Latin 131: Ovid, Heroides

The Heroides is an extraordinary collection of twenty-one letters in elegiac couplets by the poet Ovid. They represent a unique experiment with the female voice in Latin elegy, staging various heroines mostly of myth (e.g., Penelope, Medea, Ariadne) writing to their absent lovers. Fifteen single Heroides are followed by three pairs consisting of a letter and a response by the male lover. The collection is an interesting case study of issues of authorship, attribution and transmission: the fifteenth letter written in the voice of Sappho, for example, has long been considered spurious and the letters were extremely popular in the Renaissance when it became popular to write response letters to and by the Ovidian heroines. In this class, we will study the Ovidian collection and its reception within the history of both elegy and epistolography. Topics for discussion include epistolarity and the female voice; intertextuality; elegy and the female lament; letter writing and narrative; emotions and letter writing, reception of the Heroides in contemporary women’s fiction. We will read the majority of the corpus in Latin with supplementary readings in English.