPERMESTRA READING CANACE

Canace does not seem to use any one of the Heroides as a source, although she may derive certain principles from the corpus as a whole. Perhaps her lack of participation in the community of which she is a part causes her to lose her life (although it has already been seen that membership in this community of women does not necessarily save lives). Perhaps, however, Canace’s letter comes ‘‘first’’ and Hypermestra has refigured it in order to suit her own purposes; in support of this notion, we turn to an exploration of the ways in which Hypermestra’s letter may carefully and selectively utilize Canace’s. The verbal parallels between the two letters are not as substantial as those between some other letters; Hypermestra rather seems to have used the same structural principles as Canace. We thus see another way in which the women of the Heroides can influence one another. The two women undergo similar trials, and they each suffer from a conflict in family loyalty. Both women repeatedly characterize their fathers as cruel, but they do not do so with the same vocabulary.27 Like Hypermestra, 26

27

Schmitz-Cronenbro¨ck thinks (1937: 16–17) that ll. 121–32 are interpolated and that the poem should end at 120. His opinion, however, is based on an aesthetic judgment, never a reliable indicator for Ovid. Aeolus is durus (11.6), ferus and truculentior (11.9), while Danaus is violenti (14.43) and saevus (14.53).

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who mentions a weapon (ensis, 14.11), Canace is provided with a sword (also ensis), but the timing and purpose are different: Hypermestra is given a sword to kill her husband, Canace to kill herself. More importantly, Canace portrays herself as more obedient to her father than Hypermestra; according to most versions of the myth Canace is in fact too obedient, as her father will recant his order for her suicide.28 Each woman expresses her overwhelming concern to please her father, placere patri (11.6 and 14.7). Hypermestra’s willingness to disobey, to act for herself rather than simply doing as she is told, will save her life, a matter with which Canace simply does not concern herself; the latter is more interested in the life of her child. Yet interestingly, Hypermestra, who explicitly disobeys her father, is able to make herself seem obedient through a skillful use of rhetoric, while Canace does everything her father tells her, but in a defiant manner that is unmitigated by a rhetoric of submission. For instance, according to Reeson (2001: ad 8), Canace refers to her father (through his servant’s mouth) as iste (98); she does this to suggest that nobody approves of her father’s behavior.29 In this assumption that a male authority figure is necessarily her enemy, Canace shows herself a member of the female community of the Heroides. There are also verbal parallels: each woman bemoans the inappropriateness of weapons for her hand.30 At the same time, Canace asserts that she will kill herself (and does), while Hypermestra claims that she would kill herself if she could (11.97–8 and 14.59–60). Indeed, the primary difference between the two women is that Canace uses her sword and Hypermestra does not; Hypermestra acts to preserve her life while Canace ends hers in order to save her child. The two letters share further similarities of content but not of vocabulary. At the end of her letter, Canace talks about her death and how her brother should gather her bones and bury them (with the body of her son): Tu tamen, o frustra miserae sperate sorori, Sparsa, precor, nati collige membra tui, Et refer ad matrem socioque inpone sepulcro. (11.121–3)

You, then, hoped for in vain by your wretched sister, I beg, collect the scattered limbs of your son, and bring them back to his mother and place them in a common tomb. 28

29 30

See below on the ironies hereby created in Canace’s letter, outlined by Williams 1992: 207–9 and discussed by Casali 1995c. Verducci too sees Canace as compliant only to the letter of her father’s orders (1985: 210). Non faciunt molles ad fera tela manus (14.56, my soft hands do not take to harsh weapons)  Num minus infestum, funebria munera, ferrum, / Feminea teneo, non mea tela, manu? (11.19–20, Is the sword that I hold in my woman’s hand less hostile [because I number Zeus among my ancestors], a funereal gift and a weapon not appropriate to me?).

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Hypermestra demands a similar treatment: Vel fer opem, vel dede neci, defunctaque vita Corpora furtivis insuper adde rogis, Et sepeli lacrimis perfusa fidelibus ossa. (14.125–7)

Either bring help or give me to death, and cover over my body, devoid of life, with a secret pyre, and bury the bones sprinkled with faithful tears.31

Hypermestra, again showing herself to be more interested in survival than is Canace, has designed her letter so that she will not die; the mandates about her dead body are mentioned primarily to convince Lynceus of the urgency of her situation, as evidenced by the epitaph she adds to her statement. It is an epitaph that states, more boldly than Hypermestra has yet done, that Lynceus owes her his life and if she dies it is his fault: Exul Hypermestra, pretium pietatis iniquum / Quam mortem fratri depulit, ipsa tulit (14.129–30, Hypermestra, the exile, herself bore the death she repelled from her cousin, an unfair return for her piety). Canace, on the other hand, perhaps influenced by the other Heroides, has decided that suicide is her only option (11.98), so she does not write to preserve her life. There is a final series of parallels between the two stories: each occurs in the midst of a wedding, one completed and one imminent. Hypermestra again utilizes rhetoric in order to display her disobedience, while Canace’s sullen obedience will soon seem tragic in light of her death.32 Where Hypermestra expresses pity and regret (but also her moral superiority?) for her guilty sisters (14.15), Canace hopes that her sisters will enjoy their marriages, but cannot resist simultaneously lamenting her own fate: His mea muneribus, genitor, conubia donas? Hac tua dote, pater, filia dives erit? Tolle procul, decepte, faces, Hymenaee, maritas Et fuge turbato tecta nefanda pede! Ferte faces in me, quas fertis, Erinyes atras,33 Et meus ex isto luceat igne rogus! Nubite felices Parca meliore sorores, Amissae memores sed tamen este mei! (11.99–106)

31 32 33

Ehwald 3 first compared the two passages; see his (brief) discussion at 1900: 9. See Verducci 1985: 209 on Canace’s ‘‘bitterness’’ toward her father and insistence that he is culpable. Reeson 2001: ad loc. argues persuasively for reading Burman’s atras instead of the mss atrae.

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Do you endow my marriage, father, with these gifts? Will your daughter become rich, father, with this dowry? Remove far away, cheated Hymenaeus, the marriage torches, and flee an unspeakable house with disturbed foot. Bring black torches against me, Furies, the ones you carry, and let my funeral pyre shine with that flame. Fortunate sisters, may you marry under a better Fate, but nevertheless be mindful of me once I am gone.

Canace’s collocation of funeral with wedding torches is common in the Heroides and is duplicated in Hypermestra’s letter: Me pater igne licet, quem non violavimus, urat, / Quaeque aderant sacris, tendat in ora faces (14.9–10, My father may burn me with the fire that I did not dishonor, and hold torches in my face that were at the wedding). The key difference is that Hypermestra’s torches will turn out to be metaphorical because she writes a letter designed to bring about her rescue. But Canace’s belief that her marriage is nefanda is far more appropriate in the mouth of Hypermestra, a fact that has escaped critics who are overly concerned with incest. Hypermestra’s description of her own wedding has a nightmarish quality similar to Canace’s envisioning of her death/marriage. Both sets of weddings are seen as overshadowed by death, and it is here that the majority of the verbal parallels in the letter appear. In each case, Hymen flees (fuge, 11.102; fugit, 14.27) the unholy union, and in each case there is mention of ill-omened marriage torches (11.101, 103–4; 14.25). Heroides 14 adds a marriage bed that is more suitable to be used as (and will be used as) a bier (14.32), and Canace draws attention to the wedding torches which are more appropriate to light her funeral pyre (11.103–4). The two women refer not only to their own unlucky partnerings, but also to the marriages of their sisters. Hypermestra knows her sisters are cursed, and Canace hopes her sisters will have more luck than she in their impending marriages. There is a difference between the standard complaint of an abandoned woman of the Heroides that her wedding was ill-omened and the laments of Canace and Hypermestra.34 Their weddings, real or envisioned, really are a setting for death. The verbal similarities in this section may derive from Hypermestra’s crafting of her wedding-scene according to Canace’s model. REWRITING THE HEROIDEAN PARADIGM

Hypermestra, skilled in the arts of reading and writing, has, according to my interpretation, read Canace’s letter and immediately understood the 34

This topos appears throughout the Heroides; examples can be found at 2.39–42, 2.115–20, 6.43–6, 7.93–6, 12.85–8, and 12.137–42 (at Jason’s wedding to Creusa).

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similarities between Canace’s situation and her own. Yet she also decides that she does not want an outcome similar to Canace’s. For Hypermestra, the fact that Heroides 11 does not concentrate enough of its energies on persuading Aeolus to let Canace live may help her to formulate her own letter as she does. Aeolus is the most important actor in Canace’s story because he is the one with the power; Canace’s letter succeeds in winning the life of her son. Hypermestra too nominally communicates with her husband but realizes that her letter can also be used to advantage with her father. Hypermestra’s father does not trust her because she has already betrayed him, but a letter to her husband will immediately be read as ‘‘true’’ by virtue of its addressee. For a woman in a similar situation, Canace’s letter raises the question: why write a suicide letter to your lover when you might be able to obviate the need for suicide altogether by addressing a different party? Reading the letters of Canace and Hypermestra in tandem draws attention to Canace’s failure to persuade her father to spare her life, but I suggest that she is successful in achieving her true desire, securing the life of her son. Aeolus will regret his behavior, but more importantly, he will feel compelled to obey Canace’s last wish and so her son will live. It would be easy to blame Canace for not having fully understood the persuasive possibilities of her letter and to find Hypermestra superior to her; Canace sacrifices her own life in the interests of her child while Hypermestra obtains everything she wants. On the other hand, it is also easy to blame Hypermestra for her calculating (masculine?) rhetorical strategy; the reading offered in these pages can be used to argue for her moral inferiority to Canace or other heroines (ironically, given the moral superiority accorded to her by most of the other sources). Yet these conclusions are too reductive, based as they are on simplistic notions of masculinity and femininity; they also inadequately explain the workings of community in the Heroides. For Canace’s story is not yet over: despite her apparent lack of interest in her own self-preservation, her participation in the female community of the Heroides and subsequent composition of Heroides 11 might nonetheless have saved her life if she had only continued writing. We return to the Euripidean context: according to the most plausible reconstruction of the tragedy, Aeolus wants his daughter dead because she has given birth to an illegitimate child; once he learns that her brother Macareus is the father, he relents, but too late. Had he known this fact earlier, had he in fact read Heroides 11 (or had it, in defiance of the traditions of the Heroides, been addressed to him), Canace might still be alive. In fact she herself suggests this possibility:

84

The Ovidian Heroine as Author Haec est Aeolidos fratri scribentis imago, Sic videor duro posse placere patri. Ipse necis cuperem nostrae spectator adesset, Auctorisque oculis exigeretur opus! Ut ferus est multoque suis truculentior Euris, Spectaret siccis vulnera nostra genis.35 (11.5–10)

This is the image of the daughter of Aeolus writing to her brother; thus I seem to be able to please my harsh father. I could wish that he himself were present as a spectator of my death, and that the work could be completed under the eyes of the one responsible! As he is harsh and more ferocious by far than his own winds, he would see my wounds with dry cheeks.

Unfortunately Canace’s letter will not save her life, for she will have already committed suicide. Yet there is a further irony to be discerned in Heroides 11. Canace apparently kills herself immediately after writing her letter. It is likely that at the very moment of its composition, her brother is arguing with their father and will shortly come to tell her that Aeolus has relented and they may marry (Casali 1998b: 707). We now know what she was doing during that time ‘‘offstage’’: writing a letter. Canace’s letter (the shortest of the Heroides at 128 lines) has been keeping her alive as she composes. Had she written another few lines before sealing her letter (and with it her doom), she might still have been writing when her brother came to save her, and so might still be alive. Furthermore, Aeolus, if he were present at Canace’s suicide, would surely prevent it, as he later tries to do once he discovers the paternity of his grandson. In her indictment of her father’s cruelty, therefore, Canace does him a disservice. By addressing Heroides 11 to her brother instead of her father, she unwittingly holds back vital information that could save her life. Aeolus will probably read Canace’s letter, but too late.36 This letter, if read by Aeolus, would ease his mind about the very thing that concerns him, namely that her brother Macareus (and not some outsider) is the father of Canace’s child. Despite Canace’s immersion in the (primarily suicidal) world of the heroines, Heroides 11, her ‘‘suicide letter,’’ might have saved her life. In fact, the Heroides, according to my interpretation, taught

35 36

Reading, with Reeson 2001, at for ut in 9; spectaret for spectasset in 10. See his discussion ad loc. See Casali 1995c: 510–11 on Aeolus’ windy and changeable nature; he has changed his mind about at least one key point already – first he is against brother–sister marriage but he is later persuaded. If the reconstruction of Euripides outlined above is correct, he also changes his mind about assigning the sisters by lots, or is willing to remove Macareus and Canace from the process.

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Canace to write in the first place and offered her the opportunity to save her son, but the master narrative (which demands her death) could not be escaped. Indeed, my reading of the Heroides suggests that physical survival of their authors is generally not at issue; readers would likely be more favorably disposed to the heroines’ plaints if we thought they had a chance of altering the traditional stories; as it is they are too easily read as ineffectual cris de coeur. Because the women of the Heroides are literally circumscribed, given only a narrow field within which to work, they cannot transform the ends, or even the middles, of their stories: we, the literate public, will not let them (Spentzou 2003: 20 and 99). This chapter, like those before it, has sought a space in which we can let the heroines alter their stories. But even if we are unable to do so, these women who compulsively write also make a difference within the Heroides themselves, and it is here that the model of female community proves most powerful. Canace cannot save her own life, but she can help Hypermestra to save hers. Canace’s opening lines hint at her status as model text: Siqua tamen caecis errabunt scripta lituris, Oblitus a dominae caede libellus erit. Dextra tenet calamum, strictum tenet altera ferrum, Et iacet in gremio charta soluta meo. (11.1–4)

If this writing is incomprehensible because of illegible blots, the text will have been smeared by the slaughter of its mistress: my right hand holds the reed, and the other holds a drawn sword, and the unbound roll lies in my lap.

This strikingly visual image of the woman as author belies the portrait of Canace as a victim of circumstances, especially when combined with Canace’s description of herself as scribentis imago in the following line (11.5), suggesting Canace’s consciousness of herself as an author.37 Is she, in spite of it all, fully aware (perhaps even in control) of her own destiny? Her text, however we view its effect on master narratives, will not be forgotten; it will be adapted and repeated by Hypermestra, and will in fact help Hypermestra to live. If we allow ourselves to read in this way, the Heroides become a very different kind of text.

37

The scribentis imago of 11.5 is duplicated in Heroides 7.183; see too Spentzou 2003: 121 on Canace’s ‘‘space for female creativity.’’

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Canace’s letter does not save her life, although in my reading it comes closer than might at first seem. More importantly, it brings about the traditional ending whereby the child of Canace and Macareus is allowed to live. Heroides 14 can also be seen as efficacious: it brings about Hypermestra’s rescue from imprisonment. This chapter, by suggesting that Hypermestra incorporated what she learned from Canace’s letter about how to present a case to two different audiences, presented one of the material benefits of female community. Thus it is to Hypermestra’s composition for a dual readership, along with her rhetorical and epistolary skill (it turns out) that we can attribute her survival: unlike many of the heroines, Hypermestra is reunited with her addressee and does not commit suicide. Canace’s letter, which has long been seen as a plaintive and naı¨ve lament, turns out to have been the text that enables Hypermestra to hit upon a strategy that will alter her story. The argument here advanced for the efficacy of poetry is both paralleled and complicated in the rest of the corpus.

CHAPTER

4

A feminine reading of epic: Briseis and Hermione

Previous chapters have introduced the paradigm of community as a useful tool to explain many of the aspects of the Heroides that critics have found difficult to understand; primary among them is the ‘‘repetitiveness’’ of the collection, which can now be seen as the result of the women’s concentration on other stories, sometimes to the detriment of their own. Hermione, author of Heroides 8, is no different: this chapter suggests that she views Briseis as having usurped Hermione’s own place in the family; Briseis’ fashioning of herself as Helen is more credible (to Hermione) than Hermione’s own relationship to her. The chapter will further demonstrate the contrast between traditional narratives (which can be seen as ‘‘male’’ ways of reading) and the heroines’ construction of their own stories, given that Briseis, who is a minor character in Homer, will prove one of the most powerful models of the Heroides. In direct contradiction to the standard views of both women, Briseis will paint herself as vital to Greek success against the Trojans and Hermione (under her influence) will come to view herself as merely a prisoner of war rather than as the daughter of one of the most important Greek generals. Reading Hermione’s letter shows that she has constructed herself as inferior in every way to Achilles’ concubine Briseis (author of Heroides 3). Briseis’ reading of the events of the Iliad as centering around herself has garnered much critical ridicule by those who assume that Homer tells the ‘‘authoritative’’ version of the Trojan War. But to Hermione, who has a different agenda and who reads with different motives than most, Briseis’ version of events proves a tempting model for her own situation. Hermione’s reading of Briseis is in direct (and comically ironic) contrast to the now-traditional view of Briseis as writing Heroides 3 in a pathetic attempt to increase her own importance (Verducci 1985: 102–21). This chapter opens up a space for Briseis’ reading, seeking to show that she is not automatically incorrect because she differs from Homer, and that in fact her story is more plausible to a certain kind of reader than is the Iliad. 87

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Hermione, like Phyllis before her, magnifies the superficial similarities between herself and another (here Briseis); she thereby creates a world in which she becomes insignificant, even as she affirms the centrality of women both to the masculine pursuit of war and to her own worldview. As with some of the other paired stories discussed in this book, the family relationships detailed by Hermione in Heroides 8 cause her to view her own situation in potentially unhelpful ways, and sometimes insidiously undermine her arguments as she makes them. This chapter will also explore why Hermione avoids concentrating a great deal of her energies on a far more obvious role model, her mother Helen. Finally, through a brief reading of Hermione in the light of Hypermestra’s letter, I will suggest that this portrait of a self-abnegating Hermione may not be the whole story either. Indeed, in this view, Hermione crafts an identity for herself based on surface helplessness but designed to bring about her goals. SOURCES AND BACKGROUND

First, a brief reminder of the events of each story: Achilles has won Briseis in the sacking of Lyrnessus, her native town (Il. 2.690). Once Agamemnon is convinced – by a plague – to give back his concubine Chryseis to her father, he takes Briseis, thinking it dishonorable to be the only warrior without a woman (Il. 1.1–356). Achilles permits Briseis to be removed from him, but spends much of the rest of the Iliad in his tent, refusing to fight because he has been dishonored. After the death of Patroclus, Achilles and Agamemnon make up their quarrel (Il. 19.54–73) and Achilles returns to battle; Agamemnon swears that he has not touched Briseis, and Achilles, enraged by the death of Patroclus, makes it clear that to him, the issue has become immaterial (Il. 19.184–275). Hermione, the daughter of Helen and Menelaus, was betrothed to her cousin Orestes, but after the Trojan War was given to Achilles’ son Neoptolemus to wed. Heroides 8 figures this situation as the repetition of the woman-stealing of the previous generation, putting Hermione in the position of Helen: Tu mihi, quod matri pater est; quas egerat olim / Dardanius partis advena, Pyrrhus agit (8.41–2, You are to me what Father was to Mother; the role that once the Dardanian stranger played, Pyrrhus plays). As we can already see, Hermione elides the truth in her search for similarities with her mother.1 For instance, Hermione’s letter conveys urgency, but her situation as she reports it is anything but life-threatening; 1

See below, pp. 97–9 and Williams 1997: 120–2.

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her final suggestion that she will die if Orestes does not rescue her may be sincere (if melodramatic), but it is difficult to understand whence her desperation derives. Also (apparently) unique to Heroides 8 is the focus on Hermione’s desire, since generally Orestes reclaims her of his own volition. We have neither woman’s story in great detail; there is scant mention of Briseis outside of the Iliad,2 and only a few fragments of the several versions of Hermione’s tale remain. The one fully extant source that does treat Hermione, Euripides’ Andromache, is generally considered to be unconnected to Ovid’s treatment of her. Sophocles, Livius Andronicus, and Pacuvius each wrote a Hermione. There is some evidence of influence on Ovid from the last of these, but the fragments do not permit certainty.3 This leaves us with little idea of where Ovid drew his material for Heroides 8, but for our purposes that is less important than sources within the Heroides.4 An issue that will be of concern for our study is whether Hermione was married to Orestes before her marriage to Neoptolemus (as she maintains in Heroides 8) or merely betrothed to him (as seems to be the case in the Andromache).5 The reception of Heroides 3 and 8 has been mixed; prior readers have thought both letters a dismal failure, possibly because each author attempts to rewrite the canonical version of her own story and most readers of the Heroides have been uninterested in this kind of revision.6 Verducci’s reading of Heroides 3 concentrates on the literalization of the elegiac motif of servitium amoris and the ways in which Briseis has accepted a ‘‘slave 2

3

4

5

6

Jacobson finds no evidence that she plays a major role even in the material from antiquity we do not have (1974: 16–18). J. N. Anderson 1896: 33–48 compiles parallel passages, primarily from the Iliad, but also from Catullus and Propertius. As Jacobson notes, in the Roman poets, Briseis is used as an exemplum of both the power of love and servitium amoris; the latter concept forms the basis of Verducci’s treatment (1974: 18). See Jacobson ibid. 19–21 on artistic representations of Briseis. Soph: TrGF4, 202–3. Andronicus: TRF 3, 23, 187–93. Pacuvius: TRF 3, 109ff. (Ribbeck 1875: 31 and 261–70 for details). Conacher suggests that Sophocles’ play centered around a struggle between Neoptolemus and Orestes (1967: 168 with n.). In Pacuvius’ play, Orestes kills Neoptolemus during his post–matricidal madness. See Allan 2000: 16–8 and nn. and 27 n. 87 on differences between the three. Hermione’s story is also told by Apollod. Bibl. 6.14, Eust. TrGF 176, Verg. Aen. 3.330–2, Schol. Od. 4.4, and Hyg. Fab. 123. See Jacobson 1974: 44 n. 2 for other representations of Hermione in art and literature. The marriage of Neoptolemus and Andromache is detailed in Arctinus’ Iliupersis and Verg. Aen. 3.325–32. See Eust. Od. 1479. 10 on Neoptolemus’ death. In all versions, she marries Orestes; Jacobson 1974: 45 and Allan 2000: 35–6 outline the possible options. Lachmann’s condemnation of Heroides 3 derives in part from his belief in its inferiority (1876); see too Palmer’s difficulty with the first ten lines and D’Elia 1959: 134 and passim. Wilkinson 1955: 92 and Jacobson 1974: passim began the reversal of opinion on Heroides 3, but not everyone has followed suit; Verducci sees it as both ‘‘curiously compelling’’ and ‘‘curiously unpalatable’’ (1985: 119).

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mentality’’ (1985: 98 and passim). Palmer sees Heroides 8 as the ‘‘feeblest and least poetical’’ of the Heroides, decrying its ‘‘unfinished and careless performance’’ (1898: 351).7 Recent studies have reassessed his judgment, finding sophistication in the letter and in Hermione’s rhetorical selffashioning (Williams 1997). In fact, as will be seen, many of Hermione’s infelicities derive from her modeling of herself on Briseis. Briseis’ selfportrait has seemed unconvincing to many; I shall here show that, critics notwithstanding, Hermione has found it a powerful model. READING THE ILIAD

The stories of Hermione and Briseis share certain similarities, and this, in the world of the Heroides, inevitably leads to the creation of others, many of which differ markedly from the mythological tradition. Hermione’s story (at least in her rendering) plays out the ‘‘kidnapped woman’’ scenario in reverse and in the generation after Briseis: in Iliad 1, Agamemnon forcibly removed Briseis from Achilles, and now, Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, has stolen Hermione from Orestes, the son of Agamemnon. (The fact that her mother Helen was also ‘‘kidnapped’’ is certainly not lost on Hermione; indeed, it is likely to be the origin of her interest in Briseis.) Hermione herself draws attention to the replication of the previous generation throughout her epistle; see, for instance, her aside to Neoptolemus to the effect that his father would not approve of his actions in stealing a woman who belongs to someone else (8.85–6). The outward similarities between the stories of Briseis and herself, superficial as they may seem, lead Hermione to design her letter (and fashion herself ) in Briseis’ image.8 Briseis’ letter, in fact, in precisely those portions that seem the least plausible to the reader versed in the Iliad, directly affects Hermione’s reading (and writing) of her own life. To begin with, the grammatical structures of the two letters are similar. Briseis refers to herself predominantly in the passive and as an object to be acted upon.9 Hermione’s letter, while it does not contain such a preponderance of passive 7

8

9

The letter has also been seen as inferior because of its digressiveness; yet the very notion of a digression calls into question what is integral to a text. See Sharrock 1994a on the ‘‘purple passages’’ of Ars. Am. 2 and her more recent thoughts in Sharrock and Morales 2000: 3. The similarities between Heroides 8 and 3 were noted in Jacobson (1974: 46–7 and 379). Williams’ 1997 study focuses on the two, noting that Hermione is ‘‘powerless’’ to control the proliferation of analogy (125–6). The final section of this chapter will suggest otherwise. Jacobson 1974: 37–8. To his citations add 3.13, differi potui; 3.19, caperer; 3.54, capi; 3.63, devorer, cremer; 3.104, verenda. See too Barchiesi 1992: ad 3.23.

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verbs,10 nevertheless figures herself as the object of many of her sentences.11 Furthermore, each author concentrates her attentions on the importance of family and her own place in its structure.12 Hermione is writing to her cousin and disputing a decision made by her father, so her choice is reasonable.13 Briseis’ choice also makes sense in her circumstances; she focuses on others as a way of defining her (now precarious) place in the world. Briseis’ obsessive focus on a family that no longer exists (or is not hers), especially when combined with her implausible assertions of her own importance, has been read as indicative of her deluded self-aggrandizement (so, e.g., Verducci 1985). Indeed, Briseis’ understanding of Homer is very different from most people’s; in the Iliad she is of vital importance for what she symbolizes – the disrespect shown to Achilles by Agamemnon – but of limited interest as a character (except, briefly, in 19.282–300, when she laments the death of Patroclus). If Briseis does play a pivotal role in the events of the Iliad, it is nevertheless a role that could have been played by any valuable object.14 In Heroides 3, Briseis makes a bold move toward asserting her subjectivity. As it happens, Briseis’ reinterpretation of the events of the Iliad as centered around her own person has persuaded none of her readers – except Hermione, who seems utterly convinced by Briseis’ woman-centered view of the Trojan War. Hermione’s letter, treated by some as a failure because of its inclusion of so much extraneous matter, can be seen to form a coherent whole if we read it in light of Heroides 3. Hermione, understood in this way, is all too aware of the invidious comparisons that can be made between herself and other Heroidean writers – notably Briseis – indeed, she has already made them, anticipating her critics by nearly two millennia. Briseis’ letter seeks to document her value: Patroclus reminds her that she is desired and that she will surely return to Achilles: Ipse Menoetiades 10

11

12

13

14

8.36, iungar; 8.57, rumpor; 8.81, credar; 8.82, parata fui; 8.90, orba . . . eram; 8.114, credor; 8.121, exstinguar (probably a middle). Especially at the beginning of her letter: inice non timidas in tua iura manus (cast your untimid hands after your rights, 8.16); eram repetenda (I should have been recovered, 8.25); me tibi Tyndareus . . . tradidit (Tyndareus pledged me to you, 8.31–2); apta rapina sumus ? (are we fit for raping?), 8.66; see too capta Lacedaemone serva tulissem (with Lacedaemonia captured, I, a servant, would have borne, 8.11) etc. Jacobson notes that Briseis is ‘‘past–obsessed,’’ dwells upon the members of her family, and thinks of people primarily in their roles as kin (1974: 26–7, 47). Williams suggests that Hermione, a quasi-orphan, creates parallels between herself and various family members (1997: 117). Yet compare Hypermestra’s letter, Heroides 14, which, although it deploys Lynceus’ dual status as cousin and husband and reveals her concern with her father, does not so persistently detail her family relationships. There is much interesting work still to be done on Briseis’ position as a slave and the Ovidian (particularly Heroidean) exchange/interchange of women.

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tum, cum tradebar, in aurem / ‘‘Quid fles? Hic parvo tempore’’ dixit ‘‘eris’’ (3.23–4, Patroclus himself, when I was given up, said into my ear, ‘‘why do you weep? You will be here in a short time’’). A deputation of three men offers exorbitant gifts to Achilles, which Briseis catalogues in painstaking detail; in her mind they become symbolic of her worth, serving as her ‘‘dowry’’ (3.27–39).15 Indeed, Briseis’ assurance that she, if sent as an envoy, would be more effective in persuading Achilles to return to battle is typical of her self-depiction throughout her letter: Plus ego quam Phoenix, plus quam facundus Ulixes, / Plus ego quam Teucri, credite, frater agam (3.129–30, Believe me, I will accomplish more than Phoenix, more than eloquent Ulysses, and more than the brother of Teucer). Hermione, by contrast, has no external proof that she is of significance to anyone. Her father traded her for political ends to a war hero, perhaps ending her previous marriage, and clearly without consulting her wishes. Neoptolemus she loathes because she views him as her captor, and there is no discussion in her letter of his feelings for her (presumably they do not matter). Once her mother and father return home, she is sent away to marry a stranger. Even Hermione’s mother Helen, on her return from Troy, does not recognize her: Ipsa requirebas, quae tua nata foret! (8.100, you yourself were asking which was your daughter!). Hermione’s focus on her mother’s inability to identify her is part of a larger pattern of traumatic events predicated upon her mother’s departure, events over which she has no control (see Williams 1997 passim and below).16 Finally, Orestes, the man she insists throughout the poem is her rightful husband, has taken no steps to regain her, despite the models that the previous generation might have offered to him and despite his decisive action in avenging his father’s death, of which she reminds him (8.49–54). By her letter to Orestes, Hermione makes it clear that she considers her father Menelaus to have behaved appropriately in plunging Greece and Asia into a decade-long war in order to regain his wife. In fact, she expects the same from Orestes if necessary. It is Briseis’ self-portrait that structures our reading of Heroides 3 through the eyes of Hermione. Briseis claims that Achilles’ anger, and the resultant danger for the Greek troops, is a direct result of her departure: Propter me mota est, propter me desinat ira, / Simque ego tristitiae causa modusque tuae 15

16

See too quamvis veniam dotata (although I come to you with a dowry, 3.55); Briseis here refers to the prizes Achilles received – in addition to her – when he sacked her city. See especially the poignant clamabam ‘‘sine me, me sine, mater, abis ? ’’ (I was shouting, ‘‘without me, mother, do you leave without me?’’, 8.80).

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(3.89–90, Your anger was begun on my behalf; let it stop because of me, and let me be the motive and the limit of your sadness). While her statement is technically true, readers of the Heroides generally take Briseis’ construal of events as bearing only a tenuous relationship to the ‘‘reality’’ familiar to them from the Homeric poem. But why should we take Homer’s word for it? Perhaps to Hermione, who is in this respect at least very much Helen’s daughter, Briseis offers a more plausible interpretation of the events of the Iliad. If Helen is your mother and Menelaus your father, you may with good reason regard amorous relationships as the cause of major political events.17 Given her familial predisposition to see passion as the key motivational factor in human life, Hermione is more likely to read the Iliad through Briseis’ lens (and letter) than in the traditional way; she will then see two women as key players in the Trojan War. In Briseis’ world the crucial figures are Hermione’s mother Helen, pursued across the ocean by the combined might of the Greeks, and Briseis herself, an object of desire to both Agamemnon and Achilles and the cause of a rift between them which has tremendous implications for the events of that war (Wilkinson 1955: 91–2). Briseis offers an alternate model for interpretation, one we may be tempted to call ‘‘feminine’’ in contrast to Homer’s ‘‘masculine’’ text.18 Throughout Heroides 3, Briseis, contrary to precedent, characterizes herself as a figure of great desirability and importance. She claims to remain in Agamemnon’s tent because she is terrified of being captured by a Greek or a Trojan: Saepe ego decepto volui custode reverti, Sed, me qui timidam prenderet, hostis erat. Si progressa forem, caperer ne, nocte, timebam. (3.17–19)

Often I wanted to deceive my guardian and return, but the enemy was there, who could snatch fearful me. If I were to go forward, I was afraid lest I be captured at night.19 17

18

19

Indeed, however we are to interpret Herodotus’ explanation of the Persian Wars as caused by the mutual kidnapping of noble women (1.1–5), and however later readers interpreted it, it stands as a coherent explanation for the enmity between Greece and Persia. She can also be seen as Fetterley’s ‘‘resisting reader’’– except that Briseis is a participant in the story she (re)interprets. One of the readers for the Press has drawn my attention to the lengthy and distinguished literary tradition of women who read differently from men, from Sappho’s retelling of these same events from Helen’s point of view (16V) to the chorus of Euripides’ Medea (410–20), who claim that men misrepresent stories for their own benefit. On these lines, see Naylor 1911: 42 and (of recent discussions) Verducci 1985: 106–7. Briseis’ next lines undermine her statement; what she fears is becoming a slave to someone else.

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Everybody wants Briseis, so much so that she cannot hope to set foot outdoors for fear of capture.20 Hermione, on the other hand, is in no danger whatsoever; she languishes with Neoptolemus and there is no other suitor in sight. Ironically, she writes Heroides 8 in order to provoke precisely the action Briseis claims to fear: Hermione wants to be taken away by ‘‘the enemy.’’ According to Briseis’ version of events, she (like Helen before her) is not only desirable but also of tremendous (if indirect) significance to the Trojan War, as the misfortunes of the Greeks during Achilles’ absence from battle show. A standard strategy of the women of the Heroides is to refer either to promises made by their lovers or to moments of shared intimacy. Briseis does so, reminding Achilles: Tu mihi, iuratus per numina matris aquosae, / Utile dicebas ipse fuisse capi (3.53–4, You yourself, swearing to me by the spirits of your liquid mother, used to say that it had been useful to me to be captured). Hermione does nothing of the kind; her comments to Orestes center on his duty to rescue her from her undesirable kidnapper. Because a nostalgic reminiscence appears in nearly every one of the Heroides,21 its absence here is surely significant. Hermione, we may perhaps assume, has had little actual contact with her cousin/husband Orestes. Indeed, this would fit in with the mythological tradition, which has him living in exile until he returns to Sparta to kill his mother. Such time as they may have spent together would have been as children. The lack of a relationship between Orestes and Hermione provides yet another aspect in which Hermione can compare her own story to Briseis’ and find it inadequate. Briseis, or so her letter claims, has experienced a mutually fulfilling relationship with Achilles. Other elements of Hermione’s letter seem loosely based on Briseis’ text: in an attempt to show her loyalty to Achilles, Briseis swears that she has not slept with Agamemnon: Nulla Mycenaeum sociasse cubilia mecum / Iuro (3.109–10, I swear that the Mycenean has shared no common bed with me).22 Hermione provides her version of the same statement, although hers is more ambiguous in content:

20

21

22

Jacobson interprets these lines differently, suggesting that Briseis is scarred by the trauma of her capture, and so is obsessed by fear of being taken again (1974: 28). The exceptions prove the rule: Phaedra writes Heroides 4 to a man she hopes to seduce – and even she describes the moment she first became attracted to Hippolytus (4.67–84); Deianira’s letter is written to a Hercules she barely knows; Penelope has not seen Odysseus for twenty years. Critics draw attention to the fact that Briseis has had little choice in the matter (e.g. Verducci 117). Hermione characteristically assimilates the less believable aspects of Briseis’ worldview.

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Nox ubi me thalamis ululantem et acerba gementem Condidit in maesto procubuique toro, Pro somno lacrimis oculi funguntur obortis, Quaque licet, fugio sicut ab hoste virum. Saepe malis stupeo rerumque oblita locique Ignara tetigi Scyria membra manu, Utque nefas sensi, male corpora tacta relinquo Et mihi pollutas credor habere manus. (8.107–14)

When night has established me, wailing and bemoaning these cruel things, in the bedroom, and I have lain in my sad bed, my eyes produce rising tears instead of sleep, and, as much as I can, I flee my husband like an enemy. Often I am astonished at my misfortunes and, forgetful of my affairs and the place, I have covered Scyrian members with my unknowing hand, and when I have realized my unspeakable deed, I let go of the body wrongly touched, and I consider my hands to be polluted.

Whatever happens in bed with Neoptolemus (the details of which are elided), Hermione has certainly not enjoyed it. Yet not only does she not swear that Neoptolemus has not touched her, but her behavior towards him suggests that they are quite intimate indeed23 – she has touched him – her retrospective feelings of disgust notwithstanding. Further, if Briseis’ abstinence is comical because of its involuntariness, at least it suggests an appropriate gesture; Hermione’s words seem ludicrous: why (and how) would Orestes expect her to refrain from sleeping with her husband, and why (since she has not) would she raise the issue in the first place? Yet what Briseis has treated, Hermione too finds herself compelled to mention, even if it undermines her purpose. Briseis demands that Achilles kill her if he no longer loves her (coge mori 3.140),24 and gives him several options about how to accomplish this: he could command her to be killed, perform the act himself, or even order her to kill herself (3.141–6). Her statement is generally viewed as another desperate and failed attempt to show her significance (Jacobson 1974: 36, Verducci 1985: 119). If she can force Achilles to kill her, it will prove that he feels something for her, that her existence (or lack thereof) has meaning. Read differently, however, through Hermione’s eyes, it can be seen as proving that she does matter: Briseis is confident enough of her own

23 24

It is surely not inapposite to see membra as having an erotic sense. See too Briseis’ assertions at 3.61–6 that she will die if Achilles leaves her.

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self-worth to issue orders to the mighty Achilles25 and to show herself willing to die to prove her love. Briseis’ words presume her significance. Although Agamemnon and Achilles lose interest in her as they reaffirm their homosocial bond, Hermione is not attuned to that kind of information (or perhaps does not read the Iliad at all, preferring to rely upon Briseis). In contrast to Briseis, Hermione assures Orestes that she will die should he fail to come to her rescue, but gives little indication that she has thought about suicide in a serious way, claiming merely: Aut ego praemoriar primoque exstinguar in aevo, / Aut ego Tantalidae Tantalis uxor ero (8.121–2, Either I will die first and I will expire in my early youth or I, a Tantalid, will be the wife of a Tantalid). One of the notable features of Heroides 3 is that Briseis, deliberately and contrary to mythic precedent, portrays Achilles as an elegiac lover, insinuating that he is a coward for not demanding her return and especially for refraining from battle: Et quisquam quaerit, quare pugnare recuses? Pugna nocet, citharae noxque26 Venusque iuvant. Tutius est iacuisse toro, tenuisse puellam. (3.115–17)

And does anyone ask why you refuse to fight? War is dangerous, the cithara and night and Venus are pleasant. It is safer to lie in bed and hold a girl.

Briseis places Achilles in the role of elegiac lover, but would clearly prefer him to be an epic warrior.27 Interestingly, both Achilles and Orestes are described, with the quintessentially elegiac word lentus, as slow in retrieving their kidnapped ladies (3.22, 3.138, 8.18). The Ovidian notion of elegy as appropriating traditionally epic figures here works against Briseis, trapping her into transforming Achilles, Agamemnon, and even Patroclus into elegiac stereotypes. For if the kernel of an elegiac amatory rivalry between Achilles and Agamemnon is present in the Iliad (as Ovid suggests at Tr. 2.373–4), Patroclus is far more inappropriate as a lena-figure (3.23–4).28 Briseis, 25

26 27

28

Briseis uses the imperative with great frequency: in a letter of 154 lines, imperatives appear 14 times (26 (2), 85, 87 (2), 88, 91, 127 (to the Greeks), 137, 138, 140, 145, 152, 154). Hermione, by contrast, whose letter is 122 lines, uses only 3 (16 – in a conditional sentence, 24, and 29). The lack of imperatives is especially noteworthy in the end of Heroides 8, where a concentration of them to underscore Hermione’s urgency might be expected (compare the end of Heroides 14, another ‘‘rescue letter,’’ the last 10 lines of which contain 4 imperatives). I retain Palmer’s nox for Goold’s vox. This contrasts interestingly with Andromache’s role in Iliad 6; where she wants Hector to avoid war, Briseis wants Achilles to seek it (Jacobson 1974: 30–1 and 34–5; Verducci 1985: 110–11). See too Verducci’s astute characterization of Heroides 3 as the (deflating) metamorphosis of Achilles’ heroic menis into elegiac tristitia (1985: 113).

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paradoxically, would like Achilles to reinvent himself as an epic hero who is also an elegiac lover. Briseis’ notion of Achilles as an epic/elegiac figure may prove seductive to Hermione insofar as it dovetails with her own desires. In this sense, Hermione is not simply a naı¨ve reader, foolishly believing Briseis’ assertions of her own importance. Rather, she uses Briseis in order to create a text/world more like the one she would like to inhabit. According to Briseis, not only was the Trojan War begun over a stolen queen, but a captive woman can alter the fortunes of battle depending on which warrior’s bed she shares. The ‘‘elegiac’’ view of women as more important than warfare (indeed, as its cause) may not correspond to the more dominant epic paradigm, but it is surely more compelling to Hermione. The possibility of a woman influencing world events proves seductive even as it forces Hermione to realize her own insignificance. Some women are the catalysts for great events, even if Hermione is not among them. Briseis’ elegiac (feminine?) view of the world proves more plausible to Hermione than the sordid world of epic in which she is a pawn to be traded by her father to enhance his reputation.29 ‘‘ K I D N A P - P R O N E ’’

WOMEN

Indeed, there is an overwhelmingly persuasive reason for Hermione to see women as powerful actors in the public world: her mother Helen. Jacobson and Williams find Helen to be a key figure in Hermione’s portrait of herself. My interpretation similarly assumes that Hermione aims at reproducing Helen’s story, but also recognizes that Hermione may find this a daunting task. As a result, Hermione seems to insert Briseis (who also seeks to turn herself into Helen) into the middle of her family narrative, and oscillates between the two women in her search to belong. Hermione brings up the similarities between Helen’s situation and her own, Proderit exemplo mater amata suo (8.40, my mother – who was loved – will help by her own example), but then she immediately portrays herself not as a woman with two lovers but as an abandoned little girl; her letter makes clear her feelings of inferiority as it complicates things by introducing Briseis. The differences between mother and daughter are numerous: Helen too had a variety of husbands, but Helen (in most of the sources) 29

The slippage here between ‘‘elegiac’’ and ‘‘feminine’’ will not be lost on readers; indeed, the Ovidian claim that the Heroides were written by women turns most of the conventions of elegy on their head, returning gender paradigms to a more traditional equilibrium.

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does not seem to have had the difficulty Hermione does in adjusting to her new situation. Furthermore, the most common stories of the origins of the Trojan War portray Helen as a desiring participant in her journey to Troy. Hermione, by contrast, has chosen to portray herself as an unwilling victim, and is then forced to acknowledge this difference between herself and her mother. Indeed, the closest Hermione comes to comparing her situation with her mother’s is a reference to Helen as abducta coniuge, stolen wife (8.86), which does not sit well with her statement that Helen left by her own choice. Even here Hermione’s words are ambiguous: abduco, significantly, means not only ‘‘to remove by force’’ (OLD s.v. 5) but also ‘‘to attract away, to seduce’’ (s.v. 3). The real similarity between mother and daughter, as Williams (1997: 126–30) shows, is that Hermione desires the same kind of male attention as her mother had, yet she goes about obtaining it in the least effective ways possible. Her letter details her inability to replicate Helen’s narrative. Hermione is forced to plead with Orestes to take her away from her husband, whereas Paris came to Sparta because he had heard about Helen. Helen was the most beautiful woman in the world, and so men fought wars over her; Hermione, by contrast, cannot even inspire the man she considers her husband to save her from a kidnapper and assume his conjugal rights. The very fact that Hermione is forced to write a letter of this kind adumbrates the difference between the women.30 We return to Briseis: it is key to her self-portrait that Hermione sees herself as booty ( praeda, 8.82). While most would see Helen’s situation as less regular than Hermione’s, Hermione rather views her mother as legitimately married and herself as merely a war prize, given away for the sake of expediency.31 To Hermione, Helen’s choice of a husband further underlines her own involuntary situation. Hermione will insist throughout Heroides 8 that she has more legal right to belong with Orestes than with Neoptolemus. At the same time, she also uses Helen to argue for the primacy of female desire. If Helen is allowed to choose a man, Hermione seeks this for herself as well, even as she insists that she cannot rival Helen. It is not surprising that Hermione has trouble envisioning herself as Helen, given the abandonment by both mother and father that Heroides 8 details (Williams 1997: 120–1). Briseis provides a frame of reference closer 30 31

Hermione’s letter and Helen’s (Heroides 17) could not be more different. It is not necessary to resort to legal arguments here: Helen’s marriage to Paris is no such thing, while Hermione’s to Neoptolemus is legally binding because it was effected with her father’s consent. As often in the Heroides, the perceptions of the heroines matter more than the ‘‘truth’’.

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to Hermione’s experience of her own life: unlike Helen, who has in most versions of her story chosen her sexual partners, both Briseis and Hermione are pawns in the larger world of male politics. Where Helen precipitates war, Briseis and Hermione are its victims. If Briseis seems to Hermione to have succeeded in portraying her own life (which is much like Hermione’s) in a persuasive way, Hermione’s seduction by Briseis’ rhetoric is all but inevitable. Hermione’s experience of her mother may in fact be wholly literary: she notes of Helen’s departure vix equidem memini, memini tamen (8.75, Indeed, I barely remember it, but I do remember), where memini fills its traditional function of marking an Alexandrian footnote. By contrast, Helen’s letter makes no mention of her daughter as she outlines her potential reasons for staying in Sparta. This is all the more peculiar given that Paris’ letter does: for him, Hermione serves the same function as a wine glass, since, in order to mimic kissing Helen, he grabs each once it has touched Helen’s lips (16.255–6). Clearly, too, Hermione’s view of her own unimportance is in many ways worse for her than for Briseis because of her relationship to Helen. To have a mother like Helen and be as undesirable as Hermione claims to be is not easy; Hermione is, by her own reckoning, very little like her mother (Williams 1997: 126). In Hermione’s reading, Briseis takes Hermione’s place as Helen’s daughter. The novelty of this identification is highlighted not only by comparison with the Iliadic version of Briseis’ life, but even by Heroides 3, which is ambiguous – at the least – about Briseis’ chances of success. HERMIONE AS WAR-PRIZE

If Hermione has read Heroides 3 in the ways I suggest, how much more will her own insignificance trouble her? Orestes has not demanded her return, nor does anyone else seem to care, while a captive slave has already assumed the femme fatale role more appropriate to Hermione as daughter of Helen.32 As she pays unwitting homage to Briseis’ rhetorical power, Hermione simultaneously attests to her recognition that Briseis is the possession of one or another Greek hero. Hermione therefore views herself as Orestes’ (or Neoptolemus’) chattel: 32

The fact that the eponymous heroine of Euripides’ Andromache is a slave, yet proves herself superior to Hermione on nearly every level, may ironically ‘‘prefigure’’ [Hermione’s impression of] Briseis’ superiority to Hermione. If this were so, it might help to explain Hermione’s irrational behavior in that play. See Barchiesi 1993a: 334 and passim on ‘‘future reflexiveness.’’

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The Ovidian Heroine as Author ‘‘Haec tibi sub domino est, Pyrrhe, puella suo.’’ Surdior ille freto clamantem nomen Orestis Traxit inornatis in sua tecta comis. Quid gravius capta Lacedaemone serva tulissem, Si raperet Graias barbara turba nurus? Parcius Andromachen vexavit Achaia victrix, Cum Danaus Phrygias ureret ignis opes. At tu, cura mei si te pia tangit, Oreste, Inice non timidas in tua iura manus! An siquis rapiat stabulis armenta reclusis, Arma feras, rapta coniuge lentus eris? (8.8–18)

‘‘This girl, Pyrrhus, is already subject to her own master.’’ He, deafer than the waves, dragged me, screaming the name of Orestes, into his house by my unadorned hair. With Lacedaemonia captured, what would I, a servant, have borne as harsher than this, if a barbarian crowd had taken Greek daughters-in-law? Victorious Achaia distressed Andromache less, when the Danaan flame burned the wealth of Phrygia. But you, if pious care for me touches you, Orestes, cast your untimid hands after your rights. Can it be that if someone should steal your flocks from your unbolted stables, you would bear arms, but you will be sluggish when your wife is stolen?

Hermione contrasts her own treatment with Orestes’ presumed treatment of his livestock: just as Orestes would care about the loss of his animals, so too he should care about her.33 Hermione’s ludicrous comparison of herself to both cattle and a captive woman undercuts her later wistful statement tu mihi, quod matri pater est (you are to me what Father was to Mother, 8.41). Hermione believes herself to resemble Orestes’ eminently interchangeable livestock far more than the irreplaceable Helen, and her comparison of herself to Andromache, once a Trojan princess and now a slave, replicates this tendency. Like Orestes’ putatively missing cattle, like Andromache, and like Briseis (but very much unlike Helen), Hermione is an object to be traded, stolen, or sold.34 Hermione clearly derives this low estimate of her own worth from others’ reactions to her, and in this respect, it is most detrimental for her to compare herself to Helen. Both Briseis and Hermione conceive of themselves as property stolen from their rightful owners, but Hermione mentions it more often and with

33

34

See Jacobson 1974: 48 n. 10 and Williams 1997: 126–7 on these lines. Although there is no evidence for this, it is possible that some version of the Orestes–myth treats his rescue of stolen cattle. Briseis too invokes Andromache (3.51–2); see Barchiesi 1992: 29–31 on her use of Andromache and Tecmessa.

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a wider variety in vocabulary: (abducta 8.86, capta 8.11, captam 8.103, praeda 8.82, raperet 8.12, rapiat 8.17 (of Orestes’ cattle, which are later compared to Hermione), rapta 8.18 and 8.73 (of Hippodamia), rapina 8.66, as compared to caperes 3.123, capi 3.16 and 3.54, captiva 3.69 and 3.101 and rapta 3.1). Briseis uses capta at 3.36 to refer to other female captives that will be given to Achilles if he returns to battle. Briseis’ use of caperer at 3.19 refers to her fear that she will be taken as a prisoner by the Trojans. Hermione’s non . . . captavi (8.93, of her mother) is poignant in its suggestion that Helen, eminently capturable, was not accessible to her daughter.35 Finally, at 8.65–74, Hermione depicts theft as the fate of the women of her family. Yet, as Hermione also admits, she is not a war-captive: rather, she is given by her father in marriage for a political alliance with Neoptolemus: Me tibi Tyndareus, vita gravis auctor et annis, Tradidit; arbitrium neptis habebat avus; At pater Aeacidae promiserat inscius acti; (8.31–3)

Tyndareus pledged me to you, an authority figure weighty in life and years: the grandfather had the judgment over his granddaughter; but my father had promised me to Achilles’ son ignorant of what had happened.

There may well have been some irregularity in this marriage insofar as Hermione was previously intended for (or married to) Orestes, but Hermione’s overly legalistic interpretation of the situation is more consonant with her wishes than with any real wrongdoing on the part of her father. Hermione has in no way been stolen from Orestes; her father has simply made alternate arrangements for her.36 She may prefer to be with Orestes, and he may even have been unwilling to see her remarried, but her father has every right to do what he has done. This is not to deny that Hermione wishes things were different, but the role she has established for herself as not-Helen leaves her nothing to do but wish. In this way too, Briseis is an appropriate comparanda (but see below, pp. 104–5, for another interpretation of Hermione’s helplessness). Hermione feels powerless; this feeling, combined with Briseis’ persuasive rendering of the events surrounding her in the previous generation, causes her to conceive of herself as similarly mistreated. As Williams notes (1997: 125), Hermione’s worldview is simplistic, containing ‘‘undeniable truths, one of which is that Orestes is legally her husband, Neoptolemus not’’; the 35 36

Jacobson also notes that each woman refers to herself by the prosaic sarcina (3.68, 8.94; 1974: 47). Jolivet 2001: 198 is good on the legal language of this poem.

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facts are much more ambiguous than she suggests. Despite certain similarities between Hermione and Briseis, the differences between the two women are far more significant: Briseis is a slave, Hermione (even if she imagines she is treated with disrespect) is not; Briseis is a concubine, Hermione a wife. The ease with which Hermione envisions herself as a war-captive belies the truth of her situation. However wretched her life with Neoptolemus, it is surely better than Briseis’. There is another difference between the two women that Hermione mentions but does not expand upon: in Hermione’s case the ‘‘traffic in women’’ is caused by an agreement between the Atreidae and the Peleidae, while Briseis’ seizure exacerbates an already existing disagreement between them. Where Briseis seeks to heal a rift by her return (although it is motivated by her desires rather than politically), Hermione (like her mother Helen before her) seeks to disrupt the arrangements of men in the interest of her own happiness. But the similarities between Briseis and Hermione far outweigh the differences (at least to Hermione). Not only is the latter married to a man she does not love, but once she has decided she is stolen, there is the additional sting of not being rescued. As Hermione explicitly notes, there is only one person whose love she feels she has a right to expect, and it is Orestes: pars haec una mihi, coniunx bene cessit Orestes: / is quoque, ni pro se pugnat, ademptus erit (8.101–2, This one part worked out well for me, that Orestes was my husband, but he too will be removed if he does not fight for himself). Her letter describes the painful process of realizing that Orestes may not save her. Like Briseis, Hermione is functionally without male defenders. Or so her letter suggests. ‘‘ K I S S I N G

C O U S I N S ’’ : H E R M I O N E A N D H Y P E R M E S T R A

The reading of Hermione and Briseis offered above may well be naı¨ve insofar as it takes Hermione’s word about the events of her story, seeing Hermione as seduced by Briseis into looking at her own life in a certain way. This section will explore the possibility that Hermione is far more active a participant in her own self-fashioning than she may seem, suggesting that she employs a rhetoric developed by Briseis as a shorthand way of expressing her own desires.37 Hermione’s letter seems plausible because it is 37

The women of the Heroides are traditionally seen as not possessing much rhetorical skill, and their letters are understood as being artless outpourings of emotion. Recent studies have shown the ways in which the letters are small rhetorical masterpieces; see above, Introduction n. 21.

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so like Briseis’; in the world of the Heroides, repetition brings persuasion. Yet Heroides 8 shares a number of similarities with Heroides 14 as well, and so this section will briefly concentrate on the ways Hypermestra and Hermione may have been influenced by each other’s letters in their own composition.38 I have suggested above (pp. 79–9) that Hypermestra uses her letter to remind Lynceus that he is obligated to save her from certain death; Hermione does the same thing in her letter. Each woman writes to her cousin and draws attention to the family obligation that necessitates her rescue. Hermione claims that her own situation is contra pium at 8.2 and invokes Orestes’ piety at 8.15, while Hypermestra’s stress on her own pietas (14.49, 84, 129) and use of pius (14.4, 14, 64, 123) to describe herself point to a similar focus. The two women beg for help in startlingly similar ways: Hermione’s at tu, cura mei si te pia tangit, Oreste (8.15, But you, Orestes, if pious care for me touches you), is much like Hypermestra’s at tu, siqua piae, Lynceu, tibi cura sororis (14.123, But you, Lynceus, if you have any care for your pious sister). Hypermestra’s obsessive mention of her actions, which are indeed pious, may well have influenced Hermione to use that word, less appropriate in her case, in the first portion of her letter. Both Hypermestra and Hermione focus on other women of their families and suggest that their own sufferings mirror those of the past (14.85–6; 8.65–74).39 Where Hypermestra digresses on Io,40 showing how her ancestor’s situation is like hers (and using it to prefigure the end to her own story), Hermione mentions the amorous dealings of a number of her family.41 Each woman suggests that her situation is a direct result of the actions of women who have gone before; she is forced to relive the past and to pay for other people’s mistakes. Yet Hermione’s ‘‘family tree,’’ as several have noted, is difficult to reconcile with received versions of her story. Williams 1997 shows that Hermione uses these stories to create a series of family characteristics by which she can show that she belongs;42 she may well have picked up this strategy from Hypermestra. Hermione notes that Orestes is not only her husband but also her cousin, and suggests that he has a twofold obligation to her: 38 39

40 41

42

First (apparently) noted by Ehwald (1900: 3; see too 9). Williams notes that Hermione ‘‘instinctively’’ emphasizes generational similarities (1997: 120). See too Heroides 8.81–2: ne non Pelopeia credar, /ecce, Neoptolemo praeda parata fui (Lo, in case I am not believed to be a Pelopid, I am offered as booty to Neoptolemus). See Casali 1998a: 94–102 and Fulkerson 2003: 136–7 for a discussion of Io’s role in this letter. Phaedra employs a similar tactic in her letter, but her purpose is different; she uses the aberrant erotic lives of the women of her family in an attempt to justify her own desires; see below, p. 132. See especially 117 on Hermione’s ‘‘surrogate relationships’’ with her ancestors.

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The Ovidian Heroine as Author Quid, quod avus nobis idem Pelopeius Atreus, Et, si non esses vir mihi, frater eras? Vir, precor, uxori, frater succurre sorori! Instant officio nomina bina tuo. (8.27–30)

And Pelopean Atreus is the grandfather of both of us, and, if you were not my husband, you would be my cousin. I beg you, as a husband help your wife, as a cousin help your cousin: twofold names urge you to your duty.

When these remarks are compared with Hypermestra’s description of herself as Lynceus’ pia soror (14.123), the similarities are obvious, as is a key difference: Hermione highlights her dual relationship (cousin/lover), while Hypermestra, for reasons outlined above, never makes this kind of claim explicitly. Each uses the rhetorical strategy more appropriate to her circumstances. Orestes is obligated to Hermione on two fronts and she uses whichever is more effective in order to manipulate him into rescuing her. Each woman suggests that she was taken prisoner in the same way: compare Hermione’s Surdior ille freto clamantem nomen Orestis / traxit inornatis in sua tecta comis (8.9–10, He, deafer than the waves, dragged me, screaming the name of Orestes, into his house by my unadorned hair) to Hypermestra’s assertion: Abstrahor a patriis pedibus, raptamque capillis – / haec meruit pietas praemia! – carcer habet (14.83–4, I was dragged by my hair from my father’s feet and, as a reward for my piety, a prison holds me). This hair-pulling topos is common in tales of abduction, and may appear (less appropriately) in Hypermestra’s letter in order to allude to her similarities to Hermione. Each woman, unlike all the others of the Heroides (except Briseis, whom we have already seen is a model for Hermione) is a captive in need of rescue. Interestingly, however, the previous mythic tradition offers no evidence that Hermione has been imprisoned, and even her letter is not clear about this. This part of her argument may be invented in order to convince Orestes of the seriousness of her plight, and indeed, Hermione may have learned this trick from Hypermestra, or both from Briseis. The connections between Hermione and Hypermestra may suggest a further point of comparison: I have suggested elsewhere that Hypermestra does not tell all of the truth in her attempt to obtain rescue from Lynceus; Hermione too may exaggerate her difficulties in order to summon Orestes more quickly. At the very least, each woman writes a letter that in some ways deliberately misrepresents the truth to a man she hopes will get her out of a difficult or unpleasant situation (and to whom she has a previous

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tie). Where Hypermestra plays a double game to get help from her husband (or father) in escaping punishment for her actions, Hermione may be just as duplicitous about her own situation because she has grown tired of Neoptolemus. Hypermestra avoids mentioning her relationship to Lynceus except insofar as he is her cousin; Hermione, by contrast, not only stresses her family relationship to Orestes, but also insists that they are destined for one another. Where Hypermestra’s strategy is the most appropriate given her dual readership, Hermione’s shows itself to be appealing to Orestes on two fronts. Both women therefore exploit the dual nature of their letters to the full. As it happens, in every extant version we have of Hypermestra’s story, she is rescued by her husband Lynceus. We may therefore perhaps assume that Ovid conceived of Heroides 14 as reaching its addressee and materially affecting the outcome of Hypermestra’s story. Similarly, Hermione seems to marry Orestes in every version of their story known to us; reading her letter in light of Hypermestra’s may show that her self-portrait as a passive and helpless figure is a pose, designed to convince Orestes and her readers that she is very much in need of rescue. The reading offered in the majority of this chapter that sees Hermione as influenced by Briseis by no means precludes this one; it may be that in her desperation Hermione is simply utilizing every available resource. Hermione would then be far more aware of her rhetoric than at first seems. Given both women’s ‘‘success’’ in the larger world, we may want to see the two heroines as relying upon each other: Hypermestra’s success may have inspired Hermione to emulate her, or Hypermestra, having seen the rhetorical manipulation in Hermione’s letter, may have utilized it to her own advantage. In this reading, Hermione is cleverer – and less constrained by her circumstances – than a reading of Briseis might suggest; she, like Hypermestra, has carefully fashioned the truth in order to attain her objectives. CONCLUSION

Briseis’ letter is an interested rereading of Homer, designed to argue for her own centrality to the Iliad (and to Achilles’ happiness). Hermione, seduced by Briseis’ rhetoric, chooses her as a role model throughout Heroides 8, despite the model that her own mother Helen might have offered. Hermione’s reliance on Briseis is perhaps peculiar in light of the traditional view of Briseis as one of the least effective and powerful of the women of the Heroides; we do not have enough of Briseis’ story to know her fate, but it is

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surely significant that she does not even have the self-determination to commit suicide, the last resort of many of the heroines. Briseis’ letter is generally seen as a failure: her rhetoric is, as noted by many, not especially effective. She undermines herself at every step: critics note her poor use of the story of Meleager (from Iliad 9) and find her appeals distasteful.43 Yet even though Heroides 3 does fail in convincing Achilles to love Briseis, it succeeds on another level. Hermione is convinced by Briseis that the latter is indeed of great importance. Indeed, this success may well outweigh the other ‘‘failure,’’ since Briseis seems to cling to Achilles as a way to assure herself of her own significance in the world, and Hermione has granted this to her even without Achilles. Hermione’s letter has similarly been judged a failure, lacking the pathos and organization of others in the corpus. It has been easy to view her as pitiable and deluded, as merely a victim of circumstances. This chapter can be seen as contributing to that view, insofar as Hermione chooses as a model perhaps the least likely of the heroines. Yet this is not, to my mind, the most productive way to interpret Hermione’s reliance on Briseis. Both women are active manipulators of their literary tradition in order to make it cohere with their needs. Many of the congruences between the stories of Briseis and Hermione are the result of the latter’s self-fashioning. We can see Hermione’s choice of Briseis as a role model as indicative of her pathological insecurities as does Williams; we can simultaneously give her credit, as does the final section of this chapter, for being willing to portray herself in an unflattering manner in order to accomplish her aims. This chapter has complicated the idea of community offered in previous chapters, showing that the women may look to different models for different things. Hermione can be seen as a failure in light of Heroides 3 or because she so evidently does not measure up to her mother Helen. Yet when her letter is read in conjunction with Hypermestra’s, she seems to be one of the most successful of the women of the Heroides, since she is able to portray herself in a variety of ways to appeal to different kinds of readers. 43

See Jacobson 1974: 13–15, 27–8, 31–3, Verducci 1985: 112–15.

CHAPTER

5

Reading magically: Deianira and Laodamia

While prior chapters have suggested a relatively straightforward model of community, in which the women of the Heroides deliberately reframe their own stories in light of those they have found either appealing or familiar from other women in the Heroides, this chapter will offer a different version of the model, suggesting that sometimes influence is less voluntary and also that the ‘‘monotony’’ of the collection may have roots in a cause more sinister than the conscious adaptation of compelling models. The tales of Deianira, Medea, and Laodamia have a number of common elements – primary among them is the death in all three women’s stories – and those elements will be shown to hint at a more pernicious connection between the three. This chapter, admittedly more speculative than those that precede it, suggests that the three heroines share a bond not only of entwined textuality, but also of supernatural causality. Building on the links between magical and poetic carmina, this chapter first explores the characterization of Laodamia in Heroides 13 as intrigued by the supernatural, and then surveys some of the similarities between her letter and Deianira’s. This will lead to the suggestion that Laodamia may have read Deianira’s story and ‘‘learned’’ from it that when your husband dies, you should too (especially if, as I shall argue is true for both Laodamia and Deianira, you have caused that death). I then move on to a broader kind of reading, suggesting that the magical elements in both stories provide a further link between them: neither author proves able to control her carmen. Finally, Medea and her magic abilities will play a role in the interpretation of the two letters, since poetic magic is notoriously difficult to control once it has been invoked in a text. I will suggest that the supernatural elements of the three letters may stem from a common source, whether it is Deianira’s murderous rage (suppressed in Heroides 9 – as in the Sophoclean model – only to recur elsewhere in the corpus), Laodamia’s unwitting invocation of supernatural forces that she cannot control but which ‘‘contaminate’’ other women, or even Medea’s sinister presence in the letter immediately before Laodamia’s. 107

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Deianira and Laodamia’s deaths are inextricably linked to the deaths of their addressees, Hercules and Protesilaus respectively, in all tellings of their stories; in this they differ from many other women of the Heroides. Deianira writes after she has discovered that one of the slaves Hercules has brought home on his latest trip is to be his mistress. Laodamia fits less comfortably in the mold of ‘‘abandoned woman’’ since Protesilaus has left her not for a woman but in order to fight in the Trojan War. Yet looking at Laodamia’s story in light of Deianira’s may help to show how she does indeed belong in the Heroidean collection and, more importantly, how both women’s texts slip out from under their control. This chapter, more explicitly than others, engages with the dangers of writing. SOURCES, BACKGROUND, AND AUTHENTICITY

The authenticity of Heroides 9 has been much disputed. While the primary aim of this chapter is not to settle that dispute, several of the peculiar elements of Heroides 9 become explicable if considered in light of Heroides 13. Besides metrical and structural difficulties (Casali 1995a: 230–3), Heroides 9 contains the solitary occurrence of dramatic development during composition: Deianira learns as she is writing Heroides 9 that her husband is dying by her hand, and she thereupon resolves to die.1 Another piece of evidence against Heroides 9 is the (again unique) appearance of a hortatory refrain in which Deianira urges herself to commit suicide (Vessey 1969: 354 with bibliography). Secondary problems have been the ‘‘prolixity’’ of the Omphale episode2 and the ‘‘repetitive’’ use of the victor victus theme.3 Jacobson pointed out the limitations of Vessey’s analysis, showing that many of his objections disappear if the letter is not read as a suasoria (1974: 228–31). Casali’s defense of the letter reads it as ironically engaged with previous versions of Deianira’s story; prominent among those ironies is Deianira’s worry that Hercules will be conquered by wearing Omphale’s clothes (which will prove less dangerous than her poisoned gift to him – also clothing) (1995a: 504–5; see too 1995c: passim).4

1 2

3 4

See Courtney 1965: 64, who believes the letter spurious. Lehrs wanted to delete ll. 65–102 and 143–68, Shuckburgh nearly all of 55–118. See Casali 1995b, Hall 1999, and Bolton 1997: 429–32 on how the episode fits into the letter. Vessey 1969: 350. For a defense of the theme, see Bolton 1997: 424 and Pattoni 1991: 137–40. Casali’s commentary unfortunately spends little time on the ‘‘pseudo-problem’’ of authenticity (1995a: appendix IV), as he finds Vessey’s arguments, in the main, unworthy of detailed refutation. Vessey’s arguments are not, in general, very convincingly advanced; this does not, however, make the difficulties in the poem any less. Casali’s rebuttals, in brief, are that the refrain of Heroides 9 parallels

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Deianira is known for having killed her husband Hercules by means of a magical potion. In Sophocles’ version of the story, this death is accidental; prior tellings make Deianira a sorceress or a violent murderess.5 The Trachiniae, our lengthiest treatment of this latter part of the story,6 opens with the news that Hercules has returned from a long absence with a group of captive women from Oechalia, one of whom Deianira discovers to be his concubine Iole. In order to recapture Hercules’ love, Deianira unwittingly anoints a robe she has woven for Hercules with a poisonous potion given her by the centaur Nessus. Once Hercules puts the robe on, the poison eats into his skin and he dies a slow and painful death. Deianira learns this news, silently receives the reproaches of her son Hyllus, and enters her bedroom to commit suicide.7 Throughout Sophocles’ tale, which is a major influence on Heroides 9, Deianira is characterized as kind and above all naı¨ve; her murderous eponymous predecessors only add to the pathos of her Sophoclean portrayal.8 Deianira’s gullibility in Sophocles has been ridiculed, but she does seem simply to have made a terrible mistake in anointing her husband’s cloak with a potion made of centaur’s blood.9 It is a mistake that, as Faraone has shown (1999: 112–19), occurred in contemporary life as well, for the difference between a love potion and poison was one of degree rather than kind. Unlike Deianira, Laodamia has neither murder nor magic in her literary past; her story is merely tragic. Yet the Heroides version of Laodamia’s story presents a figure who can be viewed as causing her own fate through supernatural means, and in this she is comparable to Deianira. Heroides 13

5

6

7

8

9

the Trachiniae (1995a: 232; first noticed by Birt 1877); that a refrain is more likely to be the innovation of Ovid than of an imitator; and that the fact of dramatic development is attributable again to the influence of the Trachiniae. Bolton adds a sensitive reading of Deianira that contributes to Casali’s defense (1997). See too Barchiesi (1993a: 340–2) which outlines many of the ironies in the question of authenticity, particularly how Deianira is seduced by her tragic model into writing Hercules’ death. See Faraone 1999: 111–12 with nn. for bibliography on the issue of Deianira’s culpability. The Deianira of the Metamorphoses contemplates murder, if only momentarily (9.151–2). Other treatments include Od. 11.602–4, Hes. Theog. 950–5, CW 25 (14–33 MW), Cypria (where the marriage is emblematic of bad relationships), P. Oxy. 2493 (229 MW), Bacch. 5 and 16, Schol. Ap. Rhod. 1.1212, Nonnos, Dion. 35.89–91, Panyassis’ Heracleid (see Galinsky 1972: 24–5), the Oechalis Halosis, a Heracleia by Kimaithos (Schol. Ap. Rhod. 1.1357), Apollod. Bibl. 1.8.1 (which Palmer ad loc. believes to have been Ovid’s source). Sophocles and/or Bacchylides seem to have been the first to portray an ‘‘innocent’’ Deianira (March 1987: 62–4, who believes it was Sophocles). See Birt 1877: 406–9, Pattoni 1991, and Sharrock 1994a: 54 on Ovid’s use of the Trachiniae. Jolivet persuasively argues that in Heroides 9 too Hyllus is a vital character, because he will be its ultimate reader – Deianira thus gets the ‘‘last word’’ (2001: 184–5, 187–91). Two examples: Galinsky finds Sophocles’ Deianira ‘‘understanding and patient’’ (1972: 46) and argues that she is a sympathetic character (ibid. 49). Easterling finds her ‘‘deeply sympathetic . . . noble, compassionate, modest’’ (1981: 60). Contra, Segal, on how Deianira is neither entirely innocent nor entirely guilty (1977: 127).

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conveys the heroine’s worries about her husband’s safety at war, urging him to take care of himself and reminding him that her life depends on his. Readers with mythological and etymological knowledge know that Laodamia worries about Protesilaus with good reason because, as she herself notes, an oracle had stated that the first Greek to set foot on Trojan soil would die first (13.93–4). As a result none of the Greeks was willing to disembark once the ships arrived.10 Protesilaus scoffed at the oracle, leapt from his boat, and was the first to die. Once Laodamia found out about his death, she committed suicide. All of these events, however, take place subsequent to Heroides 13. Although many of the sources available to Ovid for Heroides 13 are lost to us,11 he surely used Euripides’ Protesilaus (649–58 TGF ) and Laevius’ Protesilaudamia (13–19 Courtney); both are fragmentary but seem to contain between them the primary elements of the Heroidean version, that is, the death of Protesilaus at Troy, his appearance to Laodamia, and her death, as well as a statue of Protesilaus and even, seemingly, a letter from Laodamia. Two of the later summaries of the story, however, differ from each other in an important detail. In Eustathius and most other versions, the deceased Protesilaus is granted permission by Hades to appear to his wife and tell her of his fate. When she sees him and hears the news, she kills herself. In the other version, attested in Hyginus, Laodamia creates a statue of Protesilaus to fondle after he tells her of his death. A servant sees her holding and kissing the image of Protesilaus (Hyg. Fab. 103–4), assumes she is committing adultery, and summons her father, who discovers the truth. He orders the statue to be burnt and Laodamia, dolorem non sustinens, throws herself onto the pyre and dies with the image. This second version will prove to be more influential on our Laodamia’s story, as Heroides 13 too contains a statue. THE POWER OF MAGIC

Women, especially those who are crossed in love, are often thought in ancient literature to have a unique access to punishing magic.12 To mention 10

11

12

The story itself is first attested in Il. 2.695–710, and the oracle is first attested in the Cypria but assumed in many earlier treatments. On the oracle, cf. Ausonius 12.4, Hyg. Fab. 103, Lucian, Dial. Mort. 19, Eust. Il. 2.698, Od. 11.521, Apollod. Bibl. 3.29, etc. Palmer 1898 lists most of the prior sources for the story but neglects Hes. 199 MW, Pindar, Isth. 1.53, Anaxandrides (Kock, CAF 2.150), Sophocles, Poimenes, and an episode of Heliodorus. Lipking 1988: 18–19 discusses the magical ability traditionally attributed to the abandoned woman. On the links between (powerless) women and magic, see too Barreca 1993, who is brief but suggestive.

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only heroines in the corpus of the Heroides, we have already seen that Phyllis and Ariadne utter curses against Theseus, and Dido’s curse of Aeneas provides the aetion for the Punic Wars. This female propensity to engage in magic fits in with traditional understandings of femininity; magic is considered by the ancient sources to be the last resource of those who have no access to other kinds of power. Additionally, it ties in with the well-documented ancient view of women as less rational than men and so more willing to partake in practices that may or may not have a logical basis. Yet the literary connection between women and magic is perhaps most interesting because it does not correlate with what we know about actual magic; nearly all of the love spells extant from antiquity are maleauthored (Winkler 1990: 90–1). What is more significant for our purposes than the perceived gendering of magic is that all of the women of the Heroides, and indeed all elegiac poets, are inextricably linked to the supernatural by virtue of the fact that they write carmina.13 This is a point repeatedly made by the Roman elegists, who use their poetry to win over their puellae in a way they identify as similar to love magic: poetry, like magic, has the power to open locked doors.14 It is clear that one of the personae adopted by elegiac poets of the Augustan period is that of magical practitioner: elegy suggests that magic has genuine efficacy (even when it is used to the detriment of the poets).15 Since the figure of the magician is also the figure of the author, some of the women of the Heroides may portray themselves as magicians in order to gain access to a certain kind of poetic authority. That is, the magic that appears in the letters may be read metonymically for the women’s desire to assert authorial control: the three heroines of this chapter, by showing themselves as practitioners of carmina, may also hint at their desire for authorship. We begin with Heroides 13, generally read as the pathetic and superstitious letter of an ineffectual woman. My reading, on the other hand, shows it to be infused with erotic magic imagery throughout: I suggest that Laodamia’s excessive superstition causes her to write a carmen that is deadly. Much of the ironic pathos in this poem derives from the presentation of Laodamia as consistently open to the possibility of magic, while missing its 13 14

15

For treatments of magic in the Heroides see Tupet 1976 (ad Heroides). See Romilly 1975: 4 and passim on the similarities between poetic and magical language and Sharrock 1994a on magic as metaphor in the Ars Am. (50–78). Verg. Ecl. 8 is perhaps the Ur-text for elegy’s invocation of magic, particularly 67–72, which detail the powers that carmina possess. Elegiac references to magic as possessing power (culled from Sharrock 1994a: 51 n. 47): Ov. Am. 1.8, 2.1.23–8, 3.7.31–6; Prop. 1.1.19–20, 2.1.51–2; Tib. 1.2.41–56, 1.5.11–16 and 41–58, 1.8.17–22.

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most important manifestations, those that she (unwittingly) creates. Laodamia is unskilled in her interpretation of various paranormal occurrences, and she suffers for this incompetence. Further, she seems to cause her own worst fears to manifest themselves by writing them. It is easy to judge the character portrayed in the poem as delusive and paranoid. At the same time, Heroides 13’s characterization of Laodamia as overly superstitious heightens the irony for the reader because her paranoia turns out to be justified: Protesilaus has barely left, and Laodamia is convinced that he is dead. She will turn out to be right. Nevertheless, the fact that the external reader knows he is doomed in no way necessitates Laodamia’s excessively superstitious terror. In fact, Laodamia may cause her husband’s death, thus bringing the story to its traditional close. The poem contains a variety of peculiar events, which will first be summarized and then treated in some detail. Laodamia reports an overwhelming sense of doom from the moment of Protesilaus’ departure (marked by an evil omen), offering premonitions and warnings about his death (ironically counseling him to avoid the very Trojan who kills him in most versions of the tale), and asserting that she will die with him. The letter culminates in a frenzy of superstition, in which Laodamia describes her dreams about a lifelike Protesilaus and subsequent creation of a waxen imago that bears an exact resemblance to him. In the probable conclusion to the action (at least if we follow the version in Hyginus 103–4), the wax imago will be burned and Laodamia will throw herself upon its pyre; Protesilaus too will die as soon as he sets foot on Trojan soil. Perhaps the most ironic aspect of the excessively supernatural tone of Heroides 13 is that Laodamia, the author of the letter, does not seem aware of how her actions bring about the outcome she most fears. Yet her letter is imbued with magical elements that prove deadly to both herself and her husband. We begin with Protesilaus’ departure scene, an event common enough in the Heroides but appearing here with a twist. Laodamia prefaces it with a description of the evil omen that attended her husband’s exit: Nunc fateor – volui revocare, animusque ferebat; Substitit auspicii lingua timore mali. Cum foribus velles ad Troiam exire paternis, Pes tuus offenso limine signa dedit. Ut vidi, ingemui tacitoque in pectore dixi: ‘‘Signa reversuri sint, precor, ista viri!’’ Haec tibi nunc refero, ne sis animosus in armis; Fac, meus in ventos hic timor omnis eat! (13.85–92)

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Now I confess, I wanted to call you back, and my mind carried me that way; but my tongue stuck with fear of an evil omen. When you wanted to go to Troy from your ancestral home, your foot gave a sound as it struck the threshold. When I saw, I groaned, and I said to myself, ‘‘I pray that may be the sound of a man who will return!’’ I tell you this now, so that you will not be courageous at arms. Make all this fear of mine blow away in the winds!

In most poetic texts containing an omen of this kind, the omen is merely a possibility.16 Where it has occurred, the person who has stumbled cancels the omen in some way, either by turning around and leaving properly or by not leaving at all. The omen in Heroides 13 is therefore particularly striking because Laodamia mentions it after Protesilaus has the power to alter any aspect of his departure.17 The significance of the omen, then, lies not so much in its occurrence but rather in Laodamia’s decision to describe it to Protesilaus. She mentions the omen because she must, because she has been obsessively contemplating every detail of her husband’s departure. Yet a significant part of the efficacy of curse magic lies in the victim’s knowledge of the curse.18 By warning her husband of an omen that he is now powerless to avert, Laodamia dooms him. Laodamia’s wish that her fear will disappear with the winds (13.92) is also problematic. It may be nothing more than a standard apotropaic saying. Unfortunately, as Laodamia knows, there is no wind at Aulis. Her statement linking the wind to her fears will not be meaningless; both will travel together to Aulis and, when the wind reaches Aulis, and Protesilaus sails to Troy, his fate – and hers – will be sealed. Yet, ironically, Laodamia’s wish comes true: her greatest fear is that Protesilaus will die in the Trojan War. He does precisely this (at the earliest possible opportunity), and so her fears disappear. Laodamia’s reminder of the omen and her other inauspicious words foreshadow and parallel her loss of control over her own fate. Here as elsewhere, Laodamia’s authorial incompetence is sinister and perhaps even deadly. Heroides 13 contains another element that might better have remained unwritten. Laodamia claims: Troasin invideo, quae sic lacrimosa suorum / Funera conspicient, nec procul hostis erit (I envy the Trojan women, who will thus see the tearful funerals of their men, and the enemy will not be far away, 13.137–8). Her remark parallels the epic statements of Odysseus and Aeneas that the men who died in the Trojan War were lucky, but differs in 16 17 18

Cf. Tib. 1.3.17–20. See Jolivet 2001: 76 on the ironies of Protesilaus’ trip given the Homeric focus on his swift feet. Gager 1992: 21 and Johnston 1999: 121.

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a significant way.19 The epic heroes wished themselves to have died in the glorious arena of battle, while Laodamia wishes she could see her dead husband (who, we must remember, is not yet dead). The statement reflects Laodamia’s desire to be near Protesilaus and her worry about not knowing how he fares, but her explicit statement – that she envies women whose husbands are dead – is open to multiple interpretations. The use of procul shockingly suggests that Laodamia would prefer her own town to be besieged, provided that Protesilaus returns home. Laodamia’s nightmares and subsequent actions have been the subject of critical scrutiny. On the surface, her dreams are tastefully depicted erotic fantasies; through them, Laodamia is able to pretend that her husband is physically present (Jacobson 1974: 294): Aucupor in lecto mendaces caelibe somnos; Dum careo veris, gaudia falsa iuvant. Sed tua cur nobis pallens occurrit imago? Cur venit a labris multa querela tuis? Excutior somno simulacra noctis adoro; Nulla caret fumo Thessalis ara meo; Tura damus lacrimamque super, qua sparsa relucet, Ut solet adfuso surgere flamma mero. (13.107–14)

I chase deceitful sleep in a solitary bed; while I am lacking true ones, false pleasures satisfy. But why does your pale image appear to me? Why does many a complaint come from your lips? I am struck from sleep and I worship the forms of the night; no Thessalian altar lacks smoke from me. I give incense and my tears upon it, at which, once it is sprinkled, the flame relights as it often does when wine is poured on.

Laodamia’s dream is irregular, as is her act of worship: first she is ‘‘struck from sleep,’’ and then she worships the simulacra noctis. The mention of Thessaly here is vital to an understanding of Heroides 13. While the couple is from Thessaly in all versions of their story, it is in this poem mentioned four times (twice in a single emphatic line, 13.2). Thessaly and Haemonia (a region in Thessaly) are both traditional loci of magical events.20 The emphasis on the story’s location in Thessaly is yet another allusion to the supernatural events that are happening all around Laodamia; even her homeland joins in the conspiracy to involve her in magical doings. There is a final instance of the supernatural in this poem, and it is the strangest of all. In the variants of her story in which Laodamia creates a wax 19 20

Cf. Od. 5.306–12, Aen 1.94–101, and Di Lorenzo et al. 1992 for parallels with Il. 6. Nisbet and Hubbard 1970: 316; to their citations add those in Viarre 1964: 199–200.

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statue of Protesilaus, she does this after she knows he is dead. Yet in Ovid, she makes the statue while her husband is still at Aulis. This could mean that both she and the statue are destroyed while Protesilaus is still alive or, more poignantly, at precisely the moment when he is killed by a Trojan. Because she has linked her life to his, she has unwittingly created a kind of magical bond between them: Et facito dicas, quotiens pugnare parabis: / ‘‘Parcere me iussit Laodamia sibi’’ (And make sure you say, whenever you prepare to fight, ‘‘Laodamia ordered me to spare her,’’ 13.69–70). The statue that Laodamia makes of her husband is peculiar because it serves as both a funerary monument and a reminder of someone absent but expected to return.21 She does not expect Protesilaus to return and has already transferred her affections to his statue, yet he is not dead, and there is no reason why he could not come home. Again she misreads – and so miswrites – confused by the fact that statues are made to commemorate both the living and the dead. Laodamia is led by the existence of two Protesilaoi to confuse the real for the merely lifelike; she says of the image: Dum tamen arma geres diverso miles in orbe, Quae referat vultus est mihi cera tuos; Illi blanditias, illi tibi debita verba Dicimus, amplexus accipit illa meos. Crede mihi, plus est, quam quod videatur, imago; Adde sonum cerae, Protesilaus erit. (13.151–6)

Nevertheless, while you will bear arms as a soldier in a different part of the world, I have a wax statue to remind me of your appearance. To it I speak the endearments and words owed to you, and it accepts my embraces. Believe me, an image is more than it might seem. Add voice to the wax and it will be Protesilaus.

Ironically, of course, the substanceless Protesilaus who will return to Laodamia will add to her statue precisely a voice – and nothing else. Ovid’s alteration in the time of making the statue – before the announcement of Protesilaus’ death and not after – suggests that the atmosphere of magic permeating the poem has, in effect, altered the story in a rather sinister way. Laodamia’s superstition causes her to ‘‘magically’’ link her husband’s life to her own, and then to kill herself. The next section explores the ways in which this alteration may be informed by Deianira’s presence in the Heroides. 21

Bettini outlines the various functions of statues in myth (1992: 7 and passim).

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Like Laodamia, Deianira writes a letter in which she seems overwhelmed by her circumstances; she is willing to overlook Hercules’ frequent affairs, but the arrival of one of his mistresses at her doorstep leaves her at a loss. Deianira decides to use a love charm to win Hercules back. In the Trachiniae, she discovers that the wool she used to smear the potion on the robe has burst into flame and begins to worry about what she has done. To return to Ovid’s tale, in the process of writing Heroides 9, Deianira loses control over her story (and her letter) to such a degree that it includes a refrain of the kind often found in magical rituals.22 Even Laodamia’s letter does not contain such an overt invocation of the supernatural. Yet both heroines write themselves and their husbands to death. Deianira has killed her husband in a diffuse atmosphere of uncontrolled sexuality and magical potions, and she seems as puzzled about the events as is the reader (although we have the Trachiniae to help us fill in the details). At line 142 of the letter, Deianira receives word that the cloak she sent to Hercules was poisoned, and immediately makes clear her determination not to outlive her husband. At this point (9.151) she explicitly refers to herself as Meleager’s sister, and this brings us to a key but unnoticed connection between Heroides 9 and 13. We have seen elsewhere that family relationship often provides an impetus for the women of the Heroides to read themselves into one another’s stories. Here too, there is a significant correlation: Deianira is Laodamia’s aunt.23 The fact that the two women are related provides a ‘‘hereditary’’ reason for Laodamia to look to Deianira for help in understanding her own story and in writing her letter. Laodamia’s uncle Meleager was killed through the magic of his mother (and Laodamia’s grandmother) Althaea, who, like both Deianira and Laodamia, then killed herself.24 The women of Laodamia’s family are deadly to their men, a fact that offers ample reason for Laodamia’s superstitious way of looking at the world. The remainder of this section will therefore highlight some of the main similarities between Laodamia and Deianira’s stories.25 22

23

24 25

The linkage between Deianira’s magic and these ‘‘magic elements’’ has been used to argue for the authenticity of the letter. Cf. Bolton 1997: 434 n. 36, on the refrain of Heroides 9. Pausanias, quoting the Cypria, says that Protesilaus’ wife is the daughter of Meleager (son of Oeneus) and Kleopatra (daughter of Marpessa) (4.2.7.5–7). See Ovid’s version of the story at Met. 8.445–525. Roberts 1997: 259–50 suggests that Bacch. 5 similarly plays with family relationships: Hercules meets Meleager in the underworld, enquires what hero has killed him, and upon discovering that it was a female relation, oddly asks Meleager if he has a sister available for marriage. That sister is, of course, Deianira, who will subsequently kill Hercules.

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While Laodamia’s superstition is comprehensible within the context of her poem, we can also see it as having been affected by other women’s stories in the Heroides. Laodamia may have become attuned to irrational events from her knowledge of Deianira’s mistake with the centaur’s poison. If even Deianira, wishing only to be loved by her husband, can kill, it is no wonder that Laodamia second-guesses her own words. Her focus on suspicious details becomes explicable in light of her aunt’s tragic misunderstanding. Yet in spite of her caution, Laodamia seems to have absorbed the least desirable aspects of the other woman’s story, insofar as she unknowingly follows Deianira’s lead in accidentally causing the death of her husband.26 Each woman unwittingly becomes a focus for irrational forces, and the fact that both women, in Ovid, write carmina, may offer some explanation of how. At first glance, the two women seem to seek precisely opposite kinds of action from their husbands. Deianira (like Briseis in Heroides 3) would like Hercules to cease being an elegiac lover and return to battle: Plus tibi quam Iuno, nocuit Venus: illa premendo / sustulit, haec humili sub pede colla tenet (Venus has harmed you more than Juno: the latter has raised you up by pressing you down, while the former holds your neck under her humbling foot, 9.11–12). Laodamia, on the other hand, writes in order to lure her husband back from war and into her arms, seeking to make him into an elegiac figure: tu tantum vivere pugna, / Inque pios dominae posse redire sinus (But you, fight only that you may live and be able to return to the pious bosom of your mistress, 13.77–8). Laodamia, significantly, uses the elegiac word domina to refer to herself although she is not an elegiac mistress (see too domina in 13.145 of the Trojan woman Laodamia envies); Deianira, for her part, uses the word to refer to Omphale (9.74, 81).27 (These are the only two letters in which the word appears in an erotic/elegiac sense.28) But these differences are only apparent, for Laodamia and Deianira’s desires are dependent upon what they think will make their husbands more their own: by concentrating solely on his status as a warrior, Hercules will remain faithful to Deianira, and by returning to his bride and abandoning the war, Protesilaus will preserve his life. 26

27 28

See Landolfi 2000: 175, who suggests that literature oppresses Laodamia; he (intriguingly) sees Laodamia as having read Penelope (ibid. 178–9, 185–7). The latter instance may be spurious; if it is not, each woman uses the word twice. In the other three cases (Her. 3.101, 11.2, and 14.60), the word retains its traditional meaning. In Her.3 the word is linked to the motive of servitium amoris and is not, strictly speaking, erotic; Briseis is called domina by one of her fellow-slaves although, as she is careful to point out, Achilles is her dominus in actual fact (3.5–6, 100, 127, 154). At the same time, both Briseis and Laodamia want their lovers to be more elegiac (Landolfi 2000: 192). Canace calls herself the mistress of her letter, and Hypermestra’s personified hand refers to its domina.

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Both Deianira and Laodamia worry that their husbands are dead, and indeed, both women’s husbands are dead shortly after they finish their letters (as are the women themselves): Torqueor, infesto ne vir ab hoste cadat (I am beside myself with worry lest my husband fall to a hated enemy, 9.36). Compare this to Laodamia’s: Sive – quod heu! timeo – sive superstes eris (Whether – oh! but I am afraid – or whether you are alive, 13.164). Laodamia’s statement is also comparable to Deianira’s final line, in which she bids goodbye to her family, life, virque – sed o possis – et puer Hylle, vale! (and farewell my husband – but I wish you could [fare well] – and my son Hyllus! 9.168). Each woman speaks elliptically in an attempt to avoid facing the reality she fears, as if not mentioning an unpleasant fact made it less true. Further, both women are haunted by nightmares, which they seem to rely upon as trustworthy predictors of the future; compare Laodamia’s dreams at 13.109–14 (text above, p. 114) to Deianira’s words: Inter serpentes aprosque avidosque leones Iactor et haesuros terna per ora canes. Me pecudum fibrae simulacraque inania somni Ominaque arcana nocte petita movent. (9.37–40)

I am vexed among serpents and boars and greedy lions and dogs, about to take hold through their threefold mouths. The entrails of animals affect me, and the empty images of dreams and omens sought in the secret-keeping night.

Each woman is so confused about reality that she relies upon information provided by dreams. More significantly, these are the only two places in the Heroides which contain dreams (simulacra, 9.39 and 13.111); Penelope has fears and imaginings (1.11–22, 71–4), but not dreams or omens, which may suggest that dreams and omens are meant to be seen as true harbingers of future events (especially given the role of Penelope’s dreams in the Odyssey). Evil omens appear elsewhere in the Heroides, but here they are uniquely used to foreshadow events subsequent to the end of the poem.29 There are a number of further similarities between the two women’s letters: each woman mentions her in-laws (9.43–4, 13.25). Both women use the word aucupor (9.41, 13.107; only here in the Heroides). Both poems also contain a ‘‘dressing scene’’; while Laodamia details the regal clothing she refuses to wear because she prefers to imitate the martial condition of 29

Most often in the Heroides omens are retrospective or not seen in their full significance until afterwards: e.g. a woman reflects that her wedding must have been ill-omened based on its result.

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Protesilaus’ life (13.31–40), Deianira focuses attention away from herself and describes Hercules attiring himself in Omphale’s clothing (9.55–66). Laodamia tries to imitate her husband’s wearing of armor, while Deianira criticizes her husband for wearing women’s clothing. The women’s presence in the community of the Heroides may have a variety of effects on their stories. Deianira’s murder of her husband for having an affair with another woman may start her niece Laodamia thinking; because she has learned from Deianira, she manages to exculpate herself for the death of her husband. On the other hand, Deianira, untrusting of other women because of her errant husband, may use Laodamia in order to create a community; this fits well with the concern Barchiesi has seen in Heroides 9 about different ways of obtaining information (1993a: 339). Because both Deianira and Laodamia are uncertain about what kinds of information they can rely on, they may have recourse to each other’s texts in order to interpret the distressing events that surround them. Here as elsewhere in the Heroides, women who place exclusive trust in those related to them by blood or marriage read too narrowly.

MEDEA AS GHOSTWRITER

The explanations offered above for the common elements of both women’s stories are in keeping with those advanced throughout this book. At the same time, since both letters are suffused throughout with magic, it may be useful to explore other, less mundane, explanations. Let us examine two further possibilities, both tentatively offered: first, that magic simply ‘‘happens,’’ and second, that the two women are part of a larger Heroidean community of women interested in magic. Given that these poems are carmina and that Latin elegy is notoriously linked to magic, we may be able to understand the magic that appears in the Heroides as similar to, e.g., the ‘‘witch-poems’’ of Propertius. Writing carmina may automatically bring with it both the elegiac power of enchantment and other, less desirable effects. Laodamia, the most overtly superstitious of the heroines, in her unwitting invocation of supernatural forces, may simply be the focal-point for the magic throughout the collection. She may have affected the story of Deianira by bringing magical events into it. Thus, while Laodamia causes the death of Protesilaus, Deianira also inadvertently causes the death of her husband. Yet rather than viewing magic as a diffuse, atmospheric-like force that permeates several of the Heroides, let us return to the model of community

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that offers the structure for this book. This chapter has concentrated on Laodamia and Deianira, but there are other witches in the Heroides. Perhaps we were fooled by Medea’s characterization in Heroides 12 (and 6) into temporarily forgetting that she is deadly. While other women may be interested in magic, and may even dabble in it, there is only one woman in the collection who is a famous witch. Hypsipyle may indeed threaten horrible things, but her apparent motivation is to show Jason (since he likes dangerous women) that she too can be naughty. She does not, after all, do any of the things she threatens, while Medea, who manages to portray herself as a victim of circumstances, is in fact a murderer several times over. In her eagerness to become innocent, Medea may have ‘‘displaced’’ her traditional witchcraft onto two other women of the Heroides (one of whom, after all, comes immediately after her in the collection) in order to allow her to portray herself as an innocent victim of Jason’s perfidy. If Medea has turned Hypsipyle into another Medea, perhaps she has also ‘‘ghostwritten’’ (or edited?) two of the letters to suggest that she is not alone either in having recourse to magic or in murdering those closest to her.30 Ovid’s Medea claims to be guilty only of credulitas, a statement that provokes outrage from critics,31 since she has just confessed to betraying her family and killing her brother. Perhaps her statement rather points the finger at other letters in the corpus: Hercules and Protesilaus will shortly be dead because of the credulitas of their wives, and in fact, Deianira and Laodamia may kill their husbands because of Medea’s dastardly cleverness as an auctor. These three women form a community of the guilty in the Heroides, yet none of them but Medea intends to kill in the most prior influential version of her story. I offer a final suggestion: Medea is a witch; yet the Medea of Heroides 12 does not portray herself as such. As Chapter 2’s reading of Hypsipyle and Medea suggests, the latter is (in the Heroides) relatively innocent.32 Hypsipyle is, according to most readers, the more frightening of the two; the wealth of detail she gives about magical practices, together with her 30

31

32

On the notion of the Heroides as presenting themselves as simultaneously artless – and so genuine – expressions of pain and as somehow mediated before they reach us, see Farrell 1998. And assertions of textual corruption from others (Palmer 1898, Knox 1986, contra Jacobson 1974: 113; see too Verducci 1985: 69–70 and Heinze 1997 and Bessone 1997: ad loc.). My reading of Heroides 12 would suggest that Medea uses this word advisedly in her attempt to read herself as the naı¨ve Hypsipyle. To phrase it differently, the letter freezes her in the moment before she has performed most of her most horrific deeds. See Newlands 1997 on Medea’s change from innocent young woman to terrifying monster. Is Heroides 12 as Hinds 1993 suggests, written immediately before the Euripidean Medea appears on stage?

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vitriol and efficacy at cursing Medea suggests that, if she has modeled herself on Medea, she has surpassed her teacher. I therefore suggest a final possibility for interpreting the magic of Heroides 9 and 13, one that takes into account Hypsipyle’s terrifying curse on Medea. Although the efficacy of Hypsipyle’s curse (discussed above, pp. 52–3) is certainly great (and influential on Oenone), there remains the possibility that she is still an amateur when it comes to magic. Perhaps her curse achieved its aims, but also caused certain other magical events. Hypsipyle’s curse may affect not only Medea in Heroides 12, but also ‘‘spill over’’ onto Heroides 13 and Heroides 9. Deianira and Laodamia’s stories admittedly contained supernatural events before they came into proximity with Medea’s and Hypsipyle’s. My suggestion here is that, in typically Heroidean fashion, Heroides 12 (and 6) may provide an organic explanation for the occurrences of magic in the later part of the corpus. Given the premise argued throughout this book that the women of the Heroides read one another’s letters and are influenced by them, Medea’s presence as one of the authors of the corpus may well become deadly for her co-authors. Deianira is here especially deserving of attention, since she, like Medea, is an established wife threatened with replacement by a much younger woman. Can we see Ovid’s Deianira as a failed Sophoclean heroine (or her Sophoclean incarnation as having ‘‘put one over’’ on the audience in convincing them of her innocence)? Just how accidental was Hercules’ death? Seen in light of Heroides 12, Deianira’s rendition of the events in both Sophocles and Ovid becomes suspect. CONCLUSION

My interpretation of Heroides 9 and 13 offers a different way to understand community in the collection. Building upon the power of carmina, it sees Laodamia, perhaps influenced by her aunt Deianira into finding mysterious forces behind everyday events, as writing in an atmosphere of palpable superstition. Indeed, Laodamia’s story is here different from other tellings of it, insofar as she seems to have gained the power to tell the future and the ability to cause her husband’s death from far away. This brings her story in line with Deianira’s, and so, following the model of communal influence seen in other groups of Heroides, we can see this newfound power as deriving from Laodamia’s adoption of Deianira’s murder of her husband. At the same time, because both women seem so unaware of what they are doing, it is also possible that one or both of them has unwittingly brought magic into the collection, or even that Medea or Hypsipyle has had larger effects on the corpus than at first seemed.

CHAPTER

6

Reading like a virgin: Phaedra and Ariadne

‘‘Alors elle se rappela les he´roı¨nes des livres qu’elle avait lu, et la le´gion lyrique de ces femmes adulte`res se mit a` chanter dans sa me´moire avec des voix de soeurs qui la charmaient. Elle devenait elle-meˆme comme une partie ve´ritable de ces imaginations et re´alisait la longue reˆverie de sa jeunesse, en se conside´rant dans ce type d’amoureuse qu’elle avait tant envie´.’’ (Flaubert, Madame Bovary)1

Through a discussion of the ways the women of Phaedra’s family affect her view of the world, this chapter examines Phaedra’s relationship to her stepson Hippolytus and to her husband Theseus. Like Phyllis in Chapter 1, Phaedra looks to a woman whose story is similar to her own, and bases her assessment of similarity on genetic relationship (in both cases, to Ariadne). In Phyllis’ case, the family connection is only potential, but Ariadne is Phaedra’s sister, and her story has formed an indelible impression on Phaedra, especially given that both women have a relationship with Theseus in common. At the same time, to most readers, the stories of Ariadne and Theseus and of Phaedra and Hippolytus share few similarities. Yet, as we shall see, Phaedra alters her own story to fit into the mold of Ariadne, and also borrows key details from her mother Pasiphae’s story. Ariadne’s authority does not stop here, for she is also a powerful influence on other women of the Heroides; in fact Heroides 10 explicitly establishes her text as authoritative in matters of abandonment. But Phaedra is not merely the passive recipient of her sister’s literary

1

‘‘Then she recalled the heroines of the books she had read, and the lyric legion of these adulterous women started to chant in her memory with the voices of sisters, and charmed her. She herself became an actual part of these imaginings and realised the long fantasy of her youth, seeing herself as the type of amorous women whom she had so long envied.’’ (pt II, ch. 9).

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tradition: Ariadne’s influence causes Phaedra to revise radically her own tale and force herself into the mold of an abandoned woman despite the fact that her story as traditionally told is not the tale of a deserting husband but rather of an adulterous wife. Phaedra’s letter also opens up a new plotline for ‘‘abandoned’’ women, insofar as Heroides 4 is her attempt to start over, to begin a new relationship rather than focusing on the one (she thinks) she has lost. Like the other women of the Heroides, Phaedra reveals herself to be vulnerable to the influence of others; while her story differs in many respects from theirs, she adapts key features of the characteristics of abandoned women in order to show herself truly a member of the Heroidean community of women writers. At the same time, Phaedra utilizes Ariadne’s story to help her write a different kind of letter, one that breaks away from the traditional Heroidean mold. Heroides 4 has proven a problematic poem; it seems to engage a different kind of situation from the other Heroides.2 Whereas many of the women of the Heroides seek to rekindle a previously existing relationship, Phaedra writes to Hippolytus in an attempt to begin a liaison. Phaedra’s writing strategies – centering around seduction – at first glance bear few resemblances to other letters. Topoi familiar from the other letters are not in great evidence here, but this letter is nonetheless influenced by the atmosphere of the other Heroides in profound ways. Indeed, the traditional view of Heroides 4 as seeking only to seduce is open to dispute because it ignores key aspects of the ‘‘pre-history’’ of the letter, particularly those in which Phaedra details her relationship with Theseus and characterizes him as perfidious to women. SOURCES AND BACKGROUND

Before analyzing Phaedra’s poem in light of Ariadne’s, a brief overview of their literary sources is in order. The myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus was popular for many centuries and so, especially in light of the way the Heroides often reenvision the myths they portray, it is difficult to be sure which prior literary treatments were influential on Heroides 4.3 It is generally 2

3

Torresin 1998: 168 and 187. The concentration on the seductive element of Phaedra’s letter has led Heroides 4 to be viewed as a suasoria for far too long (Wilkinson 1955: 105, Jacobson 1974: 151, Rosati 1985: 114, Torresin 1998: 187). Oppel does not consider Heroides 4 a suasoria (1968: 89–90), but his arguments could be stronger. Landolfi sees Heroides 4 as an erotic manual (2000: 13 and 16). Phaedra is first mentioned at Homer, Od. 11.321 and (perhaps) in the Catalogue of Women (West 108). Potential Greek sources for Ariadne and Phaedra include the epic Theseides, which treated a variety of the hero’s exploits (Arist. Poet. 1451 a16; cf. Barrett 1964: 3 and Sourvinou-Inwood 1979: 27–8

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assumed that the two Euripidean Hippolytus plays and the Sophoclean Phaedra form the basis of Heroides 4 (Jacobson 1974: 142 and passim). It is also agreed that Euripides’ first – no longer extant – play was likely to have been the major model, insofar as the fragments permit speculation. In addition, Seneca’s Phaedra, although later than Heroides 4, relies greatly upon it (Coffey and Mayer 1990: passim) and may contain evidence of pre-Ovidian treatments. The details of Phaedra’s story change in each version, but the following elements remain stable: Phaedra falls in love with her husband’s son Hippolytus. During one of Theseus’ prolonged absences, Phaedra’s feelings become known to Hippolytus, either because she tells him or because her nurse does. Horrified, he rejects Phaedra, who, in order to preserve her reputation, accuses him of attempting to rape her. The enraged Theseus banishes and curses his son, who dies soon after. Phaedra then kills herself.4 Euripides’ extant Hippolytus features a deathbed reconciliation between father and son and an aetiology of the cult of Hippolytus.5 The story of Theseus and Ariadne was similarly popular and long-lived, surviving in several different versions.6 Athens is required to send fourteen sacrificial victims to the Cretan king Minos (and his Minotaur) every nine years (Plut. Vit. Thes. 15.1). Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, falls in love with Theseus (who has come to slay the Minotaur) and helps him escape from the labyrinth once he has killed the beast that it houses. Theseus takes Ariadne with him but unfortunately leaves her on the island of Dia/Naxos; his motives for abandoning Ariadne are variously construed: either he deserts her for another woman, is forced from her by the gods, or, in the

4

5

6

with nn.). There were several Theseus tragedies, Theseus (one each by Euripides, frr. 381–90 TGF, and Sophocles), Minos, Aegeus (Sophocles), Cretes (one each by Euripides and Sophocles), Hippolytus (two by Euripides and one by Lycophron, of which nothing but the title survives; cf. TGF 1.174–5) and Phaedra (Sophocles). It is not clear from which play P. Oxy. 2452 (frr. 1–6; see Lloyd-Jones 1963: 435–6) comes, but see Diotti 1966: 45–7 for arguments for Sophoclean authorship. Asclepiades gives a slightly different version of the story (FGrHist 12 F 28). There were also Roman versions of the story of Theseus, some of which may have influenced Ovid (see Pont. 4.10.71 on Pedo’s epic). Other sources include Servius, ad Aen. 6.445 and 7.761, Paus. 1.22.1–2. Phaedra also appears at Fas. 6.733. See Herter 1971 for a survey of literary treatments of Phaedra. Tschiedel offers a discussion of other, similar Greek myths (1969: 16–22) and of post-Euripidean (Greek) treatments (ibid. 32–8) and pre-Ovidian (Latin) treatments (ibid. 39–44). In the Euripidean play that we have, it is before her accusation, but in other versions, she apparently committed suicide only after her deception became known (Barrett 1964: 43). On the relationship between Theseus and Hippolytus (and Troezen) as it changes in the sources, see Herter 1940: passim. Webster plausibly suggests that the myth recognizes the historical relationship between Bronze Age Greece and Crete (1966: 22). Ariadne, apparently a Minoan fertility goddess, is mentioned at Il. 18.590, Od. 11.321, and in Hes. Theog. 947–9.

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influential Catullan version, simply forgets her.7 Ariadne laments her fate, and Dionysus rescues and marries her.8 In the first Hippolytus, of which we possess eighteen fragments (428–30 and 432–46 TGF ), Phaedra herself seemingly propositions Hippolytus, and, when he rejects her, accuses him of attempted rape. She kills herself after Hippolytus’ death, perhaps as a result of the discovery of her plot. From the fragments, few conclusions can be drawn.9 Less is known, if possible, about Sophocles’ play. There are seventeen fragments of his Phaedra, but they give little indication about the plot.10 In this play Phaedra appears to have been neither as culpable as in Euripides’ first Hippolytus nor as virtuous as in his second; Barrett thus not unreasonably posits Sophocles’ play as having been performed in between the two Euripidean versions. Euripides’ second Hippolytus was performed in 428 BCE; scholars often assume that this unprecedented redramatization of a story by the same playwright was because the first proved too scandalous.11 In this version, Phaedra displays a keen awareness of both the difficulties caused by her feelings and her public reputation; she therefore struggles throughout the play to preserve her dignity. The second play appears to be a skillful (and successful)12 reworking of the themes of the first, displacing much of what was shocking in Phaedra onto her servile and elderly nurse and thereby mitigating Phaedra’s guilt.13

7

Desertion: Aigimios (298 MW), Plut. Vit. Thes. 20 (for Aigle; see Webster 1966: 26 on this); the forced departure FGrHist 3 F 148 (appearing primarily in art); amnesia: Theocritus, 2.45–6 and the scholia ad loc., Eur. Thes. 387–8 TGF, Apollod. Epit. 1.7–10. 8 Such is the version of the myth most popular from Catullus 64 and attested in Hyg. Fab. 42–3, but in other versions, Ariadne rejects Dionysus for Theseus (this ties in with the wreath or crown given by Dionysus to Ariadne; cf. Hyg. Astr. 2.5). Ariadne is mentioned by the Atthidographers, Simonides (PMG 550), Nonnus, and appears in the Cypria p. 18k. See Webster 1966 for details of the permutations of the Ariadne myth and Eisner 1977 for a survey of artistic representations of her. 9 Most agree on the following: the play was set in Athens and not Troezen (see Jeny 1989). Phaedra’s seduction may have involved political as well as sexual betrayal of Theseus (Barrett 1964, Roisman 1999). Phaedra’s nurse attempted to dissuade her from her passion. Hippolytus covered his head in shame at Phaedra’s proposal (hence the title kalupto´ meno"). Phaedra swore Hippolytus to secrecy before speaking to him. An argument occurred between Theseus and Hippolytus which resulted in Theseus cursing Hippolytus (Barrett 1964: 11–12). 10 Eur. 431 TGF, 616–31 TGF. Theseus seems to have been absent from home because he was in Hades (for four years according to Seneca, Ph. 838; see frr. 624–5 TGF ). 11 Cf. Ar. Ran. 1043 on Phaedra and Stheneboea as ‘‘whores.’’ Euripides’ first Hippolytus won third place, which has led many to conclude that he rewrote it in order to recoup his loss. 12 In fact, Euripides won first place that year; it was one of only four tragic victories for the playwright. But see Gibert 1997 on the (un)likelihood of a single play being the cause of a victory. 13 Birt 1877 is the locus classicus for Heroides 4’s use of the Hippolytus. Cf. Oppel 1968: 91ff., Jacobson 1974: 142–5, and Birt’s footnotes for Ovidian echoes of the first and second Hippolytus.

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Influenced by the overwhelmingly negative view of Euripides’ first Phaedra, criticism of Heroides 4 has tended to run along typical lines. It sees Ovid’s Phaedra as a grotesque and/or mentally deranged14 older woman, eager to manipulate both her husband and her stepson to fulfill her carnal desires. The other main current of scholarship on the poem has outlined the ways in which Phaedra uses rhetoric to gain her ends (Giomini 1993: 351–6) and does and does not fit into the elegiac genre;15 and recent approaches have read the letter intertextually, seeing Heroides 4 as building on the reputation of the ‘‘other’’ Phaedras: Ovid’s Phaedra is, in effect, a tragic character attempting to portray herself as an elegiac character. De Vito concentrates on the pathos of the letter, viewing Phaedra as a woman forced by love into an embarrassing situation. Her thesis draws support from Seneca’s (apparently non-ironic) use of Ovidian imagery,16 but does not take into account the hostility that Phaedra expresses towards Theseus (De Vito 1994: 317). In contrast with most of the tragic Phaedras, Ovid’s does not struggle against her passion; rather she struggles for the most persuasive way to express it; writing is, for her, a compulsion (Kauffman 1986: 35). Furthermore, her insistence is unparalleled even to the reader who knows the traditional story; Ovid’s Phaedra is more shameless than her predecessors – including the shocking Euripidean version – long before she causes Hippolytus’ death. An aspect in which Ovid’s Phaedra is like her tragic predecessors is in her consciousness of her literary history: Euripides’ Phaedra draws attention to her family, suggesting that she is in some way cursed to repeat her family’s penchant for aberrant love;17 Ovid’s Phaedra similarly uses her family to explain the circumstances of her own life. Where my reading differs from others is in viewing Phaedra’s focus on her family as stemming from Ariadne as well as from the tragic Phaedras. As Ariadne is the catalyst for Phyllis, so too is she the source for Phaedra to refashion her story in certain ways.

14

15

16

17

Presumably because her relationship with Hippolytus is quasi-incestuous. Jacobson 1974: 147 and Spoth 1992: 108 both refer to Phaedra as ‘‘pathological.’’ Jacobson views Phaedra as primarily elegiac (1974: 147). So does Casali (1995b: 3), although he paints a useful picture of the tensions between elegy and tragedy (her ‘‘true’’ genre). For other ways in which Phaedra is elegiac, see Rosati 1985: 129–31 and Davis 1995: 44 and passim. The Phaedra of Heroides 4, as many have noted, assumes the role of the (male) pursuer of elegy (see especially Davis 1995: 44–8) and of the elegiac lena (Rosati 1985: 127). De Vito 1994: 315 and passim; see Grimal 1963: 313 and Paratore 1953: 224–7 on Seneca’s putative transformation of Phaedra from the frivolous Ovidian model. See too Eur. Hipp. 831–3 on Phaedra’s ancestral taint (with Winnington–Ingram 1960: 175–6).

Reading like a virgin: Phaedra and Ariadne ‘‘ A B A N D O N E D ’’

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WOMEN

Rather than concentrating on the ways Phaedra is like her previous literary incarnations or unlike the seductive elegiac poet she aims to be, I will here focus on the ways Ariadne influences Phaedra’s poetic composition. As noted above, Phaedra’s letter is often compared to Sappho’s or to Canace’s, yet the heroine whom Phaedra seems most eager to emulate is Ariadne. Phaedra, in fact, rewrites her sister’s story in her own voice despite the fact that she is already married and her traditional story pattern is a different one. Where Ariadne is a maiden, kidnapped and abandoned on a deserted island, Phaedra is a matron with two children. Ariadne’s story has a ‘‘happy ending’’ of a kind; certainly the Catullan version of the story (in which she is rescued by Dionysus) will have been in every reader’s mind. Yet this traditional end of Ariadne’s story is nowhere alluded to by Phaedra; perhaps she believes her sister not to have been rescued, or (more likely) thinks that any mitigation of Theseus’ behavior is rhetorically ineffective for her purposes. While Ariadne is rescued by Dionysus and even receives a catasterism, Phaedra mentions nothing about her sister’s life after Theseus, focusing instead on Ariadne as both lover and victim. Ariadne’s overpowering influence, I will suggest, convinces Phaedra that she too has been abandoned by Theseus. Even without excessive sisterly loyalty, Phaedra may still be angry at Theseus for seducing and abandoning her sister, betraying their family, and killing their brother, the Minotaur.18 Ariadne herself mentions the latter grievance in Heroides 10: Me quoque, qua fratrem, mactasses, inprobe, clava / Esset, quam dederas, morte soluta fides (If you, villain, had bludgeoned me too with the club you used on my brother, the promise you gave would have been discharged by my death, 10.77–8). Despite the fact that they are sisters involved with the same man, the stories of Phaedra and Ariadne are not causally connected in any extant version until Ovid.19 But once the connection has been made, the question is raised how Theseus came to marry Phaedra after deserting her sister; no ancient source gives any illuminating details. Was Ariadne immediately

18

19

Her. 4.113–16, quoted below. Palmer finds this mention of Phaedra’s ‘‘brother’’ at 4.115 ‘‘perhaps the most flagrant instance of bad taste in Ovid’’ (1898: 312). Eggerding 1908: 204 and Jacobson 1974: 157. The Odyssey refers to both women together in the underworld, but makes no connection between them (11.321). While Euripides’ second Phaedra mentions her sister Ariadne when speculating on the causes of her love (Hipp. 339), she does not connect this with her own relationship to Theseus. Hyginus notes that Ariadnes autem sororem Phaedram Theseus duxit in coniugium (Theseus also, however, took in marriage Phaedra, the sister of Ariadne, Fab. 43.3).

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replaced by Phaedra in Theseus’ heart and bed? Were both women on the ship with Theseus? The major point of connection between Ariadne and Phaedra is, of course, Theseus. He was the lover/husband of both, and is absent when Phaedra writes (as he is not present when Ariadne writes Heroides 10). If Phaedra were like Penelope or Laodamia, or many of the other women of the Heroides, she might have written to Theseus to demand his return. She does not, because instead of reading these women’s letters, she has read Ariadne’s, and, under the influence of her sister’s observations about Theseus, realizes that she does not want him back. She therefore, unlike other heroines, attempts to use her letter in the service of a new relationship. Because of Ariadne’s experiences, Phaedra is predisposed to conceive of herself as abandoned by Theseus. Phaedra might reasonably learn about male–female relationships from her sister; how much more compelling is that information when both women loved the same man? And so Phaedra innovates in writing a letter not to Theseus but to his son Hippolytus. Perhaps she has learned from Ariadne that writing to Theseus is useless, or perhaps she seeks to show that she (unlike her sister) was never fooled by Theseus. Yet Ariadne is not Phaedra’s only influence; the decision to react to her purported abandonment by Theseus by seducing Hippolytus shows that her mother Pasiphae’s influence is not negligible. Pasiphae’s husband Minos was unfaithful; she not only took revenge20 but also began a relationship of her own.21 Phaedra’s attempt to seduce her stepson is thus conceived under the influence of her sister’s perceptions about Theseus and perhaps too her mother’s actions in a (seemingly) similar situation. Phaedra’s letter has conflated two separate plots: one (as in her mother’s and sister’s stories and in many of the Heroides) is abandonment; the other is seduction (her traditional story – and the story of her mother, but not the story that is usually told in the Heroides). Yet Phaedra’s new story will not end happily either; for Theseus will come to hate Phaedra, and Hippolytus is not interested in her amorous storyline. While Hippolytus is the addressee of Heroides 4, it is important to focus on the ways in which Theseus serves as an absent but central character. It will consequently be seen that Ariadne’s experiences with Theseus and Pasiphae’s with Minos and the bull encourage Phaedra to construct a story both 20

21

According to Apollodorus, Phaedra’s father Minos had many affairs, and his wife Pasiphae cursed him so that his ejaculate formed monsters in his partners’ wombs, which subsequently killed the women (Bibl. 3.15.1). Cf. Torresin 1998: 171. With a bull; tradition has it that Daedalus created a machine by which she could have sex with the bull. Their offspring, the Minotaur, was placed in the labyrinth and fed Athenians.

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dependent on theirs and radically different from it. In the traditional reading of Heroides 4, Phaedra, alone of the heroines, writes a letter before she is abandoned. Yet this interpretation of Phaedra as a seductive rather than an abandoned woman is questionable because it ignores key aspects of her self-presentation. Every version of Phaedra’s story has her attempted seduction of Hippolytus occur when Theseus is away from home;22 whatever his reason, he is not physically present when Phaedra writes her letter. Phaedra seems to interpret this as abandonment; she explicitly says that she has been deserted, even suggesting that Perithoos is her rival for Theseus’ affections (4.109–12, quoted below). In the second line of her letter, Phaedra calls herself Cressa puella, a Cretan girl. While Phaedra is indeed from Crete, this adjective is most often in elegy used not to refer to Phaedra but to Ariadne; it may take the reader (and Hippolytus) a moment to determine which Cretan is writing.23 Even the word puella is suggestive. It has been plausibly read as signifying Phaedra’s desire to present herself as young and therefore more (generically) appropriate for Hippolytus. This is surely the case, and perhaps it is Ariadne’s experiences that have shown Phaedra how desirable puellae are.24 Phaedra employs a variety of techniques to tempt Hippolytus; it has been little noticed that her (putative) abandonment also functions as a seductive tool. Phaedra suggests that because Theseus has deserted both herself and Hippolytus, they should make common cause against their enemy:25 Tempore abest aberitque diu Neptunius heros; Illum Pirithoi detinet ora sui. Praeposuit Theseus – nisi si manifesta negamus – Pirithoum Phaedrae Pirithoumque tibi. Sola nec haec ad nos iniuria venit ab illo; In magnis laesi rebus uterque sumus. 22

23

24 25

Theseus’ absence from Phaedra is variously explained: he is either helping a friend or performing a public office. Cressa is used to describe Ariadne at Ov. Am. 1.7.16, Her. 2.76, Ars. Am. 1.558, Pasiphae at Prop. 4.7.57, Aerope at Ars Am. 1.327, and Asclepius’ herbs at Prop. 2.1.61. Gnosia is not used in elegy outside of Heroides 4.68, and Minoia/Minois is used to describe Ariadne at Her. 16.349, 17.193, Ars Am. 1.509, Prop. 2.14.7, 2.24b.43, Tib. 3.6.41, Pasiphae at Prop. 2.32.57, Minos’ chair at Prop. 4.11.21, and Crete itself at Fas. 3.81. Never do any of these words refer to Phaedra. Critics have found distasteful both the puella of Heroides 4 and the puellares of 10.20. It has been suggested that Euripides’ second Phaedra seeks not only to seduce Hippolytus, but also to incite him to revolt against Theseus (Roisman 1999: 12ff.). Barrett’s discussion of the first Hippolytus suggests that it attempts to instigate a royal coup (1964: fr. d). In this play, the coup would have been more palatable because Theseus had been in hell and was presumed dead. Certain parts of Heroides 4 can be similarly read: for instance, Phaedra’s opening lines, reassuring Hippolytus that he has nothing to fear from her, and her stress on her own royal lineage and hence her continued suitability for queenhood (4.105–8).

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The Ovidian Heroine as Author Ossa mei fratris clava perfracta trinodi Sparsit humi; soror est praeda relicta feris. Prima securigeras inter virtute puellas Te peperit, nati digna vigore parens; Si quaeras, ubi sit – Theseus latus ense peregit, Nec tanto mater pignore tuta fuit. At ne nupta quidem taedaque accepta iugali – Cur, nisi ne caperes regna paterna nothus? Addit et fratres ex me tibi quos tamen omnis Non ego tollendi causa, sed ille fuit. (4.109–24)

The Neptunian hero is gone at this time and will be gone for a long time: the face of his Perithoos detains him. Theseus prefers Pirithoos to Phaedra and Pirithoos to you, unless we deny the obvious. And that is not the only injury from him against us: we have each been harmed in important matters. He has scattered on the ground the bones of my brother, broken with a thrice-knotted club; my sister was left as prey for beasts. She first in virtue among the axe-bearing girls bore you, a parent worthy of the vigor of her son. If you should ask where she is – Theseus pierced her side with his sword: your mother was not safe even with so great a pledge. But she was not even a bride or received by marriage torch; why, if not to prevent you, a bastard, from seizing his paternal realm? He added also brothers to you from me, whom, all of them, I was not the cause of raising, but that man was.

Phaedra’s statement about Theseus’ absence (and her concomitant ‘‘interpretation’’ that he does not care about her) is noteworthy because it does not seem to appear in any previous source.26 Ariadne here functions as a catalyst; to Phaedra, Theseus’ behavior can only be isomorphic: she will be (or already has been) abandoned. Hippolytus’ mother here serves a double function; she is both designed to show Hippolytus that he owes no loyalty to his father and simultaneously provides another example of Theseus’ cruel behavior. He left Ariadne on an island (note relicta in Heroides 4.104 and 10.80) and murdered Hippolytus’ mother.27 Phaedra was fortunate enough to reach Athens, but, given Theseus’ record, she might well be suspicious of his commitment to her. Even Perithoos becomes a potential rival for the wayward Theseus’ affections.28 Other myths about Theseus give credence to Phaedra’s construction of herself as abandoned, since Theseus is portrayed as engaged in liaisons with 26 27

28

Euripides’ Theseus is heartbroken about her death (Hipp. 828). The Amazon was traditionally killed by Theseus at his wedding to Phaedra (Casali 1995b: 8; cf. Apollod. Epit. 1.17 and Plut. Vit. Thes. 28.1, who does not believe the story). This version is attested nowhere earlier than Ovid; perhaps Phaedra has made it up ? At Ars. Am. 1.744, Ovid implies an affair between Perithoos and Phaedra (not elsewhere attested).

Reading like a virgin: Phaedra and Ariadne

131 ˛ 29 numerous 7 other women (and men). Plutarch notes that arpagZ
gunaikon was a characteristic common to both Theseus and Romulus, listing no less than eleven liaisons for Theseus.30 Theseus’ multiple rapes are also mentioned in Euripides’ first Hippolytus, and may there serve to provide an explanation for the outrage felt by his (and Ovid’s) Phaedra.31 Phaedra even glosses over her marriage to Theseus in her attempt to seduce his son. Despite the fact that she has given birth to two children, Phaedra assimilates herself to her virginal and desirable sister. This assimilation is especially incongruous since Ariadne and women like her are desirable precisely because they are innocent and pursued. Phaedra’s use of the verb rapio in line 65 to characterize both Theseus’ relationship to Ariadne and her own to Hippolytus further illustrates the way she views the world. While Theseus can be seen as having snatched Ariadne,32 Hippolytus has not even shown an interest in Phaedra; he has certainly not raped or kidnapped her. Yet rapio is a verb that implies violence. Under Ariadne’s influence, Phaedra conceives of her feelings for Hippolytus in terms of assault and force. Where there are virgins, there must be rapio; Phaedra thus seeks to replicate the external circumstances of her sister’s story (including her sexual status) in order to precipitate a relationship with Hippolytus. Because Phaedra presents herself as Ariadne (and despite the inherent implausibility of such a portrayal), she must fit Hippolytus into the raptor mold. Phaedra’s incongruous use of virgin imagery to speak about herself (4.19–28) is similarly explicable; here too she skews her own situation.33 Her feelings for Hippolytus are presented in the guise of ‘‘first love’’ (primos amores); she is an ingenue despite the fact that she is already married. The fact that her previous lover is Hippolytus’ father raises the suspicion that these lines are meant to assuage any guilt Hippolytus might feel. Yet here too Phaedra’s sister plays a role. Phaedra envisions herself as a virgin because she knows virgins are desirable, and she has learned this from her sister Ariadne.

31

See too Eur. Hipp. 151–4, where the chorus suggests that Theseus is unfaithful to Phaedra. Perigone, the daughter of Sinis (Thes. 8.3), Aigle, daughter of Panopeus (for whom he abandoned Ariadne; 20.1), Ariadne herself, Antiope the Amazon (26), Anaxo (a woman of Troezen; 29.1), the daughter of Cercyon (29.1), Periboea, Phereboea, and Iope (all 29.2), Helen (31.2), and finally Kore, the daughter of Aı¨doneus (31.4). A similar list of women appears in Istros, FGrHist 334 F 10 (Ath. 557a). ( 7 7 7 ‘‘tZn ai
dran kai prosegkalou san  ta " 7 7 ( toi Zse i pepoi
ken [sc. Euripi
dZ") o " dia tou’’ (491 TGF ). ekei
nou paranomi
a" eras e ian tou Ippolu In most versions she voluntarily left with him because she was in love; e.g. Plut. Vit. Thes. 19.3. The unsuitability of the imagery is noted by Merone 1964: 120–4, Jacobson 1974: 148 and Davis 1995: 49–50. (

32 33

(

30

(

29

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The Ovidian Heroine as Author

Similarly, Theseus plays a dual role in Phaedra’s letter. He is both an abandoning husband on whom Phaedra desires revenge, and the lover of Ariadne, a model for Phaedra’s relationship with Hippolytus. Throughout Heroides 4, Phaedra conflates herself with her sister. At times she fashions herself as abandoned by Theseus, and at times she draws Hippolytus’ attention to the fact that her interest in him is paralleled (and justified?) by her sister’s interest in his father. Phaedra is influenced into finding her husband so reprehensible because of Ariadne; she explicitly says that she hates Theseus because of his treatment of Ariadne, but she nowhere suggests that she has ever loved him. Perhaps Phaedra has never felt any attachment to Theseus, or perhaps she has newly invented this disaffection (Jacobson 1974: 155). Ariadne’s story proves vital to Phaedra’s interpretation of her own. In addition to extrapolating Theseus’ abandonment of her from his similar behavior with Ariadne, she uses the story of Theseus and Ariadne as a didactic model for Hippolytus; Hippolytus is to behave towards her as his father did towards her sister. This dual use of Theseus (both negative and positive: he is the reason for Phaedra’s search for a new lover and an exemplum for Hippolytus in terms of amatory behavior) is paradoxical but effective. Yet it is not merely her sister who proves influential. Phaedra connects her relationship with Hippolytus to the amorous dealings of several generations of her family. As Phaedra acknowledges, most of her relatives have fallen in love in hopelessly inappropriate ways. She traces this tendency from its very beginnings, starting with Jupiter and Europa and Pasiphae and the bull, and ending with Ariadne and herself: perfidus Aegides, ducentia fila secutus, curva meae fugit tecta sororis ope. En, ego nunc, ne forte parum Minoia credar, in socias leges ultima gentis eo! Hoc quoque fatale est: placuit domus una duabus; me tua forma capit, capta parente soror. Thesides Theseusque duas rapuere sorores – ponite de nostra bina tropaea domo! (4.59–66)

The treacherous son of Aegeus, following a guiding thread, escaped the curved edifice with the help of my sister. Lo, now, lest perhaps I be too little believed a daughter of Minos, I am the latest of my race to undergo the law of my kin. This too is destiny: one house pleased two women; your beauty captures me, while my

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sister was captured by your father. Theseus and the son of Theseus ravished two sisters: hang twofold trophies from our house.

Phaedra first notes that Jupiter is her ancestor, laying particular stress on the fact that he disguised himself as a bull to rape Europa.34 Her mother, succumbing (as Phaedra sees it) to the family curse, seduced a bull, and the Minotaur, Phaedra’s half-brother from this union, is a monster. It is not coincidental that Phaedra views Hippolytus as animal-like; not only is the bull linked to Theseus and therefore Hippolytus (who will die, we know, because of a sea-bull), but bulls are fatally attractive to the women of Phaedra’s family.35 Phaedra is Cretan; members of her family have relationships that are sexually deviant (‘‘Cretan love’’) and also dangerous.36 Phaedra concludes her family reminiscences with the story of Ariadne.37 Her phrasing suggests that she aims by seducing Hippolytus to prove that she is truly a member of her family. Yet at the very moment in which she likens her story to Ariadne’s she is at pains to draw attention to the dissimilarities. In keeping with her larger strategy, Phaedra rarely mentions Theseus except in the context of his relationship with Ariadne. Phaedra’s first mention of Theseus occurs at 4.59, where she refers to him as perfidus because of his abandonment of Ariadne.38 This is not an unexpected word in the Heroides: it appears, always in the vocative, in the single letters at 2.78, 7.79, 7.118, 10.58, and 12.37, and typically describes men who desert women.39 Yet the person in Phaedra’s story who truly deserts a lover is not Theseus, but Phaedra herself. Theseus is indeed notorious for perfidy, but not to Phaedra. Theseus’ behavior towards Ariadne has become transformed by the exigencies of the moment into abandonment of her sister Phaedra. As Phaedra sees it, three generations of her family have paid tribute to Venus (4.53–4). It is unsurprising, then, that she falls victim to an illicit passion, since Venus is the goddess not of marriage but of sex unsanctioned 34

35

36 37

38 39

See Casali 1995b: 9–10 on the intertextuality of Phaedra’s familial concern; he sees Phaedra as ‘‘correcting’’ Euripides by noting that Pasiphae was not the first to have an aberrant relationship. Her. 4.21–4 and 56–60. Cf. Jacobson 1974: 155, Casali 1995b: 10–11, Pearson 1980: 112, and Landolfi 2000: 23 n. 38 and 25–6; the last notes that Phaedra treats her family like a manipulable archive. Hippolytus is, like the bull, trux (73 and 166), as Pearson notes (1980: 112 and 119). Phaedra’s relationship with Hippolytus is fatale, ‘‘destined’’ (4.63), but also fatale, ‘‘deadly.’’ Cf. Am. 2.18.24, which mentions the letters that Hippolytique parens Hippolytusque legant; suggesting that the stories are designed to be read together. See Her. 10.58, which calls him perfide; 10.78 and 116–18 also stress his rupture of fides. Phaedra echoes Catullus’ Ariadne as well (64.132–3). Compare Phyllis’ similar attention to Theseus and Ariadne’s relationship in light of her own with another son of Theseus, above, pp. 32–5. The fact that Phaedra does not address Theseus directly only highlights her distance from him.

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by society. Phaedra’s insistence that her feelings for Hippolytus are divinely ordained is rhetorically clever; she suggests to Hippolytus the inevitability of their relationship while disavowing responsibility for it. Yet this strategy also tells a great deal about Phaedra, making it clear that she is fascinated by the stories of her mother and sister. Phaedra’s final mention of Pasiphae is the most direct. She compares herself to her mother, explicitly competing with her and drawing a parallel between herself and Hippolytus on the one hand and her mother and the bull on the other: Flecte, ferox, animos! potuit corrumpere taurum / Mater; eris tauro saevior ipse truci? (Harsh one, change your mind. My mother was able to seduce a bull: will you be more savage than a fierce bull? 4.165–6). If her mother could seduce a bull, Phaedra reasons that it should be possible for her to seduce Hippolytus. The (foreshadowing) comparison of Hippolytus to a bull, combined with earlier references to his animal-like behavior, suggests that Phaedra struggles to present herself as fitting in with the other women of her family.40 Phaedra speaks of her mother’s union with a bull as if it involved nothing amiss; this may be a rhetorical strategy, as she introduces Hippolytus to the idea that what may be regarded in the wider world as ‘‘abnormal’’ is in fact perfectly acceptable.41 Her mother’s monstrous relationship, combined with Phaedra’s own obsessive concern with family, may suggest to her that incest is a good thing (Davis 1995: 50, De Vito 1994: 318–19, Torresin 1998: 230). Because she comes from a family in which sexual deviance is the norm, she unknowingly makes her relationship with Hippolytus fit the paradigm to which she is most accustomed. I have suggested that Phaedra, under the influence of her sister Ariadne, recasts herself, contrary to tradition, as a woman abandoned by Theseus. Phaedra’s feelings for Hippolytus, as well as her relation to Ariadne and to literature, cause her to view herself as abandoned and perhaps to portray herself in that way for rhetorical effect. Yet in a way, Phaedra is an abandoned woman. The other heroines of the Heroides have for the most part already been rejected, but Phaedra’s letter is her first attempt to win Hippolytus’ love. As intertextual readers of this letter know, Hippolytus will reject Phaedra in a particularly brutal way, one that turns her love to 40

41

Phaedra uses the word gens more often than does any other heroine. The word appears in her letter at 54, 55, and 62, and in the other single Heroides only at 7.159 and 12.80. The letter is imbued throughout with family-related words (Pearson 1980: 117 n. 20). See too Eur. Hipp. 337–9, where Phaedra leads up to her confession via Pasiphae’s story. See too Her. 4.127–36, in which Phaedra, presumably motivated by Hippolytus’ close relationship with Artemis, suggests that incest is far from impious and is in fact sanctioned by the gods. To this, Pasiphae’s speech in Cretan Woman may be usefully compared (F 4 Cantarella).

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hate. Further, once Theseus discovers her betrayal, he too will turn against her. Thus although she does not yet know it, Phaedra is destined for double abandonment. Jacobson notes that Phaedra writes ‘‘at a very different time from most of [the] heroines, before the critical moment when she finds herself betrayed’’ (1974: 146). On the surface this is true; yet in its own way, this letter can be seen as related to Theseus’ (real or perceived) abandonment, insofar as it is Phaedra’s announcement that she has redirected her amorous feelings toward Hippolytus. Phaedra fashions her text based on her family’s experiences. Ariadne’s and Pasiphae’s stories are key sources for her. Yet this reliance on the women of her family proves fatal to Phaedra, for although Ariadne’s story may end happily, Phaedra’s will not. Phaedra has learned from Ariadne (and other women of the Heroides) that writing a letter to the man who has abandoned you is ineffectual. Her attempt to use writing in a new way is ultimately doomed to failure, but it is nonetheless a bold move that opens up a new series of plots for women. Phaedra’s powerful revision of her sister’s story causes her to be viewed by the world at large as even more monstrous a character than her mother, nor does she achieve any greater happiness: Hippolytus betrays her even before they have a relationship. Instead of being alone of the heroines in writing a letter before she is abandoned, Phaedra is rather doubly abandoned. As we have seen, the traditional interpretation of Phaedra as a seductive rather than an abandoned woman is questionable because it ignores key aspects of her selfpresentation in the letter. Despite the apparent uniqueness of the situation in Heroides 4, it is not so fundamentally different as has been supposed, and Phaedra’s letter is influenced in profound ways by the atmosphere of abandonment that pervades the Heroides. INTERFERENCE FROM THE DOUBLE HEROIDES

I have suggested that Phaedra’s letter opens up a new model for authorship in the Heroides, one usually seen as masculine. This section therefore briefly explores how Phaedra’s seductive letter compares to the letter of Acontius to Cydippe in Ovid’s double Heroides, the poem to which it is most similar.42 The story of Acontius and Cydippe survives in fragments from Callimachus (67–75 Pf.); its outlines are as follows.43 Cydippe is visiting the temple of Artemis at Delos when Acontius espies her and falls in love. 42 43

See too Fischer 1969: 214–18, on these two letters and Byblis’ letter in Met. 9. Bopp’s 1966 discussion of the two treatments of the story is useful.

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He inscribes on a fruit, ‘‘I swear by Artemis that I will marry Acontius’’ and rolls the fruit toward her. Her nurse picks up the fruit but, not being able to read, hands it to Cydippe, who pronounces the words of the oath. She returns home and attempts to ignore the oath extracted from her, as she is already engaged to another. Thrice upon the arrival of her wedding-day she grows ill and cannot marry. Her father sends to the oracle at Delphi and is told of her oath, whereupon Acontius and Cydippe marry. Whether they live happily ever after is unclear; Acontius’ manipulativeness as portrayed in Heroides 20 and 21 suggests that their relationship is ambiguous at best (Kenney 1996: 16 and passim, Barchiesi 1995: 325). Like Phaedra, Acontius begins the third line of his letter with the imperative perlege (4.3, 20.3). The imperative appears again in Cydippe’s letter, when her nurse hands her the apple and orders her to read it (21.109). This third instance of perlege is an important moment in the Heroides, and one that has been given little attention, for Cydippe’s nurse draws attention to the dangers inherent in reading as she underlines its necessity. If there is writing, there must be reading, and that reading will have a real and dramatic effect. Cydippe cannot but read, even though her reading will drastically limit her future choices.44 Both Phaedra’s and Acontius’ letters are peremptory in tone, taking into account their own desires without interest in the desires of their addressees. Acontius claims not to be callidus (20.25, a hapax in the Heroides), but his specious rhetoric shows that this too is duplicitous.45 He aims to have Cydippe no matter what, even, apparently, if her refusal of him causes her death; Phaedra similarly takes little account of Hippolytus’ wishes, and will later cause his death rather than give him up. Among other similarities, the two authors’ manipulation of the gods is significant. Acontius offers to Cydippe the choice between willing and unwilling submission, and bases his claims to her on Artemis, whom he has manipulated into witnessing Cydippe’s oath. Each author suggests that she is resourceless, but ingeniosus Amor (20.28) orders them (iussit) to write a letter (4.10–11, 20.230). Amor offers valuable assistance in matters both large and small: in Acontius’ case, he acts as legal advisor, while he provides Phaedra with the impetus to write a letter in the first place and guarantees her success (4.14; see too Callimachus 67 Pf. on Eros as teacher of Acontius). Even in their accounts of how relationships work Phaedra and Acontius show similarities: both suggest that the typical model involves rapere 44 45

See below, p. 137 on the nuances of lego. See Bopp 1966: 49 and passim.

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puellas (4.65, 20.37). The coerciveness of this exemplar is highlighted by Acontius – who wants credit for eschewing this form of violence as he seeks to bind Cydippe further to him (20.39, 48, and passim). It is also (as noted above, p. 131), an inappropriate model for Phaedra, who can only make it fit her situation by using rapere of Hippolytus’ effects on her heart. Both authors seek to prove that resistance to their wills is merely rusticitas, which is given a negative valence (4.102 of the forest, 132 of the ‘‘quaint’’ regard for virtue of the Saturnian age; 20.59 describing what Cydippe’s features are not – and so what Cydippe should not expect to remain); they share this pretense of persuasive urbanity with Paris (16.222, rusticus of Menelaus, claimed for herself by Helen in 17.12–13 and 186). In addition to his letter’s similarities with Phaedra’s, Acontius’ ruse with the apple offers more general information about the status of the written word in the Heroides. He has written an oath on the apple, but the power of the words remains latent until Cydippe, the reader, chooses (lego) to read (lego) them aloud (a verbal similarity Cydippe bitterly draws attention to in 21.143–4). She ‘‘undoes’’ this choice at 21.108, refusing in her telling of the story to repeat the words of the oath. Like Acontius, then, but also like Cydippe, the women of the Heroides rewrite their own stories, but their revisions are ultimately subject to the authority of the reader. Cydippe, however, is as trapped as are the women of the Heroides by our inability to envision a different ending. We may have more freedom than does Cydippe, but we are, I have suggested, nevertheless constrained by our own rules about how the canon must be read. As Cydippe notes, inque parum fausto carmine docta fui (I have been learned with unlucky verse, 21.181–2). She refers, of course, to Acontius’ oath, but she also refers to her own poetry and the poetry of the other heroines, reiterating the complaint we have seen throughout the single Heroides that even learned women can have little effect on their narratives. ARIADNE AS SOURCE-TEXT

Ariadne’s letter is an important text for several of the heroines. Where the women of the Heroides have found it a compelling poem, modern critics, on the other hand, see Heroides 10 as decidedly inferior, and their objections fall into two main categories. First, as many note, there is neither motivation nor opportunity for Ariadne to send a letter; she is abandoned on a deserted island with (presumably) no mail service, and where did the writing materials come from? Further, within the letter, Ariadne explicitly draws attention to the (implausible) fact of her writing – as she clings to a

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wave-drenched cliff (10.135–6; see Verducci 1985: 253).46 The whole scenario is deemed absurd, and Ovid has been ridiculed for not integrating the ‘‘moment of writing’’ better into his poem (Kennedy 1984: 416).47 It is, I would argue, the very implausibility of this letter reaching any living soul that makes its status as model for other women so interesting, and provokes questions central to those I have been investigating throughout this work.48 Where the men of the Heroides must rely on the vagaries of textual transmission in order to get their letters, the women compose their texts as a community, despite living in different times and places, speaking different languages, and having no way to convey poetry to each other. That Ariadne can paint a picture of herself writing while balanced on a cliff has often been seen as evidence of her (or Ovid’s) incompetence, but surely it is rather indicative of her ability to write in powerful ways, to change the world, particularly as she has been shown to be influential on several of the other heroines of the corpus. The second aspect of Ovid’s Ariadne that has troubled many is that she engages in what is clearly (to most critics) a losing battle with her more famous Catullan counterpart.49 Winsor astutely notes the major difficulty of this competition: what Catullus is able to accomplish in the third person, the epistolographer of Heroides 10 must accomplish in the first, and this almost inevitably leads to a certain lowering of tone.50 Verducci too sees this as the root of the Heroidean Ariadne’s difficulty, drawing attention to Ariadne’s (forced) figuration of herself as a desirable elegiac object (1985: 247–55) and to the comical aspects of the new Ariadne’s lament to a ‘‘bedspread’’ (altering the Catullan ecphrasis; ibid. 266–7). Indeed, Verducci views Heroides 10 as the poem that most clearly exposes the quasi-nihilistic character of the Heroides: after the ‘‘universal travesty’’ of Ariadne, elegy itself is disfigured (ibid. 246). 46

47 48 49

50

Several have noted that Ovid’s Ariadne, in explicit contrast with Catullus’, is ‘‘restless and dynamic’’ (Barchiesi 1993a: 346); Phaedra’s (Euripidean) desires to roam in the forest are here given another motivation: she has read about her sister’s antics in Heroides 10. See Verducci 1985: 253, Birt 1877, and Spoth 1993: 240 and passim on the impossibility of delivery. See Spoth 1992: 89 on communication as central to Heroides 10. Verducci, in claiming that Ovid has deliberately toppled the Catullan pathos into bathos, seems to give too much away. That Catullus 64 is an influence on this poem is not open to question; see Knox 1995: 233 on some of the many specific Catullan echoes; he also argues that both poems depend on an earlier Hellenistic poem (1998; see Ch. 1 n. 32 above). For a sophisticated reading of Ariadne, see Smith 1994. Vessey 1976: passim attempts to recuperate the Ovidian Dido and Ariadne by suggesting that they are not meant to be taken seriously, and that they in fact depend upon their predecessors for much of their wit. See Winsor on Ariadne’s ‘‘self-conscious prettification’’ (1963: 423). Vessey notes the ‘‘threat of absurdity’’ that hovers over Heroides 10 (1976: 102).

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Rather than finding this poem simply an example of Ovidian excess (nimium amator) or perversity, let us grant that it is in deliberate competition with Catullus 64; it is still by no means clear that Heroides 10 is the loser.51 Verducci and others grant to Catullus 64 the status of a ‘‘classic’’: according to this model, Ovid writes in reaction to Catullus, and cannot compete with his model, so trivializes it. In an important article on Heroides 10, however, Smith suggests that Ovid’s Ariadne has not only read Catullus 64, but also learned from it. In his view, the references to Catullus ‘‘are not parodic but indicative of the character’s personal growth, as it were, from text to text’’ (1994: 251). If we can see the two Ariadnes not as competing but as the sequential experiences of the same, perennially abandoned character (a view very much supported by Ovid’s later treatment of Ariadne),52 we can assume, for instance, that Ariadne’s direct speech to the perfidious Theseus has been deliberately cut from seventy lines (Catull. 64.131–201) to two lines in Heroides 10 (Vessey 1976: 102). Ariadne, having ‘‘matured’’ between Catullus and Ovid (Smith 1994: 251), knows from experience that it will do no good to berate Theseus verbally because he is not listening; she would do far better to write a letter that will blacken his reputation. Heroides 10 thus deliberately and in its entirety serves as a testament to the wickedness of men where Catullus 64 merely mentions it (64.143–8). We can, I suggest, read this as evidence of Ariadne’s increasing frustration: after each successive literary iteration of abandonment, she grows angrier and behaves more erratically; if she knows this has happened before, her ‘‘athletic’’ perambulations of the shoreline of Heroides 10, pointed out by Verducci 1985, become all too explicable. Further, a significant feature of Ariadne’s ‘‘education’’ is that she does change the end, even if only to make the reader less certain that the Catullan version is the only way to understand her story. The fact that Dionysus will rescue her does not change her feelings while she is on Naxos; indeed it is immaterial to her story at that moment.53 Catullus 64’s status as precursor to the Heroides is central to the issues discussed here. In fact, Ovid’s Ariadne seeks to establish Heroides 10 as the new exemplary text for abandoned women. Her competition is thus not 51

52

53

Vessey observes that Ovid’s Ariadne is ‘‘more comprehensible’’ than Catullus’ (1976: 96), and Wilkinson prefered the letter to many (1955: 102). Cf. the memini of Fas. 3.473 with Conte’s seminal discussion of Ariadne’s consciousness of her textual predecessors (1986: 60–3), Hinds 1987b: 17, and Smith 1994: 248–51. As Spentzou notes, even given the ‘‘closed’’ traditional endings of their stories, the women alter them through creating a rupture in the text – we now read the end differently (2003: 31). While she sees this as ‘‘more of a rupture in the seamless body of masculine voices and texts than a celebration and a retreat into the feminine’’ (ibid. 37), my reading could suggest the latter.

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merely with her predecessor, but with the classic status the Catullan Ariadne has attained. Ariadne states: Nunc ego non tantum, quae sum passura, recordor, / Et quaecumque potest ulla relicta pati (I call to mind not only the things that I will suffer, and whatever any abandoned women can suffer, 10.79–80).54 Verducci sees these lines as designed to refer the reader to Ariadne’s imminent rescue by Dionysus (and therefore to make her seem all the more ridiculous because she will not, in fact, suffer anything). Some commentators suspect them.55 Indeed Ariadne will not suffer any of the horrors (wolves, lions, tigers, seals, pirates, slavery, divine retribution, and foreign men) which she subsequently details (10.81–98). Nor will the other heroines, for that matter; their problems are quite different. But Ariadne’s pereundi mille figurae (10.81) may provide the impetus for the focus that many have placed on the Realien of the heroines’ own impending deaths.56 Phaedra will not be eaten by tigers, but she will take her own life; that abandoned women must die may be something she has learned from Ariadne’s text.57 Perhaps too Phaedra has learned from Ariadne that writing is more efficacious than speaking.58 As the external reader knows, Phaedra habitually writes letters, and she may have started writing because of reading about Ariadne’s unsuccessful experience in speaking in Catullus 64 (‘‘corrected’’ in Heroides 10). The reader of the Heroides may well have questions about the effectiveness of the epistolary form for abandoned women. Yet in contrast to many of the other heroines, in Heroides 4 we have a writing woman who is far from powerless. Phaedra, as she will later demonstrate, has the power of life and death in her words. Phaedra’s letter, because it reminds the reader of her other, more famous, letter, suggests that writing is an infinitely preferable choice for the woman who wants to have a lasting effect on her world.59 54

55

56 57

58 59

These lines have attracted much attention: Verducci 1985: 269–75, Barchiesi 1993a: 347, Lindheim 2003: 96, and Jolivet 2001: 214. Winsor notes the prescriptive nature of Ariadne’s statement (1963: 421). Bonner critically notes that much of what the women write is ‘‘commonplaces which any heroine might have been expected to utter on such an occasion’’ (1949: 150); according to my reading, that is a great part of their point; see too Landolfi 2000: 109–10. See Palmer’s discussion ad loc., which finds the lines ‘‘entirely otiose,’’ and Shuckburgh and Knox 1995, who question the use of recordor with the future. Reeve 1973: 327 defends them. See above, p. 24 on Phyllis’ more realistic expansion of ways to die. See too Phaedra’s statement after her (overtly literary) description of her madness that ‘‘they tell her everything’’ (4.51–2, mihi referunt . . . omnia); this is generally glossed as referring to her (otherwise unmentioned) servants, who detail to her her own behavior. ‘‘They,’’ however, may also be the other Heroides, which show her how people in love behave. Landolfi reads these lines as presenting a schizophrenic portrait of Phaedra (2000: 29). See Casali 1995b: 4 on Phaedra’s switch from speaking her passion to writing about it. Farrell 1998: 316, 319–20 is key on the dangers to women of writing. Paradoxically, writing is here unsafe for Phaedra but will later aid her in causing the downfall of her enemy. On Phaedra’s Euripidean letter, see Rosenmeyer 2001: 88–94.

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Phaedra herself draws attention to the potentially problematic nature of her written text, assuring Hippolytus that no harm will come to him from reading.60 Perlege, quodcumque est – quid epistula lecta nocebit? Te quoque in hac aliquid quod iuvet esse potest; His arcana notis terra pelagoque feruntur. Inspicit acceptas hostis ab hoste notas. (4.3–6)

Read this through, whatever it is: what harm will reading a letter do you? There can also be something in it that may please you. Secrets are carried across land and sea by letters; an enemy looks at letters taken from an enemy.

Jacobson notes that perlege ‘‘must be deliberate irony’’ (1974: 146); it is not likely that Hippolytus will read this letter (Casali 1995b: 3).61 And, as the external reader knows, another letter, the one that Euripides’ Phaedra writes ‘‘after’’ this one will in fact harm Hippolytus. This is surely an implication of the text, but this Phaedra does not intend to harm Hippolytus; her statement is sincere. She shows herself aware that letters can be dangerous, and even that Hippolytus has reason to fear letters penned by her. Yet although she will soon write another letter in which she does intend to harm Hippolytus, this letter harms only Theseus insofar as it is an attempt by his wife to avenge herself by seducing his son. Phaedra must warn Hippolytus that she means him well because, as stepmother and stepson, they should be enemies. He would presumably be after the throne that is intended for her children, and she should hate him.62 Phaedra tries to overcome this stereotype from her first words. She begins her letter knowing that Hippolytus is likely to assume that she is his enemy, and gradually tries to persuade him to warm to her and to her subject. Although her first letter fails, Phaedra’s second letter has its desired effect – because her first letter provided the practice she required? – and there is surely

60

61

62

She is, of course, absolutely wrong; neither writing nor reading is safe. See Spentzou 2003: 55 on Phaedra’s ‘‘troubled rite of passage into writing’’ and Landolfi 2000: 17 on deceitful and dangerous letters in poetry. The safety of reading is (falsely) invoked in Heroides 5 as well, and a classic example of ‘‘unsafe reading’’ is Cydippe’s verbalization of Acontius’ letter, by which she swears to marry him. Heroides 20 and 21 play with Cydippe’s fear to read again. Reading in the Heroides is a dangerous yet compelling act; Barchiesi 1993a: 353–63 is key on this issue. Barchiesi sees a different irony in Phaedra’s lines, calling perlege an invitation to the reader (1993a: 337). First-time readers of the Heroides may be wondering how many of these letters from abandoned women there are, and how they can possibly continue to hold our interest. Here too we may see Ovid peering through, wondering if he will be read. As a bastard, Hippolytus is naturally an enemy of Phaedra’s children (Gilula 1981: 129).

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pathos in the conjunction of the unsuccessful letter of seduction that we see in Heroides 4 and the successful letter of accusation in the Euripides play.63 CONCLUSION

Heroides 4 shows Ariadne’s influence upon her sister Phaedra (a woman who is already traditionally reliant upon her family for models of behavior). Ariadne’s persuasive denunciation of Theseus convinces Phaedra that she is soon to be abandoned by him. Yet unlike the other heroines, Phaedra wastes no further efforts on Theseus; instead (but still relying on Ariadne’s example) she attempts to seduce her stepson by portraying herself as another Ariadne. This new plot will prove unsuccessful and tragic, but it nevertheless offers a significantly different model of reading in the Heroides; here we can see reading the Heroides as fundamentally altering the story known to us. Ariadne, on the other hand, seeks to become the spokeswoman for deserted women, usurping that role from Catullus’ Ariadne and providing an exemplum for the other women of the Heroides. Perhaps Ariadne even suggests to us that Catullus’ character is only famous because she, the Ariadne of Heroides 10, has worked so hard campaigning for popularity and denigrating Theseus. Heroides 10, in my reading, asks us to reflect upon which Ariadne is more plausible, but it also asks us to consider which Ariadne other people believe. The answer, given what we have seen above, is Ovid’s Ariadne, who has influenced several of the other heroines in the corpus into altering their perceptions of reality. The women of the Heroides have traditionally been seen as having little effect on the ‘‘real’’ world; this perception clearly derives from their negligible effect on the men they love. In the female community of the Heroides, however, some of them are quite influential. As we have seen, this influence is unrelated to the traditional tales about the women; it is also more often than not detrimental, but given the limited plots available to women, that is perhaps unsurprising. 63

Casali 1995b: 1. Phaedra gives elegy her best effort, but she proves to be a much more effective author of tragedy. See too Segal 1986: 202–8 on the role of writing in Seneca’s Phaedra.

CHAPTER

7

Caveat lector: thoughts on gender and power

This work has shown some of the mechanisms by which the women of the Heroides read and adapt one another’s texts, sometimes to their detriment; it has also outlined some of their likely motivations for so doing. Often they are convinced that their own stories are like the stories of family members, but sometimes they merely grasp at texts that seem to share similarities to the ways in which they perceive their own situations. A ‘‘weak’’ reading would argue that, even if they are not always right, it is hardly their fault, and the tragic endings that befall most of the women of the Heroides because of their misunderstandings and misreadings serve only to place the women squarely where tradition has already located them. But the ‘‘strong’’ reading advocated here suggests that the women of the Heroides have the power to change the way we understand their stories. In either case, they have lost nothing by writing; indeed, they, and we, have gained much. Although they may be trapped by literature, their reading, or our reading of them, has been by no means fruitless: we can now see how many of the heroines came to find themselves in the positions our more canonical sources tell us they hold (Spentzou 2003: passim). By giving the heroines enough rope with which to hang themselves (sometimes literally), Ovid has vastly enriched our understanding of their stories. Because the majority of this book has consisted of a series of detailed readings, there is no need to summarize the findings of each chapter; those looking for particulars should refer back to the conclusions of individual chapters. This final chapter will instead discuss more explicitly issues of female (and ‘‘female’’) authorship, and then broaden the community of female authors to include Ovid.1

1

I should perhaps say that I see this work as a beginning rather than an end to the study of intratextual echoes within the Heroides; there are no doubt many other connections to be explored between individual poems.

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One way to ground the women of the Heroides more firmly in a materialist ideology of the sort deliberately neglected throughout this book would be to discuss their similarities to and differences from actual women writers of antiquity.2 In an enquiry of this kind, Sappho would necessarily hold the place of honor, both because she is the best-known female poet of all time and because Ovid may well have treated her explicitly in Heroides 15.3 Sulpicia’s poetry would also have much to contribute; indeed she may well have been a member of the poetic circle surrounding her uncle Messalla.4 Ovid’s own stepdaughter Perilla, an aspiring poet addressed in Tr. 3.7, might also merit attention. I will not pursue this agenda, both because there is distressingly little information about either the lives or the poetics of these women poets, and because I do not see it as the most promising avenue of approach for the questions I want to ask about the construction and portrayal of gender in the Heroides and in Ovid’s other poetry.5 I move, then, not to the lives of women poets, but to the life of Ovid as reflected in his poetry. If gender is, as most feminists agree, constituted primarily or even solely in performance, is it possible that we could see Ovid as not only writing like a woman, but as being a woman?6 Although this might be a logical conclusion, it is a move that few are willing to make; doing so would empty the study of gender of much of the political impetus that has sustained it for the last several generations. If one can become a woman simply by announcing that one is, or by acting in ways that others perceive as feminine, both feminism and gender are troubled indeed, and it is not clear that they should continue to be meaningful categories.7 The stance that is usually adopted by those who insist on the importance of preserving a difference between men and women is that gender is a 2 3 4

5

6

7

On whom Habinek 1998: ch. 6, is key. For a discussion of Sappho, see the Appendix, pp. 152–8 and Lindheim 2003: 136–76. On Sulpicia’s reappropriation of a ‘‘male’’ genre (and whether that genre is indeed ‘‘male’’), see Hinds 1987c, Hallett 1989, Sharrock 1991, Wyke 1994: 114–15, Fredrick 1997: 187–8, and, most recently, Milnor, who suggests that the category ‘‘woman’’ is not normally compatible with that of ‘‘poet’’ (2002: 263). For an approach complementary to mine, but more grounded in Realien, see James’ recent booklength study of the docta puella of elegy (2003). The ‘‘femininity’’ of elegy has been well treated by Hallett 1989, Gold 1993, and Wyke 1994, who argue that elegy is predicated upon but plays with the notion of gender difference; they differ about whether this is liberatory for women or a device for enacting masculinity (or domination, or all three). On the issues raised in this paragraph, Butler 1990 is key, as is Butler 1993, which backs down from her earlier stance to include materialist issues. See too Fuss 1989 on some of the political implications and issues involved in the definition of ‘‘woman.’’

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continuum, while sex is not (or is significantly less so). Ovid was not, most of us would agree, a woman. But feminist thought has also persuasively connected the issue of gender to issues of voice and authority, and those questions are key to Ovidian poetics. By assuming key attributes of the feminine, as I shall argue he does, Ovid provokes us to think about authorial power – who has it and how they use it.8 In what follows, I shall be interested in why the Heroides, Ovid’s most sustained portrayal of elegiac poets, implicitly assimilates ‘‘poet’’ to ‘‘woman,’’ and particularly why that equation on the surface deprives poetry of the kind of power Ovid and other poets are elsewhere eager to claim for it.9 Many of the unspoken connections Ovid draws between his own poetic persona and the women of the Heroides have been hinted at in the chapters above. I cite a few of the key examples here for convenience. Like the Ovidian narratorial persona of the Amores, the heroines of the Heroides write to cajole their lovers into behaving more affectionately. In the exilic works, Ovid’s persona shares with the heroines a sense of frustration and abandonment (Rosenmeyer 1997: 29 and 36–8). Many of the heroines are Ovidian in their strategic deployment of rhetoric, and many seem to alter their stories to fit the situation. Many write with a conception of their place in the literary tradition (although they are sometimes incorrect about that place – as Ovid may have been). Many of the heroines read in ways Ovid elsewhere recommends;10 furthermore, his exilic persona also shares their obsessive focus on literature, portraying the poet as various abandoned heroes and sometimes heroines (on which Rosenmeyer 1997: 41–5 is key).11 Hypsipyle, Medea, and other women in the corpus can serve as a model for the figure of the poet, endlessly influenced by what s/he reads and endlessly

8

The centrality of power to feminist studies was first seen by Foucault and his followers. My understanding of ‘‘power’’ in Latin literature is indebted to Barchiesi 1997a (esp. 1–8), and Habinek, both for the notion that literature is a crucial site of power contestation (1998: 8) and the focus on the distance (troubling to writers) between writer and text (ibid. 105 and throughout ch. 5). 9 Men are, in fact, explicitly instructed not to write in the Heroides (1.1 and Farrell 1998). This feminization of poetry is, of course, not unique to Ovid; in fact, recent critics have persuasively argued that it is a constituent element of elegy. On elegy as engendering men as women, the bibliography on Sulpicia is especially useful (see above, n. 4). 10 For instance, the Ars suggests that literature is a reliable source of information, especially when it refers to ‘‘real life’’ situations known from the Amores (Kristina Milnor, per litteras). Many have noted that love is a (necessarily fictionalized) discourse; see Barthes 1978, Kennedy 1993: 80–1 on the fictionality of love and Edmunds 2001: xii–xv on literature as inherently intertextual (xv). 11 See too Fish (2004) on the ways Ovid presents his exilic self as trying to follow the precepts of the Remedia. Mythical characters serve as exempla to real people throughout the poet’s work, in the Ars and Remedia most obviously, but even in the Amores (e.g. 1.12, in which Ovid compares himself to Diomedes).

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rewriting a story that has already been written out of dissatisfaction with the results of (their own) mimesis. In fact, I would argue that insofar as the Heroides are ‘‘about’’ anything, they focus the spotlight on the ability (or inability) of poetry to make a difference in the world, both within its mythological context and for the reader. That is, the Heroides provoke us to ask to what extent a heroine has the textual authority to change her story but, more importantly, to what extent our own literary experience will permit her to effect this change. It is here that the mythological aspect of the Heroides is key: we would not have the kind of knowledge we do about these women without it.12 As I have suggested in the introduction and throughout, the reader of the Heroides is placed in a position of immense authority: we are the final arbiters of whether Briseis is pitiable, Hypermestra manipulative, or Oenone naı¨ve. More importantly, by reading, we also judge Ovid. Let us first ask the question whether we can indeed view Ovid’s heroines as mirroring his own poetic persona. The Ovidian corpus, particularly but not exclusively that portion of it composed in exile, suggests that such a move is reasonable, and, indeed, that it may give us insight into the exilic persona. For, throughout the exile poetry, Ovid depicts himself as one after another mythological heroine. This exilic ‘‘feminization’’ of Ovid may suggest that femininity equals powerlessness (as it seems to in Catullus; see Skinner 1997). I have tried to demonstrate that such an equation is overly simplistic; power is a constantly negotiable issue. For instance, while it is standard critical practice to see Ovid as the manipulative figure in the background of the heroines’ stories,13 the readers of the Heroides have in fact far more authority than either Ovid or the heroines, since it is always our decision to admit or deny the plausibility of the heroines’ versions of their stories. The Heroides thematize the dangers of reception: it is dangerous to be read, but also not to be read. Section II thus engages more particularly with issues of interpretative power, implicitly drawing upon reader-response theory. OVID AND THE POETIC COMMUNITY

The details of a poet’s life are irrelevant to many contemporary ways of reading ancient texts (hence my unwillingness to focus on the amatory 12

13

Thus the reader who comes to the Heroides without knowing their canonical predecessors will have a very different view of the women’s authority. See above, Introduction n. 14 on the ‘‘literary ventriloquism’’ of the Heroides, especially the Sappho letter.

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successes and failures of the women who write Heroides), but let us now return to Ovid’s poetic self-portrayal in order to explore the ways in which the details of his literary autobiography coincide with the world of the heroines. Armed with these connections between what we know of the poet’s life and the experiences of his characters, we may be enabled to draw certain conclusions about Ovid’s views on the efficacy and role of poetry in Augustan Rome. Before focusing on the troubled world of reading and interpretation, I will briefly address the issue of community among the Augustan poets. It is, I think, fairly clear that both Ovid and his contemporary Propertius were keenly aware of the work of each other and of other poets. There is in Roman poetry a concentration on communities of authors that parallels the heroines’ focus on other women like them: Catullus suggests that he and other neoteric poets share their work,14 and the ‘‘circle of Messala’’ and ‘‘patronage of Maecenas,’’ however loosely they were constituted, are sure to have entailed significant circulation of texts. Significantly, we hear the most from Ovid about poetic community in his exilic work: because of the loss of all forms of community, the exilic persona tries to (re)create community through writing and reading, and goes so far as to claim to have written Getic poetry as a means of creating a poetic community in Tomis.15 I have argued throughout this book for a reading of the heroines as poets. To a poet qua poet, what matters is being read, and many of the heroines have proven to be very influential on their ‘‘contemporaries.’’ Ovid, too, is important to poets in his own era and to those in the generations immediately following, not to mention in the two thousand years since his death. In this way, then, both Ovid and his creations are unmitigated successes, and, significantly, the heroines’ achievement redounds even more to Ovid’s credit. For they quote each other, but doing so means that they are in effect quoting Ovid.16 Ovid thus posits himself as the most influential of all literary sources. At the same time, the picture is not wholly celebratory, particularly once it is broadened to include the context of Ovid’s poems (both ‘‘biographical’’ 14

15

16

Edmunds suggests that the theme begins in Catull. 68 (see too Catull. 50) (2001: 106–7), and the Alexandrian poets also seem to have operated within a small literary coterie. Hardie has an excellent if brief discussion on Ovid’s exilic attempt to create a community for himself through poetry (2002: 305–6 and 323; Pont. 2.8 and 3.4). See too Rosenmeyer 1997: 38 on the isolation of the Tristia. On the metapoetic level, Ovid’s habit of citing himself serves to place his work among the literary masterpieces with which his poetry vies. For an Ovidian character to quote from Euripides, Vergil, and Ovid suggests that Ovid is of equal importance.

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and mythological): we who read Ovid from this distance know about his exile (depicted as a symbolic death) and with hindsight may come to the conclusion that being a little less famous might have made his life a little happier. So too with the heroines: had Phyllis not spent any time at all reading or writing, but instead reflected on the likelihood of Demophoon’s return in a way uncolored by her literary ‘‘knowledge’’ about relationships between the sexes, her life might have turned out more happily. Thus the counterargument could be made that, far from being genuinely efficacious, poetry affects only other poets; those who either refuse to read or who read differently (Augustus and the heroic addressees of the Heroides) fail to fall under its sway. Ovid’s (sometime) exilic insistence that poetry, particularly his, simply does not possess the power to make anybody do anything has a pedigree dating back to Euripides’ Medea and even further. Poetry is simply entertainment, and it is therefore as ridiculous to punish someone for the – nonexistent – effects of his poetry as to censure those who (for instance) enjoy playing dice. This is, of course, the argument advanced in Tristia 2. The women of the Heroides do not share this notion, and indeed, there is something poignant in their insistence that words matter. But Ovid’s similar insistence that it was all meant in good fun does not exculpate the Ars Amatoria from the possible charge of having a real effect on real people,17 and we have seen that the heroines have genuine effects on the characters in their stories. An issue of vital importance in Tristia 2 and implicitly in the Heroides, is the question of whether poetry matters or not. In Tristia 2, as many have shown, Ovid seeks to have it both ways: either poetry has no power to affect the world, in which case exiling Ovid is unnecessary and savage, or it does have that power, in which case the princeps should have kept a much more careful eye on all of the poetry of his regime (and of the generations before).18 The women of the Heroides too, despite their insistence that writing is an effective means of action, are unsure of themselves. Let us press this point further: if the heroines rarely get what they want from the men they address because they do not use words appropriately, Ovid’s other poetry also fails 17

18

Surely it does not strain credibility to suggest that there has been at least one reader, perhaps even an Augustan reader, who picked up the Ars with the idea that he might learn something useful; many readers of that poem find in it immortal truths about the nature of love. A later example of a text affecting the real world is Goethe’s Werther, which had thousands of Europeans dressing like the hero, falling hopelessly in love and committing suicide. Tr. 2.361–470 with Williams 1994: 193–201. Among the poets accused of writing subversive things about love are Homer, Vergil, and a host of more likely culprits. On the separation of art and life, a subset of the first part of Ovid’s argument, see Williams 1994: 168–71.

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to prove the potency of poetry to affect the world. For instance, Ovid’s ‘‘failure’’ to please the emperor in the exile poetry suggests that the pen is not mightier than the sword. The power belongs solely to the princeps and Ovid is doomed to write ever more futile plaints. A reading of Tristia 2 and of the personae it creates for the emperor and Ovid will further explore Ovidian notions of power and literature. OVID AND AUGUSTUS

Tristia 2 has been persuasively interpreted as a lesson to Augustus on the proper reading of poetry.19 In it, Ovid makes fun of the emperor’s naı¨ve but dogmatic insistence that literature serve as a model for real life, that fiction matters. We may, in fact, find Ovid’s Augustus comically reminiscent of his Phyllis in their mutual inability to distinguish between truth and fiction. Surely Augustus, who wields genuine power, does not need to concern himself with our poet. But the Augustus of Tristia 2, although he may be depicted as an unsophisticated reader, is absolutely correct about poetry: it does indeed have a great deal of effect on the world.20 Given the dangers of not reading carefully enough (or of reading too carefully) detailed in the above pages, it is clear that reading and writing do matter, and they matter very much to Ovid, to Augustus, and to the fictional women of the Heroides.21 The notion that art is inseparable from life is common to both works; indeed, it is a prevalent theme of Ovid’s poetry. If we can trust what Ovid tells us, his exile was in part precipitated by Augustus’ (incorrect) reading of the Ars.22 But what is at issue in Tristia 2 – and elsewhere in Ovid – is exactly the question of who has the authority to determine what is a correct interpretation and what is not. Augustus’ power to impose his will upon the world suggests that his interpretation is automatically more valid than (what Tristia 2 would like you to believe is)

19

20

21

22

Most recently by Nugent 1990: esp. 248–53, Barchiesi 1993b, and Gibson 1999. Casali 1997b, while not specifically about Tristia 2, is key to my understanding of Ovid’s exilic persona. The biographical Augustus is also sure to have known this, given his interest in panegyric poetry. See too Suet. Aug. 89, which describes Augustus culling morally improving bits from poetry and prose. My discussion of these points is much indebted to Lowrie (forthcoming). See too Ovid’s tendentious misreading of previous poetry in Tr. 2.371–466 (with Gibson 1999: 29–31 and Barchiesi 1997a: 25–30) and Wheeler’s discussion of the dangers of reading inattentively as exemplified by Argus in the Metamorphoses (1999: 3–4). It is by no means certain that we can believe Ovid; if in fact the carmen serves as a smokescreen for the error, its inclusion is all the more significant: Tr. 2 would then extend ‘‘reading’’ beyond literature to life. Augustus has misread Ovid, not simply his poetry.

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the proper interpretation of Ovid’s poetry.23 The personal (that is, the poetic) is political and Augustus simply has more power than Ovid.24 We could conclude from this that the power of poets (both the heroines and Ovid) to change the world is very limited. In fact, Hardie sees ‘‘the struggle of the written word to affect events in the world’’ as a ‘‘constant theme of the Heroides’’ (2002: 121). While I do not deny that this is true (in fact, I would expand his statement to cover much of Ovid’s poetry25), I hope to have shown that, just as Ovid’s exile poetry, despite its pose of ineffectiveness, is anything but, so too the words of the Heroides possess a power to affect the world, even if that power is manifested only by changing, in small, subversive ways, the way in which we read the women’s stories elsewhere. In my view, there is not a simple equation between poetic misreading and failure, artistic or otherwise. Poetry, then, is not without effect. It is clear that this must have been Ovid’s viewpoint, if only because of the fact that he continues to write after the princeps tries to silence him. Ovid writes elegies from exile, I would suggest, not only because he is an elegiac poet, but because he can thereby portray Augustus as the withholding and irrational puella, deaf to his suffering and to the justice of his claims.26 In fact, even within Ovid’s ‘‘unsuccessful’’ elegies from exile, we are shown the effectiveness of the written word to create reality. For, like the heroines, Ovid has no control over his own ending. But, also like them, he writes, and his writing, if we pay attention to it, will change our ways of thinking about those he depicts. Given the sustained and unflattering portrayal of Augustus in the exile poetry (and earlier, if we equate him with Jupiter, as Ovid does in the Metamorphoses), it is hard for most fans of the poet to think kindly of the princeps.27 The fact that a real man is depicted in Ovid’s exile poetry, and a very important man at that, irreparably breaches a boundary that most would like to preserve between criticism and life. Further, Ovid’s refusal to publish the details of his error requires us to take his word that it deserves 23

24

25

26

27

See Barchiesi 1993b: 166, Williams 1994: 155–8, and Gibson 1999: 23–4 on the possibilities Tr. 2 opens up for the text’s independence from its author (in this case, to Ovid’s detriment). A similar issue is addressed in the end of the Metamorphoses; see Hinds 1987b: 24–6, Barchiesi 1997b, and Lowrie (forthcoming) on the ambiguities of that passage. The same issue was earlier faced by Pollio, who in Macrob. Sat. 2.4.21 is reputed to have made the vital observation that it was rather difficult to scribere in someone who could proscribere you. See too Hardie on Narcissus as the desiring reader, ‘‘caught between the intellectual understanding that texts are just texts . . . and the desire to believe in the reality of the textual world’’ (2002: 147). Indeed, this would fit in with the Ovidian notion that once the worldview of elegy has been accepted, it is inescapable – for Ovid, poetry is necessarily erotic (see Fulkerson 2004: 219–21). See Williams 1994: 162–8, 186–9, 208–9 for more on the construction of Augustus in Tr. 2, and Barchiesi 1997a on the polarization of poet and princeps (passim, but esp. 1).

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to be forgiven; he insists upon fighting only the poetic battle, in which he has a distinct advantage over Augustus. More significantly, his decision to write anything at all from exile necessarily pits him against the emperor: we have no choice but to choose sides: do we want Ovid to continue (have continued) to write? Because we are Ovid’s readers, we are more likely to choose his side, however reluctantly, than to ally ourselves with Augustus. In the end, then, Augustus has control over Ovid’s physical location and even his continued existence, but proves himself to be just as incapable of controlling his own reception as are both the heroines and Ovid.28 Seen through the lens of the Heroides, Augustus becomes not only elegy’s unreasonable puella, but also – far more damning – the callous and distasteful abandoning hero, who either does not have time to read poetry (whether it be a letter from the woman whose heart he has broken, or the Ars Amatoria) or (even worse) who is not clever enough to understand what he has read. Yet, in the hands of Ovid, Augustus becomes what the heroines are usually understood to be: voiceless, powerless objects in the hands of a more powerful force. Again, because we have likely colluded with Ovid in constructing ourselves as the kind of readers who prefer poets and poetry to politics and principes, we must find Augustus objectionable. Reading, we have seen, is dangerous: the women of the Heroides read previous texts and refashion themselves as the women of those texts. Their combination of reading with writing grants them some power to insert at least momentary instabilities into traditional narratives. But reading is dangerous even if one does not write: for instance, our reading is dangerous, perhaps not for us, but for the heroines and for Ovid. For with reading comes judgment; if readers are indeed all-powerful, it is no wonder that authors are constantly urging us to be very careful what we do to them. To write is to make oneself vulnerable: you are either not read, in which case you are safe (but unknown), or you are read, which subjects you to interpretation beyond your control.29

28

29

See Williams 1994: 197–200 on the poet’s renown, and Gibson 1999: 26 and 30 and Lowrie (forthcoming) on the instability of interpretation and the reader’s ultimate control over the text. As Barchiesi notes, Ovid’s audience is always as large as he can imagine it, and he conceives of that audience as the final arbiter of his success (1997a: 43 and 262). Most poets would prefer to be read, if only they dictate the terms of that reading; see the important article by Casali 1997b on how Ovid instructs his readers to read ‘‘more’’ than what he is able to write. See also Hinds 1987b, influential on later discussions of Ovidian duplicity, and Sharrock 1994a and b and Citroni 1995: 440–50 on Ovid’s instruction of his reader.

Appendix: The authenticity (and ‘‘authenticity’’) of Heroides 15

The authenticity of the Sappho letter has been the most seriously questioned of the entire corpus. Because I have some hesitation over certain of its metrical and linguistic difficulties, I am unwilling to treat Heroides 15 within the compass of this book.1 On the other hand, Sappho’s presence among the women of the Heroides, if indeed she belongs there, would have much to contribute to the purposes of this study. I have therefore chosen to treat Heroides 15 separately, in order to offer a brief outline of ways the Sappho letter intersects with my focus on the intratextuality of the corpus. Those who have concentrated their energies on the literary aspects of this poem2 have come up with a variety of interpretations; I will summarize only those most influential on my reading. Baca sees the letter as a kind of apologia (Ovid’s) for not writing lyric poetry (1971: 35). Jacobson’s interpretation of the letter suggests that Sappho is a poet first and foremost, and a lover only incidentally; for him the focus of Heroides 15 on the intricacies of poetic composition shows Sappho to be an artist fully conscious of her reputation, indeed more interested in it than in her lover Phaon (1974: 287–97). Heroides 15 then becomes a parody of the ‘‘persona of the loverpoet,’’ for whom love is a prerequisite for poetry (ibid. 297–8).3 In this case, 1

2

3

On the vexed issue of Ovidian authorship, Comparetti 1876, De Vries 1885: 135ff., Palmer 1898, Kenney 1979, Do¨rrie 1975: 261–2, Tarrant 1981, Murgia 1985: 464–72, Courtney 1990 and 1998, and Knox 1995: 12–14, are essential. Consensus is nowhere to be found (and the issues of Heroides 15’s separate manuscript tradition and possible citation in Am. 2.18 do not help, but see Baca 1971: 29–30 and Tarrant 1981: 149–51 on the latter). Heroides 15 exhibits several egregiously un-Ovidian usages; Tarrant, the most recent complete study, divides them into metrical issues (1981: 137–8), non–Ovidian vocabulary (ibid. 139–42) and ‘‘incriminating borrowings’’ from Ovid’s works (ibid. 142–7). Those who would see the poem as a deliberate attempt to make Sappho seem a poetaster are able to explain many of these as meant to be comical, but certain things (late vocabulary, metrical oddities) are harder to explain away. Knox provides the most recent discussion of the problem (2002: 121 n. 15). Difficulties with the text will be noted ad loc. See Jacobson 1974: 278–86 on the uses of Heroides 15 for biographical information about Sappho; on the Sapphic echoes in the poem, see below, nn. 11 and esp. 14. Verducci’s reading, that the poem is a study of the loss of separation between love and art (1985: 137–40, 146–8, 163, and passim), is similar to Jacobson’s.

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153

the poem will exemplify generic conflict more than psychology, and we may expect Sappho to fall in between lyric and elegiac modes.4 This reading provides the basis for my own interpretation of the poem – the ‘‘community of women’’ I have outlined in the preceding pages is, it now becomes clear, a fundamentally elegiac one, and the lyric viewpoint simply does not fit with the women’s obsessive focus on love as the most significant aspect of their lives (which may, as we shall see, go a long way toward explaining what critics have found troublesome about Heroides 15).5 Even a casual reading of Heroides 15 suggests that Sappho views herself differently from the women with whom she shares a corpus. While she may turn to poetry in an attempt to make sense of her own ‘‘lived’’ experience, she does not voluntarily turn to elegiac poetry. In fact (to take a Jacobsonian view), with Sappho, poetry seems to gain priority over life. Sappho refers to herself in Heroides 15 as an auctor (15.3),6 poetria (15.183; see Jacobson 1974: 286), and vates (15.58, 15.205),7 to her right hand as studiosus (15.1) and to her letter as an opus (15.4)8 and a carmen (15.6).9 She boasts of

4

5

6

7

8 9

This had been adumbrated by several: see Jacobson 1974: 290 and passim on the ‘‘formalities and requirements’’ of the elegiac genre and Verducci on the ‘‘palpably lyric strain’’ that intrudes into the poem and on Sappho’s misunderstanding of elegy (1985: 137 and 150). The fact that Sappho actually wrote elegies (Anth. Pal. 6.269, 7.489, and 7.505; see too Suda
4.323.9 and P. Oxy. 1.2.5 and Farrell 1998: 333–4, from which these citations come) does not change the fact that she is primarily a lyric poet. See Sappho’s statement flendus amor meus est – elegiae flebile carmen; / non facit ad lacrimas barbitos ulla meas (15.7–8, my love must be lamented: the poetry of elegy is for misery; there is no lyre suitable for my tears). This word appears also at 6.120 (Jason as the author of Hypsipyle’s pregnancy); 7.105 (on Aeneas as the author of Dido’s deceit; here critics have seen an allusion to Vergil as the (hidden) author, since it is through reading the Aeneid that Dido discovers Aeneas’ repetitive treachery); 7.138 (Aeneas as author of Dido’s death); 8.31 (Tyndareus as possessing more authority than Menelaus to choose a husband for Hermione); 10.132 (rocks and the waves as the true parents of Theseus); 11.8 (Aeolus as the party responsible for Canace’s suicide); 14.110 (‘‘hoary old age’’ as the source of Hypermestra’s knowledge about her ancestor Io; possibly also an allusion to a literary treatment of the story, on which see Hinds 1987b: 18); and 15.78 (Phaon as author of Sappho’s cultus). Nowhere else does one of the heroines refer to herself as an auctor. Vates also appears in Heroides 5.123, where it refers not to Oenone but to Cassandra, who has predicted an unhappy end for Oenone once Paris has left for Greece. While the word appears outside of Heroides 15 (8.52, 11.8, 14.50), it does not refer to poetry. Interestingly, at 15.13–14, she suggests that Heroides 15 is not, in fact, a carmen because she is unable to write poetry: Nec mihi, dispositis quae iungam carmina nervis, / proveniunt; vacuae carmina mentis opus! (Nor does poetry come to me, which I can put together with well-placed strings; poetry is the work of an unfettered mind); see too 15.195–7. (Tarrant 1981: 145 regards this as evidence of inauthenticity.) But to Sappho, poetry is lyric poetry; given the (elegiac) terms of the discourse of the Heroides her venture into elegy cannot but be unsuccessful. The word carmen appears at Heroides 2.118 (an ill-omened song at Phyllis’ wedding); 2.146 (an inscription of Demophoon’s deeds; see above, p. 32 for discussion); 5.28 (the poem Paris has inscribed on a tree which signifies his love of Oenone); 6.83 (the wicked spells Medea knows); 7.194 (Dido’s epitaph); 12.141 (songs in celebration

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her fame as a poet10 and remembers past poetic performances: Cantabam, memini – meminerunt omnia amantes – / Oscula cantanti tu mihi rapta dabas (I used to recite, I remember – lovers remember everything – and you would snatch stolen kisses from me while I was reciting, 15.43–4). She also invokes a host of divinities associated with poetry with whom she has had long acquaintance and from whom she expects favors.11 This concentration on Sappho’s poetic pretensions is not surprising; after all, Sappho, unlike the other writers of the Heroides, can hardly be portrayed as a novice at poetry. But at the same time, she is new to the genre of Roman elegy, and it is here that she betrays her inexperience.12 This also explains the opening lines of Heroides 15: Sappho wonders if her reader will recognize her poetry even though it has been composed in the ‘‘wrong’’ meter (and language).13 Heroides 15 has few obvious similarities to other Heroides (but many to Sappho’s own poetry).14 Given what we have seen so far about the care the letters take to situate themselves in relation to one another, this lack of internal reference can be seen as yet another piece of evidence against the authenticity of the poem. Sappho simply does not belong. Given another set of reading practices, however, Heroides 15 can be seen as a ‘‘bad’’ poem (and Sappho a poor elegiac poet) precisely because, as a poet who traditionally writes lyric, she does not know how to adapt the topoi of elegy to her own purposes; Heroides 15 contains too many lyric details. Among the elegiac topoi (mis)handled by Sappho in her new elegiac persona, the ‘‘departure scene’’ stands out, if only by its absence: Si tam certus eras hinc ire, modestius isses,15 Et mihi dixisses ‘‘Lesbia puella, vale!’’ of Jason’s new wedding). Phyllis and Dido are the only other heroines to assume to themselves the power of writing carmina; see Farrell 1998: 39 on Phyllis as a writer. 7.1, where Dido commends her carmen to Aeneas, is probably spurious. 10 15.27–30, At mihi Pegasides blandissima carmina dictant; / iam canitur toto nomen in orbe meum. / Nec plus Alcaeus, consors patriaeque lyraeque, / laudis habet, quamvis grandius ille sonet (But the Muses recite to me most pleasing poetry: my name is already sung in the whole world, nor does Alcaeus, my compatriot in country and lyre, have more praise, although he sings rather loftier things); see too 15.33–4, nomen, quod terras impleat omnes, / est mihi (I have a name which fills every land). 11 Muses: 15.27–8, 15.108; Thalia: 15. 83–4; Venus: 15.57–8, 15.213; Amor/Cupid: 15.107, 15.179, 15.215; Apollo: 15.181–3. The similarities between this and Sappho’s ‘‘Hymn to Aphrodite’’ (fr. 2 V) are not lost on critics. Sappho even receives a divine epiphany from a Naiad (15.162–72). 12 Rimell offers a reading of Heroides 15 (building on Farrell 1998) that posits Sappho as a pupil of Ovid’s Ars Am. 3 because she has never written love letters before (1999: 110 and passim). 13 The lines are also, of course, an interpretative challenge to the external reader (Slater 1990: 69–70). 14 On this issue, Hubaux 1926 and Treu 1953 are the classic studies (summarized, in the main, by Jacobson 1974: 281–3). See too Verducci 1985: 157 and 166. 15 See Tarrant 1981: 145 on modestius isses of 15.99; he suggests that it derives from Met. 1.510.

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Non tecum lacrimas, non oscula nostra tulisti; Denique non timui, quod dolitura fui. Nil de te mecum est nisi tantum iniuria, nec tu, Admoneat quod te, pignus amantis habes. Non mandata dedi: neque enim mandata dedissem Ulla, nisi ut nolles inmemor esse mei. (15.99–106)

If you had decided to leave here, you should have gone more properly and should have said to me, ‘‘Goodbye, Lesbian girl!’’ You did not take my tears with you, nor my kisses: in fact, I did not fear what I would later mourn. I have nothing from you except an injustice, and you did not have the pledges of a lover that might remind you of me. I did not give you my final orders: nor would I have given you any orders, except that you not want to forget me.

Jacobson notes that while many of the Heroides feature tearful departure scenes, Ovid’s Sappho is denied one (1974: 290). Indeed, her words suggest that even if she had been given one, she would not have known how to use it. She would simply have kissed him and asked him to remember her. A comparison with any one of the histrionic departure-by-boat scenes of the Heroides (2.91–8, 5.41–56, 6.57–68, 13.3–24) points up the contrast in style, but Briseis’ letter is the exception that proves the rule. Briseis is taken away from Achilles by Talthybius and Eurybates, the two Homeric heralds, and, because of Achilles’ stony silence, she is free to project her own fantasies onto the situation: Alter in alterius iactantes lumina vultum / Quaerebant taciti, noster ubi esset amor (Each [herald] casting his eyes at the face of the other, silently wondered where our love was, 3.11–12). Critics of Heroides 3 generally note that the two men, if in fact Briseis has not imagined the entire scene, were probably simply grateful that Achilles did not kill them where they stood. Yet Briseis, because she is eager to seize any opportunity to remind Achilles of his relationship with her, is able to turn this (imaginary?) silent exchange to her advantage: according to her, she and Achilles belong together and everyone knows it. Sappho, by contrast, is unable even to speak when she discovers Phaon’s departure:16 Cum mihi nescio quis ‘‘fugiunt tua gaudia’’ dixit, Nec me flere diu, nec potuisse loqui! Et lacrimae deerant oculis et verba palato, Adstrictum gelido frigore pectus erat. 16

This scene may be usefully compared with Sappho’s erotic paralysis in F 31 V.

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Appendix: The authenticity (and ‘‘authenticity’’) of Heroides 15 Postquam se dolor invenit, nec pectora plangi17 Nec puduit scissis exululare comis, (15.109–14)

When someone told me ‘‘your pleasures are leaving,’’ for a long time I was not able to cry, or to speak. And tears were lacking to my eyes and words to my tongue; my heart was constricted by a frozen chill. After the pain found itself, I was neither ashamed to beat my breast nor to shriek with shorn hair.

By being unable to talk, Sappho loses out on the opportunity to display her poetic skills. Where Laodamia, for example, passes out only after Protesilaus has left (13.21–4) so that she can describe the pathetic scene of his departure and its effect on her, Sappho did not even know Phaon was leaving until someone else told her. She eventually shrieks, beats her breast and pulls out her hair (like Ariadne in Heroides 10), but unlike Ariadne, she does not utter an elegiac lament. We could attribute this to Sappho’s ignorance of the necessity of complaint to elegiac poetry but for the fact that she claims to be writing querellae (15.71). Heroides 15 includes a departure scene manque´ ; Sappho implicitly confirms generic expectations as she refuses to fulfill them. If I were pursuing this line of argument in order to prove that this poem does indeed belong with the rest of the corpus, I would suggest that Sappho learned from reading the other heroines about the necessity of a departure scene (but not how to compose one). Instead, I move on to another topos of Heroidean elegy. Sappho’s ‘‘suicide’’ is also not handled in a typically Heroidean manner. There has been much debate about the outcome of her letter. While it has traditionally been assumed that Sappho’s leap off the rock at Leucas results in her suicide, it is the most ambiguous suicide threat of the Heroides (even given the oracular ambiguity of the Naiad’s advice: if she dies, Sappho will also be freed of her love for Phaon); in any case, Sappho herself does not seem to think that this jump will end her life. Further, as Rosati shows, Amores 2.18.34 suggests that Sappho’s letter does indeed provoke Phaon’s return and that they live ‘‘happily ever after’’ (1996: 209–10; see too Rimell 1999: 124 and 131–3).18 If true, this would be a surprising end to the Heroides: some of the women are indeed reunited with their correspondents, but this reunion would alter the traditional story of Sappho’s death (Rosati 1996: 210 and nn. 15–16). This is indeed a significant difference from 17

18

See Tarrant 1981: 138 on the oddities, metrical and lexical (se dolor invenit) of 15.113 and 139–40 on the peculiarities of deerant . . . verba palato in 15.111 and of nec puduit scissis exululare comis of 15.114. Jacobson thinks that the placement of the leap and the letter at the end of the corpus may signify Ovid’s departure from (women’s) erotic elegy (1974: 299).

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the other letters, which most often have little palpable effect on their writer’s stories. It may, in fact, suggest the limitations of elegiac poetry (since Ovid’s Sappho writes a hybrid of the elegiac and lyric genres). Sappho’s injunction that Phaon should either return to her or write her a letter to end their relationship parallels the farewell of Hypermestra, who gives Lynceus a choice of saving her from death or seeing to her burial (14.125): Sive iuvat longe fugisse Pelasgida Sappho – Nec tamen invenies, cur ego digna fugi – Hoc saltem miserae crudelis epistula dicat. (15.217–19)

Or if it is pleasing to you to leave far from Pelasgian Sappho – although you will not find any reason why I deserve to be left – at least let a cruel letter say it to wretched me.

But Hypermestra’s mandate is designed to induce Lynceus to save her life (see above, pp. 78–9). Sappho’s words are weak by comparison, conveying little of Hypermestra’s urgency. More significantly, as several have noticed, Sappho’s instruction, quite possibly the last two couplets of the single Heroides, is comparable to their opening couplet: Penelope insists that Odysseus return rather than sending a letter: Nil mihi rescribas attinet: ipse veni! (It matters nothing that you write back to me: show up yourself ! 1.2). Penelope’s command, which serves as a model for the rest of the heroines (Farrell 1998: 324), is disregarded by Sappho.19 Men do not write in the Heroides; why then does Sappho want a letter (especially a letter that signals the end of her relationship)? One suggestion (in keeping with the purposes of this book) is that she has read enough of women’s writing (that is, at least in Heroidean terms, of elegiac writing): her plea to Phaon to write to her may signal her recognition of the fundamental barrenness of the poetic community of her fellowwriters. Like most historical readers of the Heroides, Sappho is not interested in the mechanics of how abandoned women form a community to read and write one another; she simply wants Phaon back. An endless cycle of unanswered letters (compare Penelope’s repetitive querellae in 1.61–2) holds no appeal for Sappho. She either wants Phaon to return or to write back to her; in either case she will be freed from the world of the Heroides (and of elegy) so that she may return to the kind of poetry she knows how to write.20 19 20

Rosati 1996: 211 and passim is crucial to my understanding of these passages. See Kauffman on the return of the lover as the end of writing (1986: 36); this is surely more the case for women elegiac poets than for men.

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I have outlined three Heroidean staples and their permutations in Heroides 15; there are several more.21 In essence, Sappho’s letter is inauthentic whether it was written by Ovid or not; as a lyric impostor she is doomed to misunderstand elegiac rules.22 Sappho simply does not get it, and Heroides 15 proves that she is not a very good elegiac poet. Yet we will miss the point if we do not move a step further. Although it has been one of the aims of this book to show that reading and writing are significantly more problematic than they might appear once they are in the context of a community, misreading (in the Heroides and elsewhere) is most emphatically not a bad thing. Given that the genre of elegy (especially as written by women) almost inevitably results in misery, Sappho’s elegiac incompetence can be seen as a powerful restatement of her own poetic virtues.23 In other words, Sappho may be too much her own poet to suffer the usual fate of the women of the Heroides. Her misreading of Heroidean elegy, rather than causing her death as it does for so many of the women, merely points out her alienation from the concerns of elegy. Unlike most of the other women of the Heroides, Sappho realizes that elegy is a no-win game, for women above all. 21

22

23

Lines 15.55–6 (directed to the women of Sicily), for example, are particularly jarring: Nec vos decipiant blandae mendacia linguae! / quae dicit vobis, dixerat ante mihi (Nor let the lies of his pleasing tongue deceive you: what he says to you, he used to say to me); while they are a typically Heroidean statement, they seem odd coming from Sappho, who wants Phaon to return. See Farrell 1998: 332–3 on the ‘‘authenticity’’ of Heroides 15; he suggests that Sappho is inauthentic because she represents the figure of the poet. Gordon pursues the question of gender authenticity, asking, ‘‘Does Sappho write ‘like a woman’?’’ (1997: 275). Cf. Casali’s interpretation of Ovid’s exilic poetry: to be unable to write panegyric may suggest not that your abilities have declined but that you cannot write about unworthy subjects (1997b).

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Index

abandoned woman as compelling model 18, 21, 36, 39, 108, 128, 135, 139, 140 as suicidal 39 abandoned women, community of 63, 82, 157 abandonment Ariadne’s 20, 35, 122, 124, 127, 137, 139 Hermione’s 97, 98 Hypsipyle’s 40, 41 Laodamia’s 108 Medea’s 40 Phaedra’s 129, 130, 132, 134, 142 Phyllis’ 23, 25, 29, 31, 39 Ovid’s 145 poetics of 1, 2, 3 Achilles 58, 88, 91–92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 101, 105, 106, 155 see also under murder Acontius 10, 20, 22, 58, 135–137, 141, see also under Callimachus and rhetoric addressee, actual 70, 72, 105 addressee, intended 70, 72, 73 addressee, see reader adultery, see rivalry, erotic Aegyptids 74, 77 Aeneas 27–29, 36, 45, 54, 65, 111, 113, 153, 154 see also under perfidy Aeolus 68, 70, 79, 83, 84, 153 Aeschylus 41, 69 Danaids 69 Prometheus Bound 69 Suppliants 69 Agamemnon 88, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96 ‘‘Alexandrian footnote’’ 48, 99, 154, see also ‘‘Heroidean’’ footnote Amor 154, see also love Andromache 20, 89, 96, 100 anxiety of influence 5 Apollo 61, 62, 117 Apollonius character of Hypsipyle 53

character of Medea 4, 51, 53 Argonautica 42, 48 Apuleius, Golden Ass 12 Arctinus, Iliupersis 89 Ariadne 12, 15, 19, 36, 42, 53, 65, 111, 127–140, 156 see also under abandonment, author, Catullus, curse, model, reading, revenge, rhetoric, victimization Aristophanes 69 Asclepiades 124 Augustan poets 1, 2, 3, 7, 22, 39, 111, 145, 147 like heroines 18 see also under community Augustus 148–151 see also under misreading, naı¨vete, power, puella, reading, victimization construction of 150, 151 interest in poetry of 149 like heroes 151 like Phyllis 149 authenticity gender 158 Heroides 21 Heroides 3 89 Heroides 9 108, 109, 116 Heroides 12 43, 120 Heroides 15 152, 153, 154, 158 author, see also gender, writing, and individual characters Ariadne as 9, 10, 35, 71, 137–140 Briseis as 91, 92–97, 98–99, 100–103, 105–106, 117 Canace as 70–72, 79–83, 83–85, 86 Deianira as 72, 108 Dido as 12, 54 Helen as 63 Hermione as 97, 99 Hypsipyle as 47 Medea as 49, 120 Oenone as 53, 55–66, 121 Paris as 153

171

172 author (cont.) Penelope as 7, 38 Phaedra as 11, 57, 94, 103, 127, 142 Phyllis as 19, 26, 29 Sappho as 152–158 heroine as 2, 3, 10, 11, 12, 18, 43, 49, 97, 107, 111, 145, 147, 153, 157 authoritative version, see canonical narrative authority, in question 145, 149 authorship, see writing and poetry Bovary, Emma 12, 13, 122 Briseis 9, 12, 71, 89–101, 117, 146, 155, see also under author, death, Homer, lies, misreading, model, naı¨vete, rhetoric, suicide, victimization Callimachus’ Acontius 135 Callimachus’ Phyllis 4, 24 Canace 9, 19, 45, 68, 70, 72, 80–87, 117, 127, 153, see also under author, fidelity, love, model, naı¨vete, reading, suicide, victimization, virginity canonical narrative 4, 5, 6, 12, 18, 93, 94, 104, 110, 115, 127, 139, 143 authority of 2, 3, 6, 7, 12, 16, 17, 18, 27, 54, 72, 85, 87, 93, 117, 126, 137, 143, 146; authority of disrupted 87, 90, 102, 139, 146 changes in 3, 14, 15, 27, 41, 42, 54, 59, 89, 106, 115, 123, 137, 139, 142, 145, 150, 155, 156; subject to external reader 17, 18, 85, 137, 139 see also under individual characters and authors and primary sources carmen Deianira’s 117 Dido’s 154 Laodamia’s 117 Medea’s 46 Sappho’s 153 Ovid’s 149 use of in Heroides 153, 154 see also magic, poetry Cassandra 60, 62, 65, 153, see also under prophecy Catullus 22, 32, 89, 146, 147 Catullus’ Ariadne 4, 21, 32, 36, 53, 125, 127, 138, 142 circle, poetic, see community Clarissa, Samuel Richardson’s 11, 23, 27–31 communication 2, 8, 12, 138, see also Heroides, transmission of and writing community Alexandrian 147 Augustan poetic 2, 111, 147

Index benefits of 67, 85, 86 dangers of 39, 79, 107, 119 heroines’ 2, 4, 6, 8, 12–13, 67, 72, 80, 83, 87, 106, 107, 119, 121, 123, 138, 142, 153 key to Ovidian poetics 2, 6, 7, 8, 17, 143, 147, see also Ovid and writing 18, 158 Corythus 56 Creusa (Aeneas’ wife) 54; (Jason’s wife) 54 curse Ariadne’s 35, 111 Dido’s 65, 111 Hypsipyle’s 41, 50–54, 121 Oenone’s 64, 65 on Phaedra 126, 133 Phyllis’ 31, 35, 65, 111 Cydippe 135–137, 141, see also under reading Danaids 55, 69, 70, see also under murder Danaus 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79 dangers of writing, see writing death Briseis’ 95 Hercules’ 107, 116 Hippolytus’ 124, 136, 140 Hypermestra’s 103 Medea’s 45 Minotaur’s 124 Ovid’s 148 Paris’ 64 Protesilaus’ 107, 112, 113, 116 from reading 67 topoi of 140 see also suicide Deianira 20, 55, 94, 107–109, 115–121, see also under author, carmen, magic, misreading, model, murder, naı¨vete, suicide Demophoon 19, 23, 25–26, 27–31, 33–35, 148, 153, see also under perfidy desire Helen’s 98, 99 Hermione’s 89, 102 Hypermestra’s 75 Laodamia’s 114 ‘‘Ovid’’ ’s 2 Phaedra’s 94, 126 Sappho’s 155 Dido 4, 15, 36, 45, 54, 65, 138, 153, see also under author, carmen, curse, epitaph, love, magic, marriage, misreading, model, rhetoric, suicide, virginity Dionysus 32, 125, 127, 139 Diphilus 69 dreams 112, 113, 114, 118 duty 77, 94, 103, 104

Index elegiac love 94, 96 elegiac topos 9, 37, 43, 71, 96, 97, 126, 154, 158 departure scene as 112, 154 epitaph as 28 ill-omened wedding as 82 infidelity as 61 intimacy as 94, 95 lena as 96 puella docta as 63, 137, 144 Sappho and 154, 157 servitium amoris as 3, 117 suicide as 13, 14, 16, 26, 39, 72, 84, 148, see also suicide wish not to have met as 28, see also rivalry, erotic elegy 8, 59, 150, 151, 153, see also genre as seduction 1, 2, 4, 127, 156, see also carmen femininity of 97, 144, 145, 157 heroines’ use of 37, 59, 62 limits of 19, 66, 157, 158 masculinity of 144 mourning and 153 performance and 8 voracity of 8, 11, 19, 38, 49, 56, 96, 97, 117, 126, 138, 150 emotionality, heroines’ 55, 75, 102, 111, 120 Ennius’ Medea 42 epic, see under genre and Heroides epistolarity 4, 8, 9–10 duplicity of 141 eroticism of 10 femininity of 15 epitaph Dido’s 28, 29, 153 Hypermestra’s 79, 81 Phyllis’ 29 Eros 29 Euripides 147 character of Hypsipyle 41 character of Medea 4, 36, 42, 48, 53, 54, 120, 148 character of Phaedra 138, 140 Aeolus 68, 70, 72, 83, 84 Andromache 89, 99 Hippolytus I 131 Hippolytus 21, 124, 125 Medea 93 Eustathius 110 family, see also under model or under individual characters family, betrayal of 52, 120 feminist theory 5–6 and reading Ovid 5 fidelity Canace’s 79

173 Helen’s 63, 64 Hypermestra’s 78, 79 Oenone’s 59, 61 Penelope’s 37, 62 Phaedra’s 127 ‘‘future reflexiveness’’ 99 gender 8, 15, 21, 58, 83, 97, 144, 158 genealogy, royal 69, 129 generic conventions 9, 12, 37, 38, 50, 59, 62, 63, 129, 153, 156, see also elegiac topos genre 8, 9, 56, 60, 126, 144 Hecuba 59 Helen 18, 19, 20, 38, 55, 57, 58–66, 70, 88, 92, 93, 97–9, 100, 101, 131, 137, see also under author, fidelity, marriage, model, rhetoric, virginity Heliodorus 110 helplessness, see victimization Hercules 70, 72, 94, 108, 109, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, see also under death Hermione 12, 20, 45, 70, 71, 87–91, 92–93, 94–96, 97–106, 153, see also under abandonment, author, desire, love, marriage, misreading, model, naı¨vete, reading, rhetoric, victimization heroes 1 ‘‘Heroidean’’ footnote 48 Heroides authenticity of, see authenticity book division of 21 critical reception of 6, 16, 40, 51, 52, 56, 69, 72, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 102, 106, 120, 126, 137, 138, 140, 146, 154, 157, see also under individual characters didactic elements of 123 double 19, 20, 22, see also under individual characters efficacy of 2–3, 8, 67, 69, 71, 83, 86, 105, 106, 112, 145, see also under individual characters elegiac aspects of 9, 37, 56, 63, 89, 126, see also under elegy and individual characters epic aspects of 9, 37, 96, 97, 114, see also under individual characters ‘‘failure’’ of 9, 15, 16, 67, 85, 95, 98, 106, 126, 128, 135, 137, 148, 152, 157, see also under individual characters influence of 1, 147 lyric aspects of 152, 153 order of (chronological) 44 order of 21, 22, 37, 48, 49, 63, 78, 79, 120 pastoral elements of 9, 56, 60, 61, 64, 65, see also under individual characters relative dates 8

174 Heroides (cont.) repetitiveness of 3, 7, 8, 11, 15, 16, 19, 20, 22, 35, 36, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 49, 50, 62, 65, 67, 73, 87, 91, 103, 107, 108, 116, 123, 140, see also under individual characters tragic aspects of 9, 42, 43, 49, 50, 56, 68, 71, 76, 81, 109, 126, 142, see also under individual characters transmission of 9, 10, 17, 38, 70, 73, 105, 137, 138, see also under individual characters Hippolytus 20, 122, 123, 124, 125, 128, 133, 134, 135, 141, see also under death Homer 13 character of Briseis 14, 16, 20, 87, 89, 105, 148 character of Penelope 7, 37, 118 Iliad 87, 93, 96, 99 Odyssey 13, 37, 38 Hyginus 25 Hyllus 109, 118, see also under reading Hymenaeus 30, 81, 82 Hypermestra 19, 55, 67, 71, 72–83, 85, 91, 117, 146, 153, 157, see also under death, desire, epitaph, fidelity, lies, love, marriage, model, murder, piety, rhetoric, victimization, virginity Hypsipyle 15, 19, 40–55, 64, 120, 145, 153, see also abandonment, author, curse, Euripides, marriage, model, murder, naı¨vete, piety, reading, rhetoric, victimization, virginity identity, poetic 11 imprisonment 87, 92, 94, 97, 98, 99, 100, 104 incest 57, 68, 71, 126, 134 intertextual irony, see under irony intertextuality 2, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 42, 49, 66, 126, 145 intratextuality 2, 8, 13–14, 18, 40, 67, 133, 137, 143, 152 Io 72, 103, 153 Iole 55, 109 Irigaray 8 irony 8, 9, 14, 52, 87, 111 intertextual 41, 42, 46, 64, 65, 80, 84, 108, 109, 134 isolation 72 Jason 19, 36, 40, 41–54, 55, 63, 71, 120, 153, 154, see also under lies, perfidy Judgment, Paris’ 56, 60 Jupiter 71, 72, 132, 133 Augustus as 150 kidnap 91, 93, 94, 100, 131, 136 Kimaithos, Heracleia 109 Laodamia 3, 20, 107–108, 109–110, 111–121, 128, 156, see also under abandonment, carmen, desire, magic, misreading, murder, suicide

Index Lemnian Women 41, 51, 54, 55 lentus 38, 96 lies Briseis’ 91 Hypermestra’s 74, 104 Jason’s 44 Oenone’s 60 literacy, women’s 16 literature, see poetry and elegy litterae 64 Livius Andronicus 89 love and Ars Amatoria 148 and poetry 152, 153, 157 femininity of 16 fictionality of 145 Canace’s 68, 71 Dido’s 29 Hermione’s 71, 93 Hypermestra’s 69, 71, 72, 73, 78, 79 Oenone’s 62, 64 Lycophron Aeolus 68 Hippolytus 124 Lynceus 69–70, 72–79, 74, 91, 103, 104, 157, see also under murder Macareus 68–69, 70, 84, see also under suicide Maecenas, circle of 147, see also community magic and women 110–121 Deianira’s 107 Dido’s 35, 36 Laodamia’s 20, 53, 107, 111–121 Medea’s 31, 42, 50, 55, 64, 65, 153 Oenone’s 56, 64, 65 marriage ill-omened 118 Dido’s 15, 27 Helen’s 98 Hermione’s 89, 96, 98, 101, 102, 105, 153 Hypermestra’s 69, 70, 81–82 Hypsipyle’s 45 Jason’s 36, 82, 154 Oenone’s 56, 59 Phyllis’ 27, 153 masculinity 83, 88, 93, 144, 145 materialism 5, 144 Medea 15, 19, 29–31, 35, 36, 40–55, 107, 120, 153, see also under abandonment, Apollonius, author, carmen, death, Ennius, Euripides, magic, model, murder, naı¨vete, reading, reputation, revenge, victimization, virginity Melanippides 69 Meleager 116

Index Menelaus 64, 65, 88, 92, 93, 100, 137 Messala, circle of 147, see also community Minos 124, 128, 129, 132 Minotaur 32, 33, 127, 128, 129, 133, see also under death misreading 150 Augustus’ 149, 151 Ovid’s 149 heroines’ 5, 11, 13, 17, 98, 107, 143, 145, 158 Briseis’ 93 Deianira’s 109 Dido’s 12 Hermione’s 94, 99, 102 Laodamia’s 111, 115, 117 Oenone’s 57 Phaedra’s 123, 128, 130, 134 Phyllis’ 19, 23, 26, 38, 148 Sappho’s 153, 158, see also reading, dangers of and writing, dangers of model family members as 2, 20, 32, 33, 39, 54, 67, 71, 72, 79, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 105, 116, 119, 122, 124, 126, 127, 132, 133, 134, 142, 143 Ariadne as 3, 4, 17, 20, 23, 26, 31, 32–36, 38, 42, 63, 71, 122–125, 127–140, 142 Briseis as 17, 20, 87–88, 89–103, 104, 106 Canace as 67, 71, 74, 79–83, 85, 86 Deianira as 115–121 Dido as 12, 19, 23, 26–29, 36, 38, 111 Helen as 22, 87, 88, 90, 94, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106 Hermione as 103–105 Hypermestra as 20, 88, 103–105, 106 Hypsipyle as 45, 48, 49, 58–66, 71, 120–121 Io as 103 Medea as 4, 19, 20, 23, 26, 30–32, 38, 44–45, 49, 52, 58–66, 71, 120–121, 145 Pasiphae as 128, 135 Penelope as 36–38, 39, 62, 71, 117 Phyllis as 31, 36 Theseus as 33, 132 see also under individual characters murder Achilles’ (of Briseis) 95 Danaids’ (of Aegyptids) 69, 73 Deianira’s (of Hercules) 120 Hypermestra’s refusal of 69, 74, 75, 76, 80 Hypsipyle’s desire for 51 Laodamia’s (of Protesilaos) 20, 112, 113, 120 Lynceus’ (of Hypermestra) 78, 79 Medea’s (of children) 120 Orestes’ (of Neoptolemus) 94 Phaedra’s (of Hippolytus) 141

175 mythology, and heroines 5, 7, 8, 12, 13–14, 17, 18, 21, 146, 148, see also canonical narrative, primary sources, and under individual characters naı¨vete Augustus’ 149 heroines’ 15, 42 Briseis’ 102 Canace’s 69, 86 Deianira’s 109, 121 Hermione’s 102 Hypsipyle’s 52, 120 Medea’s 31, 42, 51, 53, 66 Oenone’s 55, 62, 65, 146 Phaedra’s 131 Phyllis’ 19, 24, 31, 37, 56 Sappho’s 154 Neoptolemus 45, 88, 89, 92, 94, 95, 98, 99, 101, 102, 105 neoteric poets 147 Nessus 109 Nicochares 69 Nine Ways, the 24, 29, 35 Nonnus 32, 125 oaths, swearing of 31 Odysseus 7, 19, 37, 39, 62, 92, 94, 113, 157 Oechalis Halosis 109 Oenone 19, 40, 55–66, 72, 146, 153, see also under author, curse, fidelity, lies, love, magic, marriage, misreading, naı¨vete, prophecy, reading, revenge, rhetoric, virginity omens 118, see also under prophecy Omphale 108, 117, 119 Orestes 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, see also under murder, revenge Ovid, see also under abandonment, carmen, death, desire, feminist theory, misreading, reputation, rhetoric anxieties of 57, 141 as heroine 145, 146 error of 150 exilic persona 16, 145, 147, 149, 150, 151 exilic poetry 2, 16, 147, 150, 158 female ventriloquism of 5–6, 11, 15, 16, 21, 29, 49, 53, 141, 145, 146 life of 18, 144, 147, 148, 149 poetic principles of 4, 5, 9, 11, 14, 16, 18, 21, 24, 32, 40, 49, 51, 56, 65, 79, 89, 91, 96, 105, 115, 127, 138, 139, 143–151, 147, 150, 151, 156 Amores 10, 145 Ars Amatoria 111, 145, 148, 149, 151, 154 Fasti 22

176 Ovid (cont.) Ibis 11 Medea 42, 43 Metamorphoses 2, 22, 149, 150 Remedia 145 Tristia 18, 147, 148–149, 150, 151 Pacuvius 89 Paris 19, 22, 55, 56, 58, 60, 64, 72, 98, 99, 137, 153, see also under author, death Paris, Judgment of, see Judgement, Paris’ parody, Heroides as 138, 152 Pasiphae 122, 128, 129, 132, 133, 134, 135, see also under model, revenge pastoral, see under genre and Heroides Patroclus 88, 91, 96 Penelope 19, 37–38, 94, 117, 118, 128, 157, see also under author, fidelity, Homer, reading, rhetoric perfidy Aeneas’ 29, 33 Demophoon’s 29, 32, 33 Jason’s 33, 63 Theseus’ 28, 33, 63, 123, 132, 133, 139 performance, see under gender performance, of poetry 7, 8 Perithoos 129, 130 perlege 57, 136, 141 Petronius 12 character of Encolpius 4, 12, 13 Phaedra 10, 20, 22, 24–36, 53, 71, 122–137, 140–142, see also under abandonment, author, curse, desire, Euripides, fidelity, misreading, murder, naı¨vete, reputation, revenge, rhetoric, suicide, virginity Phaon 152, 153, 156, 157 Phyllis 15, 23–39, 54, 88, 122, 126, 133, 140, 148, 149, 153, see also under abandonment, author, Callimachus, curse, epitaph, marriage, misreading, model, naı¨vete, reputation, revenge, rhetoric, suicide piety Hypermestra’s 73, 75 Hypsipyle’s 52 plots, limited (women’s) 12, 13, 91, 135, 142, 143 Plutarch 131 poet, see also author, writing, women poetic book, arrangement of 7, 12, 22 poetry as mere entertainment 148, 150 femininity of 21, 144 power of 6, 10, 12, 14, 17, 21, 39, 58, 111, 119, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 152

Index politics 99 Augustan 150, 151 power Augustus’ 149, 151 heroes’ 15 heroines’ 10, 14, 15, 18, 56, 64, 146, see also under reading or writing Priam 54, 59, 65 primary sources Heroides 1 37 Heroides 2 24 Heroides 3 88, 89–91 Heroides 4 123–138 Heroides 5 55, 56 Heroides 6 41–54 Heroides 7 26, 118 Heroides 8 88–91 Heroides 9 108, 109 Heroides 10 124–125, 139 Heroides 11 68–69 Heroides 12 42 Heroides 13 109–117 Heroides 14 69–71 Heroides 15 154 letters in 110, 140 Propertius 56, 63, 89, 119, 147 prophecy about Protesilaus 110 Cassandra’s 65, 153 Oenone’s 56, 62 to Sappho 156 Protesilaus 108, 110–115, 117, 118, 120, 156, see also under death, prophecy psychology 5, 11, 12, 18 puella 129, see also under elegy Augustus as 150, 151 querellae 9, 156, 157 reader Augustan 148 external 10, 13, 14, 22, 110, 137, 140, 143, 146, 157; authority of 10, 17, 54, 56, 65, 137, 145, 146, 149, 150, 151; dangers for 16, 18, 36, 38, 137, 146, 151, 154; eavesdropping of 10, 11; knowledge of 4, 7, 14 internal 12, 17 reader-response theory 146 reading 15, see also misreading and under individual characters as affecting conduct 33, 58, 141, 142 as enactment 34, 66, 149 dangers of 14, 18, 39, 135, 136, 141, 146, 149, 150, 151, 158 dangers of not 19, 119

Index ‘‘feminine’’ 5–6, 8, 10, 13, 93, 97, 144 heroines’ 5, 145, 157 ‘‘masculine’’ 87 Augustus’ 148–151 Ariadne’s 139 Canace’s 72 Cydippe’s 137 Hermione’s 90 Hyllus’ 109 Hypsipyle’s 41, 44–45, 47, 53 Medea’s 45, 48 Oenone’s 57, 62 Penelope’s 38 Realien 140, 144 rejection 134 reputation Ovid’s 148 Cornelia’s 71 Hypermestra’s 79 Medea’s 48 Phaedra’s 125 Phyllis’ 30 Sappho’s 152, 154 rescue 72, 102, 103, 105 resistant reading 5, 93 revenge divine on hero 29 Ariadne’s 139 Medea’s 32, 42, 64 Oenone’s 64, 65 Orestes’ 92 Pasiphae’s 128 Phaedra’s 132, 141 Phyllis’ 31 rhetoric heroines’ use of 7, 8, 9, 12, 15, 66, 74, 102, 145 of epistle 9 Ovid’s 16, 148, see also under Ovid Acontius’ 136 Ariadne’s 35 Briseis’ 94, 99, 106 Dido’s 28 Helen’s 61 Hermione’s 20, 88, 90, 102, 103, 104, 105 Hypermestra’s 73, 74, 80, 81, 83, 86 Hypsipyle’s 46 Oenone’s 66 Penelope’s 19 Phaedra’s 103, 123, 125, 126, 127, 134 Phyllis’ 28, 35 Sappho’s 156 rivalry, erotic 19, 37–38, 45, 46, 47, 55, 59, 61, 64, 66, 94, 97, 110, 116, 121, 123, 128, 129, 130, 131, 136 rusticitas 37, 59, 60, 61, 64, 137

177 safety, of love 60 Sappho 6, 93, 127, 144, 146, 152–158, see also under author, carmen, desire, elegiac topos, misreading, naı¨vete, prophecy, reputation, rhetoric, suicide Seneca Medea 4 Phaedra 4, 124, 126, 142 Sophocles Aegeus 124 Hermione 89 Hypsipyle 41 Minos 124 Phaedra 124, 125 Poimenes 110 Theseus 32, 124 Trachiniae 109, 116, 121 speech, opposed to writing 15, 16, 139, 140 suasoriae, Heroides as 8, 123 suicide, see also under elegiac topos Briseis’ 106 Canace’s 68, 71, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 153 Deianira’s 108, 116 Dido’s 29, 153 Laodamia’s 107, 110, 116 Macareus’ 70 Phaedra’s 124, 135 Phyllis’ 19, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 31, 36, 140 Sappho’s 156 Sulpicia 17, 144 Theseus (epic) 123 Theseus 10, 12, 20, 31, 32, 33, 36, 62, 63, 111, 122, 123, 124–125, 126, 127–135, 141, 142, 153, see also under perfidy Tibullus 63 Timesitheos 69 tragedy 2, 6, see also under Heroides and under individual authors and characters Trojan War 14, 20, 56, 65, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 110, 112, 113 Tuscus 24 urbanitas 62 Varro, Argonautica 41 Venus 29, 133, 154 Vergil 147, 148, 153 character of Dido 4, 12, 26, 36 Aeneid 26 victimization Augustus’ 151 heroines’ 12, 17, 54, 151 Ariadne’s 127 Briseis’ 94, 99

178 victimization (cont.) Canace’s 71, 79, 85 Encolpius’ 12 Hermione’s 98, 99, 101, 106 Hypermestra’s 75, 105 Hypsipyle’s 53, 79 Medea’s 120 virginity Canace’s 71 Dido’s 31 Helen’s 63 Hypermestra’s 69, 76 Hypsipyle’s 45, 64 Medea’s 31, 45, 64 Oenone’s 64 Phaedra’s 131 war 8, 88, 96, 97, 98, 99, 102, 110, see also Trojan War

Index weapons 68, 70, 80 weaving, as writing 38 women and power 15, 144, 145, 146 duplicity of 16 women’s writing, see under writing writing as compulsion 38, 66, 141, 145, 151 benefits of 13, 83, 85, 98, 143, 157 dangers of 5, 10, 13, 16, 17, 18, 20, 38, 51, 57, 58, 60, 87, 108, 112, 113, 116, 137, 140, 141, 145, 147, 150, 151, 158 ‘‘like a woman’’ 5–6, 58, 144 ‘‘masculine’’ 16, 20, 83, 135, 144 men’s 157 power of 10, 14, 15, 17, 19, 67, 119, 136, 140, 142, 143, 144, 151 women’s 3, 8, 12–13, 15, 16, 17, 143, 144, 145, 157

Index Locorum

Aes. PV 865 Dan. 1 PEG TrGF 247–8 Aigimios, 298 Anaxandrides, CAF 2.150 Andronicus, TRF 23, 187–93 Anth. Pal. 2.215–21 6.269 7.489 7.505 Apollod. Bibl. 1.7.4 1.8.1 1.9.17 Bibl. 3.6.4 3.12.6 3.15.1 3.29 Bibl. 6.14 Epit. 1.7–10 1.17 1.18 Epit. 6.16–17 6.17 Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1.609–39 1.674–96 1.890–7 1.904–8 Ar. Nub. 1371 Ar. Ran. 1043 Arist. Poet. 1451a16 Asclepiades FGrHist 12 F 14 12 F 28 Ath. 14.651 557a Ausonius 12.4 Bacch. 5 16 Bion, 15.10 Call. Hek. 232–3

69 69 41 125 110 89 56 153 153 153 68 109 41 42 56 128 110 89 125 130 33 24 35 41, 52 41 41 41 68 125 123 41 124 69 131 110 109, 116 109 56 31

Hymn 6.98–9 fr. 67 fr. 67–75 fr. 226 fr. 556 fr. 668 Catullus 64 64.131–201 64.132–3 64.135 64.143–8 64.177–82 65.39 68 Conon, Narr. 23 Cypria Cypria, 18k

68 136 135 41 24 41 33, 53, 125, 139 139 133 35 139 34 21 147 56 109, 110 125

Diod. 4.62 Dion. Hal. Rhet. C.9.22

33 68

Ennius, fr. 269 Euripides CW F4 Hipp. 151–4 337–9 339 828 831–3 Med. 20–3 171 410–20 TGF 14–38 22 31–2 381–90 387–8 428–30 431 432–46 491

26

179

134 131 134 127 130 126 31 42 93 68 71 68 124 125 119, 125 125 125 131

180 Euripides (cont.) 616–31 624–5 649–58 Eust. Il. 2.698 Od. 11.521 Od. 1479.10 TrGF 176 Herodorus FGrHist 31 F 6 Hdt. 1.1–5 Hes. CW 25 108 Theog. 947–9 950–5 fr. 199 Homer Il. 1 1.1–356 2.690 2.695–710 6 7.467–71 9 18.590 19.54–73 19.184–275 19.282–300 21.305–84 Od. 1.61–2 4.276 5.306–12 8.518 11.321 11.602–4 23 Hor. Carm. 3.22 Hyginus Astr. 2.5 Fab. 15.254 42–3 43.3 59 74 103 103–4 108 123 242.2 254.2

Index Locorum 125 125 110 110 110 89 89 41 93 109 123 124 109 110 90 88 88 110 96, 114 41 106 124 88 88 91 58 7 65 114 65 123, 124, 127 109 7 69 125 41 125 127 24, 34 42 110 110, 112 27 89 68 51

Istros, FGrHist 334 F 10

131

Kaukalus, FGrHist 38 F 2

41

Laevius, 13–19 Luc. 9.973 Lucian Dial. mort. 19 Lycophr. Alex. 57.68 TrGF 1.174–5

110 56 110 56 124

Macrob. Sat. 2.4.21 Myrsilus FGrHist 477 F 1a

150 41

Nonnos Dion. 35.89–91

109

Ovid Am. 1.7.16 1.8 1.12 Am. 2.1.23–8 2.6.61–2 2.7–8 2.18 2.18.24 2.18.32 2.18.34 Am. 3.7.27 3.7.31–6 3.7.80 Ars Am. 1.327 1.509 1.558 1.744 Ars Am. 2 2.128 Ars Am. 3 3.38 3.617–30 Fas. 3.81 3.473 Fas. 6.733 Her. 1 1.1 1.2 1.11–22 1.59–62 1.61–2 1.66 1.71–4 1.77 1.81 1.84 Her. 2 2.1 2.1–8 2.3 2.12 2.13–14

129 111 145 111 28 12 9, 40, 152 133 24 156 35 111 35 129 129 129 130 90 4 154 24 9 129 139 124 10 38 157 118 38 154–155 38 118 37 71 37 10 24 25 25 35 35

Index Locorum 2.23 2.23–34 2.25 2.26 2.27 2.27–8 2.28–9 2.31 2.31–2 2.34 2.37 2.39–42 2.43–4 2.50 2.51–2 2.59–60 2.63 2.63–4 2.65 2.67–78 2.69 2.69–72 2.75–80 2.76 2.78 2.79 2.81–4 2.83–5 2.89 2.91–8 2.102 2.103 2.103–6 2.105 2.115–16 2.115–20 2.118 2.121–2 2.121–30 2.124 2.133–42 2.137 2.141 2.146 2.147–8 Her. 3 3.1 3.5–6 3.11–12 3.13 3.16 3.17–19 3.18 3.19

38 30 28, 31 33 31 29 30 33 31 27 31 82 29 31 31 31 28 31 31 35 33 33 32 129 29, 33, 133 33 27, 29 34 28 155 33 28 34 31 31 82 153 35 29 35 35 35 33 153 29 10 101 117 155 90 101 93 45 90, 101

3.22 3.23 3.23–4 3.26 3.27–39 3.36 3.45–50 3.51–2 3.53–4 3.54 3.55 3.61–6 3.63 3.68 3.69 3.85 3.87 3.88 3.89–90 3.91 3.100 3.101 3.104 3.109–10 3.115–17 3.123 3.127 3.129–30 3.137 3.138 3.140 3.141–6 3.145 3.150 3.152 3.154 Her. 4 4.1–4 4.2 4.3 4.6 4.10–11 4.14 4.19–28 4.21–4 4.51–2 4.53–4 4.54 4.55 4.55–60 4.56–60 4.59 4.59–66 4.62

181 96 90 92, 96 96 92 101 71 100 94 90, 101 92 95 90 101 101 96 96 96 93 96 117 101, 117 90 94 96 101 96, 117 92 96 96 95, 96 95 96 45 45, 96 96, 117 10 57 129 136 45 136 136 131 133 140 133 134 134 71 133 33, 133 132 134

182 Ovid (cont.) 4.63 4.65 4.67–84 4.68 4.73 4.102 4.104 4.105–8 4.109–12 4.109–24 4.113–16 4.127–36 4.132 4.157–62 4.165–6 4.166 Her. 5 5.1–4 5.2 5.3–4 5.14 5.21–32 5.28 5.32 5.35–6 5.41–56 5.43–6 5.57–60 5.60 5.75 5.75–6 5.79–88 5.81–8 5.85–6 5.88 5.89 5.92 5.99–104 5.99–106 5.102 5.106 5.109–11 5.113–24 5.115 5.115–16 5.125 5.125–6 5.126 5.127–30 5.129 5.133–45 5.134 5.140–5 5.149–50

Index Locorum 133 32, 131, 137 94 129 133 137 130 129 129 129–130 127 134 137 71 134 133 10, 141 57 64 60 64 58 153 64 60 155 64 64 64 64 64 59 72 62 64 60 64 64 63 60 64 64 65 64 60 64 59 64 62 64 61 64 61 64

5.151 5.152 Her. 6.1 6.3–4 6.5–18 6.9 6.10 6.11 6.13 6.19 6.19–20 6.20 6.23 6.31 6.32 6.33 6.34 6.35 6.39 6.40–2 6.41 6.43–6 6.49 6.51 6.55–72 6.57–68 6.58 6.60 6.62 6.63 6.73–8 6.76 6.81 6.82 6.83 6.83–93 6.95 6.95–8 6.97–8 6.101–4 6.105–6 6.109 6.111–12 6.113 6.113–16 6.114 6.117 6.117–18 6.120 6.121–2 6.123 6.125–6 6.128 6.129–30 6.131–2

30 64 47 48 44 64 44, 47 44, 64 44 45 46 64 45 47 44 44, 64 44 44 46 44 33 82 44 46 44 155 44, 64 44 46 44 64 46 45, 64 45 46, 64, 153 50 46 44 50 47 44 64 44 46, 71 71 53 64 46 153 46 46 46 46 45 46

Index Locorum 6.132 6.133 6.133–4 6.134 6.135–6 6.136 6.137 6.137–8 6.138 6.139 6.140 6.141–50 6.145 6.146 6.147 6.148–50 6.149 6.151–64 6.153–4 6.153–64 6.154 6.164 Her. 7 7.1 7.8 7.11–12 7.17 7.18 7.30 7.34 7.53–64 7.55–6 7.62 7.71–2 7.77 7.79 7.87 7.87–8 7.93–6 7.101 7.105 7.110 7.116 7.118 7.120 7.138 7.155 7.159 7.164 7.183 7.194 7.197–8 Her. 8.2 8.7–18 8.9–10

64 64 45 46 45 64 46, 51 46 50 51 47 44 46 33 44 51 64 65 64 52 64 64 10 154 28, 33 28 26, 54 33 33 29 28 33 45 65 33 29, 133 29 65 82 29 153 33 45 33, 133 29 153 45 134 29 85 153 29 103 100 104

8.11 8.12 8.15 8.16 8.17 8.18 8.24 8.25 8.27–30 8.27–32 8.29 8.31 8.31–2 8.31–3 8.36 8.40 8.41 8.41–2 8.43–8 8.49–54 8.52 8.57 8.65–74 8.66 8.73 8.75 8.80 8.81 8.81–2 8.82 8.85–6 8.86 8.90 8.93 8.94 8.100 8.101–2 8.103 8.107–14 8.110 8.114 8.121 8.121–2 Her. 9 9.9–32 9.11–2 9.25 9.36 9.37–4 9.39 9.41 9.43–4 9.55–6 9.74 9.81

183 91, 101 101 103 91, 96 101 96, 101 96 91 104 71 96 153 91 101 91 97 100 88 71 92 153 91 71, 101, 103 91, 101 101 99 92 91 103 91, 98, 101 90 98, 101 91 101 101 92 102 101 95 45 91 91 71, 96 9 72 117 45 45, 118 118 118 118 118 119, 125 117 117

184

Index Locorum

Ovid (cont.) 9.142 9.151 9.168 Her. 10 10.17–18 10.20 10.26–8 10.34 10.38 10.47–8 10.49 10.51–2 10.56 10.57 10.58 10.63–9 10.77–8 10.78 10.79–80 10.80 10.81 10.81–98 10.91 10.109 10.110 10.116 10.116–18 10.130 10.132 10.135–6 Her. 11 11.1–4 11.2 11.5 11.5–10 11.6 11.8 11.9 11.10 11.17–18 11.19–20 11.31–2 11.32–4 11.44 11.48 11.97–8 11.98 11.99–106 11.101 11.102 11.103–4 11.121–3 Her. 12 12.1

116 116 118 10 35 129 35 35 35 32 35 35 35 35 33, 133 34 127 33, 133 140 130 35, 140 140 71 35 35 33 133 35 153 138 10 85 117 85 84 79, 80 153 79, 84 45 71 80 69 68 45 69 80 81 81 82 82 82 80 10 47, 48

12.1–2 12.3–5 12.11–12 12.15 12.15–16 12.16 12.17 12.19 12.21 12.21–2 12.23–92 12.25–6 12.30 12.35 12.37 12.40 12.41 12.43 12.45 12.47 12.52 12.53 12.57 12.60 12.70 12.71 12.72 12.78 12.78–80 12.80 12.81 12.82 12.85–8 12.89–90 12.90 12.91 12.92 12.93 12.94 12.95 12.98 12.99 12.101 12.103 12.105 12.108 12.109 12.111 12.114 12.115–27 12.119–20 12.127 12.127–8 12.131–4 12.133

44 31 44 44 31, 45 44 44, 45, 64 31, 33, 46 50 44 44 51 64 46 33, 133 44 44, 153 44 44, 64 44 64 48 64 44 45 31, 44 33 31 71 134 64 44, 50 82 31, 44 31 31, 44, 64 31 44 44 44, 64 44 44 44 64 45 44 45 31, 44, 45 64 43 31 44 46 44 46

Index Locorum 12.137–42 12.141 12.149 12.161 12.163 12.163–4 12.167–8 12.171–2 12.173 12.173–4 12.175–82 12.177 12.177–8 12.177–82 12.180 12.182 12.183 12.189 12.192 12.193 12.194 12.197 12.198 12.199 12.199–204 12.201 12.202–3 12.207–10 12.207–12 12.210 12.212 Her. 13 13.2 13.3–24 13.21–4 13.25 13.31–40 13.44 13.69–70 13.75–6 13.77–8 13.79 13.85–92 13.92 13.93–4 13.107 13.107–14 13.109–14 13.111 13.137–8 13.138 13.145 13.151–6 13.164 Her. 14

82 46 46 64 50 50 64 64 46, 64 64 44 64 46 65 64 45 46 46 46, 50 46, 64 33 46, 50 46 64 46 44 64 44 65 33 42 10, 13 114 155 156 118 119, 124 45 115 45 117 45 112 113 110 118 114 118 118 113 45 117 115 118 10

14.1–2 14.4 14.7 14.9–10 14.12 14.15 14.17–21 14.19 14.25 14.27 14.32 14.41 14.42 14.43 14.43–50 14.45 14.49 14.49–50 14.50 14.53 14.53–68 14.55 14.56 14.59–60 14.60 14.63 14.64 14.71–78 14.78 14.80 14.83 14.83–4 14.84 14.85–6 14.85–110 14.110 14.114 14.119 14.119–27 14.121–32 14.123 14.123–32 14.124 14.125 14.125–7 14.129 14.129–30 14.130 Her. 15 15.3 15.4 15.6 15.7–8 15.13–14 15.27–8

185 73 103 73, 80 82 73 81 75 75, 103 82 82 82 74 74 79 74 74 103 75 153 79 76 64 80 80 117 76 103 77 78 77 77 104 103 103 71 153 76 78 78 79 78, 103, 104 96 78 157 81 103 81 79 10 153 153 153 153 153 154

186 Ovid (cont.) 15.27–30 15.33–4 15.43–4 15.55–6 15.57–8 15.58 15.71 15.78 15.83–4 15.99 15.99–106 15.107 15.108 15.109–14 15.111 15.113 15.114 15.123 15.139–40 15.162–72 15.179 15.181–3 15.183 15.195–7 15.205 15.213 15.215 15.217–19 Her. 16.39–144 16.72 16.95–8 16.159–62 16.222 16.255–6 16.349 Her. 17.12–13 17.21–34 17.51 17.65–74 17.96 17.116 17.139–40 17.139–46 17.143 17.186 17.193 17.195–6 17.199–204 17.213–14 17.229–30 17.263 Her. 20.3 20.25 20.28

Index Locorum 154 154 154 158 154 153 156 153 154 154 154–155 154 154 155–156 156 156 156 44 156 154 154 154 153 153 153 154 154 157 60 60 63 63 137 99 129 60, 137 63 60 60 60 60 60 61 60 60, 137 129 63 63 63 63 60 136 136 136

20.37 20.39 20.48 20.59 20.230 Her. 21.108 21.109 21.143–4 21.181–2 Ib. 355 Met. 1 1.510 7 8.174–8 8.445–525 9 9.151–2 14.527–65 Pont. 2.8 3.4 4.10.71 4.16.20 Rem. Am. 55 457 757–66 Tr. 2 2.361–470 2.371–466 2.373–4 2.384 3.3.73–6 3.7 P. Oxy. 2452 frr. 1–6 2457 2493 1.2.5 Pacuvius, TRF 3 109ff. Panyassis, Heracleid Parth. 4 34 Paus. 1.22.1–2 2.25.4 4.2.7.5–7 Pherecydes, FGrHist 3 F 148 Phrynichus, 1, 4 TGF Pindar, Isth. 1.53 Ol. 9 Pyth. 4.251ff. fr. 176 Pl. Leg. 8.838c Plutarch Mor. 312c Vit. Thes. 8.3 15.1

137 137 137 137 136 137 136 137 137 68 149 154 43 32 116 135 109 21 147 147 124 24 29 56 18 18 148 149 96 68 28 144 124 68 109 153 89 109 56 64, 65 124 70 116 125 69 110 69 41 33 68 68 131 119, 124

Index Locorum 19.3 20 20.1 20.5 26 28.1 29.1 29.2 31.2 31.4 Prop. 1 1.1.19–20 2.1.51–2 2.1.61 2.13.55–6 2.14.7 2.24b.43 2.32.35ff. 2.32.57 4 4.3 4.7.57 4.7.85–6 4.11.11–13 4.11.21 Quint. Smyrn. 10.259–489 Quintilian 2.4.2 Sappho fr. 2V fr. 16V fr. 31V Schol. Ap. Rhod. 1.1212 1.1357 Schol. Ar. Nub. 1371 Schol. Eur. Hec. 886 Schol. Eur. Orest. 872 Schol. Hom. Od. 11.321 4.4 Schol. Pers. 1.34 Schol. Pl. Leg. 8.838c Schol. Theocritus 2.45–6 Seneca, Ph. 838 Serv. ad Aen. 6.445 7.761 10.497

131 125 131 3 131 130 131 131 131 131 13 111 111 129 28 129 129 56 129 13 13 129 28 71 129 56 12 154 93 155 109 109 68 70 69 33 89 24 68 125 125 124 124 70

187

10.722 ad Ecl. 5.10 Simonides, PMG 550 Soph. TrGF 384–9 TrGF 4 202–3 Stat. Theb. 4.715ff. Stob. Flor. 64.35 Strab. 596 Suda 4.323.9 Suet. Aug. 89

27 24 125 41 89 42 68 56 153 149

Theocritus, 2.45–6 Theolytus, FGrHist 478 F 3 Tib. 1.2.41–56 1.3.17–20 1.3.55–6 1.5.11–16 1.5.41–56 1.8.17–22 1.8.18 3.2.29–30 3.6.39 3.6.41 Timaeus, FGrHist 566 F 82 Trogus, Just. Epit. 16.4–6

125 41 111 113 28 111 111 111 35 28 33 129 26 26

Vergil Aen. 1.94–101 Aen. 3.325–32 3.330–2 Aen. 4 4.36–8 4.68 4.320–1 4.338–9 4.450 4.508 4.534–6 4.596 4.640 4.655–6 4.657ff. Aen. 6.456 Aen. 9.107–22 Ecl. 8 Ecl. 10

114 89 89 33 27 28 27 27 28 36 27 28 21 28 28 28 21 111 56