Part I
The Name of the Mother
Our journey through the Heroides begins with Penelope’s letter to Ulysses, which has been handed down to us as the first epistle of the collection.1 Penelope is one of the most famous of the Ovidian heroines, and her story, which is first told in Homer’s Odyssey, begins at the dawn of classical literature. Homer’s Penelope is the main source of inspiration for Heroides 1, which—as Duncan Kennedy argues—should be imagined as having been written by Penelope at the very moment of Ulysses’s arrival in Ithaca.2 Thus, within the fictional universe of the Heroides, Penelope’s epistle may be understood as the letter that is to be given by Penelope to Ulysses himself, who is disguised as a beggar, having recently arrived in Ithaca.
In her letter, Penelope urges Ulysses to return to Ithaca as soon as possible, mentioning all the suffering that his prolonged absence is causing her (Her. 1.1–58), and complaining of the difficult situation she has to deal with: the suitors are trying to take control of the realm, while spoiling Ulysses’s possessions (87–96); she is supported by neither the servants of the house nor the people of Ithaca (97–104); Ulysses’s father, Laertes, is too old to oppose the suitors (105–106); her son, Telemachus, is still a puer (98) and is unable to rule without the protection and support of his father (107–112). In some respects, this letter can be read as part of the widespread literary and artistic tradition that views Penelope as the embodiment of an ideal faithful wife and devoted mother. In fact, Ovid’s Penelope merges previous epic tradition with the programmatic patterns of the Heroides. While still maintaining some of her Homeric and long-established epic features, the faithful Penelope is thus transformed into an elegiac lover—and letter writer.3 This conflation is crucial to interpreting Penelope’s motherhood within Heroides 1 and to exploring the ironic content of her writing. Within the subjective narrative of her epistle, Penelope fluctuates across different roles: traditional matrona; elegiac puella, or, conversely, elegiac (male) poet, since she represents the authorial voice of the epistle; and finally master of the house, as the (female) substitute for an absent Ulysses. This heterogeneity is particularly appreciable in the mother-son relationship between Penelope and Telemachus.
The second chapter in part 1 navigates Deianira’s complex familial dynamics, which are denoted by a quadrangular relationship between Deianira, Hercules, and his two paramours (Omphale and Iole). The complexity of this love “quadrangle” is further enhanced by Deianira’s son, Hyllus, whose role is not openly stated but covertly implied within the heroine’s writing. Both Penelope and Deianira are wives of major epic heroes, for whom they have produced legitimate sons, as opposed to many of the other letter-writing heroines, such as Dido, Hypsipyle, and Medea, who are lovers, mistresses, or more ambiguous in their status as wives. Like Penelope, Deianira takes advantage of her (male) partner’s absence to reduce his heroic status and appropriate a more central position within her narrative. The subtle involvement of her son within her letter contributes to strengthening her quasi-subversive discourse. While Heroides 1 might be the letter that Penelope is going to deliver to Ulysses disguised as a beggar, Deianira’s writing is interrupted in medias res by the news that the robe she sent to Hercules is now the cause of his death (9.143–168).
Although she has often been paralleled with notoriously “wicked” wives such as Clytemnestra and Medea, Deianira appears as a more innocent and harmless character, as her original target is to gain back Hercules’s love, not to kill him. However, Deianira’s true intentions and foreknowledge remain ambiguous, and scholars have argued that she should have suspected that Nessus’s blood could be poisonous.4 Building on this interpretation, my analysis of Heroides 9 emphasizes Deianira’s active role and responsibility for the death of Hercules, who is also the alleged addressee of her letter. Concurrently, certain lines of Heroides 9 (i.e., 165–168) suggest that Hercules may not be the only addressee of Deianira’s letter, which implies at least one more fictional addressee—namely, Deianira’s son, Hyllus. Heroides 9 can accordingly be read as the heroine’s rhetorical attempt to justify her ill-fated deeds to her son.
Both Penelope’s and Deianira’s epistles are characterized by reversals of stereotypical familial roles and traditional generic patterns. While the comparative reading of the Odyssean Penelope, the analysis of the Roman legal context, and the filter of modern psychology are profitable to explore Penelope’s relationship with her son in Heroides 1, I mainly investigate Deianira’s letter through Judith Butler’s theories on the performative nature of gender. Along with modern theoretical approaches, I explore Deianira’s quasi-subjective narrative vis-à-vis the Sophoclean model and Augustus’s political discourse, as well as re-situating it within other roughly contemporary elegiac references to Hercules, Deianira, Omphale, and Iole. Finally, for both heroines, I draw on anthropological maturation models. By engaging with this literary, historical, and theoretical framework, I aim to demonstrate how the heroines’ motherhood is rhetorically shaped and ingeniously employed as a means to embrace a more active and self-conscious role within their epistles.
1. Jacobson 1974, 407–409; Barchiesi 1992, 51–52; Kennedy 2002, 217, with notes.
2. Kennedy 1984, 417; see also Barchiesi 2001, 29–30; Knox 1995, 86–87; Casali 2017, 176.
3. Jacobson 1974, 243–276; see also Drinkwater 2007, 369.
4. For discussions about Deianira’s innocence and (fore)knowledge, particularly with regard to Sophocles’s Trachiniae, see Faraone 1994, 115–135; Pozzi 1994, 577–585; Scott 1995, 17–27; Wohl 2010, 53–60; Kratzer 2013, 43–45, with bibliography; for Ovid’s Deianira, besides Casali 1995, 215, see Jacobson 1974, 235–236, with notes; Gerlinger 2011, 303–309.