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Ovid, Heroides 6.1–2*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Matthew Leigh
Matthew Leigh
Affiliation:
St Anne's College, Oxford
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Extract

It is a characteristic of Ovid's Heroides for each epistle implicitly to establish the dramatic time, context and motive for its composition by the particular heroine to whom it is attributed. In this way the poet is able to exploit the tension between the heroine's inevitably circumscribed awareness of the development of her story and the superior information which can be deployed by a reader acquainted with the mythical tradition or master-text which dictates what is actually going to follow: Penelope hands over a letter to a man whom the reader familiar with Homer can identify as Ulysses even if she cannot, Ariadne wonders whether Naxos is infested with tigers at a moment shortly before Dionysus and his tiger-driven chariot will arrive.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , December 1997 , pp. 605 - 607
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1997

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References

page 605 note 1 For Penelope, see Ov. Her.1.59-62 and D. C. Kennedy, ‘The Epistolary Mode and the First of the Heroides’, CQ34 (1984), 413-22, esp. pp. 417-18. For Ariadne and the tigers, see Ov. Her.10.85-86 and cf. Ars Am.1.549. A number of examples of this phenomenon are discussed in A.Barchiesi, Future Reflexive: Two Modes of Allusion and Ovid's Heroides’, HSCP95 (1993), 333

page 605 note 2 See sp. Ov. Her. 6.125-30, 6.151-64, 12.175-82, 12.187-8,12.207-12.

page 606 note 3 The filiation is identified by Ellis and Fordyce at Catull. 64.171-2 and Pease at Verg. Aen. 4.657-8.

page 606 note 4 Ellis at Catull. 64.171-2 cites Ap. Rhod. Arg. 3.774-9 and 4.32-3. Note how the process comes full circle with the words of Medea at Val. Flacc. Arg. 8.432-3: ‘vellem equidem nostri tetigissent litora patris te sine duxque illis alius quicumque fuisset’.

page 606 note 5 As Bessone at CQ 45. 2 (1995), 575 notes, Medea's own lament at Ov. Her. 12.7-20 is also strongly reminiscent of Euripides and Ennius.

page 607 note 6 For the anticipation in Apollonius of events subsequent to the close of the epic, see G. E. Duckworth, Foreshadowing and Suspense in the Epics of Homer, Apollonius, and Vergil (Sew York, 1966), pp. 35–4. To the passages discussed by Duckworth, add the speech of Medea at Ap. Rhod. Arg. 4.355-90. While the threats and closing curse of Medea are not immediately fulfilled, the anxiety of Jason at 4.394 (vnoSSeiaas) is only too justified.

page 607 note 7 See Ov. Her. 6.9, famavenit, 6.19 'narratur', 6.32 'narrat', 6.39 'narrat', 6.132 'diceris'. On this point, see also H. Jacobson, Ovid's Heroides (Princeton, 1974), pp. 97–99.

page 607 note 8 For 'fama' as a vehicle for the poet's contemplation of his own place in the literary tradition, see esp. D. Feeney, The Gods in Epic (Oxford, 1992), pp. 186-7 and 247-9.

page 607 note 9 The criticism of the close of the Argonautica in A. Korte, Die hellenistische Dichtung (Leipzig, 1925), p. 199 ignores the role of the prolepses elsewhere in Books 3 and 4.