Heroides

Summary

The Heroides (Heroines) is a collection of twenty-one verse letters in elegiac couplets, written as if by women of myth and legend to the men who have left, betrayed or endangered them, together with three pairs of letters exchanged between lovers. Ovid claimed to have invented the form. The first fifteen letters are single. Penelope writes to Ulysses, years after Troy has fallen, begging him to come home and describing the suitors and the old Laertes. Phyllis, a Thracian princess, reproaches Demophoon, son of Theseus, who sailed away promising to return within a month, and resolves to die. Briseis, the captive taken from Achilles, begs him to reclaim her and return to the fighting. Phaedra confesses her love to her stepson Hippolytus. Oenone, the nymph whom Paris abandoned for Helen, reminds him of their life on Mount Ida and laments that the healing arts Apollo taught her cannot cure love. Hypsipyle, queen of Lemnos, writes to Jason, who left her with twin sons and has now returned from Colchis with Medea. Dido, about to die on her pyre, pleads with Aeneas not to sail for Italy and composes her own epitaph. Hermione asks Orestes to rescue her from Pyrrhus. Deianira, having sent Hercules the robe smeared with the centaur's blood, learns of its effect as she writes. Ariadne, waking alone on the shore of Naxos, calls after Theseus's vanishing sail. Canace writes to her brother Macareus as she obeys her father's order to die. Medea recalls how she saved Jason in Colchis and threatens vengeance on his new marriage. Laodamia, wife of Protesilaus, fears for her husband at Troy and keeps a waxen image of him. Hypermnestra, the one daughter of Danaus who refused to kill her husband on the wedding night, writes from prison to Lynceus, whom she spared. Sappho, the poet of Lesbos, writes to the young ferryman Phaon and considers the leap from the Leucadian cliff. The last six letters are paired. Paris writes to Helen in Sparta urging her to leave with him, and Helen answers with hesitation that already leans toward consent. Leander writes from Abydos, kept by storms from swimming the Hellespont, and Hero answers from Sestos, fearing for him. Acontius reminds Cydippe of the apple on which he wrote an oath that she read aloud in Diana's temple, and Cydippe replies from a sickbed, worn by a fever she believes the goddess has sent. The authorship of the Sappho letter and of the paired letters has been debated by scholars. The library text is Grant Showerman's complete prose translation of 1914, without his notes or the facing Latin.

Plot or Argument

• Letters I-III: Homeric heroines

  Penelope writes to the absent Ulysses, Phyllis to the faithless Demophoon, and Briseis to Achilles as he sulks in his tent.

• Letters IV-VI: Phaedra, Oenone, Hypsipyle

  Phaedra declares her forbidden love to Hippolytus; Oenone reproaches Paris; Hypsipyle complains to Jason of his desertion and of Medea.

• Letters VII-IX: Dido, Hermione, Deianira

  Dido pleads with Aeneas before her death; Hermione begs Orestes to free her; Deianira learns too late what her gift has done to Hercules.

• Letters X-XII: Ariadne, Canace, Medea

  Ariadne calls from the shore of Naxos; Canace writes before her enforced death; Medea recalls her aid to Jason and foreshadows revenge.

• Letters XIII-XV: Laodamia, Hypermnestra, Sappho

  Laodamia fears for Protesilaus at Troy; Hypermnestra writes from chains for sparing her husband; Sappho mourns Phaon and contemplates the Leucadian leap.

• Letters XVI-XVII: Paris and Helen

  Paris courts Helen with promises and flattery; Helen replies with scruples, fears and growing willingness.

• Letters XVIII-XIX: Leander and Hero

  The lovers on opposite shores of the Hellespont write while storms keep Leander from swimming across.

• Letters XX-XXI: Acontius and Cydippe

  Acontius defends the trick of the inscribed apple; Cydippe answers from her sickbed, blaming the oath for her illness.

Characters

• Penelope, writer of Letter I

  Wife of Ulysses, waiting at Ithaca with Laertes and Telemachus amid the suitors.

• Briseis, writer of Letter III

  Captive woman taken from Achilles, who begs him to take her back.

• Oenone, writer of Letter V

  Nymph of Mount Ida, skilled in healing herbs, abandoned by Paris.

• Dido, writer of Letter VII

  Queen of Carthage who pleads with Aeneas before her death.

• Ariadne, writer of Letter X

  Cretan princess left asleep on Naxos by Theseus.

• Medea, writer of Letter XII

  Colchian princess who saved Jason and now faces his remarriage.

• Hypermnestra, writer of Letter XIV

  The daughter of Danaus who spared her husband Lynceus and is imprisoned for it.

• Sappho, writer of Letter XV

  The poet of Lesbos, writing to the young Phaon.

• Paris and Helen, writers of Letters XVI-XVII

  The Trojan prince and the Spartan queen on the eve of the elopement that begins the Trojan War.

• Leander and Hero, writers of Letters XVIII-XIX

  Lovers divided by the Hellespont, which Leander swims by night.

• Acontius and Cydippe, writers of Letters XX-XXI

  A young man who won a girl by an inscribed apple, and the girl, fevered and resentful.

Lessons

• The other side of the epic

  Ovid retells the stories of Homer, Virgil and the tragedians from the point of view of the women left behind: Penelope weaving at home, Briseis in the camp, Dido on her pyre. The letters show that every heroic journey leaves someone waiting.

  • How does Briseis's letter change the way you read Achilles's quarrel in the Iliad?
  • What does Dido's letter add to Virgil's account of Aeneas's departure?
  • Why might Ovid choose letters rather than speeches for these voices?

• Faithfulness under pressure

  Penelope waits for twenty years, and Hypermnestra accepts chains rather than kill her husband. Ovid gives their fidelity eloquent voice and contrasts it with the broken promises of Demophoon, Jason and Theseus.

  • What reasons does Hypermnestra give for refusing her father's command?
  • Which of the men written to keeps his promises, and which do not?

• Persuasion and self-deception

  Ovid was trained in rhetoric, and each letter is an argument. Paris uses flattery and promises; Helen's reply raises objections that her own words gradually undo; Acontius defends a trick as an act of love. The letters teach readers to watch how arguments serve desire.

  • Which of Paris's arguments seems strongest, and which weakest?
  • Where does Helen's letter show that she has already decided?
  • Is Acontius's oath on the apple binding? Why or why not?

• Love as an illness

  Oenone, taught healing by Apollo, admits that love cannot be cured by herbs; Cydippe lies wasted with a fever that physicians cannot explain. The letters belong to a long tradition that describes love as a sickness of body and mind.

  • Why does Oenone's skill in medicine make her complaint sharper?
  • What different causes do Cydippe and Acontius give for her illness?

Context

The Heroides belong to the Augustan age, when Roman poets such as Propertius and Tibullus wrote love elegy in the elegiac couplet. Ovid combined that form with the Greek myths known from Homer, the tragedians and Hellenistic poetry, and with the rhetorical exercises of Roman schools, in which students composed speeches for mythical figures in difficult situations.

Composition

The single letters (I-XV) are usually dated to about 25-16 BC, since Ovid mentions several of them in Amores II.18, along with replies composed by his friend Sabinus. In the Art of Love he claims the form as a new kind of work. The paired letters (XVI-XXI) may be later, perhaps from the years before his exile; their authenticity, and that of the Sappho letter (XV), have been questioned and defended by scholars. Showerman's Loeb translation (1914) printed the Heroides together with the Amores.

Reception

The Heroides were widely read in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Chaucer drew on them in The Legend of Good Women and The House of Fame, and they inspired verse epistles such as Pope's Eloisa to Abelard (1717). Michael Drayton's England's Heroical Epistles (1597) adapted the form to English history.

Comparisons

• metamorphoses

  Ovid tells many of the same stories, Ariadne, Medea, Phaedra's household, Hero and Leander's world, in his later epic, but there as narrated transformations rather than first-person letters.

• the-odyssey

  Penelope's letter (I) imagines her writing in the years Homer covers, waiting for news of Ulysses while the suitors waste the house.

• the-aeneid

  Dido's letter (VII) answers Aeneid IV, giving the queen a full speech of reproach and her own epitaph before Aeneas sails.

• medea-and-other-plays

  Medea's letter (XII) and Phaedra's (IV) speak for heroines of Euripides's Medea and Hippolytus, at moments before the tragedies' catastrophes.

• the-iliad

  Briseis's letter (III) is written from the time of the embassy to Achilles in Iliad IX, pleading with him to take her back and return to battle.

• apollodorus-library

  The Library gives the bare genealogical stories, the Danaids, Deianira and the poisoned robe, Ariadne and Theseus, that lie behind Ovid's letters.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The first line of each letter, which usually names the writer and the person addressed and sets the situation.
• The moment in each story Ovid chooses: Dido before the pyre, Ariadne just waking, Deianira as news of Hercules arrives.
• How Penelope (I) and Hypermnestra (XIV) speak of faithfulness, compared with Phyllis, Ariadne and Medea speaking of broken promises.
• The three paired letters at the end, where a second voice answers the first.
• References to herbs, healing and illness in Oenone (V), Hypsipyle (VI) and Cydippe (XXI).

Key terms and names

Epistle

A letter; Ovid's heroines write verse epistles, a form he claimed as his own invention.

Elegiac couplet

The Latin meter of the Heroides, alternating a longer and a shorter line; Showerman translates it into prose.

Danaids

The fifty daughters of Danaus, ordered to kill their husbands on the wedding night; Hypermnestra alone refused.

Hellespont

The strait between Europe and Asia, which Leander swims at night from Abydos to Hero at Sestos.

Leucadian leap

A cliff on Leucas from which, according to legend, the lovesick leapt to be freed of love; Sappho contemplates it in Letter XV.

Prosopopoeia

Speaking in the voice of another person; each letter is an exercise in this rhetorical art.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What does Penelope ask Ulysses to do instead of writing back?
2. Comprehension Why is Hypermnestra in prison, and what does she ask of Lynceus?
3. Comprehension How did Acontius bind Cydippe with an oath?
4. Interpretation Which letter seems most likely to persuade its reader, and why?
5. Interpretation In the paired letters of Paris and Helen, how does Helen's reply answer Paris's arguments?
6. Interpretation Why does Ovid let us hear only the women's side in the first fifteen letters?
7. Big Question What makes a promise binding, and what is owed to someone who has kept faith with us?

Faith Connections

• Song of Solomon 8:6-7 (Scripture)

  The bride asks to be set as a seal upon the beloved's heart and arm. Ovid's heroines plead for exactly such a seal, a promise kept, from men like Demophoon, Jason and Theseus who have broken theirs; Leander's struggle with the waters of the Hellespont also echoes the Song's image of waters that cannot quench love.

• Ruth 1:16-17 (Scripture)

  Ruth's vow to Naomi, whither thou goest I will go, is a model of loyal love beside which Penelope's and Hypermnestra's constancy can be read.

• Augustine, Confessions I.13 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine recalls weeping as a schoolboy over Dido's death while unmoved by his own spiritual death, a warning about how literature can move the heart and an invitation to read it rightly.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Each heroine argues from her own suffering and her lover's obligations: I helped you, you promised, I have kept faith, therefore you should return, or else you are guilty of my ruin. The collection as a whole shows that the great deeds of myth carry private costs borne largely by those left behind.

Rhetorical device: prosopopoeia. Ovid speaks entirely in the voices of mythical women, as in Hypermnestra's letter (XIV), where the prisoner argues her own case to the husband she saved.

Debate: Resolved: that Hypermnestra was right to disobey her father.

Memory Work

She is not faithful who regrets her faith.

Alas, wretched me, that love may not be healed by herbs!

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose two letters in which a woman writes to a man who has broken a promise and compare the arguments each uses to move him.

Comparison with The Aeneid: Compare Dido's letter in the Heroides with Dido's speeches in Aeneid IV, and argue which presentation of her makes Aeneas's departure harder to judge.

Medical Lens

The Heroides are an important early source for love as a disorder of body and mind, the condition later physicians called lovesickness (amor hereos). The heroines describe sleeplessness, pallor, wasting, trembling, loss of appetite and obsessive thought of the beloved, the same signs listed by ancient and medieval medical writers. Oenone, a healer taught by Apollo, admits that love cannot be cured by herbs, a line much repeated in later medical and literary writing on the subject. Cydippe's letter gives a patient's account of a lingering fever unexplained by physicians, which she and Acontius each interpret morally, as divine punishment or as love; the story of Acontius and Cydippe was also told by Callimachus. Several heroines contemplate death, Phyllis, Dido, Canace, Deianira and Sappho, and their letters belong to the literary history of despair in love; they are rhetorical compositions, not case reports. Medea's and Hypsipyle's letters refer to herbs, incantations and waxen images, the magical pharmacology of the ancient world.

• Letter V (Oenone to Paris)

  Oenone recalls that Apollo taught her healing and every useful herb, yet she cannot cure her own love.

  Ancient Medicine Melancholia Depression
• Letter XXI (Cydippe to Acontius)

  Cydippe describes her wasting, pallor and a fever that returns as her wedding approaches; the nurse guards her door and physicians cannot help.

  Fever Infection Physicians Doctors Mind Body
• Letter VII (Dido to Aeneas)

  Dido, sleepless and consumed by love, prepares the pyre and writes her own epitaph.

  Suicide Sleep Insomnia Grief
• Letter VI (Hypsipyle to Jason)

  Hypsipyle accuses Medea of winning Jason by spells, baneful herbs and a waxen image pierced with a needle.

  Pharmacology Poisons
• Letter XV (Sappho to Phaon)

  Sappho describes weeping, sleeplessness and dreams of Phaon, and is told of the leap from the Leucadian rock as a cure for love.

  Melancholia Depression Suicide

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write Ulysses's reply to Penelope's letter, sent from Calypso's island, in the manner of Ovid's paired letters.

• Essay

  Compare Dido's letter with Dido's speeches in Aeneid IV. What does Ovid add, and what does he leave out?

• Classroom

  Divide the class into the six paired letters and the fifteen single ones; have each group report the situation, the persuasive aim and the strongest argument of its letter.

• Dialogue

  Stage a conversation between Hypermnestra and Penelope about what faithfulness requires.

Further Reading

• Metamorphoses, Ovid

• The Legend of Good Women, Geoffrey Chaucer

  Retells several Heroides stories, including Dido, Phyllis, Hypsipyle, Medea and Ariadne.

• Eloisa to Abelard, Alexander Pope

  An English verse epistle in the Ovidian manner.

• Ovid's Heroides, Howard Jacobson