Heroides 1,2,5,7,10 notes

‘epistulae’ ?

• ‘or recite a latter in an assumed voice; this type of work, unknown to others, he pioneered’

  • Heroides?

  • Does Ovid actually believe he is the first to write letters?

  • The myths themselves / idea of the lamenting woman is not new (see Euripidean tragedy and Alexandrian epic)

  • BUT the mode is crucial to the text! Should rather be called the epistolae heroidum

• Purser - ‘the Epistles are really soliloquies, the epistolary setting being little more than a mere form which gives an apparent reason for these soliloquies being committed to writing at all’

  • suasoriae in verse (rhetorical persuasion in guise of particular mythologicall character)

  • Part of repetitive exercise on single theme - ‘commonplace of monotony’

• BUT now seen to be a means of discussing communication in general - looking to the ‘performative aspects of language’

  • And reiteration, not repetition on a theme

  • AND monotony part of the message - voice of isolation demands to be heard even when nothing has changed

Heroides 1 - opening

• ‘These words your Penelope sends to you, O Ulysses, slow of return that you are; writing is pointless: come yourself!’ = writing to initiate union

  • tua Penelope tibi (surrounded)

• Troy is fallen by this point, but not worth it for Penelope (wished that the adulterous lover had been overwhelmed by raging waters on his journey = water & sexual adventure)

• ‘Then had I not lain cold in my deserted bed…’ (sexual isolation & loyalty via the bed)

  • And ‘widowed hands’ !

• Feels fears worse than reality, and believed that Ulysses would be killed by Trojans (name of Hector, Antilochus laid low, Patroklus, Tlepolemus etc)

  • ‘chaste love’ = Troy is ashes and lord safe

• ‘The young wife comes bearing thank-offering for her husband saved’ = not taken 10 years → old

  • And the wife listens to the tales of her own husband and draws pictures in the wine (Here the Simois)

Heroides 1 - transport

• Penelope takes responsibility for sending off Telemachus! (‘whom I sent to seek you’)

  • SHE sent Telemachus! Distorting her place in the intertextualised mythology (because to Odysseus?

  • Ancient Nestor told him and he told me

  • Rhesus and Dolon’s death (impressive, but ‘too forgetful of your own!’)

  • ‘ever gave ME first thought’ = the wife wants her husband safe, not to be courageous

• But now what avails that Troy has fallen if nothing has changed and she must live still bereft of her lord?

  • Fields of corn where Troy once was

  • Half-buried bones of her heroes struck by the curved share

• Now ‘whoso turns to these shores of ours his stranger ship is plied with many a question ere he go away and into his hand is given the sheet writ by these fingers of mine…’ = the one instance where we see HOW she tries to seek the man

  • But again not herself travelling!

  • Sent to Pylos and Sparta but not helpful !

• Before would have known that he was at least only fighting (only fear war) and not the only one

Arrival?

• This here is the one time we see a heroine physically attempt connection with her lover

  • Most ironic here as by this point Odysseus is already on the island

• For every other woman, we never see attempt to reach the man

  • And little means to do so (Ariadne’s stuck on an island! What is she even writing on?)

  • The letter thus acts as a reminder of their attempted BUT inevitably unsuccessful connection with the lover (‘the letter symbolises and reifies communication while it does not necessarily embody it’)

• The letter as bridge but also a barrier - need to be separate to write a letter!!

  • Furthermore, these women do not know when (if) these letters will be read BUT it will be after the moment of composition = inherently anachronistic

  • Will only be able to show to the men a past version of themselves = temporal boundary

Heroides 1 - inability to defend themselves

• Now, she does not know what to fear!

  • ‘While I live on in foolish fear of things like these, you may be captive to a stranger love - such are the hearts of you men!’

  • And tells of his rustic wife, only fit to dress wool (but this is a sign of her occuping the domestic space!)

• Even now her father orders her to quit the ‘widowed couch’

  • ‘Let him chide on - yours I am, yours must I be called’

  • Always his wife

• However the men of Dulichium and Samos come pressing about her, suing for her hand

  • In your halls, they are masters ! Pisander, and Polybus and Medon and Eurymachus

• And only three, unused to war - poweless wife, a boy and old man

  • Telemachus should be protected by father! And have been trained in his father’s ways

• ‘As for myself who when you left my side was but a girl though you should come straightaway I surely shall seem grown an aged dame’

Heroides 2 - opening

• ‘I, your Phyllis, who welcomed you to Rhodope, Demophoon, complain that the promised day is past’ (moon has waned and waxed 4 times!)

  • She is not complaining ahead of time!

  • Fixes this letter in specific time (when theoretically arrived, this time will have passed = memory)

• But hope still stays, and she has defended him and thought she saw his white sails

  • Curses Theseus ‘yet mayhap tis not he that has stayed your course’

  • Fears the ship was wrecked = begged the gods with holy incense

• ‘faithful love’ and ‘tell me, what have I done except not wisely love?’

  • One crime is that I took you to myself

  • Pledge of the right hand you placed in mine = shaking for marriage (SHE has done it!)

• Promises owed to the sea (‘all tossed by wind and wave over which you had indeed sailed and were to sail once more) and grandsire - ‘unless he too is but a fiction’ !!

  • Also swore on Venus and Juno, ‘the kindly ward of the bridal bed’ = not just sexual!

Heroides 2 - cheating a woman

• Laments that she refitted the shattered ships so that the keel be firm enough to leave her behind

  • Gave oars by which to fly from her

  • Wounded by weapons of her own! Foreshadowing…

• Have faith in his word, his lineage and his tears (‘are these also guileful, and ready to flow where bidden?’)

• And now does not regret that she aided him BUT ‘shamefully to have added to my welcome of the guest the favours of the marriage-bed…’

  • Ruined by her sexual decision

  • And wished to have died chaste

• ‘I was deceived by your words - I, who loved and was a woman’ (gendered element to the deceit)

• And wishes that he be given statue next to his father but all his says is ‘this is he whose wiles betrayed the hostesss that loved him’ (like his father!!)

  • ‘Heir to father’s guile’

  • And Ariadne is in better place now with Bacchus, but she is left alone and scorned (rumours declare that she set a stranger before her countrymen)

Heroides .2 - wants to be seen, or die

• Phyllis is now aware that Demophoon will not return nor bathe his wearied limbs in the Bistonian wave again!

  • ‘Ever to my sight clings that vision of you as you went’ = only her eyes, not herself

  • ‘Phyllis, remember well, expect your own Demophoon’ (him to become hers also = won’t happen)

  • ‘Am I to expect the sails denied return to my seas?’ - more questions

• ‘It may be you are already won by another bride…’ = sexual jealousy

  • If he has forgotten her, should remember that she accepted him in Thrace and gave plenty gifts

  • ‘and whose guileful hand ungirlded my chaste zone’

  • Tisiphone minister at that bridal

• Nonetheless she treads the rocks and the thicket-covered strand, ‘wherever the sea view opens broad before my eyes’

  • If sails appear, she rushes forth (retinentibus! undis) until she faints

• Wishes now to throw herself off of the bay’s cliffs, ‘let the waves bear me away ans cast me up on your shores and let me meet your eyes untombed!’

  • The neck once embrced by his arms now with a noose

  • And on her tomb, ‘Demophoon twas sent Phyllis to her doom’ (but she killed herself)

• Point of the letter? No longer relevant after she kills herself…

Heroides 5 - opening

• ‘Will you read my letter through? or does your new wife forbid?’

  • + Read - this is no letter writ by Mycenaean hand = emphasising that it is written by a non-Greek (emphasis on the written form!)

• ‘What god has set his will against my prayers’ = begins with questions too

• And reveals that he was not too great when she was happy to marry him (now a son of Priam, but then a slave married to a nymph!)

  • ‘mingled grass and leaves afforded us a couch’

  • ‘Who was it pointed out to you the coverts apt for the chase, and the rocky den where the wild beasts hid away her cubs?’ (with him to lay the nets and lead the hounds)

• ‘The beeches still conserve my name carved on them by you and I am read there Oenone, charactered by your blade’

  • More the trunks, the greater grows my name

  • And another tree, a poplar, has been carved with verse = water of Xanthus turn backwards before he leaves Oenone !

  • Will do in the Iliad! B20

Heroides 5 - Paris’ departure

• ‘That day spoke doom for wretched me’ (judgement of Paris, which he tells her and she then takes council and is told an evil threatens her)

  • And thus ‘the firs were felled, the timbers hewn; your fleet was ready and the deep-blue wave received the waxed crafts’

  • ‘mingled our weeping’ = both crying

  • Like elm clasped by the clinging vine as her neck by his embracing arms

• Light breeze stirred the sails, and in wretchedness ‘I follow with my eyes the departing sails as far as I may’ = cannot actually accompany him

  • Wished he would return home but realises now that ‘twas for the sake of a cruel rival that my persuasive prayers were made’

• Mass of native rock, a mountain that stays the billows of the sea = combats it (resistit)

  • And from here recognises the sails and ‘my heart’s impulse was to rush through the waves to you’ BUT then sees a gleam of purple

Heroies 5 - she too is worthy

• Fear seizes her, and then ‘with trembling heart I have caught the sight of a woman’s face’

  • And ‘in your embrace that shameless woman clung’ (like the ivy and tree)

• She then mourns (beating her breast and furrows her cheeks with hard nail)

  • And curses that Helen will too lament to be without a mate (suffer what she inflicted)

  • ‘leaving behind their lawful-wedded lords’ = travel as adulterous

• Oenone did not care for his wealth or royal status (though she is not beneath that either!)

  • ‘Nor despise me because once I pressed with you the beechen frond; I am better suited for the purpled marriage-bed’ - sexual identity

• And her love will bring no war! ‘This is the dower the dame brings proudly to your marriage-chamber’ (sex!)

  • Take counsel = reminder of the Iliad where Antenor does stand against Paris

  • ‘to prize a stolen mistress more than your native land’

Sexuality?

• Here Oenone mentions that she too is worthy of the purple couch

  • Sexual!

  • See continuous reference to the bed as key aspect of the loss

• Penelope

• Even Sappho (more explicit!) - ‘I’m ashamed to mention the things that happen beyod this…but we go all the way; it’s pure pleasure and I do not remain dry’

  • Sexual fantasies

  • → suppression of female sexuality is a critical element

Heroides 5 - Helen is not faithful

• The Laconian will NOT be faithful either

  • ‘she who so quickly turned to your embrace’

  • Menelaus ‘cries out at the violation of his marriage-bed’ (and you too will cry!)

  • And purity cannot be made whole once wounded

  • And Menelaus too in trusting her now lies ‘in a deserted bed’

• Andromache is lucky… (but Paris is lighter than dry leaves that flutter in breeze), and the tip of grain once burnt

• And then recalls when Cassandra sang to her that she is committing seeds to sand, and that a Greek heifer is coming to ‘ruin thee, thy homeland and thy house’

  • Slaves carry away the raving girl, and she is on edge but should have listened!

• And adds that this is not the first time she has been taken (Theseus - ‘is it to be thought she was rendered back a maid, by a young man and eager?’)

  • She knows this because she loves

  • She so often stolen has surely lent herself to theft / contrast to Oenone who remains chaste

Heroides 5 - conclusion

• She adds that she was loved by the swift satyrs, wanton with nimble foot

  • ‘where I would lie hidden in covert of the wood’

  • And Faunus and that builder of Troy → loved and let my hands into the secret of his gifts

  • Has skill in herbs and roots = of the land

  • Yet she cannot save herself with this skill…

• Only Paris can bestow this aid for her

  • ‘have pity on a deserving maid!’

  • She comes with no Danai or bloody armour

  • ‘I am yours’ and was and prays to always be!

Heroides 7 - opening

• ‘Thus at the summons of fate, casting himself down amid the watery grasses…’ = might be interpolation

• ‘Not because I hope you may be moved by prayer of mine do I address you…’ (purpose of writing is not to change fate)

  • Like Medea’s ‘Love has ordered me to write’ (not functional) → like Ovid?

  • Aware of ‘god’s’ will

  • ‘losing of words is a matter slight indeed’ after all she has lost

• The same winds bear away your sails and your promises? Questions!!

  • Break mooring and pledge

  • And head for Italy, ‘which lie you know not where?’

  • Has already found a land but wishes to pursue another

• Honest question - ‘who will deliver his fields to unknown hands to keep?’

  • And ‘I suppose a second love lies in store for you, and a second Dido’

  • And a wife to love you as I?

• She is all ablaze with love like torches of wax tipped with sulphur / pious incense on an altar

Heroides 7 - his departure

• ‘Aeneas my eyes cling to through all my waking hours’ (inhaeret! Not her body)

  • And she does not hate him despite how he feels for her and she shall only complain of his unfaithfulness

• And asks Venus to spare her! (awareness that it is she who has orchestrated this!)

• ‘Ah, vain delusion!’ He is actually bore of rocks and mountains, or of the sea as he now looks upon (tossed as he prepares departure despite the threatening flood)

  • But still worries for him - ‘I am not worth enough - ah, why do I not wrongly rate you - to have you perish flying from me over the long seas’

  • He is harder than the oak for doing this! Like the simile in Aeneid

• But should be careful on the sea when he has broken his pledge (Venus was borne from the sea!)

  • And if he drowns, he will think of his false tongue and Dido driven to death by him

  • Also who is the coniungis who we hear of? Her or Creusa?

Heroides 7 - Aeneas is a liar

• Asks him to grant a space for the sea to calm, as he should at least spare little Iulus

  • What has Ascanius or the Penates done to deserve ill fate?

  • ‘Yet neither are you bearing them with you; the sacred relics which are your pretext never rested on your shoulders nor did your father. You are false in everything’ !!

  • Dido fights back against the Aeneid

• ‘Do you ask where the mother of pretty Iulus is? → she was abandoned! And should have been warning for Dido

  • Passive participles (no agent) - erepta, lapsa, amissam from relicta BUT a duro viro !!

  • And fallere moves from Creusa (cheating family with death) to Aeneas cheating her

• And she was kind! Scarce knowing your name, I gave to you my throne!’

  • Wishes she would have been content with this kindness but ‘that dreadful day was my ruin’ Aware of what Virgil has said about her

  • Thought the nymphs were crying but was Eumenides! Has read the Aeneid but one-upping (Virgil says nymphs)

• = penalty should be exacted for her purity undone (weeps in front of statue of Sychaeus, which calls to her to come)

Heroides 7 - her past

• Cries that she will delay no longer and will come as Sychaeus’ bride

  • Asks for forgiveness as his divine mother and aged father gave hope he would remain a faithful husband

  • ‘my error had honourable cause’

• Her husband fell in own home before the altars, killed by her brother and she was thrown into exile until she landed here

  • ‘escaped from my brother and the sea’ and establishes her own city

  • ‘by wars, a stranger and a woman, I am assailed’

  • And a thousand suitors look one and complain that she preferred a foreign love (now Iarbas and her brother close in)

• And asks Aeneas whether he thinks that she could be mother - ‘a part of your being lies hidden in myself’

  • With his own mother will Iulus’ brother die

• But you are bidden to go - ‘by your god!’ (truth?)

Heroides 7 - wishes to die

• ‘Is this foresooth the god under whose guidance you are tossed about by unfriendly winds and pass long years on the surging seas?’ = how are you being helped by this god?

  • ‘and the land of your quest so hides from your sight’ and won’t be your lot to reach it in old age

• ‘Cease then your wanderings’ and choose Dido!

  • Place for peace and war here

• ‘What can you charge me with but love?’

  • Not Greek or have husband who opposed him

• Again asks him to watch the wind and explains that his fleet is only half refitted

  • Asks for a little time ‘while the sea and my love grow calm’

• And if he does not yield, she will pour forth her life

  • And wishes he could see her face as she writes these words!! Trojan blade in her lap (tears fall onto the steel, soon blood)

  • And already bears wound of cruel love

• Soon consumed on fire → ‘Elissa, wife of Sychaeus’ and epitaph (ess. he caused her death but she enacted it)

Virgil?

• Ovid’s relationship to Virgil is viewed as tense especially in relation to the Metamorphoses

  • Summarises the Aeneid in 5 lines in 14.77-81

Heroides 10 - opening

• ‘gentler than you I have found every race of wild beasts; to none of them could I so ill have trusted as to you’

  • Reading words from the shore from which he sailed without her (letter almost like her following)

• The time when earth is first sprinkled with frost and birds sing, she turns in bed to clasp Theseus

  • Tries again and moves arms over whole couch = ‘threw myself headlong from my abandoned bed’

  • Beats her chest and tears her hair

• Moon shining still, and can only see the shore

  • Can only bend gaze and see with eyes

  • ‘Deep sand stays my girlish feet’ - even the land against her

  • And land echoes her cries of Theseus = she and land as one

• Cries that the ship does not have the whole crew, and then beats chest again (and fixes veil on tree branch = her chastity)

  • And eyes fail her, so now weep

  • Roams like Bacchant (Bacchus!) or sits on rock, almost like a rock (Medusa’s head…)

  • Returns to the bed that once received them both and can only touch the imprint left

• ‘Ah faithless bed, the greater part of my being, oh, where is he?’

  • Bed is faithless, not Theseus as in Cat 64 - trying to persuade Theseus! Rhetorical aspect

Heroides 10 - where can she go?

• ‘What am I to do?’ - reflective / rhetorical questions !!

  • She is alone without man nor cattle

  • And the island is girt by sea all around = what was her escape is now her prison

• BUT even then where is she to go? She is still an exile from Crete

  • Betrayed her own father! But promised by Theseus that he would protect her

  • ‘We both live, Thseus, and I am not yours!’ (if she can be alive if as a woman she has been buried by treason of mate)

• Should have killed her with same sword as brother → yet now must suffer ‘all that any woman left behind can suffer’

  • Wishes to die, and only to not be a captive and spin the long task with servile hand (as princess!)

• Wishes Androgeos was still alive (what started the bringing of the children for labyrinth)

  • And she not given the thread

Heroides 10 - wants to be seen

• But now asks her sleep why it held her inert!

  • Better that she had died there if so

  • Winds and breezes cruel to be so prepared for his departure

  • And cruel the pledge that you gave at my demand!

• ‘Treason three-fold against one maid!’

• And asks if she will die without burial, to be the prey of hovering birds, not beholden to her mother’s tears?

  • Only asks that he tell of her, ‘abandoned on a solitary shore’

  • And says that he was borne of the rocks and the deep

• Wishes he would have seen her from the high stern

  • No longer can see her, but wishes he imagine her clinging to a rock, her hair loose and her robes heavy with tears

  • Body shaking like corn struck by lightning

• ‘tis not for my desert - fr that has come to naught - that I entreat you now’

• Hands now wearied with beating her chest stretch out to the wide seas, AND please, turn the ship

• ‘If I have died before you come, twill yet be you who bear away my bones’ (a union in one way)

The tragedy of the canon

• Part of the tragedy for these women is that only exist here because of existence within prior source material

  • Thus their story has already been told

  • And even if they suggest otherwise, the reader will recall what has happened before

• And tragedy in accidental allusion to the future of the past

  • eg. Oenone cursing the Xanthus to return back to its source → B21 of Iliad! Reminder of the epic future that Oenone will not be able to occupy

  • And Helen - ‘nor do I doubt that were I to follow you, war would be prepared’ → arma which is programmatic word of Iliad but also Aeneid! Amount of suffering incurred from this one action

  • ‘eris tauro saevior ipse truci?’ to Hippolytus…who will die by bull

  • And never see these letters in the canon…

• YET do these letters also aid in unraveling the idea of the canon itself?

  • Why should we trust Euripides over Ovid? Can this not too be their story?

  • ‘works to unravel the phenomenology of myth itself and the role in myth-formation of ‘classic’ texts’

  • A reinterpretation of what is already a reinterpretation - but is this not just what mythology is?

  • Should talk less of ‘sources’ and more of ‘correspondences’ between the different material

A voice?

• HOWEVER, giving these women a voice to begin with is providing them with their humanity

• Can use a later text, even though it is post, to explore how Ovid views the voice

  • In the Metamorphoses, the voice that defines the humanity of the mythological figures

  • Ino never speaks, and when she finally tries, she is afraid she will low (it is her loss of speech that remains with her)

  • Actaeon & Orcyrhoe both make noises between human and animal in attempt to communicate - ‘scarcely human’

  • Human nature to speak when suffering but cannot if not human

• THUS by providing them their own voice, Ovid is allowing them humanity

  • Provides them a voice amidst the suffering, and way to forge their own perspective on events even if pointless in the end

  • If they cannot act, at least let them speak

Ovid as narrator?

• How visible is Ovid as a writer here?

  • In other material, it is either faux-biographical like Amores, Tristia

  • Or playing role of authority - Ars Am, Met and Fasti

• But here, entirely in the voice of another

  • Some believe that Ovid’s desire to make everything witty is at the expense of the heroine as writer

  • And the emphasis on intertextuality of Heroides has focused the attention too much onto Ovid as manipulator of literary tradition RATHER THAN the women who write

  • Too eloquent because of Ovid? Can we not see eloquence alongside passion?

• Do still have to place an intermediate between ‘original’ writer and ourselves as Briseis talks of writing in Greek, despite being a barbarian

  • And to ignore her tear blots

  • Ariadne - ‘articulo…tremente’ & Helen and Cydippe finish writing when tired

  • BUT would be reading clean Latin with no smudges! The fictionality of the sorrow…

• And these women, lost to the mythological past, would not know how to write Greek! Did not exist as a written language then

Acontius & Cydippe - need of audience

• Acontius, in desiring Cydippe, writes her a ‘letter’ upon an apple

  • But in the first person = does not have meaning until she reads it out loud

    • And with lack of gaps or punctuation = currently no beginning or end to the circular letters, just silent symbols

    • When she reads it, reads it into existence

    • + the future is same as present (when written in the future, but then present when she says it)

  • The letter is reliant on an audience! No function otherwise

  • Her speaking out loud is paired with the picking up of the apple = both an acceptance

    • Apples as erotic - symbol of love (eg. judgement of Paris and Sappho!)

• And see this idea of writing / speaking into existence in Ovid’s letter

  • She nearly repeats what she read twice, but has to for us to understand

  • Teasing internal and external reader

  • But also adds that she did not swear but read letters than read → do the letters speak for themselves?

The physical letter!