Introduction

Heroines or Hero(id)es? The State of the Art

Ovid occupies a very prominent position among Greek and Latin authors who have been explored through feminist readings.⁵ Scholars focusing on gender dynamics in Ovidian works have often followed a hermeneutical path and used terminology first employed in Vergilian scholarship. In particular, the traditional opposition between an optimistic and a pessimistic approach to the Aeneid has evolved into the dichotomy between resisting and releasing readings of Ovidian poetry,⁶ which builds upon feminist interpretations.⁷ As Alison Sharrock points out, however, the borders between these allegedly conflicting readings (pessimistic and optimistic; resisting and releasing) are blurred.⁸ On one side, the “resisters” see freeing and recovering the voices of women within Ovid’s texts from the constraints of a reality dominated by patriarchal and phallogocentric discourses as highly problematic; yet a deeper exploration of the representations of female figures within Ovidian poetry may lead to a greater awareness of sexual harassment and gender inequality, as well as contributing to the contemporary feminist debate.⁹ On the other side, the “releasers” argue that female voices can find a niche, a room of their own (to adapt a famous expression from Virginia Woolf), within Ovid’s writings and thus indeed be released;¹⁰ at the same time, the precariousness and fragility of this hermeneutical operation, which might lead to distortions of the texts, as well as anachronistic views, must be acknowledged.

This interpretative framework can be applied to three major studies of the Heroides from the early 2000s, which represent the point of departure for this book. The first, Sara Lindheim’s Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s “Heroides” (2003), is informed by a Lacanian interpretation of the Ovidian collection. Lindheim’s study notes how the discourse of the heroines is deeply affected by the rules of the Symbolic realm and accordingly articulates Ovid’s male authorial voice, thus offering a rather resisting reading of the Heroides.¹¹ Taking a different approach, Efi Spentzou’s Readers and Writers in Ovid’s “Heroides” uses modern hermeneutical tools, particularly Luce Irigaray’s and Julia Kristeva’s reception of the Platonic chora, to explore the epistles. Through this poststructuralist lens and a quasi-releasing approach, Spentzou uncovers the rhetorical complexity of the Heroides and shows how modern theory can be fruitfully applied to the epistles.¹² Finally, Laurel Fulkerson (The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the “Heroides”) interprets the Heroides as an example of écriture féminine, giving space to the heroines’ authorial personas. By suspending the awareness that they are staged by a male poet, Fulkerson reads the heroines as though they were writing within a community and addressing one another’s texts, thereby exploring intertextual links, narrative similarities, and allusivity across the collection.¹³ Given the central role of intertextuality within Ovidian scholarship and Augustan poetry as a whole,¹⁴ this book will also take the intertextual connections between the epistles into account, although it will not make these connections its pivotal hermeneutical tool. Intertextuality is functional to uncovering the heroines’ rhetorical construction and ironic discourse, and hints at previous (and often less attested) mythological narratives, as well as “opening windows” to alternative outcomes of their story.¹⁵ The rediscovery of the Heroides as the heroines’ multifaceted poetic and artistic creation leads us to appreciate the role reversals, the fluidity of gender, and genre, boundaries, as well as the reconceptualization of traditional definitions (in particular, that of motherhood) that characterize the collection as a whole.

By further developing the theoretical framework and approaches used by these three scholars, this book takes a sort of “third” way, situated between a purely resisting and an entirely releasing reading. While I side with Fulkerson’s and Spentzou’s quasi-releasing approach, whereby the Heroides are seen as an example of (fictional) female writing, I do not think it necessary to assume a complete obliteration of the author’s voice. On the contrary, the authorial voice, characterized by irony and ambiguity, enhances the fluidity of the heroines’ construction of a self-identity as subjects and poets. Throughout this book, I often employ expressions such as “female subjectivity,” “female agency,” and “self-definition” (as well as related concepts), while also speaking of “(Ovid’s) heroines,” that is, enclosing the name “Ovid” in parentheses. However, I do not intend to provide a definitive answer to such questions as whether Ovid was able to write like a woman or was empathetic with women and women’s experience, which are not essential to the aim of this book; nor do I look for a “genuine” female voice in the Heroides. By paying attention to the generic interplay within the epistles, and their highly rhetorical content, as well as analyzing them vis-à-vis their historical, social, political, and legal context, this book merges rather traditional philological methodologies with modern theory. This combination sheds new light on the Heroides, re-situating them within the contemporary feminist debate, but without distorting their textual meaning.

An analysis of the Heroides must take into account their intrinsic gender polyphony, which is determined by the fact that the female characters are a creation of a male poet, who has them tell their own story through mythological letters in elegiac couplets. As mentioned, the Heroides are an innovative, even provocative text, unique within the Greco-Roman poetic landscape. This novelty is underscored by Ovid himself at Ars amatoria 3.346, where he refers to his epistulae as ignotum … opus, an “unknown (kind of) literary work.” Ovid’s closest model must probably be sought in Propertius’s Arethusa (4.3; see also Prop. 1.3.34–46, 3.12), who writes a poem to her lover.¹⁶ However, as an isolated poem, this fictional epistle is not comparable to a collection like the Heroides.¹⁷ In terms of literary genres, the Heroides are characterized by a blend of elegy, epic, tragedy, and epistolography.¹⁸ While (Ovid’s) Penelope casts herself as an elegiac lover, she cannot help alluding to her epic counterpart and her relationship with her son, Telemachus (Her. 1).¹⁹ Similarly, the elegiac Phaedra forecasts Hippolytus’s and her own tragic (Euripidean) destiny in Heroides 4, while the Ovidian Dido challenges her Vergilian, epic Doppelgängerin by playing with her lack of offspring in Aeneid 4.²⁰ Despite this coexistence of genres, which is typically Ovidian, the Heroides are formally elegy, insofar as they are written in elegiac couplets. What is the reason for this choice? And what does it tell us about the content and rhetorical meaning of the epistles? How can it change our interpretation of the heroines’ (fictional) writing?

Elegy, the genre of erotic poetry and complaint, is perfectly suited to vocalizing the feelings of women who have been abandoned by their partners, as the heroines are. Moreover, elegy is intrinsically characterized by a reversal of roles, insofar as the male poet expresses his complaint through a feminine posture.²¹ As Patricia Rosenmeyer convincingly argued, Ovid himself in his exile poetry re-employs the patterns of the abandoned and complaining lover that we can note in the Heroides: by taking inspiration from his own writing, Ovid creates a link between the fictional female personas of the Heroides and his autobiographical persona in the exile works.²² On the basis of this parallel, the heroines seem to give voice more directly to the impulses and inner feelings of the poet, and almost help him to express a quasi-feminine voice of complaint. The coexistence and tension between the female and male sides, however, are never definitively reconciled, but emerge from the constant reversal of roles between the two main actors of the epistles—namely, the female fictional author and the male addressee. Polyphony, multifariousness, and variety of gender and genre enhance the ambiguity of the heroines’ discourse, which marks their departure from expected social and familial roles, as well as subtly undermining literary and generic canons.

The heroines’ subversion of traditional relationships and definitions is articulated, at a formal and stylistic level, by the cyclical nature of their écriture féminine.²³ This cyclical essence is conveyed precisely by the self-enclosed unity of the elegiac distich, which is marked by the regular alternation of hexameter and pentameter. Alongside the elegiac couplet, which is a metrical expression of circularity, the epistolary form is also characterized by opening and closing formulae that lend a cyclical nature to the poetic diction.²⁴ The stylistic and formal circularity, along with the repetitive content and the ambiguity intrinsic to the letters, enable the heroines to dismantle traditional categories as well as generic patterns, and to free themselves from patriarchal discourse. The cyclical essence of the heroines’ writing coexists with their intervention in what feminist writer and semiologist Julia Kristeva has defined as “linear” history.²⁵ This intervention is expressed through their active involvement in the process of creative work, as well as their agency at a familial, social, and political level. As I will show, the heroines’ subjective reinterpretation of their maternal experience leads to a collision with the roles they are made to play by the source texts. This subversive reappropriation of their motherhood also determines a departure from the tasks that they would presumably have been expected to perform in their contemporary society, as fictional counterparts of actual Roman women.

Motherhood in the Augustan Age: Behind and Beyond the Heroides

In her pioneering study, The Roman Mother, Suzanne Dixon stated that in Rome “motherhood had always established or enhanced a woman’s status,”²⁶ thereby pointing out the importance of maternity in the life of a Roman woman, in both the private and the public sphere. A good marriage and the (re)production of offspring were considered the most important achievements for a Roman matrona.²⁷ Although this maternal role was particularly enhanced under the Augustan Principate, women’s procreative function had been highly valued since early Republican times. In Plutarch’s Life of Caesar (Caes. 61), for instance, the ancient ritual of the Lupercalia is described as specifically intended to foster female fertility, which was induced by flicking women with leather thongs. In the first century BC, Titus Lucretius Carus opens his De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”) with a hymn addressing the goddess Venus as a generative and procreative force: “Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas, / alma Venus” (Mother of Aeneas and his race, pleasure of men and gods, nurturing Venus; DRN 1.1–2). Moreover, from the earliest Republican times, the censors had the duty of verifying that men were marrying for reproductive purposes (libe‑ rorum procreandorum causa), and even urged citizens to have children.²⁸

While this concern with reproduction had always characterized Roman culture, it seems that Augustus focused more specifically on the role of women, by issuing laws and promoting policies that were aimed at defining, and at the same time limiting, female duties and liberties.²⁹ The princeps’s preoccupation with legal marriages and parenthood (particularly motherhood), as well as the reduction of adultery and concubinage, was without precedent.³⁰ This policy played a prominent role in Augustus’s propaganda from the very start, as demonstrated by, for instance, the spread of the sculptural type known as Venus Genetrix (Venus Mother), a symbol of procreative force, and the restoration of the statue of Cornelia Mater Gracchorum (Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi), which represented traditional values of motherhood (see, e.g., Plut. C. Gracch. 4; Plin. HN 34.31; CIL VI 31610).³¹ Such a promotion was part of a political program supporting peace and a recovery of the antiqui mores (“ancient customs”), the so-called res publica restituta (“the restoration of the Roman Republican state”).³² In the years following the battle of Actium (31 BC), and after Octavian acquired the titles princeps and Augustus (27 BC), this political and social agenda was intensified through his intervention in the legal system and revision of family law.

The most evident result of this intervention is the issue of the Leges Iuliae (18–17 BC) and the Lex Papia Poppaea (AD 9). These laws established a system of rewards and punishments: illegal unions and adulteries were sanctioned; “the unmarried” and “childless” (caelibes and orbi) were hindered in their capacity to inherit, while families with three or more children received the ius trium liberorum (“right of three children”), consisting of privileges for the political career of the father and providing the mother with a limited financial autonomy.³³ This focus on family and parenthood was also mirrored by the structure of the imperial household, as well as certain honorary titles that Augustus attributed to himself and his wife, Livia. While Augustus designated himself as pater patriae (“the father of the state”), Livia was celebrated as uxor (“wife”), mater (“mother”) of the state (Tac. Ann. 1.14.1; Suet. Tib. 50.2–3), and the patrona (“patroness” or “protectress,” a word that comes from the same etymology as pater) of local communities. Accordingly, in many Roman settlements and colonies, statues were erected portraying her as a parens (“mother”) and protector.³⁴ On the one hand, Augustus’s preoccupation with motherhood and procreation has thus been said to have provided Roman “mothers” with more power and a higher social status than they had during the Republican period;³⁵ on the other hand, this autonomy was controlled, encircled, and determined by the political authority and regulations of the pater patriae Augustus—that is, by “the law of the Father” (of the state), to put it in Lacanian terms. Women’s quasi autonomy and prestige were therefore directly related to their performance as (good) mothers: normally, they were valued for their procreative function, and not appreciated as women per se.³⁶

Besides these legal arrangements, Augustus also promoted moral regeneration more widely in the public sphere through the construction or restoration of symbolic buildings—along with the erection of statues (as we have seen). One famous example of a symbolic building is the Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of Augustan Peace), whose construction was commissioned on July 4 in 13 BC and ended on January 30 in 9 BC.³⁷ In addition to representing the religious and moral restoration of Rome carried out by Augustus, the altar also emphasized his position as Pontifex Maximus (Highest Priest), which he had acquired in 12 BC. Furthermore, the lower frieze of the altar, decorated with acanthus scrolls that ran along the entire precinct, hinted at the idea of natural regeneration and continuation of species.³⁸ Similarly, the upper panels, particularly the so-called Tellus relief, which represents a woman with two small children in her lap, and animals and vegetables around her, were intended as an open reference to procreation and wealth.³⁹

Augustus’s propaganda also informed literary production, to some extent. In this respect, two prominent examples can be mentioned: Vergil’s Eclogues 4, which celebrates the advent of a puer bringing a new Golden Age, informed by peace and wealth; and Horace’s Carmen saeculare which was composed in 17 BC for the opening of a new saeculum of prosperity, marked by the celebration of the Ludi Saeculares (Games of the Century).⁴⁰ Although the theme of Rome’s restoration and wealth characterizes Horace’s poem throughout, lines 13–20, with their emphasis on reproduction and procreation, are particularly instructive.

The goddess of childbirth, who can be identified with the pantheon deity Diana (the Greek Artemis), and in this context is indicated with three names, Ilithyia (14), Lucina (15), and Genitalis (16), is asked to bring forth offspring (producas subolem, 17). After linking procreation with the senators, or more specifically with the decrees of the senators (patrumque … decreta, 17–18), the poet refers to Augustan legislation on marriages for women (see iugandis / feminis, 18–19) and the generation of children (19–20): prolis novae feraci / lege marita (see the Lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus). While patres, “Fathers,” is a very common way to refer to the senators in Latin, the expression patrum … decreta (“the decrees of the Fathers”) linguistically recalls the “patriarchal” control of the “fathers,” and particularly of the “father” (of the state) Augustus, over female procreation. Through the open encouragement of legal relationships and childbirth, these lines translate certain key aspects of Augustus’s family policy into text.

This analysis of the historical context shows how central motherhood is to the sociopolitical, as well as cultural and literary, discourse of the Augustan period. As mentioned, motherhood enhanced the status of a Roman woman but was still inscribed in and controlled by a society ruled by the “fathers”: Augustus as the “father of the state”; the senators; and men in general. The idea of motherhood as a reason for women’s deployment in and quasi enslavement to the dynamics of a patriarchal system is a well-acknowledged view and conforms to certain (old-fashioned) positions of the feminist movement. The revaluation of the maternal experience was catalyzed by Irigaray’s and Kristeva’s works, increasingly politicized from the late 1990s, and in the 2000s applied to women’s subjective perception of their corporeality (e.g., Grosz, Braidotti, Ettinger).⁴² Building upon this revaluation, the chapters of this book demonstrate that in the ancient world, and more particularly in Ovid’s Heroides, motherhood could also become a tool for women to enhance their agency—instead of fostering their reification and belonging to their male counterparts. With this, I do not intend to argue that motherhood should always be seen in a positive light—namely, as an opportunity for women’s self-empowerment. Yet a more in-depth reading of the Heroides reveals that it could serve as a means to strengthen the heroines’ subversive discourse, as well as the formation of their self-identity and subjectivity.

The Ovidian heroines sometimes benefit from such a profoundly transformed and rhetorically manipulated idea of motherhood, which allows them to gain a higher level of autonomy and authority within, and outside, their narrative. Studies focusing on women’s literacy in the Roman imperial age suggest that the Heroides—like other literary works—might have been read by an actual female readership.⁴³ Thus, the heroines’ ironic, almost subversive, reconceptualization of their motherhood may reflect social instances, as well as encouraging learned Roman women to reconsider and reappropriate their own maternal experience.⁴⁴ As we shall see to some extent in the case of Dido in Heroides 7 (chapter 5), her potential, rhetorically constructed, pregnancy serves to enhance her heroic status and to diminish that of Aeneas. Providing women with the opportunity to take control of the political career of their sons, in some cases motherhood led them to gain more influence than they previously had, as well as legitimating their decisions, in both the familial and the social sphere (see, e.g., Sen. Helv. 16.2, 6–7; 18.6).⁴⁵ Such an agency characterizes Penelope in Heroides 1 (chapter 1), who takes advantage of her responsibilities as the mother of Telemachus to act as the master of the house, and ruler of Ithaca, thereby replacing her husband, Ulysses.

Through her motherhood, a Roman woman may have been able to acquire a rather active and quasi-male role. Accordingly, a good matrona was often regarded as having masculine qualities, such as virtus (“virtue,” a word coming from the same etymological root as vir, “man”), as well as consistency, austerity, and self-control.⁴⁶ These qualities, pertaining mainly to men, were attributed to good wives and mothers who appeared particularly virtuous by comparison to allegedly less virtuous women, who could be stigmatized simply because of their excessive ambition and sexual freedom. To these women, the sources attribute more stereotypically feminine features, such as levity, weakness, and inconsistency.⁴⁷ Bad wives or mothers were depicted as adulterous, unchaste, selfish, ambitious, and violent, and were said to behave irrationally and instinctively.⁴⁸ Well-known historical examples from the imperial age are Agrippina and Messalina,⁴⁹ whereas in literature and mythology the most (in)famous instances are probably Phaedra and Medea, who also feature in the Heroides. A passionate and ambitious woman was considered to have illegitimately taken on attitudes usually pertaining to a man.⁵⁰ This allegedly wicked, almost perverted motherhood is what gives Ovid’s Phaedra (Her. 4; chapter 3), Deianira (Her. 9; chapter 2), and Medea (Her. 12; chapter 6) the opportunity to free their voices and challenge the patriarchal, well-established authority.

The reference to this coexistence of (what can be defined as stereotypically) masculine and feminine attitudes within women calls for some clarification regarding my use of gender categories and definitions. Although words like man/woman, male/female, and masculine/feminine have been hitherto, and will continue to be, widely used in this book, I draw on seminal works on gender and sexuality in antiquity that have shown how gender roles were perpetually redefined and “in the making,” as well as going beyond the biological.⁵¹ Accordingly, I understand the dichotomies masculine-feminine and man-woman as loose definitions. Alongside terms like heteronormative or binary, these words articulate the divide between the actions that (those who were identified as) men were expected to perform and the actions that (those who were identified as) women were expected to perform. One of the main challenges faced by contemporary feminist theorists is precisely to find new notions that encompass the renewed perception of gender as in flux, nonbinary, evolving, transforming, and fundamentally subjective concept.⁵² My critical analysis and reinterpretation of the Heroides endorses and defends gender fluidity and the instability of gender categories, as well as challenging a binary view of social relationships, both in antiquity and in the present. However, this book cannot forgo, for reasons of clarity and specificity, the use of widely acknowledged and recognizable definitions, which are not employed uncritically, but whose application is functional to their displacement, destabilization, and resemantization.

Having shed light on the historical context and on my use of concepts and definitions, it is now beneficial to briefly explain how this book is situated within the latest developments of motherhood studies, both outside and within the classics. We have seen not only that motherhood was important in the ancient world, but also that it has occupied a central place in the contemporary feminist debate. In this book, I support the idea that motherhood has the potential to enhance a revaluation of women’s subjectivity and the construction of an independent self-identity by advocating for a materialistic return to the female body. At the same time, I am also deeply aware of the most recent shifts in the conception of motherhood, which is intertwined with an increasingly nonbinary and fluid perception of gender relationships. Motherhood is attaining a more flexible and malleable definition, which can encompass diverse forms of parental experience, such as surrogacy or adoption. The question of what makes a mother a mother is as relevant today as it was two thousand years ago, when it was addressed by the Latin fable writer Phaedrus (first century AD), for instance. In fable 3.15, a dog urges a lamb to look for his mother among the sheep, instead of the goats (inter capellas, 1) as he was doing. The lamb replies that he does not consider his mother as the one who gave birth to him, but the one who nurtured and took care of him, and concludes by saying, “facit parentes bonitas, non necessitas” (Love is what makes you a parent, not nature; 18).⁵³ By incorporating popular beliefs and folkloric tradition, Phaedrus’s fable mirrors a somewhat fluid idea of parenthood within Roman society, which also found expression in everyday practice, such as imperial adoption or, conversely, the exposure of infants.⁵⁴ The question as to whether motherhood is about blood, love, or social conventions will be addressed again in chapter 3, which focuses on Phaedra (and Hippolytus) in Heroides 4.

The interest shown toward motherhood in feminist discussions, as well as in certain fields of the humanities and social sciences,⁵⁵ has led to its more frequent appearance in classical scholarship, as demonstrated by the 2020 volume Maternal Conceptions in Classical Literature and Philosophy.⁵⁶ In the introduction to the volume, Alison Keith, Mairéad McAuley, and Alison Sharrock pointedly show how research on mothers can benefit the study of classical mythology and ancient history. Mothers, along with fathers, feature in foundational myths, ancient historical accounts, and material culture. While identifying the role of women (and mothers) within the ancient world has not always been a priority for classical scholars (to speak somewhat euphemistically), the feminist movement (particularly second-wave feminism) has encouraged classicists to pay more attention to the role of women and mothers in antiquity.⁵⁷

Concerning Latin literature more specifically, motherhood has been explored by Anthony Augoustakis (Motherhood and the Other: Fashioning Female Power in Flavian Epic) and, more recently, by Mairéad McAuley in Reproducing Rome: Motherhood in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, and Statius.⁵⁸ While Augoustakis mainly focuses on motherhood in Flavian poetry, particularly Statius’s Thebaid, McAuley offers new insights into the implications of the maternal experience across four Latin authors: Vergil, Ovid, Seneca, and Statius. In her analysis, McAuley mainly builds on more “traditional” feminist writers, such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler, as well as theorists who have been less frequently considered by scholars in classics, like Adriana Cavarero, Rosi Braidotti, or Patrice DiQuinzio, to name but a few. While this volume is deeply indebted to McAuley’s seminal study and gladly converses with its results, it also differs from it in two crucial aspects. First, it deals specifically with the Heroides, instead of a diverse body of texts and authors, with the implication that the specificity of this work (a high degree of ambiguity; interplay with previous sources; references to the contemporary context; polyphony; coexistence of literary genres) plays an important role in the interpretation of the heroines’ motherhood. Second, I apply a limited set of theories (often one prevalent theory) to each heroine, or epistle, and explain the reason for my choice case by case.

The Heroides and Their “Gender Trouble”: Theoretical Framework

Given its centrality in the contemporary public debate, gender can be a slippery concept when considering the distant past. In this book, however, rather than an obstacle, gender (theory) becomes an opportunity to shed new light on an ancient text, the Heroides. While it is indeed crucial to keep in mind that there are differences between the contemporary and the ancient worlds, it is likewise important to note that certain aspects of Greco-Roman culture and society may be profitably compared to, and help us to understand, certain criticalities (such as heterogeneity, fluidity in the subject-object relationship, and the blurring of gender, as well as social, categories) of contemporary discussions on gender identities and definitions.⁵⁹ For instance, the notion that gender roles in antiquity were continuously redefined and went beyond the biological mirrors certain contemporary theorizations on the indeterminacy and fluidity of genders, from Butler’s gender performativity to the posthuman feminist conceptions of gender as flux, which stand as the theoretical foundation of my analysis of Medea’s epistle (Her. 12) in chapter 6.⁶⁰ Therefore, while Ovid obviously did not, could not, describe reality or produce literature by relying on, and being aware of, our same categories, these categories—and the means to dismantle or escape from them—have always existed to some extent, and have only been given a definition, and been challenged, in our modern times.

Moreover, the poststructuralist turn in cultural and literary studies encourages us to rethink the role of the text per se, as an autonomous and self-transforming entity. Drawing from Roland Barthes’s and Jacques Derrida’s theorizations, I believe that, once it has been released, the text no longer entirely belongs to the author.⁶¹ Readers, and their various interpretations, contribute to giving new form and meaning to it. As the final lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses suggest (15.875–879), what allows the survival of the author is not simply his literary work, but rather the fact that this work, which Ovid identifies with himself, will be read (“ore legar populi … vivam,” I will have mention on the people’s lips … I shall live; 878–879). That Ovid (that is, his poem) will be read throughout the ages implies not only Ovid’s survival, but also a transformation of the poem itself. Building on the idea of the text as a living, malleable, and ever-changing organism that is continuously shaped by the intervention and interpretation of the reader,⁶² we can say that Ovid’s poetry (and every kind of text) is reinterpreted, re-created, and rewritten as many times as it is read.⁶³ Accordingly, the Heroides may also have been received, reinterpreted, and given new meaning by their contemporary or future readers.⁶⁴ Many of these readers could have looked at these epistles from a female perspective, as well as considering them as an expression of feminine writing.⁶⁵ Among other things, this book should also pave the way for each reader to (re)interpret the Heroides according to their own sensibility.

If we can now appreciate why modern theory is suitable and fruitful to explore the Heroides, then one more specific question, important to this book, still needs an answer: What does this theoretical and methodological framework have to do with motherhood? I showed how central motherhood was in Augustan Rome, but how does its central role interact with modern ideas about the maternal experience? Within feminist writing, motherhood is depicted both as a form of subjective jouissance of the female (maternal) body and as a pleasure that has to be repressed by the patriarchal system. According to Kristeva, Electra’s agentic role in the murder of her mother, Clytemnestra, to avenge her father articulates her status as “her father’s daughter,” and is an expression of patriarchal and symbolic power.⁶⁶ Thus, Electra is the most extreme representation of a woman who does not tolerate the jouissance of motherhood.⁶⁷ By (contributing to) killing her mother, the Greek tragic heroine eliminates a hypostasis, a proxy, of her own maternal feeling, thus standing as an exemplum for every woman who wants to escape her condition, that is, the demand for her to be(come) a mother. In the Heroides, motherhood is sometimes rejected (Medea), at other times reshaped (Phaedra), reappropriated (Hypsipyle), and even exploited (Penelope) by the heroines. Through this reconstruction and reconceptualization of their motherhood, the (Ovidian) heroines challenge traditional gender categories and enhance their subversive discourse. Motherhood makes these heroines troublemakers.

This (gender) trouble within the Heroides can also be interpreted as both the consequence and the result of Ovid’s subversive discourse against the contemporary political and social order—namely, the Augustan Principate. Ovid in many cases proved himself to be not particularly eager to promote, or even to agree with, Augustus’s family policy. To cite an example, the Ars amatoria, which is regarded as one of the reasons for Ovid’s banishment, is de facto a handbook on how to cheat on one’s partner without being discovered.⁶⁸ By having the heroines consistently undermining social and familial hierarchies, Ovid does not simply ventriloquize these women, he also cooperates with them. Through the adoption of marginalized voices that speak from the “distaff side,” Ovid may well have masked his mockery of current Augustan policies and questioned the consistency and validity of the Roman political, social, and legal systems. Such a polyphonic and complex background makes the heroines’ discourse highly contradictory and ambiguous.

The Heroides are thus characterized by a continuous alternation between acceptance and refusal of the role that the heroines are supposed to play: between agency and passivity, autonomy and dependence, violence and weakness. This contradictory nature of the epistles, which engenders many interpretative possibilities, is the reason the Heroides have been read in such different, often contrasting, ways by previous scholars. Accordingly, the heroines have been depicted either as mere puppets moved by the hands of their “father,” that is, the male author (Lindheim 2003), or conversely as early, yet problematic, examples of écriture féminine (Spentzou 2003; Fulkerson 2005). By using motherhood as a foundational hermeneutical tool, I find a balance between these conflicting views.

The coincidence of opposites (opposite genders, literary genres, attitudes) is exactly what makes the Heroides unique. In this light, Seeking the Mothers in Ovid’s “Heroides” becomes a key to interpreting the permeability of gender categories and the instability of social as well as familial roles, both within and beyond the Heroides, from the Augustan to the contemporary period. Thus, throughout this book, my analysis of the epistles may occasionally appear more broadly focused on the heroines’ enhancement of their (female) identity and active role within their narrative, rather than strictly centered on motherhood. Yet construction of self-identity and appropriation of an independent agency are closely linked to and participate in the heroines’ reconceptualization of their motherhood.

Contents, Methods, and Approaches

The chapters that follow are divided into three parts based on thematic similarities, and show in practice what has been explained so far at the theoretical level. Focusing on Heroides 1 and 9, part 1 opens with a chapter that navigates Penelope’s relationship with Telemachus, thereby demonstrating how motherhood serves the heroine’s appropriation of a central role within her household. A reading of this epistle vis-à-vis the contemporary social and legal context reveals Penelope’s ironic allusions to Augustan legislation. By manipulating well-known, and recently institutionalized, legal concepts concerning parenthood, Penelope legitimates her status as the master of the house, a sort of Roman paterfamilias. My reinterpretation of Penelope’s attitude through the lens of Kristeva’s reception and re-elaboration of the Oedipal complex shows that the relationship between Penelope and her son is, in fact, a (veiled) conflict for the appropriation of a central role within the household and realm. Chapter 2 mainly draws on (Butler’s) notion of gender performativity and on Laura Mulvey’s and Mary Ann Doane’s theories on the scopophilic gaze to explore Deianira’s manipulation of her motherhood. Through her narration of Hercules’s cross-dressing and (erotic) enslavement to Omphale and Iole, Deianira highlights Hercules’s performance of female tasks and roles, thereby attributing to him feminine, or gender-fluid, attitudes. As a result, she presents herself to her son Hyllus (the implied addressee of her letter, as I argue) as the legitimate substitute for the male hero. By downplaying Hercules’s heroic status, Deianira finds a justification for her (supposedly accidental) murder of her partner, which complies with an epic code of conduct, and actualizes the etymological meaning of her name (i.e., “slaughterer of men”). Therefore, Deianira reappropriates her agency as both a (fictional) writer and a character within her story, which is ultimately legitimated by her son’s acknowledgment of her powerful role within the family.

Part 2 includes three chapters, focusing on Phaedra, Canace, and Dido. The combined use of (male) gaze theory (Mary Ann Doane; Laura Mulvey) and feminist narratology (Adriana Cavarero) allows us to appreciate how Phaedra recasts herself as a suitable partner for her stepson Hippolytus in Heroides 4 (chapter 3). At the same time, the heroine manipulates the traditional image of Hippolytus by portraying him as effeminate and underscoring his physical beauty, thereby taking on the role of the male scopophilic observer. Moreover, like other heroines, Phaedra also appropriates the role of the (male) poet and “corrects” the previous literary tradition by presenting herself as more rhetorically trained, and more knowledgeable of the plot of her narrative, than her Euripidean Doppelgängerin. Through this representation of herself as the most authoritative source for her story, Phaedra reshapes previous literary models, overturns stereotypical gender roles, and reconceptualizes traditional definitions of familial relationships (see her reference to privignus, “stepson,” and noverca, “stepmother,” as nomina vana, “empty names,” at Her. 4.129–130). As a result, the heroine can present her incest with her stepson as lawful and reinterpret the meaning of her (step)motherhood. In chapter 4, I explore Canace’s incestuous pregnancy through the filter of Kristeva’s theory of “abjection.” As a liminal element between the exterior and interior dimension, between subjectivity and objectivity, the fetus becomes an “otherness,” which determines and at the same time limits Canace’s subjectivity. By giving birth, expelling, and objectifying the abject element within her body, Canace redefines her subjectivity along with her corporeality. The portrayal of herself as a mother and character within her story corresponds to Canace’s self-definition as a fictional author. The heroine’s allusions to the unreliability of the previous literary tradition leave open different possibilities for alternative outcomes of her story. The active intervention in her narrative further emphasizes Canace’s reappropriation of her maternal body and identity, which differentiates her from more unsympathetic representations of pregnant women in Ovid’s poetry (e.g., Am. 2.13 and 14). A reading of this reappropriation through the filter of Julia Kristeva’s theory of “abjection” allows us to shed new light on Canace’s description of her pregnancy as a quasi-subjective, embodied experience. The overlap between material aspects of pregnancy and literary production is also pertinent to Dido in Heroides 7 (chapter 5). By “correcting” the Vergilian intertext and suggesting that she “may be pregnant” with a child from Aeneas (forsitan et gravidam Dido; Her. 7.133), Dido uses her rhetorically constructed motherhood in order to rewrite and challenge her literary past. As both the potential mother of Aeneas’s child and the actual mother, creator, and crafter of the text that she is writing, Dido intervenes in her (Vergilian) narrative and recasts it. By combining Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine with Jacques Derrida’s and Roland Barthes’s theories on the corporeal nature of the text, as well as the work of art, this chapter demonstrates how the body of the (potential) child overlaps and merges with the body of the text, which turns the absence of Dido’s child into narrative potential.

Part 3 analyzes the letters of two heroines who have often been connected in the literary tradition, Medea and Hypsipyle. Chapter 6 draws on the posthuman notion of female subjectivity as a flux to explore Medea’s reinterpretation of her motherhood in Heroides 12. The fluctuation between genders and literary genres, between maternal love and thirst for revenge, and the blurring of narratological levels articulate Medea’s continuous, perpetual, yet unresolved evolution as both a character and a narrator of her story. This construction of her self-identity as a female (posthuman) subject-in-becoming (i.e., a subject in perpetual transformation and development, to put it in Rosi Braidotti’s words) differentiates the Heroidean version of Medea from her characterization by other authors (as well as in other Ovidian works). The object of chapter 7 is Heroides 6, where Hypsipyle shows that she “has learned” from Medea’s epistle how to downplay Jason’s heroic status and thereby enhance her agency within her narrative. While adopting Medea’s strategy, Hypsipyle nonetheless casts her rival, Medea, as a demonic entity, a witch (barbara … venefica; Her. 6.19). Concurrently, although later in her letter Hypsipyle states that she is willing to become a new Medea (Medeae Medea forem, 151), she departs from Medea’s “wicked” motherhood by stressing her attachment to her two sons. Hypsipyle’s children change from being a proxy for Jason due to their similarity to him (123–124) to a marker of her distinctness from her Doppelgängerin Medea. As a result, they become a means for Hypsipyle to recognize the contours of her subjectivity. By distancing and then reappropriating her maternal body, Hypsipyle is able to reincorporate motherhood into her subjective experience and distinguish herself from other, “external” subjects.

Finally, the epilogue examines how the natural world’s prominent role within Sappho’s letter is intertwined with the maternal element. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s notion of “natureculture,” I argue that Heroides 15 displays a blurring of boundaries not only between Sappho qua poet and Sappho qua character, but also between Sappho’s poetic persona and the natural elements (vegetables, animals, natural objects, landscape features). This overlap reaches its peak when Sappho compares her cry to the nightingale’s song, thus drawing a parallel between Procne’s lament for her son Itys and her lament for Phaon (151–156). Sappho’s self-portrayal as a maternal figure to Phaon is strengthened by the earlier mention of her daughter (69–70), which further collapses the distinction between humans and nature, parental and erotic relationships.

This overview shows that the application of a specific theory or, in some cases, a body of theories to a particular heroine is determined by reasons of suitability and appropriateness. Theory is always applied according to the features of each epistle and aims at a deeper understanding of the text. In turn, by engaging with modern theory, the ancient text provides new insights into contemporary feminist debate: the Heroides converse with contemporary issues concerning motherhood, female subjectivity, and gender identities. The choice of these eight heroines (Penelope and Deianira; Phaedra, Canace, and Dido; Medea and Hypsipyle; Sappho) is determined by the fact that motherhood is central to their letters.

In the history of scholarship on the Heroides, the issue of authorship has played a pivotal role;⁶⁹ yet (Ovidian) authorship is not functional to this book. Authenticity will be discussed individually, if need be, but it will not affect my understanding of the letters. Indeed, my interpretation of the heroines is not influenced by their being written by Ovid (or not) for two reasons: first, because they demonstrate, in many passages, a quasi-independent voice; second, because they also reproduce Ovidian accents and ironic discourse, thus being de facto “Ovidian” without necessarily being (written) by Ovid. Furthermore, “Ovid” himself is not always to be considered as a straightforwardly real person, but rather partly a construct of both text and the history of reception. Like authorship, questions that regard the sequence of the epistles or the letter openings, which have been central to the scholarly debate for many years, will be addressed only on a case-by-case basis as they appear relevant to my discussion.⁷⁰

Leaving aside the search for the auctor—both “author” and “father” in Latin—of these elegiac epistles, in the chapters that follow we will therefore be looking for the “mothers” and to some extent forget about the authority, or the “father,” of these poems. The mothers are central and essential to this investigation of the Heroides, not to mention all research concerning Ovidian poetry, Augustan literature, Augustan Rome, and—dare we say it—perhaps the history of literature, philosophy, thought, and humanity at large. However, the mothers have been long forgotten or, more often, silenced throughout history, with their individuality being appropriated and reified by the patriarchal construction of motherhood. By seeking the mothers and trying to listen to the heroines’ female voices, this book encourages us to challenge and reconceptualize traditional conceptions of motherhood and womanhood, in both the past and the present.

1. See Ramminger in TLL online, IX 1, 79–114, s.v. “nascor.”

2. Barraclough 2021.

3. For research into women’s literacy and female writing across the ages, see Wilson 1984; Chalmers 2004; Plant 2004; Natoli, Pitts, and Hallett 2022.

4. Hemelrijk 1999.

5. See, e.g., Desmond 1993, 56–68; Segal 1998, 9–41; Keith 2000; Liveley 2003, 147–162; Keith 2009, 355–369; Fulkerson 2011, 113–133; Fox 2015, 335–351; Fabre-Serris 2018, 127–144; Martorana 2020b, 135–160.

6. The original dialectic between a pro-Augustan and an anti-Augustan interpretation of the Aeneid has subsequently developed into an opposition between “the optimistic European school” and “the pessimistic Harvard school”; see Johnson 1976, 8–15; also Lyne 1987; Putnam 1995; Perkell 1997, 257–286; Schmidt 2001, 145–171; Clark 2017, 57–61.

7. Sharrock 2020, 33–53; for some earlier references, see Sharrock 2002, 95–107; Sharrock 2011, 55–77.

8. Sharrock 2020, 37: “Both the optimistic and the pessimistic responses to the Metamorphoses are valid readings of the poem. Often, however, our readings need to acknowledge both possibilities at once and to accept that the coexistence of objectification and empathy should make it impossible for us either to convict or to exonerate the poet”; also Salzman-Mitchell 2005, 18–21; McAuley 2016, 16–18.

9. For some connections between the violence in Ovidian works (and ancient literature at large) and our misogynistic present, see Richlin 1992b, 158–179; Kahn 2006; James 2016, 92–109.

10. McAuley 2016, 16–17, 26–27, with bibliography.

11. Lindheim 2003, 3–12 and passim.

12. Spentzou 2003 navigates questions of gender within the Heroides by focusing on the heroines’ self-depiction as helpless and innocent (chap. 3), their writing (chap. 4), the genre of the epistles (chap. 5), and narrative patterns (chap. 6).

13. Fulkerson 2005, 1–22.

14. For an overview of Ovidian intertextuality, see Casali 2009, 341–354; also Hardie 2002. On allusivity, see Barchiesi 1993, 333–365. For intertextuality in Augustan poetry, see, e.g., Thomas 1999; Thomas 2001; Thomas 2009, 294–307; Gale 2000; Hallett 2006, 37–42; Rosati 2017, 117–142.

15. Barchiesi 2001, 31: “The poetics of the Heroides suggest … that new windows can be opened on stories already completed. Ovid’s narrative prowess is evident in the respect he shows for the traditional script.”

16. E.g., Barchiesi 2001, 29–47.

17. Most of what survives from Greco-Roman (and more generally premodern) literature is by men, with female voices lost; for female authors and literacy in antiquity and beyond, see Stevenson 2007; Bowman 2004, 1–27.

18. See, e.g., Kennedy 2002, 217–232; Rosati 1992, 71–94; Farrell 1998, 307–338; Auhagen 1999, 12, 45–63; also Steinmetz 1987, 128–145. For an early definition of Ovid’s poetry— particularly the Heroides—as “Kreuzung der Gattungen,” see Kroll 1924, 218.

19. See chapter 1.

20. See chapters 3 and 5.

21. The poet (amator), who as a man would normally dominate, submits to the puella, who is often described as dura (while, as a woman, she would be expected to be mollis) and identified as domina. Furthermore, the poet is often characterized by features that pertain rather more to the feminine sphere (emotionality, a lack of constraints, oscillation between opposing feelings). See, e.g., Holzberg 2000, 28–29; James 2003, 129: “Elegy thus presents the lover-poet as violating all standards of upper-class Roman masculinity, through both servile behavior and inertia of character.”

22. Rosenmeyer 1997, 29: “I interpret his [Ovid’s] choice of the letter form for the exile poems as not only an allusion to, but also as an authorial statement of identification—on some level—with his earlier epistolary work, the Heroides.”

23. In a famous essay, Cixous (1976, 875–893) conceptualized the so-called écriture féminine, which has become central to feminist writing, literature, and discussion.

24. E.g., Altman 1982, 161–163.

25. Kristeva 1981, 13–35.

26. Dixon 1988, 71.

27. See Hackworth Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell 2012, 1: “A woman’s primary role has traditionally been defined vis-à-vis her ability to reproduce and/or care for offspring.”

28. See Gell. NA 4.3.2, 5.19.6, 17.21.44; Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 2.25; Plut. Cam. 2; Cat. Mai. 16; Val. Max. 2.9.1; Cic. Leg. 3.7; see Treggiari 1991, 8n37.

29. Treggiari 2005, 144–147; Hallett 2012, 373: “These laws … compelled women of all social stations to place a high premium on sexual chastity if they were not married and on marital fidelity once they had wed, and also pressured them to produce multiple offspring”; McAuley 2016, 42–44.

30. See Hor. Carm. 4.5.21–24; Ov. Fast. 2.139; Suet. Aug. 34; Ulp. 11.20: Dig. 23.2.44–46; see Raditsa 1980, 278–339; McGinn 2008, 1–32.

31. The inscription (CIL VI 31610) reads: “Cornelia Africani f(ilia) / Gracchorum <mater>,” with Dixon 2007, 56–57, 76; Valentini 2009, 196–201.

32. On Augustus’s political and cultural restoration, see, e.g., Zanker 1988, 33–166; Taylor, Rinne, and Kostof 2016, 43–51.

33. See Treggiari 1991, 277–278, with notes; Tatarkiewicz 2023: 16–19.

34. See Hemelrijk 2012, 201–220; Woodhull 2012, 225–235; Brännstedt 2016, 91–136; on Livia Drusilla, wife of Augustus, see also Bartman 1999; Barrett 2002.

35. Milnor 2005, 1, 3: “In the Augustan period, we find women… who are able to take on real and important roles in the civic sphere, without compromising their perceived performance of ‘traditional’ domestic virtues… . Women as the focal point of domestic sphere had an important role to play in the new vision of Roman society.”

36. McAuley 2020, 28. For the tensions between familial dynamics and Augustus’s policy as they are reflected by the so-called Laudatio Turiae, see Hopwood 2019, 63–77.

37. Perhaps not coincidentally, January 30 was Livia’s birthday; on the Ara Pacis, see Koeppel 1987, 101–157; Koeppel 1988, 97–106; Torelli 1999, 70–74; Rossini 2007; for Augustus’s cultural policy, see Zanker 1988, 101–238.

38. For an analysis of the acanthus frieze, see Pollini 1993, 181–217, and Caneva’s work (2010) on the “botanic code of Augustus.”

39. For the problematic identification of this figure, see Zanker 1988, 172–179; Galinsky 1992, 457–475; Spaeth 1994, 65–100; La Rocca 2010, 211–223.

40. See Martino 2005–2006, 217–228. Besides the volume of Schnegg-Köhler (2002), for the Ludi Saeculares, see, e.g., Beard, North, and Price 1998, 201–206; Šterbenc Erker 2018, 377–404.

41. The Latin text and the English translation (with changes) are from Rudd 2004.

42. See Grosz 1994; Braidotti 2002; Braidotti 2017, 21–48; Ettinger 1992, 176–208; Ettinger 2010, 1–24.

43. Hemelrijk 1999.

44. For a recent reading of the Heroides as a poetic response to “a sense of the disquiet that accompanied the dawn of the principate,” see Drinkwater 2022, 6.

45. See Dixon 1988, 41–70.

46. See Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, already mentioned (Tac. Dial. 28); Procilla, mother of Agricola (Tac. Agr. 4); also, Seneca’s Consolatio ad Helviam, where maternal virtue is described as a male quality, and Seneca praises his mother for her pudicitia, her ability to sustain grief without complaining excessively, and her generosity in helping her son in his career; see Gloyn 2011, 14–47.

47. For exemplary wives/mothers, see Cic. Brut. 211; Livy 2.40–41; Plut. Coriolanus 33–36; Ti. Gracch. 1; C. Gracch. 19; Tac. Dial. 28; for wicked ones, see, e.g., Medea and Phaedra, as well as Cicero’s Clodia in the Pro Caelio and Sassia in the Pro Cluentio, with Ige 2003, 45–57; Richlin 1992a, 97; on women’s roles in the Augustan period, see Treggiari 2005, 130–147.

48. Famous examples of misogynistic invectives can be found in Juvenal’s satires (see 2, 6, and 9), but attacks against allegedly lascivious and luxurious women are rather frequent throughout Latin literature, from Sallust’s Sempronia (Cat. 25) to Cicero’s Clodia (Cael. 33–34 and passim), to Horace’s Cleopatra (Carm. 1.37). Cleopatra, in particular, was masculinized in Augustus’s propaganda, whereas Antony was feminized: see Jones 2012, 173–178.

49. For Agrippina, see Tac. Ann. 12.66; Cass. Dio 61.34; Suet. Claud. 44 (see Barrett 1996; Deline 2015, 766–772); for Messalina, see Tac. Ann. 11.37–38; Juv. 6.114–132; Suet. Claud. 26–40 (see Joshel 1997, 221–254; Panoussi 2018, 1–19).

50. Deline 2015, 766. This maleness was emphasized even more if a woman was involved in a relationship with another woman. In the Roman world, such women were designated tribades, and they were thought to be sexually active; see Phaedr. 5.15 (Zago 2020); Sen. Controv. 1.2.23; Mart. 7.67; OLD, s.v. “tribas”; see Williams 1999, 211–215; Schachter 2015, 39–55.

51. For gender identity in Rome as a social construct “perpetually in the making,” see Gleason 1995, xxvi and passim; also Gunderson 2000; for gender fluidity in elegy, see James 2003, 7–12 (155–211 for Ovid’s Amores and Ars amatoria); also Gold 1993, 75–113; Oliensis 1997, 151–171; Janan 2001; Zimmermann Damer 2013–2014, 493–514. For the socially constructed notion of gender as interlaced with discourses of identity and ethnicity, see Fabre-Serris, Keith, and Klein 2021, 1–14; on constructions of gender, and gendered spaces, in Latin elegy, see most recently Lindheim 2021, 1–21.

52. Besides Butler’s fundamental works at the beginning of the 1990s (particularly Gender Trouble, published in 1990, and Bodies That Matter from 1993), see Grosz 1993, 167–179; Braidotti 2002; Fine 2010, for a psychological and sociological approach; Fineman 2013, 619–639, for a legal approach; Fine, Dupré, and Joel 2017, 666–673, for a psychoanalytical approach.

53. For Phaedrus’s text, see Zago 2020.

54. Among the most recent studies on adoption in ancient Rome, see Lindsay 2011, 346–360; Davenport and Mallan 2014, 637–668; for exposure, see, e.g., Cooper 2007, 3–33; Barry 2008, 222–246; Zelyck 2017, 37–54.

55. Besides the volume Motherhood in Literature and Culture (2018), edited by Rye, Browne, Giorgio, Jeremiah, and Six, see, e.g., Ettinger 2010, 1–24, for motherhood in visual art; Heritier 1999, for motherhood in anthropological studies; Maclean 1994, for a sociolinguistic study of motherhood.

56. Sharrock and Keith 2020.

57. Keith, McAuley, and Sharrock 2020, 3–25.

58. Augoustakis 2010; McAuley 2016; see also Clayton 1999, 69–84; Gold 2006, 165–187; Lateiner 2006, 189–201; Gladhill 2012, 159–168; Salzman-Mitchell 2021, 25–50; on maternal absence in antiquity, see Huebner and Ratzan 2021.

59. See DuBois (1995, 18) on her own use of Lacan to interpret ancient texts; on “queer unhistoricism” applied to the classics, see Matzner 2016, 179–201. For a discussion about the problematic application of modern labels (e.g., heterosexual, heteronormative, homosexual) to the ancient world, see Williams 1999, 4–5. In a 2017 edited volume about transgender dynamics in antiquity, Carlà-Uhink, while acknowledging that “transgender” is a contemporary concept, states that “nonetheless, in Classical Antiquity, it is possible to identify forms of behavior and action which might fall into our modern category of transgender” (3).

60. Butler 1990; Butler 1993; Braidotti 2002; Braidotti 2013; also Haraway 1997; Haraway 2003.

61. Barthes 1975; Derrida 1976; on the application of this poststructuralist approach to the classics, see Batstone 2006, 14–20; Martindale 2006, 1–13.

62. Barthes 1975, 16: “On the stage of the text, no footlights: there is not, behind the text, someone active (the writer) and out front someone passive (the reader); there is not a subject and an object.”

63. See Kirichenko 2019, 315–322; Martorana 2023, 199–201.

64. For “reception” as a mutually illuminating, dialogical, two-way relationship with ancient texts, see Martindale 2013, 171.

65. Besides Hemelrijk 1999, for literary circles from the imperial age that may have included educated women, see Hallett 2002a, 45–65; Hallett 2002b, 421–424; James 2003, 71–107, on the docta puella. For the early modern and contemporary reception of the Heroides in women’s epistolary writing, see the 1989 volume edited by Goldsmith; for two successful examples, see Pollard’s Ovid’s Heroines and the Jermyn Street Theatre’s 2020 production 15 Heroines: The War/The Desert/The Labyrinth; 15 Monologues Adapted from Ovid.

66. Kristeva in Moi 1986, 151–152.

67. See Moi 1986, 139, 151–152.

68. The Ars amatoria is mentioned by Ovid himself as the carmen that, along with his error, led to his banishment (see Ov. Tr. 2.207: “perdiderint cum me duo crimina, carmen et error,” Two crimes have brought me ruin, a poem and a mistake); see Green 1982, 202–220; Ingleheart 2006, 85–86; Hinds 2007, 194–220; Ingleheart 2010, 2–5, 202–205.

69. The reference to the Heroides at Am. 2.18.19–34 kicks off this debate; see Courtney 1965, 63–66; Reeve 1973, 324–338; Kenney 1979, 394–431; Courtney 1997–1998, 157–166; Lingenberg 2003.

70. For the sequence of the epistles, see, e.g., Jacobson 1974, 407–409; Pulbrook 1977, 29–45; Knox 1995, 11–12.