Readers and Writers in Ovid's Heroides: Transgressions of Genre and Gender

READERS AND WRITERS IN OVID'S HEROIDES Readers and Writers in Ovid's Heroides Transgressions of Genre and Gender Efr...

Author: Efrossini Spentzou

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READERS AND WRITERS IN OVID'S HEROIDES

Readers and Writers in Ovid's Heroides Transgressions of Genre and Gender

Efrossini Spentzou

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Efrossini Spentzou 2003 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data applied for ISBN 0–19–925568–7 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset in Imprint by Regent Typesetting, London Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by T. J. International, Padstow, Cornwall


Στη μητέρα μου και στη μνήμη του πατέρα μου

Preface This book is a revised and modified version of my doctoral dissertation submitted to Oxford University in 1997. I was exceptionally lucky and privileged in my two doctoral supervisors, the late Don Fowler and Alison Sharrock. From the nebulous start of this study, Don's inspirational presence supported me with exceptional wisdom, and endless gusto, patience, and humour. I will always remember his valuable friendship and startling faith in me and this work with the deepest gratitude. He taught me to be rigorous with ideas and also to dare to imagine, and these are lessons for life. Quite early on in the course of my doctoral studies, he went on an extended British Academy Fellowship which required that responsibility for his research students be passed formally to others, thus I acquired my second supervisor, Alison Sharrock. Through her acute and creative response to my efforts, the arguments of this thesis slowly but steadily crystallized, and thinking about classical poetry, allegories, and gender became really exciting. My two examiners, Denis Feeney and Maria Wyke, also offered perceptive suggestions for improvement of the initial typescript. Alessandro Barchiesi and Stephen Hinds read parts of early drafts and offered advice and encouragement. Other immediate concerns after graduation sidelined the revision project for a while. But the ideas gestated in me. About two years of intense and variable teaching intervened, and I had the first chance to teach the female voice of the Heroides in my Ovid class at Royal Holloway and be rewarded by some thought-provoking reactions from my students. When started, the revision process was slow and frequently interrupted by other commitments and projects but it was through these that a valuable critical distance was gained. At this later stage Patricia Rosenmeyer read parts of the revised script and offered most helpful insight into the modes of epistolarity in the Heroides and gendered thinking in general. In the final straight, Richard Alston, too, provided support and advice on a whole variety of

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PREFACE

issues, thus considerably aiding the finishing stages of the book. I am grateful to the anonymous readers of the Press for constructive and helpful suggestions. I am especially deeply indebted to one of them for an astonishingly detailed eye and thorough criticism which improved the shape of the book a great deal and saved me from many pitfalls. All remaining errors are of course my own responsibility. I would also like to thank Hilary O'Shea and the staff at OUP for friendly and efficient management of the production of the book. Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge my debt to my undergraduate Latin teacher in Thessaloniki, Dr Theodore Papanghelis, whose challenging teaching and thought initiated me into the intricacies and intrigues of the Ovidian world all those years ago. This book is dedicated in memory of my father and to my mother, who instilled in me the desire for knowledge and a passion for books and reading from my very early years. I hope I have made them both proud of me. E.S. Royal Holloway College January 2002

Contents Synopses of the Myths 1. Getting Down To Essentials? 2. Reading Characters Read: On Methodology 3. Landscapes of Lost Innocence 4. The Heroines in the Chora of Writing 5. Postcards Home: The Heroides as Letters 6. A Splintery Frame: The Heroides as Short Stories Postscript: Writing on the Edge? References Index Locorum General Index

xi 1 13 43 85 123 161 197 201 217 225


Synopses of the Myths Single Heroides 10. Ariadne 1

Ariadne was the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae. When Theseus arrived in Crete to fight the Minotaur that was kept in the Labyrinth, Ariadne fell in love with him and devised a plot to help him through his daunting task. Equipped with a ball of thread which he unwound on his way into the maze, Theseus followed the thread back out again and thus successfully completed his mission. As a result, Theseus promised to take her with him back to Athens. They fled the island and Minos' wrath. However, Theseus abandoned Ariadne as she was still asleep early one morning on Dia, later called Naxos. Upon waking Ariadne saw Theseus' ship speeding away and burst into uncontrollable lament: this is also the narrative setting of her letter. Soon afterwards, though, Dionysus reached Naxos in his chariot accompanied by maenads and satyrs, and whisked Ariadne away from the island, making her his wife and giving her the gift of immortality. He also gave her as a wedding present a golden crown made by Hephaestus, which later became the constellation Corona Borealis. In a different version attested in Homer, Ariadne was killed by Artemis following an accusation made by Dionysus. The accusation is unclear but, most likely, Ariadne was found to have been unfaithful with Theseus even though she was already promised to Dionysus.

3. Briseis Briseis was Achilles' concubine in the Iliad, won by him when he sacked Lyrnessus, near Troy, killing her husband and three brothers. The Iliad attests genuine love and respect between the two: characteristically, in the last reference to Achilles in the epic the two of them sleep peacefully together (24. 675–6). When

1

The number before each mythical figure signifies the order of the heroines' (and heroes') letters in the Ovidian collection.

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SYNOPSES OF THE MYTHS

Agamemnon was forced to return his own concubine to Chryses and arbitrarily claimed Briseis as a substitute, she obeyed only reluctantly. Her letter is written from the tent of Agamemnon, where she is bursting with grief at separation from her beloved.

11. Canace Canace was the daughter of Aeolus, the ruler of winds. According to one version, she had five sons by Poseidon. According to a second version, she was involved in an incestuous affair with her brother Macareus and bore him a child. When Aeolus found out, he threw the child to the dogs and sent a sword to his daughter to kill herself. According to the same sources, Macareus also committed suicide. Canace's letter is a despairing farewell to Macareus as she prepares to die.

9. Deianira Deianira was the daughter of Oeneus, king of Calydon, and Althaea, sister of Meleager. When Hercules travelled to the Underworld to fetch Cerberus for King Eurystheus as one of his Labours, he met Meleager (killed by the agency of his own mother after the Calydonian boar hunt), and the latter urged him to marry his sister, Deianira. Hercules travelled to Calydon and won Deianira after a savage fight with Achelous. Early in their marriage Hercules and Deianira had to leave Calydon due to an accidental killing. Reaching the river Evenus, they were ferried over by the centaur Nessus who attempted to rape Deianira in the process. Hercules shot Nessus in the heart with an arrow poisoned with the Lernaean Hydra's blood. As he was dying, Nessus gave Deianira a supposed love charm and advised her to use it if ever she felt there was danger that Hercules was going to forget her. According to one account, the ‘charm’ was a concoction containing Nessus' own blood; according to another, it was actually his blood-soaked tunic—but, in either case, the blood (and therefore the charm) was infected with the deadly poison of the Hydra. Years later, and after the sack of the city of Oechalia, Hercules acquired a concubine, Iole, whom he sent ahead prior to his triumphant return home. Upon hearing the bad news, Deianira took Nessus' tunic, or a tunic steeped in his poisonous concoction, and, presumably believing it to be a love


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charm, sent it to her husband with Lichas, one of his followers. Lichas found Hercules preparing a sacrifice on Cape Cenaeum in Euboea. He promptly put on the tunic and soon its poison began to burn his flesh. Unable to carry the guilt of having caused the death of her husband, Deianira killed herself. In the narrative time of Deianira's letter the events are blended in her consciousness. She begins an angry letter upon hearing of the existence of Iole, but it turns into a lament as the news of Hercules' death reaches her.

7. Dido Dido was the founder and first queen of Carthage and possibly a Phoenician divinity, though the conjecture is based on scant evidence. Elissa was her Phoenician name. Daughter of Belus (or Mutto) she married her uncle Sychaeus. Her brother Pygmalion, who had ascended the throne after their father's death, had Sychaeus murdered in order to usurp his riches. Dido fled to Libya with a small company of devoted Tyrians, where she was allowed as much land as could be encompassed by a bull's hide. Dido cut the hide of the bull in such thin strips that, when these were all tied together, enough land was encompassed to build a city. The city prospered and grew. Early stories state that the Libyan king Iarbas was alarmed by this growing strength and pressed Dido to marry him. She feigned consent and asked for time to prepare her nuptials. When granted this time, she built a pyre on the pretext of preparing a sacrifice and killed herself by leaping upon it. Virgil introduced Aeneas into Dido's story. Having fled the destruction of Troy, Aeneas, his father, and a few companions landed on the coast near Carthage, where, prompted by his mother Venus, he embarked on a passionate affair with the Carthaginian queen, which lasted for a whole winter before Mercury was sent by Jupiter to remind Aeneas of his neglected destiny to found Rome. Obedient to the call of fate, Aeneas left Dido in spite of her pleas. Heartbroken and bereft, Dido had a pyre built, supposedly to destroy every memory of her affair, and there she ended her life by stabbing herself with Aeneas' sword. Her letter in the Heroides is written as Aeneas is sailing away and Dido laments her abandonment and plans her own demise.

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8. Hermione Hermione was the daughter of Menelaus and Helen. Her mother eloped with Paris and abandoned her in Sparta when she was only nine years old. When Menelaus was away fighting in the Trojan War, Tyndareus—acting in loco parentis—promised Hermione to Orestes, Agamemnon's and Clytemnestra's son, in an effort to join the kingdoms of Sparta and Mycenae. Subsequently, Menelaus overrode Tyndareus' word and gave Hermione to Pyrrhus, Achilles' son, in an attempt to spur Achilles' and Pyrrhus' effort in the Trojan conflict. After the fall of Troy, Pyrrhus also acquired Andromache, Hector's wife, as a concubine, and she bore him a son, Molossus. Andromache cast spells on Hermione who thus became unable to have children. Resenting Andromache and her son Molossus, Hermione attempted to have them both killed, but they were saved by Peleus, Pyrrhus' grandfather. Fearing her husband's wrath, Hermione was subsequently rescued by Orestes and fled with him to Sparta. In Heroides 8 Hermione belongs to Pyrrhus—who already has Andromache as concubine—but she writes longingly to Orestes, her first and eternal love, asking him to rescue her from her loveless marriage.

14. Hypermestra Hypermestra was one of the fifty daughters of Danaus. He and his twin brother Aegyptus inherited the vast kingdom of Belus, their father, who gave Libya to Danaus and Arabia to Aegyptus. Threatened by his brother's drive for expansion, Danaus fled with his fifty daughters, and, pursued by the fifty sons of Aegyptus, sought refuge with King Pelasgus at Argos. Persuaded or forced to give his daughters in marriage to Aegyptus' sons, he ordered the brides to kill their husbands on the first night of their marriage, with daggers provided by him. Only Hypermestra spared her husband Lynceus and helped him to flee, thus incurring the wrath of Danaus, who imprisoned her and brought her to trial—though the Argives acquitted her. Later, Danaus was reconciled with Hypermestra and Lynceus. Hypermestra writes her letter during the ill-fated first night of her marriage as Lynceus lies asleep next to her, oblivious to the lurking danger.


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6. Hypsipyle Hypsipyle was the daughter of Thoas, son of Dionysus and Ariadne and king of the island of Lemnos. When the Lemnian women failed to honour Aphrodite, they were afflicted by a vile smell. As a result, their men started affairs with women from neighbouring Thrace. The neglected Lemnian women took revenge by killing their husbands and their mistresses, and, in fear of retribution, they massacred the rest of the male population too. The only man to survive was Thoas, spared by his daughter, who subsequently became queen of Lemnos. When Jason and the Argonauts reached the island on their way to Colchis, they became involved with the Lemnian women; eventually, however, they resumed their expedition. Soon after his arrival in Colchis, Jason became attached to Medea, snatched the Golden Fleece with her help, and fled Colchis with her. Hypsipyle's letter recounts her grief, anger, and distrust of Jason's new witch-concubine.

13. Laodamia Laodamia was the daughter of Acastus, king of Iolcus, and wife of Protesilaus, king of Phylace, who was the first to be killed at Troy. Learning of his death, Laodamia implored the gods to bring him back for a space of three hours. The gods granted the favour, but when the time came for Protesilaus to return to Hades, Laodamia killed herself in his arms. In another version, Laodamia made a waxen image which she kept in her bedroom in place of her beloved husband. This is the narrative time of her letter. One day a servant saw her kissing the image and reported to Acastus, who assumed that she had a lover. Indignant, he threw the image on the fire. Laodamia met her death by throwing herself onto the fire.

12. Medea Medea was the daughter of Aeetes, king of Colchis, and granddaughter of Helios, through her mother Eidyia, the youngest of the Oceanides. Other sources accept her as the daughter of Hecate, daughter of Perses. When Jason arrived at Colchis to reclaim the Golden Fleece, as instructed, Medea loved him at first sight, and assisted his mission with her magic skills and

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herbs. Subsequently, Medea fled back to Iolcus with Jason, terrified of her father's wrath and reassured by Jason's promise to marry her. The trip back to Iolcus was beset by various difficulties—though once there, and married to Jason, Medea continued to offer assistance. She tricked the daughters of Pelias, who had usurped the throne of Iolcus, into killing their father—ostensibly so that he could have his youth renewed. Following this incident, Medea and Jason fled and found refuge with Creon, the king of Corinth, where they spent ten peaceful years and had two or three children, before Jason deserted Medea and married Creon's daughter, Creusa. Humiliated and isolated, Medea took terrible revenge. First, by means of a poisoned dress presented in feigned goodwill, she killed Creusa along with her father, who tried to embrace his daughter and was also overcome by the poison. And then, in an effort to inflict the greatest possible pain upon her treacherous husband, she killed her own children. The Euripidean tragedy presents us with an intriguing Medea: a woman who was not that terrible in spite of her horrendous deeds, a woman who tries to convince us that she killed her children out of love. Her letter in the Heroides furthers this insight into her character, as Medea writes it from the isolation of her ‘house arrest’ and reveals in it all the turmoil of her heart before she is ready to strike.

5. Oenone Oenone, a nymph and daughter of the river-god Cebren, fell in love with a handsome shepherd on Mount Ida, Paris, the son of Priam. Paris had been exposed at birth, since a prophecy had warned that he would destroy Troy. He was rescued by one of the king's shepherds and brought up in his home as his own offspring. When Paris decided to participate in the annual games that Priam had established in Paris' memory, he was identified by his sister Cassandra and restored to his blood family. Some sources suggest that Oenone joined him with their son in the royal house. Paris soon recalled the prize (Helen) promised by Aphrodite at that ill-fated ‘beauty contest’ of the three goddesses on Mount Ida, and, deciding to claim it, he embarked on a journey to Sparta—in spite of Oenone's and Cassandra's efforts to dissuade him. Oenone returned to Mount Ida with her son but rumours of Paris' return with Helen as his new wife


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reached her in her new abode. This is the dramatic setting of her letter. Years later, Paris, fatally wounded by Philoctetes, asked to be carried to Mount Ida, hoping to be healed by Oenone's medical skill. Still angry, Oenone refused her aid and he was carried back to Troy. Soon, though, Oenone changed her mind and rushed to Troy only to find Paris dead—whereupon she hanged herself.

1. Penelope Penelope was the wife of Odysseus, and the daughter of Icarius (a Spartan king and brother of Tyndareus, the father of Helen) and Polycaste from Acarnania (or the nymph Periboea, according to other sources). Odysseus defeated Penelope's other suitors in a foot-race, a contest devised by Icarius, and Penelope obediently followed her husband to Ithaca in spite of Icarius' pleas for them to stay in Sparta. Most sources report only one son, Telemachus (though there are occasional mentions of another son, and perhaps a further one after Odysseus' return to Ithaca following the Trojan War). When Telemachus was still a baby, the Trojan War began and Odysseus reluctantly followed the Greek fleet, spending ten years at Troy and ten more years wandering across the Mediterranean. During these years, Penelope remained faithful to her husband (according to the majority of sources). At the moment of writing of her letter, she is being harassed by the rapacious Suitors, local noblemen who had installed themselves in Odysseus' palace, ignoring Telemachus (a young adult by now), feasting at Odysseus' expense, and competing for Penelope's hand (and fortune).

4. Phaedra Phaedra, daughter of Minos, the king of Crete, and younger sister of Ariadne, was married by Theseus and brought to Athens, probably soon after the death of his previous wife, Antiope the Amazon. Antiope had borne a son, Hippolytus, who was brought up in Troezen by his grandmother Aethra and great-grandfather Pitheus. Like Antiope, he embraced the worship of Artemis when still in his early manhood. Aphrodite's revenge for ignoring her was exacted through Phaedra, for the goddess made her fall in love with her stepson when she saw him dressed in white at Eleusis during the celebration of the

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Mysteries. A virtuous woman, Phaedra resisted her induced passion with all her strength but eventually confessed to her nurse, who in turn communicated the situation to Hippolytus himself, hoping to relieve her mistress's sufferings. Hippolytus was appalled and enraged. Phaedra, afraid of Theseus' reaction, wrote a letter to her husband accusing his son of rape and then hanged herself. Theseus found the letter upon his return, and cursed Hippolytus, who was thereupon driven to his death by a bull sent from the sea by Poseidon. In other versions (e.g. a lost Euripidean tragedy, and a Senecan tragedy) Phaedra is presented as a more shameless character, much less torn by her incestuous desire for her stepson. Her letter in the Heroides expresses turmoil and feelings for Hippolytus that she could not disclose in the extant Euripidean drama.

2. Phyllis The daughter of a Thracian king, Phyllis fell in love with Demophoon, the son of Theseus and Phaedra. When Theseus was exiled from Athens, Demophoon and his brother Acamas were sent to King Elephenor in Euboea for safety. Both brothers grew up with Elephenor and accompanied him to the Trojan War, during which they rescued their grandmother Aethra who had been in Troy as a slave of Helen. On the way back, Demophoon stopped in Thrace where he married Phyllis. Soon, however, he sailed away (because he felt homesick for Athens, according to some sources), promising the broken-hearted Phyllis that he would return at a certain time. When he did not return, Phyllis, who had visited the appointed landing place many times in vain, finally hanged herself and was then metamorphosed into a leafless almond tree. When Demophoon eventually returned, he embraced the tree, which then developed a rich foliage (hence Phyllis, the Greek word for ‘leaves’ being phylla). A similar story is told of Phyllis and Acamas in some other sources. Phyllis' letter in the Heroides is written at the point when, having lost any hope she will ever see Demophoon again, she is filled with anger and resentment and announces her imminent suicide.


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Double Heroides 20–1. Acontius and Cydippe Acontius was a young man from Chios, offspring of an affluent but not noble family. One year he visited the festival at Delos and was smitten by Cydippe, an Athenian girl from a noble family. Having followed Cydippe and her nurse to the temple of Artemis, he picked a quince and inscribed the words, ‘I swear by the temple of Artemis to marry Acontius.’ He then threw the quince towards Cydippe's feet; the girl picked it up and innocently read the inscription on it aloud. She blushed and threw the quince away, but the goddess had heard her vow. Acontius returned to Chios consumed by love for the girl. At Athens, Cydippe's father three times tried to proceed with her betrothal to a man he had selected for her, but she fell ill each time. Confused, Cydippe's father decided to consult the oracle at Delphi. The oracle disclosed that Cydippe was bound by oath to somebody else, so Artemis was punishing her every time she was on the point of committing perjury. Upon returning to Athens, Cydippe's father enquired about Acontius and his family, and, approving of them, gave his daughter to the young man as his bride. In their two letters the two young people try to transcend the boundaries between the families and express their love and excitement, but also bewilderment and confusion.

16–17. Helen and Paris Helen was the daughter of Zeus and, according to most sources, Leda, the wife of Tyndareus, king of Sparta. While Helen was still in her early youth, she was abducted by Theseus and Perithous, both being resolved to marry a daughter of Zeus. The two heroes drew lots and Theseus won. Helen was eventually rescued by her brothers, Castor and Polydeuces, and brought back to Sparta. When Helen came of an age to marry, suitors from all over Greece gathered with gifts in the hope of winning her hand. A fragmentary list in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women includes the majority of the Greek leaders attested in the Iliad—apart from Agamemnon, who was already married, and Achilles, who was too young. Tyndareus, afraid of making enemies by choosing one suitor above the rest, made them all swear an oath

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of allegiance to the chosen husband in case of her abduction. Helen married Menelaus and they had a daughter, Hermione (other sources also mention a son, Nicostratus). In due course, Paris arrived in Sparta to claim the hand of Helen, promised to him by Aphrodite. For nine days Menelaus entertained his guest and Paris reciprocated by offering gifts to Helen. On the tenth day, Menelaus sailed to Crete to bury his grandfather, Catreus, leaving Helen in charge of the hospitality. Coerced by Aphrodite, Helen succumbed to Paris' seduction and started an affair with him. The couple eloped, removing along with themselves a great part of Menelaus' property. In the course of the exchange of the two letters, Paris tirelessly and shamelessly proclaims his love to Helen and she still resists. But it will not be long before the two sail off to Troy.

18–19. Hero and Leander These ill-fated lovers lived on opposite sides of the narrow Hellespont (the Dardanelles). Hero was a priestess of Aphrodite at Sestos (on the European side). Every night she would light a lamp in the window of the tower in which she lived, to shed light onto the dark sea as Leander swam across to reach her for their regular tryst. The two lovers would spend a passionate night together and at dawn Leander would swim back to Abydos again. One stormy night, the lamp was blown out so Leander lost his way in the dark and drowned. His body was washed up by the waves and discovered next morning by Hero, who then threw herself to her death from high up in the tower. The two letters are written as a desperate attempt to complement the furtive communication at nights. Leander can hardly keep himself from dashing into the waves to meet his beloved, and Hero worries that he is late, but, in the name of their love, also advises caution with the treacherous sea.

1 Getting Down To Essentials? ῎Αγαν θαυμαστῶς πρὸς τὰς ϕύσεις καὶ τούς λόγους ἀμϕοτέροις ἀνέπλασεν. Τοῖς μὲν γὰρ ἀνδράσιν, ἐπεὶ θρασυτέρα ἡ ϕύσις, ἄνυσιν καὶ τέλος τῶν μελλόντων εἰσάγει, ταῖς δὲ γυναιξίν, ἐπεὶ ἀσθενέστεραι, εὐχὰς καὶ ἱκεσίας ποιεῖ. τοιαῦται γὰρ ἐπὶ τῶν μεγάλων καὶ ϕοβερῶν πραγμάτων αἱ γυναῖκες. And [the poet] made both [men and women] quite extraordinary in constitution as well as spoken skills. He geared the men, being more audacious by nature, towards completion and achievement of things to come, and he turned the women towards prayer and supplications. For such are the women in the face of important and formidable things.2 (Scholion in Apollonium Rhodium 1. 247–9) Recent years have witnessed something of a boom in studies on Ovid's Heroides. In the context of a steadily increasing attention focused on all things Ovidian the new trend is hardly surprising. Yet perhaps no other element of the corpus has been more radically affected by this upsurge in Ovidian scholarship than the literary reputation of the Heroides, which had previously been seen as no more than witty repetitions of female enclosure, typical of male dominance in the Augustan era.3 As I will argue in the next chapter, the origins of this re-evaluation are located in the early to middle 1980s. This new critical focus was dominated by intertextuality: the complex ways in which these texts acknowledge and link with other texts through a series of analogies of language and imagery. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of these studies for the Heroides' recovery from the contemptuous oblivion to which they had been consigned. And yet, for all their merits, these studies share the same flaw: they all

2

All translations from Greek and Latin are my own.

3

For a fuller account of these mostly contemptuous critical responses see Ch. 2 below.

2

GETTING DOWN TO ESSENTIALS?

ultimately depend on an interpretative conspiracy between the critic and the reader. The learned reader knows the ‘end’ of the story and can thus rejoice in the self-conscious irony and intertextual links that display authorial and reader's wit; but such displays operate at a level above that of the dramatis personae, the heroines. The critics do justice to Ovid's skills as a writer in the Heroides—as was badly needed—but they do not take the heroines' challenge seriously enough. The learned reader takes pleasure in the intertextual complexities offered to him, but the heroines' voice has not been acknowledged or appreciated (let alone celebrated). As Alessandro Barchiesi has aptly put it: ‘the heroines are prisoners of too much literature’.4 Encouraged by this new (intertextual) appreciation of the Heroides, this book aspires to take the heroines' challenge more seriously. Its debts and loyalties are diverse and also eclectic. It is a book on women's literary representations with a particular debt to contemporary French feminism, but its subjects are also the twists of epistolarity, the fictional first person, the false objectivity of intertextuality, and the nature of the short story. Working at the intersection of gender and genre and stressing the importance of reception for the creation of meaning in these texts where the heroines are above all on the receiving end, it aspires to offer a recuperative reading of the assailed heroines, pursuing traces of unacclaimed strength and juxtaposing them to the heroines' acknowledged manipulation by Ovid. A reading of the female voice in a male-authored text is bound to raise questions and perhaps objections in essentialist and historicist circles. Performing a lecture féminine independently of authorial intention, this book not only recaptures the heroines' feminine writing within the masculine text, but also inevitably triggers the question of the extent to which a woman's voice can slip through a man's text. And if the answer to this is that it can, what is the ‘challenge’ posed by these heroines and whose perception, whose reality, would this recovered feminine voice reflect? I deal with these issues more extensively in Chapter 2. Appropriately for a study of an elegiac corpus, my approach can best be described by using a metaphor, but one distinctively different from those in the standard list of elegiac topoi. A group of famous literary women wake up from their (literary) inertia—as

4

Barchiesi (1994) 112 (my translation).


3

notoriously Ariadne does on the deserted Naxos—to find themselves abandoned in a lonely land. They indulge in a helpless and harmless complaint. But this is only one level of the story, the one that manifests itself at first glance, which perhaps is an explanation of sorts for the infamous dismissal of the collection by critics in the past. For the heroines are as combative as they are unhappy. Their enclosed and limited world also encompasses a striking tool, their letters, which makes them authors, female writers who attack the male-dominant classics in what can also be seen as a narrativized struggle of a series of fictional characters writing against Homer, Euripides, Virgil. Furthermore, this writing project of theirs is a striking act of defiance: more often than not, the heroines' letters are written in the shadow of people in power, be they husbands, fathers, or kings. They are thus a discourse of subversions growing at the side of dominant (and predominantly male) hierarchies which would destroy these letters should they ever come into their hands. This defiant discourse is thus always at risk from readings which are complicit with this dominance, but it is also open to rescue by readings which refuse to cooperate with it. Like other issues raised by the Heroides, authorial voice, while certainly embedded in a Graeco-Roman cultural context, is not simply a historical issue but has a complex symbolism that goes beyond the Heroides' historical moment. This book fully respects the insight gained by more historicizing approaches. In fact, their suggestions feature as counter-options time and again in its various chapters. However, this study focuses on the symbolical and the metaphorical aspects of these feminine epistles, which have received remarkably little attention but which can establish the collection in a prominent position in contemporary debates on gender and writing. A recent article by Joe Farrell (1998) has given a significant impetus to our combined appreciation of gender and writing in the collection. His most illuminating study of the Heroides focuses on issues of rhetoricity, persuasion, duplicity, and seduction and their intricate relationship to writing. Men are aligned with duplicity and speech, and women with truthfulness, voluntary or involuntary self-disclosure, and writing. The Heroides as an epistolary form of female expression are expertly studied as tools of persuasion, within the context of the agonistic use of letters in the Ovidian

4


corpus as a whole, and especially in the Ars Amatoria. In its explicit discussion of the gendered struggles triggered by letter-writing, Farrell's study shares some fundamental interests and concerns with the present book. However, this book is a less agonistic and more consciously feminocentric reading. It is less interested in the heroines' letters as a—rather inadequate—mode of persuasion5 and more keen on using them as tools and conveyors of expressions of a female culture. On the first level, this is, indeed, a series of letters desperate to persuade. But this reading resists the overpowering first-level messages emitted by the collection; it is a reading against the grain of a sort not unprecedented in classical scholarship. However, what is more unusual and challenging is that this collection has the need for unofficial and undermining readings inscribed in it: if the Heroides have been tokens of exchange between two male gazes (and two predominant readings)—that of the historical writer and that of the dominant male Augustan reader—they also emphatically signal their need for ‘furtive’ readings through their own narrative structures and metaphors, as I hope will become clear in Chapter 2, the methodological chapter. In the wake of several brilliant close readings in recent years, I think this is the right moment to ‘stand back’ and wonder about the collection's larger-scale messages. Intertextuality still features in this book as a key tool, but, as I will explain more fully in Chapter 2, my focus is on the heroines' literary lives and literary ambitions, as opposed to Ovid's aesthetic concerns. From such a perspective, generic choices are still of importance, but for their emotional and ideological implications rather than their formal characteristics.6 In that it builds its arguments upon a schism between the voices of Ovid and the heroines, this study draws in and responds to feminist issues and preoccupations about the Graeco-Roman world. However, it is not a study of women's ‘lived reality’ modelled upon the ‘activist’ targets of historically oriented

5

Cf. Farrell (1998) esp. 322, 323, 327, 328, 329 with intelligent remarks on this unequal game.

6

I include both single and double letters but not the Epistula Sapphous : not so much because of the (strong) doubts over its authenticity as because its heroine is not exactly a figure of myth. For a recent sympathetic account of Heroides 15, see Rosati (1996a); Rimell (1999). For the authenticity of the collection in general and my stance towards it, see Ch. 2.3 below.


5

feminism:7 its range and interests fall within literature (and for the most part, within mythical discourse). Myths give us hints of social ‘reality’ which are of abundant significance for our understanding of an era, but their relation to ‘historical evidence’ is strikingly complex. Whatever the connection, however, between these feminine voices in Ovid's text and the (always already alien) everyday life of women in Greece or Rome, they serve for us as a brilliant expression of the tough (and long-lasting) negotiations behind the interpretative act. To read oneself in others' stories has often been considered to be the lot of women (and recent postmodern insight has powerfully claimed that it is also the lot of men); in fact, any modern interpreter of the classics reading the heroines' text must in a sense figure herself—or himself—in the position of the heroines, coming to terms with her—or his—own unusually complicated intertextuality. My own ‘unsparing’ use of cultural fragments from different places and different times has one distinguished predecessor, at least: Ovid himself. The ‘Text’ of these stories has already been tampered with from the very beginning. I am therefore happy to let the heroines' transcultural readings and writings of their myths slip through the fabric of Ovid's (Roman) text summoned by my own reading choices as a modern woman reader, and to embrace the doubt they instil regarding the ability of the collection to ascertain and transmit a univocal message.8 All this raises the question of my own definition of femininity, especially as it relates (or does not relate) to essentialist differentiations and discourses traditionally associated with it. Gender discourses, and, by extension, discourses of love have had to account for their essentialist credentials at a time when all essentialist footholds have been further exposed in the postmodern era. Duncan Kennedy's (1993) attempt to explain the uncomfortable rapport between essentialist stances and feminist discourse is eloquent: What […] emerges as constantly at issue in the discourses of sexuality

7

For more on activist feminism and the Classics, see Rabinowitz and Richlin (1993), and the debate on feminism and the literary canon in Classics in Helios (1990).

8

Cf. here Richlin (1995: 1–8), who reads the story of Zeus and Metis in Hesiod as a powerful metaphor for the complex and often antagonistic politics of interpretation.

6


and gender is the essentializing process of thought as a whole: is there a ‘thing’ that transcends history called ‘sexuality’ or ‘gender’? The feminist movement was instrumental in bringing into question not only the assumption that certain qualities are essentially masculine or feminine but the means by which this thinking operates. Feminists differ as to what they wish to do with these arguments. Some, having destabilized the male/female hierarchy of values would wish to maintain that some qualities remain essentially masculine or feminine, except that now the values attached to them have been re-assessed; others would wish to continue the critique of essentialism; and so the discourse continues and ramifies. (Kennedy 1993: 39)9

The Heroides are replete with gendered controversies, women ‘confronting’ men—even if from afar—and vice versa, and by focusing on this aspect of the stories I work in this book with both feminine and masculine qualities and differentiations. But a keen interest in gendering I's is already explicitly—even if not directly—expressed by the Heroides' male author, who was obviously thinking that there is a distinctive ‘women's discourse’ on which he wanted to experiment by creating these exclusively feminine narratives. This is a gendered reading consciously resisting the association with traditional concepts of essentialism: it is a reading based on texts, stories, and images; some from the Heroides collection and others from the Graeco-Roman culture from which Ovid himself drew when putting up his parade of mythical heroines. This is a book whose principal audience will be classicists, and all those interested in the classical world. It is a book on antiquity, on Ovid's Heroides and classical literature. But it is also a book intensely aware of, and intrigued by, intellectual and cultural continuities. On several occasions, elements of contemporary French feminist thought are also implicated in the discussion (especially in Chapter 3). Their incorporation is not to be received as an unqualified endorsement of the transcendental character of gender in general, or femininity in particular. Apart from a felicitous coincidence in the imagery they use to define femininity, there is much that is different in Plato's Republic or Timaeus, Ovid's Heroides, Euripides' Iphigeneia in

9

For more on the troubled relationship between essentialism and the range of ideologies which dominate the corpus of Latin love elegy, see Ch. 2 below, and esp. 2.2 and 2.3.


7

Aulis, Hélène Cixous's écriture féminine, and the Kristevan chora. And locating affinities in the images that differing, and often discordant, cultures create in order to talk about life does not assimilate these cultures in a simplistic way. And yet, these affinities—especially when they are as gripping as those of texts such as the ones mentioned above—testify to the capacity and the need of these diverging cultures to establish points of reconciliation and convergence; and this need is too important to let pass unheeded. Literary theory and critical trends are tools and not the end itself of this study. Therefore, this book will not offer extended presentations of literary theory topics; there are a good number of highly literate and detailed studies to which the reader will be able to refer through appropriate guidance given in the footnotes. Contemporary critical trends will be integrated into my close reading of the Ovidian texts, and contemporary methodologies will be grounded in the Ovidian material I discuss. I shall explore a number of ways in which modern criticism and thought can speak to classical material across the centuries, and through this, learn more about modern criticism and modern sensitivities. The life of the mind is far from linear, has never been that way: it stretches back and forth in time and place. Later developments illuminate earlier thoughts, and earlier texts are often primary struggles that are both necessary and valuable if certain channels of thought are to progress and flourish. Critical theory is not placed on a pedestal in this study; it does not deliver pristine truths as the sole tools to make these letters come alive. But through critical theory, the possibilities of understanding the Heroides multiply. Snippets of theory create a conducive environment; and issues which lie dormant between the lines of the text, and escape the attention of traditional methodologies from the Classics, can come alive under the probing of intellectual patterns from the future that recognize in these issues valuable precursors. In turn, this book offers those interested in Comparative Literature and Women's Studies a realization—or reminder—that they need to be always searching to expand their horizons of study, forwards and backwards, if they are to appreciate fully the potential of the theories they have studied. Letting oneself be continuously surprised is a most

8


creative way to improve awareness and understanding. And when the student of Women's Studies takes his or her tools and sets out to approach a different culture, his or her understanding of his or her field deepens because his or her knowledge has been tested (and twisted) along the different paths of this different material. Modern literary feminisms need the Heroides in order to keep exploring themselves, just as much as the Heroides need contemporary feminist thought in order to revitalize and invigorate their messages to the world of Classics and beyond. In the study mentioned above, Duncan Kennedy powerfully makes the case for the rhetorical nature and the mobile alterity of all major elegiac components, including gender, femininity, and love. His inspection of recent critical studies of essentialism uncovers acts of essentializing obscured by the relativistic surface of those discourses. As he suggests: representing the past as fundamentally ‘different’ involves projecting it at some level, however occluded, as also fundamentally the ‘same’.… All relativizing discourses and definitions will invoke, at some level and however provisionally, essentializing notions and vice versa, whatever ostensible positions are adopted. (Kennedy 1993: 41)

And he concludes: In adding to the essentializing question ‘what does amor/love mean?’ the supplement ‘how does amor/love mean?’, I offered the concept of a discourse of Roman elegy, in which the ‘text’ of elegy stands for, means, all the forces that moulded the text plus the appropriations that constitute its reception. (p. 44)

I am obviously in sympathy with this view of the appropriating nature of reception, but I wish to follow it up in a different direction. If Kennedy's unveiling of the constraints of relativism leads him to defer absolute meaning and interpretation, I am happy to elaborate on the heroines' urgent pleas for resolution. Relativism is supposed to numb our reactions as everything is tinted by self-conscious irony. Although there may be nothing outside but texts alluding to one another in the Heroides, still these texts echo with the heroines' gripping eagerness. My project follows the heroines' ardent pursuit of definitions and their desperate appeals to ethics with self-conscious naïvety, so to speak. The struggle for justice and truth returns, slipping through the


9

multiple ironies of these intensely self-conscious narratives. But this time it is surrounded by multiple textual frames which cannot muffle the heroines' restlessness but do prevent any one voice from claiming dominance. The heroines' testimony and indefatigable vigilance are as powerful and as vulnerable, as real and as unreal, as stories can be. This approach does not pretend to explain every motif in the collection. It does not cover all aspects of the poems, and is not even the only way of approaching gender in the collection, which has become a kind of critical mainline in recent years.10 But even though they break new ground in taking the heroines seriously,11 existing gendered approaches (just like the intertextual ones mentioned at the beginning of this section) are reluctant to question Ovid's authorial control: he is always the one to pull the strings together and pick up the pieces. So, for instance, Patricia Rosenmeyer (1996: 30) concludes her study on a ‘mailorder bride’ with this poignant description of authorial/male control while discussing Acontius and Cydippe's story and more specifically the golden apple of Her. 20. 237–40: Cydippe's name is still glaringly absent, but Acontius' … apple with its inscribed oath has been immortalised in gold. The private apple-as-letter is now made public, an open letter to be read by all passers-by. It will stand there, a monument to Acontius the master inscriber … But the writer fulfils his goal only through the silencing of the memory of Cydippe. Her name appears neither on the base of the statue nor on the golden apple itself … she is coerced, deceived, entrapped and finally here erased.

Unveiling the suppression of the feminine voice has been a valuable and much needed critical turn in classical studies, and the Heroides have had a lot to gain from arguments such as the one outlined above. What such studies cannot capture is the symbolic character of the heroines' predicament. The heroines may be passionate, and their passion is a doomed one. But this alone need not make them losers. Phyllis has an interesting (and emblematic) thought about this: careat successibus, opto, quisquis ab eventu facta notanda putat! ‘let them come to nothing, I pray,

10

Cf. here Smith (1994); P. A. Rosenmeyer (1996), (1997); Farrell (1998).

11

See e.g. P. A. Rosenmeyer (1997) 30: ‘I read the Heroides as a much more complex interplay of literary and psychological insights, a game that can be humorous in one line and deadly serious in the next.’

10


those who think to know a deed by its result!’ (Her. 2. 85–6). What Phyllis is actually saying is that not everything in literature is about the end of the story. The end is in some obvious and practical ways decisive, but it cannot erase the middle and the ideas and challenges it offers. The heroines' passion and their letters (mostly unregistered in previous literature) are exactly this middle. Their passion hurts them and brings them to their doom but it can also be seen as a kindling force behind their defiance. And this defiance is too important, too loaded with connotations, to be allowed to drift away unnoticed: it endorses literature's desire for and acceptance of alternative, resisting readings. These appropriative readings may turn out to be ephemeral, and new readers will step in to collect Penelope's wandering message in a bottle. But without the interpretative and interceptive readings of the heroes, the strangers expected to carry further Penelope's message, and ourselves, the Heroides might still have made it into the canon of literature, but the heroines' letters would never have been ‘unsealed’. Chapter 2 elaborates the main interpretative strategies of my approach and argues for its position within the wider context of the existing scholarship on the Heroides. The first section of Chapter 2 draws a rough map of the main lines of enquiry that have been traced by critics so far. It briefly sketches the passage from the earlier derogatory comments on the heroines' portraits to the more recent interest in the subtle intertextual games played by Ovid in these deeply self-conscious narratives. The rest of Chapter 2 delineates the main preoccupations of my own approach in the light of the insight gained and impasses reached by the previous critical strands. I start by demonstrating the need to listen to the heroines' separate voices, which are in danger of becoming muffled by the intricate intertextual links created by critics as they focus on Ovid's own skill and interests. The chapter continues by suggesting ways of achieving this task of listening to the feminine, by drawing attention to the multiplicity of writing subjects at work inside and outside the collection and the subsequent importance of reading practices in the interpretation of these texts. Having thus delineated the main targets of this approach (and provided the main disclaimers necessary for a study of the


11

feminine voice in a male-authored text), the chapters that follow engage in an appropriative and metapoetic reading of the heroines' creative efforts, structured around a main metaphor that runs through all the remaining chapters: each heroine's struggle for control over her own gloomy destiny is also a female artist's effort to (re)write her story against the will of the classical authorities. The heroines' love letters are tokens of their authorship—women's writings—and their (re)writings betray their (re)readings of the world that they have been living in—women's readings. Chapter 3, in a sense, delays this exposition of feminine writing, drawing attention to what I call a rhetoric of innocence, an idiom of Golden Age nostalgia which marks the poems with a quest for life before writing. In many ways, this is the least self-conscious chapter of all: the heroines have not yet taken up their artistic tasks. They long for (emotional and artistic) purity, but, as self-conscious readers and writers, they cannot articulate this idiom and every effort they make to approach their pre-lapsarian ideal is an extra step away from it. But it is from within this sombre ambience of struggle that the heroines' writing emerges, appropriately signalling the strains of feminine writing within a male-dominated world. Chapter 4 is the chapter concerned with the heroines' feminine voice par excellence. Building on the metapoetic metaphor of the heroines' artistic awakening, I follow their efforts to establish their own discourse and turn themselves from scriptae puellae (‘written girls’) to writing women, whose flowing narrative responds to descriptions of the female nature and creativity from ancient philosophy to modern French feminism. Specific emphasis is given to the symbolic significance of their (in)famous and much derided enclosure, which, in my reading, is prompted to reveal powerful characteristics of a feminine space and a feminine order. Chapters 5 and 6 follow up specific generic aspects of the heroines' ‘discovered’ idiom. Recontextualizing the collection outside its elegiac boundaries, Chapter 5 explores the Heroides as letters and Chapter 6 as short stories. My main interest in both chapters is with the interdependence of gender and genre and the effect of this interdependence on the creation and manipulation of the stories that we read in the Heroides. Different formulations

12


of men's and women's writing and time emerge, in reference to both generic practices, which I explore through the gendered observations offered in metaphorical form by the texts themselves. In contrast with the preceding chapters, Chapters 5 and 6 are especially interested in juxtaposing male and female modes of constructing a story. As a result, they include a significant amount of the heroes' discourse from the double Heroides. As I explain there, the heroes' alliances are not always with Ovid, and yet they are a link between him and the heroines and at times put forward those ‘thoughts’ of Ovid which bring him closer to the heroines' voices. Symbolically, especially in Chapter 6, Ovid is ‘invited in again’. But, this time, he ‘does not have the last word’, and I will return to this at the beginning of that chapter.

2 Reading Characters Read: On Methodology 1. THE HEROIDES AND THEIR CRITICS: INSIGHTS AND IMPASSE Up until the middle of the twentieth century, the Heroides were seen mainly as witty and useful exercises for the rhetorical education of the young. But the literary evaluation of the collection was almost entirely derogatory. At their best, the Heroides were looked at as little gems advertising Ovid's linguistic wit, but more often they were deplored as a rather unfortunate slip of an anyway not very respectable dilettante author.12 But the rhetorical features could not, of course, account for the entire composition of the poems. Though elegies in form, the Heroides are also consciously fashioned as letters. At the same time they promote themselves as strikingly vivid monologues integrated in an imaginary but explicitly evoked dramatic setting. Additionally, as monologues of a ‘personal’ nature, they have been linked with the female monologues of archaic lyric or Hellenistic poetry.13 This plurality of signals prompted the critics to see the collection as an impressive case of generic fusion,14 justifying Ovid's claim to originality on behalf of his collection as stated (at AA 3. 345–6). The Heroides may have

12

For extensive bibliographic selections see Jacobson (1974) 414–17; Rosati (1989) 59–62; Spoth (1992) 235–50.

13

Cf. e.g. Alcaeus fr. 10 (L–P) and the carmen Grenfellianum in Powell (1925) 177–9, respectively, and Jacobson (1974) 338–47.

14

Cf. e.g. Dörrie (1967), who talks about a mixture assimilating suasorial, epistolary, and elegiac traits. Jacobson (1974: esp. 319–48) offers a noteworthy survey of the literary antecedents of the Heroides. His analysis illuminates the complex interrelations, in both Greek and Latin literature, between rhetoric, elegy, epistle, monologue, and the other literary classifications seen as antecedents for the Heroides.

14

READING CHARACTERS READ: ON METHODOLOGY

been a blend of a number of pre-existing forms, but ‘the whole is surely much more than the sum of its parts’,15 and it was in this idiosyncratic synthesis that the controversial novelty of the œuvre was located. This generic diversity, however, rendered the question of how to read the collection all the more urgent but also perplexing, as the poems' assertive syncretism naturally brought about a clash of expectations in the critics' minds, which inevitably led to conflicting judgements on the whole corpus. Encouraged by the elevated subject-matter of the texts, some critics chose to read the stories as heart-breaking renditions of the classical myths, but others were more impressed by Ovid's wit and turned to the collection expecting to be entertained. For most critics, the subjectivity of these confessional narratives was never a real issue, and Ovid collected all the credit—or, as more often, the blame. Even though several of the Heroides' predecessors, most notably Homeric Penelope, Euripidean Medea, and Virgilian Dido, have attracted considerable attention (even if discussions have not exactly flattered them), the heroines of our collection were restricted to a cursory glance and relegated to the status of two-dimensional caricatures. An important step forward was achieved by Howard Jacobson (1974), still the standard and most far-reaching book-length study of the Heroides. Breaking with tradition, Jacobson (p. 7) wholeheartedly embraces Ovid's serious intentions regarding the heroines, dismissing his humour and wit as a distraction, because they blur and block the perspective of the love and letters, the perspective of the heroines: The Heroides, a spectrum of love and lovers, is almost ipso facto, in its deheroization of the mythic material and in its rejection of the male viewpoint, a denial of the Augustan (and Virgilian, at least as envisioned in the Aeneid) ideal.

The shift is unmistakable and significant and promises a more

15

Jacobson (1974) 348. See also Steinmetz (1987) 131–2; Spoth (1992) 209–14, who offers a different (to me unconvincing) interpretation of A A 3. 345–6; Laguna-Mariscal (1994), who sees Statius' reference to Penelope and Laodamia as veteres Graias heroidas (‘ancient Greek heroines’) in Silv. 3. 5. 44–9 as a literary denomination of an established literary ‘genre in the thematic sense of the term, although actual examples could appear in different formal genres, ranging from lyric to epic, from elegy to epyllion’ (pp. 355–6).


15

rounded inspection of the heroines' characters.16 And yet, the study soon abandons focus on the heroines' characters and perspectives, which are once again subsumed under Ovid's art and, more precisely, his artistic failure: The faults which detract from the achievement of the Heroides are generally those which seem, one might say, congenital to Ovid and are recurrent in most of his work. Here as elsewhere nescit quod bene cessit relinquere: points are made and made again, poems carried on further than taste and need dictate … (Jacobson 1974: 7)

More importantly, when put under the spotlight, the heroines' personalities and psychology failed to meet the standards set by Jacobson's study. The various sections on the individual letters are replete with his disappointed comments on their ‘psychopathology’, particularly in relation to their dignified, classical arch-models. The heroines briefly move to the centre of the stage, only to be subjected to new concerns about Ovid, and serve as interpretative tools in renewed debate on the relations of the poet with Virgil and the rest of the previous literature. Jacobson's extended analyses and views gave ample food for thought. A couple of years later, the debate on the wit, distance, and authorial indifference of the Ovidian collection was renewed, as David Vessey (1976: 94) warned us that ‘The poet at play is not necessarily the poet trivialised’, ascribing a good deal of the critical discomfort vis-à-vis Ovidian wit to the inherent difficulty of the twentieth century in appreciating humour that depends closely on words: In antiquity, with its belief in rhetoric, truly understood, not only as a pivot for the educational process but also as a fundamental basis for humanitas and for the maintenance of social order, the problem did not arise… Through humor and artifice, through irony and detachment, Ovid passed on the Rome of Augustus with its pretentiousness, conservatism and grandiosity. (Vessey 1976: 107–8)

Uneasiness about the Heroides, or rather the heroines, was growing as Ovid's ingenium frustrated the critics while the heroines' fragile behaviour puzzled them. And yet, in spite of the confusion, the awareness that the heroines could no longer be unproblematically equated with the Heroides was steadily growing, and became apparent in the second book-length monograph

16

Cf. also Jacobson (1974) 349–62.

16


on the collection, that of Florence Verducci (1985). In a highly idiosyncratic and witty discourse, the book sets off to explain the much misunderstood and much derided ‘transgressions against decorum and good taste’ (p. 289) that had constantly unnerved the supporters of the serious in the œuvre. However, her defence of Ovid's wit and good taste is on the whole at the expense of the heroines themselves, who are typically presented as bathetic developments of their dignified models, often verging on the ridiculous.17 However witty and succinct at points, such an uncharitable perspective cannot be the only view on the Heroides, still less the only way to present the heroines to the world. But the challenge of supporting Ovid against the heroines, or—perhaps more significantly—supporting the heroines against Ovid was by now on the agenda. Some critics had already been willing to present those powerless and abandoned women in a more sympathetic fashion. As early as 1973 W. S. Anderson had realized that Ovid's achievement and the heroines' image were seriously tarnished through their comparison with canonic artists. For this reason in his own presentation of the heroines, especially Dido (his case study), he deliberately foregrounded their calculated difference, building on the fundamental contrast between a cunning Ovidian Dido and her hopeless and pitiful Virgilian counterpart.18 Of course, the reader's prior knowledge of these famous plots cannot really be renounced; Dido, for example, does not escape without a telling critique: though ‘clever’ and ‘witty’, she is also ‘hopeless’, ‘static’, and ‘pathetic’. And, more importantly, this enlightened presentation of the heroines is eventually sealed with a reminder of their ‘doomed vitality’.19 However, W. S. Anderson's article clearly put the heroines on a level with Ovid when he declared that after all ‘we remain aware of his clever fiction, but we are also easily trapped into responding sympathetically to their unhappiness in love’ (1973: 66 (my emphasis)). Anderson's primary appreciation of the ‘I’ of the heroines as a separate voice in the collection and a courier of a distinct message

17

Cf. Cahoon (1988) 276: ‘Verducci puts herself unnecessarily on the defensive … with unjustifiably savage assessments of the heroines …’.

18

See W. S. Anderson (1973) esp. 61–4.

19

See e.g. W. S. Anderson (1973) 51, 54, 55, 67.


17

was reflected in Gustav Seeck's (1987) subsequent study of the collection. Intrigued by the impressive multivalence of tone registered in the letters, Seeck's article did not try in the time-honoured manner to explain away puzzlement through easy condemnation. Without concealing his puzzlement in the face of the heroines' manifold and unpredictable identities, Seeck alluded to a sort of subjectivity, perhaps latent but also more accomplished than the sum of Ovid's generic experiments could ever produce. As Seeck implied, for all its confusion, this is an ‘I’ which goes beyond Ovid's ‘technical’ trials, even if it was initially designed as one of them. Invested with this sort of subjectivity, the heroines become models for self-confident, self-centred, and self-important literary characters of a distinctly modern appeal (see especially p. 467). However intuitive or hesitant—and not without regressive moments—such studies may appear, they should still be seen as valuable precursors in the long process of recuperation of the heroines' voices. They tentatively proposed a need to come to terms with the literariness of the heroines' ‘I’. That is, to construct their consciousness on the basis of the textual testimonies of the past, which pulled these figures together, gave them a past and a future, things to lament, and things to rejoice in. But the path for an informed and systematic exploration of this literary identity had by then been trodden, as I explain next. By the middle of the 1980s classical studies had made their acquaintance with post-structuralist concerns. Reacting to the remains of biographical biases but also to the totalizations of mid-century Structuralism, postmodern frames of thought established the sovereignty of textual realities above any other reality, and foregrounded a vigorous belief in literature as an intriguing and unpredictable structure, independent of authorial intentions and open-ended. Such faith in multiple communication between literary entities provided a jolt in classical studies and a powerful tool for new readings that were to break open the boundaries, and consequently the import, of individual texts: intertextuality. ‘Intertextuality’ is a web of relationships that link together a number of passages so that the significance of any one passage becomes an amalgam of suggestions and connotations residing in all the different inter-textual link-sites. Shifting the emphasis from the author's

18


intentions (commonly termed ‘allusion’), contemporary inter-textual studies view this multiple connectedness as a drive inherent in language and in the linguistic structures that comprise literary texts. This new perception of language sees the texts as inherently self-conscious and self-reflexive, that is with an intrinsic tendency to comment on their nature and their position within past (but also forthcoming) literature. In the light of the self-conscious messages of Hellenistic poetry, discovered in previous decades, this theoretical shift towards the examination of the structures of the text per se was perceived as particularly pertinent to certain areas of classical literature (such as, pre-eminently, the Augustan period) and produced a boom of narratological and metapoetic studies, which has yet to subside.20 The new critical trends found particularly fertile ground in the Heroides. Duncan Kennedy (1984) has become a standard reference point ever since.21 Imaginatively responding to the call to textuality, and using Penelope's letter as his case study, Kennedy pinpointed specific moments in the model-texts of the past where the narrative developments of the collection could be located. Soon afterwards, Alessandro Barchiesi laid out the theory of this approach in connection with Ovid in general, and the Heroides in particular. ‘Poetry’, he explained, ‘has traditionally been considered as a course tracing a poet's development. But it is actually also a path from one text to another’ (Barchiesi 1986: 103). A few lines earlier, he had made clear that this was of particular importance especially for the Heroides: ‘There is a space, an already written textual existence of these stories, that each new Ovidian story has to intersect.’ This last idea was further exploited a year later in another article which considered these stories as ‘blank points’ that reformulate certain narrative silences in the illustrious plots that fostered the heroines.22 By this, Barchiesi expanded and furthered in diverse ways the implications of Kennedy's 1984 article. It is indeed difficult to overestimate the significance of these studies for the Heroides' deliverance from the contemptuous

20

For a lucid account of the theory of intertextuality see Preminger and Brogan (1993) s.v. See also Edmonds (1995); Fowler (1997); Hinds (1998); Hinds and Fowler (1997) for a range of intertextual approaches to individual texts.

21

Taken further/challenged in Henderson (1986).

22

Barchiesi (1987) esp. 65–6 and passim.


19

oblivion to which they had been consigned. As interest in the quirks and twists of the texts flourished, light was shed on the intense self-consciousness and intricate intertextual meanderings of the Ovidian letters.23 And yet, as we shall see in the next section, the road to the heroines' deliverance still had hurdles to clear.

2. OVID, THE HEROINES, AND THE CASE FOR A TEXTUAL INTER-SUBJECTIVITY Not surprisingly, renewed textual concerns also boosted curiosity regarding the genre of the collection. And this path proved both intriguing and fruitful: determined to give an effective response to the embarrassment of earlier criticism, the new approach stressed the elegiac nature of the collection, which was considered the key tool to account for many—if not all—of the heroines' traits. Penelope, Phaedra, Medea, Helen, and the other abandoned women of the Greek myth were particularly exciting in their new environment, this trend suggested, exactly because they had subsumed under the brief and slender outlook of the elegiac code the wide and robust worlds of epic and tragedy. Gianpiero Rosati was amongst the first to trace a systematic picture of the heroines' elegiac ego as they acted and reacted following elegiac topoi, established and well tried out in other elegiac corpora by Ovid himself as well as the other elegists before him.24 This challenge was taken fully on board in Friedrich Spoth's monograph—the third booklength study of the Heroides—a learned and ardent diatribe for the ‘elegiacity’ of the Ovidian corpus (Spoth 1992). There is indeed an abundance of learned detail in this book. There is also a significant claim: namely, that such a manœuvre, the elegization of myth in the Heroides, broadens the horizons and gives a lease of life to what was a ‘thin’ genre bound to exhaust itself soon (p. 222). The same argument, though, can be convincingly flipped: ‘thin’ as it is, Roman elegy was bound to seek an exit out of its narrow-focused elegiac code. In fact, this was eloquently argued by Gian Biagio Conte in an article expertly depicting the ‘natural development’

23

See e.g. Hinds (1993); Barchiesi (1993); Casali (1995a), (1995b).

24

See e.g. Rosati (1992) esp. 73–85; Rosati (1985) with a specific focus on Phaedra.

20


of the genre of Roman elegy, namely the drive out of it. According to that article, the exit comes with the Remedia Amoris: the Heroides are nowhere mentioned. But the logic of the piece directly points to them. The elegiac world is a suffocating, self-consuming world. Elegiac love and its conventions as ‘correlated thematics of elegiac “closure”’ mark this claustrophobic universe.25 A Remedy is then needed to break the confinement within the enclosed space of subjective elegy and to bring to the fore ‘other worlds, other values, other models and other discourses… other literary genres to which the same kind of legitimacy must be accorded’ (Conte 1989: 460). For Conte, the way out can be achieved through authorial irony and didactic objectivity, and through figures such as that of the lena (‘procuress’) or the praeceptor amoris (‘teacher of love’), whose superior understanding will bring to the fore the partial vision and point of view of the elegiac genre. And yet, the heroines of the Heroides seem to me to fulfil a similar role, thanks to their hybrid nature—another cry for escape from elegiac closure. Conte's remarks are meant to describe a literary handicap, but they actually put the finger on a critical impasse as well. If ‘the text must make use of the acknowledged partiality of the world of elegy to indicate the existence of the advantages of other worlds which lovers can escape to’, such is the case with critical discourse as well. Elegy's embracing of other genres, discourses, and worlds through the Heroides is an outward just as much as an inward process, if not more so. There is only a certain amount of elegizing of the Heroides' hybrid world that can and should be done. Much worthwhile work has already been accomplished along these lines. But there is still a lot to be done outwards, i.e. by means of observing the heroines' ‘dismantling’ of the elegiac puella in the interests of a larger feminine consciousness. The need for a fresh turning point in the Heroides' appreciation was succinctly voiced by Alessandro Barchiesi in a review article in 1995. Considering the psychological portrait of Helen offered by Hintermeier (1993) on the double Heroides, he takes the opportunity to propose a possible way out of the impasses of both impressionistic/psychological and intertextual readings of the Heroides:

25

Conte (1989) 448, 450, and passim.


21

It is almost unavoidable that research based on psychological standards of realism describes the Ovidian Helen as ‘geradezu schizophren’ (42). [However, t]his could be the beginning of another piece of research, if one is prepared to frame together psychology and intertextuality. … I would be glad to see the problem of character combined with the poetic consciousness created by intertextuality. (Barchiesi 1995: 327)

Opening the way to exploration of the heroines' ‘own’ and separate textual life and character was an inspired move. And yet, if that blend of psychology and intertextuality were to work, intertextuality had to reconstruct itself in order to take up the challenge. For all their subtle observations, and even though they turned the spotlight on hitherto neglected figures, the games played by the advocates of intertextuality were largely played at the expense of their own protagonists. The intricate textual links function to an important degree on a level above that of the heroines. Sergio Casali's articles, particularly that on Phaedra (1995a), are especially strong examples of this. His acute observations on the complexities of Phaedra's letter standardly appeal to Ovid or a supervising reader-observer as accomplice in order for these complexities to be understood: ‘In the programmatic use of the designation “the Amazon's son”, Ovid reveals himself to be an attentive reader of Euripides' (p. 2); ‘The reader knows that Hippolytus will not read the letter all the way through’ (3); ‘Did Ovid read Euripides in this way?’ (4); ‘… but Ovid, on the other hand, was sufficiently perverse a reader to recognize the element of inappropriateness in the exemplum of Cephalus’ (6). The main drive behind that study, as well as the other intertextual studies discussed in the previous section, is engagement with the all-encompassing authorial irony, Ovid's sharp and, at times, devastating irony, an authorial winking of the eye at the reader in the absence of the heroine. One of the first explicit invitations to such a learned game is to be found in Kennedy's primary intertextual study, when he discusses Dido's welcoming of Sychaeus' voice (Her. 7. 103 ff.): Ovid's Dido is trying, as always, to play on the feelings of Aeneas, but Ovid himself has an ulterior purpose in making his Dido welcome the ghostly voice of Sychaeus. His readers remember from the Aeneid that she will be reunited with Sychaeus in the Underworld (6. 473–5), but Dido when she is writing this letter cannot, of course, know that. Ovid is trying to foreshadow future events for his readers through his words,

22


a technique that is an important but neglected aspect of the Heroides, and one that must be dependent on the knowledge of the story the reader brings to Ovid's version. (Kennedy 1984: 420)26

There is no doubt that this is first-class intertextuality, fully capable of triggering a renewed appreciation of the merit of Heroides, and the same applies to other intertextual studies discussed in the previous section. But ultimately the exercise is still at the expense of the heroines themselves, who have their own intertextual interests, as writers and creators of their own myth. If this intertextual life matters, as I believe it does, for its ability to signify a woman's reading, then it is not, or not adequately, covered by observations such as the above-mentioned quotation. Though explicitly setting out to study the difference of the heroines' ‘own words’ and ‘own stories’ as they broke away from the canonical versions, what has really been given centre-stage in these stories was Ovid's intricate mastery of the previous texts. As a result, and although intertextuality is the study of the texts par excellence, the text is once more abandoned, as its independent existence gets subsumed under its frame: if we know that ‘Hippolytus will not read the letter all the way through’, Phaedra does not, and this makes all the difference for her story, as opposed to Ovid's story, if we accept this distinction. This books seeks to fill (some of) these gaps in the intertextual work on the Heroides, aspiring to bring the world of the Ovidian heroines alive. Such a reading refuses to be lured into accepting predetermined frames and closed overviews of the heroines' wor(l)d, and allows itself to be surprised by the speaking subjects. This is territory brilliantly mapped by the French feminist thinker Julia Kristeva. Condemning the rigidity and repression of the Saussurean view of language as a homogeneous and predictable system, Kristeva suggests an alternative integer unit for modern linguistics: the speaking subject.27 In the hands of the speaking subject, language, and human expression for that matter, is no longer a monolithic, over-determined system, but an ongoing, unpredictable process. Kristeva suggested the need for contemporary linguistics to embrace the speaking subject, in

26

Cf. here Barchiesi (1987) 70, 90, and passim.

27

See here Moi (1985) 151–3 and 99–101. The splits and rafts of a fractured subject, as a vital (anarchic) unit in our communication, are also dealt with in Kristeva (1981), e.g. 99–100, 124–5, 135–6, 185–6, 237–43.


23

an attempt to condemn social and political oppression through language and expose the inadequacy of such a fixed and fixing mechanism to represent satisfactorily the tumultuous changes of the individual and the society of her time. Kristeva's political and social preoccupations are obviously worlds apart from the abandoned heroines' reckless protestations. And yet, the heroines, as primary precursors of Kristeva's speaking subject, are a forcible exemplification of the resistance against centralized power that she mobilizes. When seen as primary precursors of Kristeva's speaking subject, the full capacity and the potential of the heroines' dissenting character can be fathomed. As speaking subjects from another era, Penelope, Medea, Helen, and the rest condemn the closure of their stories, the arrogant master narratives, and their male authors. According to Kristeva, subversion and dissonance are inherent in language as the sole way to express the uncontained changes and mutation in consciousness and society. When this dissonance is not allowed to surface, subversion becomes an undercurrent. The heroines are perfect examples of this undercurrent of discomfort and restlessness within a robustly patriarchal society. As disrupted subjects, unfinished (unfixed) entities (sujets en procès), they are bound to seek expression and identity as they converse, speak, and engage with one another. In the heroines' hands, the text forgets and breaks free from its predetermined fate and causality, as the words dance, shift, plunge ahead, and regress in unforeseen and ever-mutating ways. This is the heroines' polyphonic story, and it is the fabric of the carnivalesque, where language, in Kristeva's own words, escapes linearity (law) to live as drama.28 A final thought from the same study brings Kristeva's subject and the protagonists of our stories strikingly close: like the heroines' personalized expressions, the carnivalesque, as Kristeva conceives it, is in fundamental contrast with the monologism of the epic (p. 80).29 The present book acknowledges these texts' intricate intertextual status and has profited a lot from the mass of detailed work already mentioned. The reader and his or her intertextual connections are still of primary importance—and I will soon

28

See Kristeva (1981) 64–91, esp. 77–80.

29

For more on these notions and a wider coverage of Kristeva's work see Kristeva (1975), (1981), (1984); Moi (1986); Oliver (1997).

24


turn to further discussion of this. But the intertextual meander that will follow will be a reflection of the life and interests of the characters as they are staged in the ‘play of language’, rather than an attempt to reconstruct the director's authorial intent.30

3. DECENTRING THE TEXT: THE JOURNEY AWAY FROM OVID Talk about the intricate signification of the elegiac voice is not a novelty in the field of Roman love elegy. The decisive turn was made already in the seventies, when Judith Hallett outlined what she called the Roman elegy's ‘counter-cultural feminism’ (Hallett 1973), namely a systematic ‘violation of general behavioral principles’ (pp. 241–62) which Hallett detected while observing modes of male and female conduct within Roman love poetry, and which, as she suggests, puts the elegiac corpus in discord with the upper-class environment that fostered it. Ever since, scholarship has taken up varying positions in regard to the genre's complex treatment of Roman attitudes to the genders.31 One mode of criticism focuses on the fluidity and interchangeability of gender features as these are allocated to the lover-poet and his elegiac puella. This blend of gender behaviours in the personality of the Roman male elegiac poet can be read into constructions of Roman society (or perhaps the Roman elite in particular).32 Men were not excluded from the feminine, and, particularly relevant to the Heroides, Roman men were not excluded from feminine writings and readings, just as femininity

30

Cf. here Cahoon (1990), Met. 5, respectively.

31

For a thorough discussion of the various critical modes investigating the gendered aspects of the elegiac corpus, see Wyke (1995).

32

At this point, one has to acknowledge, of course, the limitations of literary evidence in terms of historical validity. Critics have certainly ‘found’ a similar erasure of gender boundaries in ‘realistic’ discourses of the period as well (see e.g. Hallett (1990): 193 and passim ). But the distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘reality’ is one much deconstructed in recent criticism. If the real nature of men and women at Rome is in any case always already constructed, a site for negotiation, then the question is reduced to what genres of texts are included in those constructs.

(1996)

in two especially powerful articles with similar distinctions in the case of the story of Ceres in Fast.

4 and Calliope's song in


25

was not only constructed by both Roman men and women, but also inscribed in both Roman men and women.33 Barbara Gold's article explores vivid instances of this masquerade, this appearance of the elegiac ego on ‘stage’ as the feminine.34 Moreover, research on gender play in Propertius has naturally focused on Book 4 of his elegies, where, in a manner vividly reminiscent of the Ovidian heroines, Cynthia is allowed a first-person narrative, as are Tarpeia, Acanthis, Cornelia, and Arethusa. In particular, Arethusa's letter to her absent beloved and Caesar's soldier, Lycotas (4. 3), has been considered a likely source of inspiration for the Heroides, even though the argument has been marred by the impossibility of relative dating of the two poems.35 Whatever the chronological obscurities, the prominent theatrical quality of this last book, and especially of the Vertumnus poem (4. 2),36 is an eloquent narrativization of the constructed nature of gender perceptions. Far from being limited to biological features, femininity becomes a set of behaviours acquired through the education and social training of each individual.37 However, elegiac counter-feminism has not gained critical consensus. At the opposite side to those who see an interchangeability of gender features at work in the elegiac corpus, a series of interpretations has drawn attention to the discursive control of the narrating ego over the written puella of the elegies.38 According to this critical stance, the female subjectivity that emerges through the elegiac poems is a seriously limited and sketchy construct ‘employed in the text as a means of defining the male’.39 The same critics acknowledge the wider and less invigilated presence of women in Book 4 of Propertius, but do

33

Cf. Loraux (1990) on the gendered ambivalence surrounding a milestone of Greek myth, namely Hercules.

34

Gold (1993) 87–93. Cf. also Hallett (1989) 75 n. 17.

35

See Fedeli (1965) ad loc.

36

Cf. here Wyke (1995) 121–4.

37

The cultural construction and symbolical value of gender characteristics is a hot issue for contemporary feminism. Cf. e.g. Ortner (1974); Butler (1990); Irigaray (1993). But the cultural and symbolic character of gender traits is also part of the (modern constructions of) Roman perceptions of gender as well. Cf. e.g. Gleeson (1995); Edwards (1993) 63–97.

38

See e.g. Wyke (1987a), (1987b); Sharrock (1991a), (1991b); Wyke (1995) esp. 111–13, 117–21.

39

Wyke (1995) 118.

26


not consider them independent from the structures of male authority.40 Taking sides in this debate over the hierarchies of gendered expression in the elegiac discourse directly affects the understanding and appreciation of the Heroides. For the advocates of a counter-cultural feminism, Ovid was contaminated by inherited literary images as well as the anticipations and prerogatives linked to feminine nature by the Roman culture of his age. These first-person mythical narratives cloak the authorial ‘I’ and their lack of assertiveness contrasts vividly with the certainty of characters such as the lena (‘procuress’) or the praeceptor amoris (‘teacher of love’) in the rest of Ovid's elegiac work. The Ovidian epistolary collection can, therefore, register as one further (and particularly intricate) expression of the gender mobility that has come to be recognized as essential for the understanding of the elegiac genre. In many ways, formal renunciation of this authority foreshadows the polyphony and indeterminacy of the Metamorphoses, a plurality with diverse gendered and other implications.41 Furthermore, Ovid has already been credited with an intense understanding of, or charged with a deep curiosity about, female psychology, as displayed especially in the Tristia, and, of course, the Heroides.42 Nonetheless, in sceptical readings, the situation is complicated by Ovid's manipulative presence, backstage, behind the heroines' dramatic self-representation. And indeed, there is enough material to justify such a concern. All the letters are permeated by explicit expressions of lament and impotent emotionality. This sceptical mode would allow very little space

40

See here e.g. Wyke (1995: esp. 123), who compares the subjectivity of the women in Propertius' Book 4 to the circumscribed representation of women in Athenian drama.

41

Cf. e.g. Gamel (1984); Janan (1988); Cahoon (1996).

42

Cf. Jacobson (1974) 7; Spoth (1992) 59–62. On the exile poetry see, for example, Hallett (1990) esp. 191–4 on Tristia ; De Luce (1993) 318 on Ex Ponto 2. 6. On links between the Heroides and the exile poetry, see also Hinds (1985) 14–16, 27–8; Rhan (1958). For Ovid's concern with shifting gender identities throughout his poetry, see especially the episodes of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in Met. 4. 285–388 and Iphis and Ianthe in Met. 9. 670–797. For comments on Ovid's ‘insight into female nature’ but also on his ‘misogyny’, see Culham (1990) 163 nn. 21–5.


27

for self-expression to the heroines. Abandoned by their companions, they deploy a narrative of entreaty, which emphasizes their helplessness, exclusion, and passivity. Indeed, it would not be particularly daring to suggest that these letters were triggered by male fantasies and have repeatedly nourished such fantasies as readings. When Penelope calls herself a ‘powerless wife’ (sine viribus uxor, 1. 97) and Briseis the ‘captive’ and ‘lowly slave’ of Achilles (victorem captiva sequar, ‘I will follow my conqueror as a captive’, 3. 69; nos humiles famulaeque tuae data pensa trahemus, ‘humble, and as your slave, I will carry through the given task’, 3. 75) they signify convincingly the thematic closure of their stories: both of them are figures trapped and immobilized, tokens of exchange between two male gazes, that of the historical writer and the dominant male Augustan reader. And the closure is endorsed in modern times, by the prevalent critical positions taken over the Heroides, as outlined in the first section of this chapter. I do not want to deny the intricacies of the Ovidian ego in the Heroides, but I do want to shift the focus of the above dilemma, placing it onto the signals ‘given’ by the structure of the poems themselves. To put it succinctly, certainty (emotional as well as interpretative) is undermined through the very construction of the Ovidian collection. Given the inaccessibility of their lover, as exemplified by the ‘lack of postal facilities’ faced by some of them—notably Ariadne in the total seclusion of Naxos—the heroines' letters read as a personal fantasy stubbornly held against all odds. And yet, despite these postal difficulties, the combative-even-more-than-unhappy heroines rage, cajole, assert, and beg throughout the collection, eagerly seeking to convince the ever-absent addressee of their love. In the dominant cliché of modern criticism, ‘meaning is always realised at the point of reception’.43 With or without Ovid's consent, the

43

Martindale (1993) 3. The phrase reflects the current sovereignty of readeroriented criticism. On the reasons for the ‘death of the author’, cf. Freund (1987) 5: ‘the swerve to the reader assumes that our relationship to reality is not a positive knowledge but a hermeneutic construct, that all perception is already an act of interpretation, that the notion of a “text” in itself is empty, that the poem cannot be understood in isolation from its results and that the subject and the object are indivisibly bound’. For more on the appropriative nature of reader-oriented criticism of the classical texts, see Martindale (1991), and (1993) esp. 1–34. For the relationship between reader and text in the field of Classics in general, see Arethusa (1986). Cf. also Sharrock (1994a) esp. 1–20, and (1994b) esp. 97 f., 103 f., on the intricate relationship between author, text, and reader in another Ovidian work, the Ars Amatoria.

28


epistolary form of the poems itself narrativizes the texts' demand of a reader, while the precariousness of these letters' long journeys to the vanished addressees further acknowledges and welcomes interceptive readings from the world ‘outside’. The stranger to whom Penelope is about to entrust her letter (as well as all the other unknown sailors that had received a similar letter before him (Her. 1. 59–62)) is a powerful reminder of the collection's eager need for intermediaries, contingent ‘extradiegetic’ addressees whose readings can further disperse the messages of this collection.44 In other words, the basic narrative modes that run through the Heroides allow in multiple addressees at different points in time, inviting them to indulge in unpredictable and transgressive readings.45 I come now to my own reading of the Ovidian Heroides. A group of famous literary women wake up from their (literary) trance—if we are to acknowledge the metaphorical value of Ariadne's famous awakening on a deserted Naxos—to find themselves cut off in a lonely land, whose literal or emotional aridity is an eloquent signifier of their static poetic lot, fixed as they are in literary history by the masculine certainty of the master narratives that created them. In this sense, the heroines'

44

The metaphor of the book's desire to meet its readers is not new. Horace, in Ep. 1. 20. 1–4, compares the eagerness of his book to escape from its author's overprotective control with a young lover's desire to flirt (or sell himself): Vertumnum Ianumque, liber, spectare videris, / scilicet ut prostes Sosiorum pumice mundus. / odisti clavis et grata sigilla pudico; / paucis ostendi gemis et communia laudas, ‘You seem to be gazing at Vertumnus and Janus, my book. Clearly, you want to stand on sale, smoothed by the Sosii's pumice. You detest the keys and the seals pleasing to modesty. You moan when shown to few and praise public exposure.’ Cf. also Martial, Epigr. 1.3.9–11 along very similar lines. It is worth noting that, unlike the heroines-as-authors, the personae of Horace and Martial appear particularly reluctant to let the book meet their readers, as we learn from the wider context of the above passages.

45

Modern psychoanalytical thought has heavily built on this image of the purloined letter: it is, to be precise, a kind of erratic wandering of the signifier (which in Lacan's imagery is reflected in the concept of the purloined letter) that constructs the self, during the signifier's journey ‘around’ the subjects. Lacan's own theory on this is to be found in his ‘Seminar on Poe's “The Purloined Letter” ’ in Lacan (1966). A good short discussion of this essay can be found in Benvenuto and Kennedy (1986) 91–102. Cf. also Felman (1987) 27–51.


29

struggle for control over their own destinies is really these feminine literary figures' effort to (re)write their stories, against the will of the classical authorities. Their love letters are the tokens of their authorship—women's writings. And their (re)writings betray their (re)readings of the world that they have been living in—women's readings. Once such an assumption is made, the apparently secluded and immobilized world of the Heroides is disturbed by a series of overlapping schemata: the heroines become at the same time protagonists and critics, readers and writers, lovers and interpreters. And the consequences of such a semantic multivalence are vertiginous: if we accept the heroines both as characters in and critics of their stories, this also means that they are at the same time inside and outside the text. Their thematic plot is continually turned into their metapoetical investigations and their metapoetical investigations dictate and direct their thematic advances. Obviously, such a hypothesis still views the meta-discourse on structures as a necessity for the appreciation of these poems, but this time the poet's elegiac ego is split between the heroine and Ovid. The chapters that follow will discuss various aspects of the heroines' poetic skill, as traced in a preliminary way above, and they will try to do justice to the multivalence of their talent. At this point, I will content myself with discussing briefly what we could call a paradigmatic expression of this suppressed and also indomitable creativity, that can be found in Heroides 17, Helen of Troy's furtive letter to Paris during the latter's visit to Sparta. Helen's artistic endeavour is self-consciously exposed already by the second line of the letter: Nunc oculos tua cum violarit epistula nostros, non rescribenti gloria visa levis. Now that your epistle has harmed my eyes, the glory of not writing back seemed trivial. (17. 1–2)

That is, already before her writing, it was her reading that had deprived Helen of her artless innocence, ushering her into the cunning world of the letters.46 However, her conscience suffers from guilt and embarrassment due to her rudimentary mastery of art:

46

For more on writing and the loss of innocence as a metaphor instrumental in the understanding of the Heroides, see Ch. 3 below.

30


sum rudis ad Veneris furtum, nullaque fidelem— di mihi sunt testes—lusimus arte virum. nunc quoque, quod tacito mando mea verba libello, fungitur officio littera nostra novo.

I am unskilled in the tricks of love and—the gods are my witnesses—I have never deceived my faithful husband with any cunning. And even now that I commit my words to this silent page, my letter executes a service unusual for me. (17. 141–4)

On a first level, Helen has just depicted a tantalizing moral dilemma, that of a loyal wife tempted into adultery for the first time. However, the double significance of her avowal promotes the line of the heroines' female creativity in an emblematic way: if she is telling the truth, Helen has never betrayed her marital bonds—so far, the message appears unambiguous. But the specific wording unmistakably carries with it metapoetic overtones of great significance for the plot that I am trying to outline. Along with the defence of her conjugal fidelity, Helen has also pictured herself in the above lines as unpolished in what she considers the artistic play of love. Helen's specific choice of terms is an appropriation of the favourite vocabulary for poetry and poetics in Callimacheanism. It also connects Helen with the Roman successors of these Hellenistic artistic principles, for whom rusticitas (‘country manners’), as a metaphor for thinking, living, and creating, summed up the antipode of their poetic programme and world-view.47 In this context, Helen being rudis can be read as referring to her previous lack of experience in writing poems and indeed love poems, since the playful art of love, featuring in Helen's words, unmistakably alludes to Ovid's own ‘cultus of love’,48 i.e. his own erotic poetry. To reiterate and push our plot forward: Helen is about to claim the role of her male creator and become herself a female artist. In spite of her profound indecision—or exactly because of it—she cannot resist the temptation of writing with her own poetic conventions (or the lack thereof) and her own poetic

47

It is beyond the scope of a footnote to summarize Hellenistic and Roman Callimacheanism. Keywords would be refinement and self-reflexivity. Indicative studies are: on the Hellenistic side, Bing (1988); Hutchinson (1988); on the Roman side, Clausen (1964); Newman (1967); Ross (1975). On Ovid's Callimacheanism, important amongst others are: Lyne (1984), Hinds (1992a) and (1992b); Kennedy (1993); Sharrock (1994a).

48

Myerowitz (1985) 32.


31

principles. Open-ended and underdetermined, her story, as a writing subject's language must be, will nonetheless be fundamentally different from the one that gave Helen substance previously. Given a sympathetic audience—‘a stranger willing to get her message across’ (to follow up Penelope's plea to the stranger in her palace)—she is ready for a storytelling of her own in the margins of her traditionally assigned role. And hers would be a story already foreglimpsed, even if not fully explored, by mainline criticism. Warning against the monopoly of learned readings built on the reader's expectation that Homer, Euripides, and Virgil have for ever deposited the definitive stories, over and above the ‘naïve’ heroines, Barchiesi (1993: 350) counteracts with a perceptive proposition for a new reading with far-reaching possibilities: The idea of allowing ‘feminine’ voices to make themselves heard through the gaps in the opus of the past is full of possibilities, which are by no means limited to intertextuality and poetics. Once again I want to stress that we too, as readers, are caught in the process of irony, because our ironical reading needs an external vantage point, and this ‘external’ vantage point turns out to be based on the acceptance of master fictions … but irony cuts both ways, and the superiority of the reader exposes the nexus between tradition and fiction.

In statements like this, the present study has found a valuable and encouraging precursor. From his own point of view, Farrell (1998), whose study was discussed above, also makes an explicit plea for gendered readings of writing: Just as the writers of Heroides are all women, the addressees are all men. This polarity of genders within the text is (or should be) crucially important to the effort of interpreting, writing a monograph, making a translation, or preparing a critical edition. The texts present themselves as texts written by women to an audience of men, and as truthful utterances made to agents of duplicity and falsehood. (p. 337)

For the purposes of such a reading, the textual debate regarding the authenticity of parts of the Heroides becomes an issue of lesser importance for the present study. The current orthodoxy49 leans in any case towards accepting the authenticity of all the Heroides (except perhaps for 15, the Epistula Sapphous50).

49

Cf. though Knox (1995) 7–8 (who doubts the authenticity of Her. 1–14 as a whole).

50

Cf., however, Rosati (1996a).

32


But even if some were not by Ovid, this would not affect my analyses, which are predicated on the collection as we have it and do not in any case attribute any decisive final power to the empirical author. For my purposes, the controversy about the authenticity of these texts strikingly mirrors my own multiple suggestions about the writing ‘I’. I therefore find Stephen Hinds's stance, in his essay on one of the most fiercely disputed letters, Medea's, particularly relevant to my position: On the one hand, I might keep ‘authenticity’ as the central issue, and continue to probe the arguments adduced against Ovidian authorship for their inability of appropriation by the Ovidian interest. I think that more such probing can be done; but I do not expect ever to arrive at anything which can be called scientific proof. All that I can show in this area (and I hope I have begun to show it here) is that the author of Her. 12 seems to be a lot better at being Ovid than he has recently been given credit for: In fact, I am less concerned to identify the author per se than to defend the author's workmanship—whether he (or she) be Ovid or not.…A poet can fail to be Ovid without failing to be a poet; a Roman writer can fail to make the inner canon without failing to have command of the vocabulary and themes of his own literary tradition. Modern critical discussions of authenticity and attribution are not always sufficiently aware of these truths.51

As a study mainly preoccupied with the criss-crossing and fertile contamination of the artistic ego, this book naturally endorses the above statement.52 What the pragmatics of the collection—namely the historical complexities of its creation and reception—illustrate most vividly is that this poetry has been a slippery affair of changing hands, with readers who in their turn become writers as a response to their readings. Somebody other than Ovid may have ‘tampered with’ Ovid's text but that is exactly what Ovid himself has already done with the literary production of earlier centuries. Moreover, if alleged tampering has been

51

Hinds (1993) 43–5.

52

Of course, textual criticism in the strict sense can also promote the literary appreciation of the complex ego of the collection. Cf. Barchiesi (1995: 327) on the need for more such work: ‘… I believe that careful study of the narrative poetics and intertextuality has something to say to future editors of the ill-attested passages.… students of authenticity do not take on board poetic models, and Quellenforscher tend to take for granted the problems of authenticity. A convergence is needed.’ Hinds's own essay on Medea, just referred to, is an important example of this convergence.


33

done with style,53 such a tension is not less ‘appropriate’ or intriguing than the tensions within Ovid's (authentic) ‘I’ as they have been foregrounded in the course of this chapter.

4. ANXIETIES OF READING IN THE HEROIDES: TOWARDS A HERMENEUTICS OF COMPLICITY Shedding light on the heroines' separate voice has not been unprecedented in Heroides scholarship. Hints and conjectures about the heroines' distinct message are scattered especially through recent scholarship. But two studies are worth special mention at this stage. A year after Barchiesi welcomed the possibility of a female voice ‘slipping through the gaps’ of Ovid's text, R. Alden Smith spoke incisively about the heroines' ‘personal growth from text to text’ (1994: 251). Significantly depriving Ovid of responsibility for certain preferences in the texts, Smith located instances in the letters where the discourse follows the heroines' personal awareness and perception of previous literary events.54 However, Smith's acute observations on the heroines' developing psychology are steadily informed by his major interest in Ovid's neat authority (see especially 247). Even though sensitive to the ‘uncontrolled and highly personal fantastic quality’ (258) of some of the heroines' utterances, Smith is preoccupied by ‘bringing the [conflicting] strands [of the narration] together’, a concern which inevitably anchors him firmly in the figure of Ovid, the super-author, in spite of the heroines' frequent departures: In the midst of this combination of distinctly different generic ideas which inform the surface of the text, Ovid also performs the further internal synthesis of the opposing strands of intertextualised myth and personal fantasy. Disparate elements are so uniquely combined that the reader is rarely aware of the fleshing out of this dynamic. (Smith 1994: 268)

In spite of Smith's many enlightened remarks, the need of his approach for a superintendent figure ‘pulling the strings’ introduces afresh the system condemned by Kristeva, a language

53

Cf. e.g. Barchiesi (1995: 326) on such disputed passages from Her. 16, 17.

54

Smith (1994: esp. 251–7) on Ariadne, Dido, and Penelope.

34


dependent on homogeneity and neatness in order to exist and make sense. More importantly, it also makes the monopoly of learned ironic readings deplored by Barchiesi all the more manifest. Ovid's stunning flair for the ironic cuts into the flesh of previous narratives and has earned praise and appreciation, mainly through the trenchant intelligence of the intertextual studies discussed earlier on. Any new readings can only make a difference for the Heroides when placed alongside the ironic readings. All-pervasive and cutting, the irony is always implicitly looming over the letters: as a counterpoint of disengaged, nonchalant supervision which the heroines attempt to pierce (with their committed positions and vehement voices). The heroines have their own unforgiving and sometimes devastating critiques of previous literature to deliver. Their authorial twist is to take themselves and their stories seriously, refusing the role of puppet and pushing their assigned roles to extremes occasionally foreshadowed but, as will be shown later, never properly explored by the master narratives. Now, it may be suggested that such a stance tends to disregard all too wilfully Ovid's presence and ‘intentions’ behind the narrative. If (my) feminine reading takes the heroines more seriously perhaps than Ovid himself consciously did, modern statistical research claims to have found that this is a consistent gendered twist, and a more persistent characteristic of women's reading. Some of its formulations appear strikingly relevant to the issues I have been discussing in this chapter: Women enter the world of the novel, take it as something there for that purpose; men see the novel as a result of someone's action and construe its meaning or logic in these terms.… Women tend to become the tellers of the tales that they are reading and therefore do not notice or demand to notice the author … The men, however, draw boundaries much more decisively. For them to see the author is as fluent as it is for the women not to see him or her.55

55

Bleich (1986) 239, 264–5. Reader-response criticism has in recent years powerfully explored the elaborate interactions between readers and texts which problematize any objectivist models of reading. Nevertheless, most theorists have concentrated on what they consider as general characteristics of the reading process, expertly defying the notion of reading as a straightforward procedure, yet without consideration of gender issues. Nevertheless, studies like Mulvey (1975) on visual pleasure and narrative cinema have directed the attention to the gendered response not only to texts but to all forms of cultural expression in general. The debate has attracted male as well as female critics. See, for example, Jonathan Culler (1983) on reading as a woman. Nowadays, the gendered reading of cultural signals has become a serious preoccupation of contemporary criticism: cf. e.g. Flynn and Schweickart (1986); Pribram (1988); Press (1991); Mills (1994).


35

Whether an ancient or a modern distinction, rooted in gender or not, this ‘earnestness’ of reading and readers, if we can call it such, may be a reaction to previous trends, but does not make the texts more determinately readable: quite the opposite. As speaking subjects, disrupted subjects in process, in the Kristevan mode, the heroines depart in unmapped and unforeseen directions; the result is the product of an irregular, uneven, erratic consciousness that counts more than the neatly welded joints of a well-tuned structure. The heroines' story is built as it is recounted. And this book tries to tune itself to an appropriate exegetic mode: to adopt the interviewer's mode of transcription with as little editing as possible, so to speak. Another perceptive observation of the heroines' utterances is Marilyn Desmond's (1993) representation of Dido. Desmond identifies Ovid's Dido with Judith Fetterley's (1978) ‘resisting reader’, i.e. the modern feminist reader who recalcitrantly exposes the male-dominant structures that have been implanted in the text and in the prevalent frame of mind around her.56 Building upon this concept, Desmond constructs Ovidian Dido as a privileged reader of the Aeneid, whose retrospective knowledge of the events enables her to lay bare Virgilian Dido's limited understanding of the plot. Going beyond the familiar generic opposition between epic and elegy, Desmond's observations are valuably conscious of the interpretative relationship between gender and reading which, as already explained, is a main preoccupation of the present book.57 But her approach, especially to the extent that it is based on Fetterley's concept of the resisting reader, can only expose signs of oppression of the woman within a male text. And yet, as well as seeking to produce closure by establishing her delusion in the Virgilian text,58

56

Cf. Desmond (1993) 59 n. 13.

57

Cf. e.g. Desmond (1993: 61) on Ovidian Dido's exposure of Virgilian Dido's passivity in the face of Aeneas' disturbingly disengaged account of Creusa's death; Desmond (1993: 63) with an acute reading of Ovidian Dido's subtle devaluation of Aeneas' grand cause in Her. 7. 158.

58

Desmond (1993) 60.

36


Ovidian Dido's discourse signals a will for a break-out from this tamed role assigned to her. Ovidian Dido is not only sceptical, as Desmond suggests,59 she is also appropriative, even if the end is always already known. Such an appropriative reading is not encouraged by Desmond. Her reading focuses almost too much on the Ovidian Dido's knowledge of the Aeneid. True, this knowledge is liberating since it enables Dido to renounce the injustice done to her in Virgil's text. However, by transferring to Dido knowledge of Virgil's text, Ovid also renders her a subconscious accomplice of this text.60 By sharing his own privileged point of view with her, he actually induces her into echoing the interpretative authority of the Virgilian narrator. The structures and order of the Virgilian text are perpetuated and Dido's role cannot go beyond denouncing these structures, and towards her own (feminine) order. The gap is difficult to ignore: however disempowered and marginalized, the heroines' letters are also fiercely combative and this essential aspect of their text awaits justice. Of all the heroines, Helen's letter presents most eloquently the appropriative structure of this discourse. Albeit a narrative systematically articulated on expressions of doubt,61 Helen's discourse is a striking act of defiance against the professed will of her husband and king. Menelaus has indeed gone away but his mastery is uncontestably powerful, as Helen admits halfway through her letter: sic meus hinc vir abest ut me custodiat absens— / an nescis longas regibus esse manus? ‘My husband is absent from here in such a way that he can keep watch on me even though absent. Don't you know that the hands of kings can reach far?’ (17. 165–6). But, to use the well-known Derridean metaphor, Menelaus-the-King is a convincing contextualization in the Heroides of Plato's (and Derrida's) Father-the-King-the-Author figure. That is, by taking up writing, Helen dares

59

Desmond (1993) esp. 59, 65.

60

A vivid example is Desmond's discussion of the substitution by Dido of the Eumenides for the Nymphs (Her. 7. 93–6), which were part of the Virgilian narrator's point of view (Aen. 4. 165–70). See Desmond (1993) 62: ‘By inserting the Eumenides into this scene, Ovid's Dido recalls the Eumenides' appearance in a simile (469–73) used by the Virgilian narrator to describe Dido's later, frenzied disintegration.’

61

Cf. 17. 37–8, 119–20, 123–4, 147–8, 178 as examples of this rhetoric of uncertainty.


37

to circumvent the Spartan king's mandate concerning the hospitality to be offered to Paris—but also Father-the-Author's control.62 Through this last achievement, Helen becomes an emblem for all the heroines. Her ‘inappropriate’ reading of Paris' letter and the daring writing of her own letter in Menelaus' (the author's) absence symbolize the largely overlooked appropriative structure of these poems and therefore pronounce the need for a fresh look into the collection of the Heroides which will support the heroines' courageous transgressions. In such a reading, the heroines' voices pierce through silence, and disrupt the neat body of the dominant linguistic order that gave them birth. This dominant Graeco-Roman order was heavily masculine and dominantly male. And yet, the main distinctions I am drawing for this book are not essentially biological. The perceptions of male and female that guide this book are predominantly cultural. The masculine images that will appear in the following chapters are sketches taken from the ancient (and sometimes not only ancient) texts. The heroines' voice that seeks to transcend the enclave in which they had previously been confined is more of a rupture in the seamless body of masculine voices and texts than a celebration and a retreat into the feminine. As will be discussed in subsequent chapters, the multiplicity, hesitation, and suspense on which the heroines' discourses are built have been notorious tools for the cultural marginalization of the feminine in Greek and Roman culture. The heroines' voice seizes these tools and celebrates them, celebrates what is already there, even if exiled and degraded by the strictures of the masculine discourse. Each heroine's voice is a scattering of language down and through the channels of the authoritative and official discourses, scorning the established links and skipping the confirmed markers that kept the web of the master narratives well knit together. A new intertextual nexus is being built as the heroines' voices travel in fits and starts. Haphazardly and vehemently, different links seam together a story different from the one imprinted in our minds through the interlaced doctrines of the dominant past

62

For an extended discussion of the applicability in the present reading of the Heroides of the Derridean metaphor Father-the-King-the-Author, see Ch. 5 below.

38


genres, mainly epic and tragedy. It will not always be clear who oversees the new intertextual chain. But boundaries of intellectual ownership and intellectual property are incompatible with this frenzied advance of language in the hands of these amateur-writers-‘in-process’. The heroines will be at the same time facilitators and conduits of their intertextual tales, facilitators and conduits of disruption in the body of classical texts. Authors under erasure themselves, they seek links in textual pasts and textual futures which speak better about their interests than the web carefully woven by previous masters—ancient authors and modern critics alike. And their own interests prompt them to seek signals always already present but previously neglected and to celebrate the marginal, the excessive, the redundant detail, that which had never acquired significance in the master narratives. As authors, the heroines know about literary stories and literary perils. However, as authors deeply engrossed in their creations, rather than arrogantly supervising them, the new order they strive to build is one whose momentum often derives from their liberating ignorance and stubborn neglect of the structures and fates of master writings. I try to follow the heroines' eager need for alternative expression. I suggest alternative links, and feed passages into one another that would allow the heroines' fringe message to move on. I also bring the heroines in touch with other authors in erasure, backwards and forwards in time, for meetings (already) decided through the irresistible workings of language but never previously materialized.63 There is no straightforward way to reach these voices. Their transmission is the result of a complex exercise in literary reception articulated on a series of complicitous, often underground, readers conversing with one another across genres, genders, and time. I am led down this path by Ovid himself, and by his recasting of Greek myth in a new and distinctive way. In their new capacity as resisting readers, the heroines are united in their determination to assert, explore, and vindicate women's mindset and value-schemes, seeking ways to isolate and ‘steal’ women's voices from within Ovid's male script. In this sense, each and every letter, each and every heroine, is a

63

For more insight on the non-linear workings of inter- (and intra-)textuality, see Sharrock (2000) esp. 33–7.


39

celebration of this feminine experience. But as we saw in the first section of this chapter, the collection has been severely judged in the past on account of its repetitive character. As this book attempts to recuperate the heroines' expressions, it also invites the readers to look at this repetitiveness afresh. So long as they register these women's vehement protest, these letters may be considered repetitive; but their repetitiveness is the measure of their resolution to make their exclamations heard. Departing from the specific occasion to speak broadly about the heroines' message will at times be a rhetorical ploy, legitimate and justifiable, in my opinion. For, many times, the specific will be nothing more, or nothing less, than a striking illustration of, or an intense encounter with, one—or more—of the general concerns that inform the collection. It is important, though, to realize that each heroine does not always speak on behalf of her fellow sisters and, even less, on behalf of the entirety of her fellow sisters. United and uniform in their ultimate goal of reclaiming the feminine, the letters also significantly diverge when closely explored. Themes and concerns are triggered with one letter and pushed further, or exploded, or mitigated, or dismissed, or complicated by another or a series of others. My exploration will thus often have its own clear plot, following the path of these themes and concerns as they digress and ramify throughout the collection. Ovid's Heroides is a collection built on the logic of a series of dynamic interventions. What Helen's paradigm suggests is that reading choices were always already there in conflict with one another at the genesis of the Heroides, an eloquent example of what Harold Bloom (1975) has aptly suggested, namely that ‘reading is the art of defensive warfare’ (p. 126). And this is not without consequences for my approach. When Canace, Hero, and Cydippe write their letters to Macareus, Leander, and Acontius, respectively, their letters are not addressed to any influential readers—these readers are considered unsuitable, and feared as unable to comprehend the messages of the heroines' letters. And these are only contingent examples: without seeking to allocate specific metapoetic roles to the personae in the text, I cannot help observing that the Ovidian collection, almost in its entirety, functions by circumventing

40


powerful readers who would obstruct the letters' message with their rigid beliefs, should those letters ever come to their hands. To phrase it differently, if the Heroides, so far, have been principally tokens of exchange between two male gazes, the historical writer's and the dominant male Augustan reader's, they also emphatically signal their need for ‘furtive’ readings through their own structures and metaphors, some of which will be addressed in the following chapters. It may be that ‘this reading behind the back of Roman gentlemen’ was indeed operated by Roman ladies, who like Martial's Lucretia would take up their book in their husbands' absence.64 Certainly, it is (also) a reading of a contemporary female reader. And in the frame of the Heroides' self-reflexivity, the multiple displacements of the heroines interestingly mirror the ‘otherness’ of the interpretative act. To make the last suggestion more specific: one of the constitutive elements of the heroines' adventurous love affairs is their necessary emigration from friendly and familiar whereabouts to

64

Martial, Epigr. 11. 16. 9–10. Martial in fact shows a distinct liking for such references. Cf. also Epigr. 3. 68. 11–12; 7. 88. 3–4. The symbolic affinity of the female furtive readings alluded to in the above passages with the Heroides should not obscure an important difference between the Ovidian and the Martial text. In Martial's case the furtive readings are mostly pornographic, and therefore the references to them can be read as a (veiled?) irony regarding the women's susceptibility to such ‘easy’ readings. The ambivalence of this intertext makes the case of the Ovidian heroines reading ‘high literature’ even more significant. Cf. also Trist. 2. 253–4 with a Roman view on the purloining character of women's reading: at matrona potest alienis artibus uti, / quoque trahat, quamvis non doceatur, habet, ‘yet a woman can employ the skills of others, and, even though untaught, enjoys what she draws from them’, and 279–312, a playful comment on the unpredictability of the female reading of cultural signs in general. Of course, alongside such views of the subversive character of female reading come signs that suggest that an (often sophisticated) female audience was an inherent part of the world of elegy, and especially of Propertius. See e.g. Hallett (1993); Gold (1993) 91 n. 17; Wyke (1995) 125 n. 71. Unfortunately, our evidence on the issue is far from satisfactory. And any endeavour to unveil the feminine voice in Latin literature is, in a certain sense, ‘a cry in the wilderness’, given the conspicuous lack of evidence on women's own writing—with the exception of the scant, and therefore not necessarily representative, fragments by Sulpicia, on whom see e.g. Hinds (1987a); Lowe (1988); Hallett (1989) 70 ff.; Wyke (1995) 114–15. Roman women are, however, often seen as more educated and more cultured than Greek (especially Athenian) women (on which there has of course been a large body of work: see e.g. Foley (1981a) esp. 146 ff.; Cole (1981); Walters (1993)): see e.g. Farrell (2001) 52–83.


41

a new, alien, and frequently hostile land. Medea's soliloquies of nostalgia for places enjoyed and now lost make the heroine a paradigm of displacement: ut culpent alii, tibi me laudare necesse est, pro quo sum totiens esse coacta nocens. ausus es—o, iusto desunt sua verba dolori!— ausus es ‘Aesonia,’ dicere, ‘cede domo!’ iussa domo cessi natis comitata duobus et, qui me sequitur semper, amore tui.

Even if others blame me, you must definitely praise me, you for whom I have so many times been forced to commit crime. Yet, you have had the audacity—and appropriate words fall short of such fair grief—to say: ‘move away from Aeson's palace!’ At your commands, I left our house accompanied by our two children and by my love for you, which follows me everywhere. (12. 131–6)

But before that, she had already been ‘asked’ to abandon her fatherland and the abode of her father in order to follow her beloved: illa ego, quae tibi sum nunc denique barbara facta, nunc tibi sum pauper, nunc tibi visa nocens, flammea subduxi medicato lumina somno, et tibi, quae raperes, vellera tuta dedi. proditus est genitor, regnum patriamque reliqui; munus, in exilio quod licet esse, tuli! virginitas facta est peregrini praeda latronis; optima cum cara matre relicta soror.

And therefore I, who now at last have become a barbarian for you, who now am poor, who now seem to you to be plunged into a life of crime, have raised my burning eyes from my drugged sleep, and given you the fleece to snatch away unharmed. I betrayed my creator, I abandoned my kingdom and country, and as a reward I was allowed to live in exile! My virginity has become the plunder of a bandit from afar. The greatest of sisters together with a beloved mother are left behind. (12. 105–12)

And before that she was already a Greek literary figure ‘dressed’ in a Latin garment, linguistically and generically transmuted. But then, if the lover is the other side of the reader, as already suggested and as will be explored further in the next chapter, Medea's plight narrativizes the interpreter's lot; we will always

42


be like aliens on the threshold of antiquity. Very similarly, Phaedra expresses her total devotion to her new home: Aequora bina suis obpugnant fluctibus isthmon, et tenuis tellus audit utrumque mare. hic tecum Troezena colam, Pittheia regna; iam nunc est patria carior illa mea.

Two seas batter the Isthmus with their waves, and a narrow strip of land hears either tide. Here, together with you, I will live in Troezen, the kingdom of Pittheus; already a country more precious to me than my own land. (4. 105–8)

Like her, we, as modern readers, aspire to look back at that antique world unperturbed by our own experiences, to find ourselves at home. But as Hippolytus' frigidity sternly recalls, antiquity will always stay aloof from such unifying desire. It would be very difficult to contrive our access to it with codes, preoccupations, and values other than our own. Thus interpretation itself becomes a heroic act of transgression.

3 Landscapes of Lost Innocence δίδυμ᾽ ὁ χρυσοκόμας ῎Ερως τόξ᾽ ἐντείνεται χαρίτων, τὸ μὲν ἐπ᾽ εὐαίωνι πότμῳ τὸ δ᾽ ἐπὶ συγχύσει βιοτᾶς. There are two arrows bearing charms, which can be strung by the bow of golden-haired Eros. The one is tipped with bliss and the other with confusion and ruin. (Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis 548–51) This chapter draws attention to what I call the rhetoric of innocence in the Heroides. In particular, it explores the symbolism of images of idealized happiness which are to be found scattered in the poems, investing the collection with a drive for emotional and poetical closure. However, writing reigns over the collection: in the course of the chapter, this innocent order will be disturbed and ultimately annulled by the complexities of the heroines' self-reflexive conscience, just as their visions of innocence will be gradually disturbed by their artistic impulse.65 It is difficult to summarize the full identity of this innocent state as it is registered in the heroines' imagination. Only fleeting signals of it, scattered and covert in the heroines' unsparing narratives, persistently—almost stubbornly—sketch literal and metaphorical landscapes of lost innocence, all pointing at a fantastic state of things that promises simplicity, spontaneity, and the availability of satisfaction. Through this undeterred impulse, the collection links with a long series of (past and future) literary works in their never-ending preoccupation with

65

From a slightly different angle, this quest for innocence can also be read as the heroines' battle against Ovid (and his narration), but one in which they fail, because they contend with him through writing (finding their own voice), which, obviously, entails the loss of innocence. But then again failure holds the seeds of its inverse, according to the well-known elegiac truism that, by failing, you succeed. Cf. e.g. Sharrock (1995).

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LANDSCAPES OF LOST INNOCENCE

Golden Age bliss and its idyllic inhabitants and features. Invited and encouraged by the retrospective character of these poems, the dilemmas and indecisions of Golden Age rhetoric unfold unresolved and unrestrained in the course of the Heroides, thus building a fascinating range of stark conflicts.66 The discourse of skill and absence (and deceit) mingles with utterances of spontaneity and presence (and ignorance) in the heroines' narratives, with love hovering undecidably between the two positions as the dominant signifier and signified in this pursuit of innocence. The contradictions and misrecognitions are strengthened by the inherently paradoxical nature of the heroines' goal. Through their letters the heroines struggle to visualize an Eden, but, as we shall see, their efforts keep failing them, moving them even further away from it and much deeper into the domains of knowledge and sophistication, and into the intricacies of a literate world. As a result of all this, knowledge, innocence, and love interweave in the heroines' imagination in a striking, open-ended discourse.

1. UBI ESSET AMOR? (HER. 3.12): IDIOMS OF LOVE AND GOLDEN AGE NOSTALGIA Even if folded in the narrative twists of the letters' dominant discourse of anxiety, secure signals and a strong memory of presence grab our attention already at first glance. The heroines' spontaneous reaction to their feelings of loss is to recall images of an ideal love as a healing response to the troubles of their own and their companions' lives. Oenone's appeal to an ever-absent Paris is the most eloquent example of this representation of love-as-security in the Heroides. At the narrative time of Oenone's letter, Paris has already returned to Troy with Helen of Sparta at his side. It was only a few lines earlier in her letter that Oenone—the love of Paris' life, before he met Helen—had described how she first saw the returning couple while watching from her post on the seashore (5. 68–70). Trapped in a powerless position, the deserted heroine looks for weapons that would strengthen her efforts to win Paris back and finally comes up with the privilege of the safety and stability of her own love:

66

For more on the perennially puzzling position of a Golden Age idiom within Augustan poetry see Barker (1996); Galinsky (1996) 90–121.


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Denique tutus amor meus est; ibi nulla parantur bella, nec ultrices advehit unda rates. And finally, my love is safe for you: it does not prepare any wars, nor bring vengeful ships from the sea. (5. 89–90)67

The surface meaning is simple: loving Oenone has none of the risks of loving Helen. But the broader significance of the heroine's statement should not pass unheeded: love is called upon as the counterpart to treachery, dangers, and the war itself.68 However, what Oenone on a private level wishes to remind Paris of is that her affectionate feelings are able to guarantee safety, just as they have already done in the past days of their cloudless cohabitation. In fact, no detail of those forsaken times seems to have slipped from Oenone's memory. It was only a little previously that she was trying to break Paris' present indifference by reminding him of the dramatic intensity that ruled his parting with Oenone when he was sailing off for Troy: flesti discedens—hoc saltim parce negare! miscuimus lacrimas maestus uterque suas; non sic adpositis vincitur vitibus ulmus, ut tua sunt collo bracchia nexa meo You were weeping as you left. At least don't deny this! Each steeped in sorrow, we mingled our tears; and your arms were wrapped round my neck more tightly than the clasping vine embraces the elm. (5. 43–8)

The imagery is repeated with little variation in Phyllis' narrative. Like Oenone, she also reminds the fleeing Demophoon of how, at the time of their parting, he clung to her, joining his lips with hers in lingering kisses and mingling his tears with hers in an effort to achieve a perfect (even though desperate) union: ausus es amplecti colloque infusus amantis oscula per longas iungere pressa moras cumque tuis lacrimis lacrimas confundere nostras

67

Note, however, the implicit knowledge of the main events of the Iliad, as a necessary presupposition for this statement of Oenone to make sense: do the above lines, then, enact the loss of this innocent state at the very moment that they attempt to establish it?

68

The metapoetic overtones of the passage should also be noted: the genre of love is here juxtaposed to that of war. In more self-conscious terms: Oenone's elegiac love claims the ability to keep away war and the world of epic—even if this is, of course, a deluded claim.

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You dared embrace me and, throwing yourself at the neck of her who loves you, to join our pressed lips with lingering kisses, and mingle my tears with your tears. (2. 93–5)69

Oenone's and Phyllis' common weapon here is their memory/knowledge of an amor able to bring people together in an almost melting proximity, instilling into them a desire for immediacy—and the abandoned ‘feminine order’ that this chapter attempts to define. Memory is perhaps paradoxically opposed to paradise, but I would like to postpone any firm suggestions on this until the later stages of this chapter.70 At any rate, both images bring to mind metaphors for erotic fusion common in antiquity and canonically associated with Empedocles' concept of ϕιλία (‘love’). In Empedocles' famous formulation, Love and Strife are the two fundamental and constituent elements of the universe. Just as they alternately gain power, all things come into being and then get destroyed in a never-ending succession. But the qualities of love itself interest us most here: as Love and Strife reign over the world in turn, things at one time come together into one through love and then again are pushed away from one another by strife's repulsion.71 To reiterate and emphasize: love is the cause of all things dissolving and fusing into one.72 Even though coming from their distant past, this observation goes to the heart of the heroines' agony, as an urgent need for security and tangible presence tantalizes and overwhelms their monologues. This need has many expressions, and central among them is the motif that links love with metaphorical, as well as literal, anchorage. Phyllis' case is telling in this respect: her discourse is dominated by sorrow and a vast sense of abandonment, which is not so sweeping,

69

The imagery recalls descriptions of the lovers' union such as Lucretius' 4. 1101–20: cf. R. D. Brown (1987) ad loc. Lucretius' intertext is important as well as ominous for the Heroides in that in his description the urge for unconditional mental and physical proximity is exposed as impossible at the very time that it is so emphatically illustrated.

70

See section 3.4, below.

71

Emp. fr. 17.5–8 (D–K); cf. also Wright (1995) ad loc.

72

The motif of the melting qualities of Eros was, of course, in place from the archaic period: Hesiod was the first to suggest that Eros is λυσιμελής (‘limbrelaxing’), though in Homer the adjective had been used of sleep: Od. 20. 57, 23. 343. See Theog. 121 with the scholion ad loc. For similar images of Eros from archaic lyric, see Carson (1986) esp. 39–45.


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however, as to efface from her mind her own powerful role in the love affair. In a fit of anger, she recalls her union with Demophoon as her generous offer of a loving retreat (nec moveor, quod te iuvi portuque locoque, ‘I am not disturbed that I have assisted you, receiving you in my harbour and in my kingdom’, 2. 55). The reference is very short and inserted only as a secondary point in the main frame of speech; still, even if subsumed within a rhetoric of indignation, feeble images of a haven and a hypothesis of closural harmony make a timid appearance in the shadow of the overall discord.73 And Phyllis is not the only one to be haunted by such memories: ruminating about Jason and his new partner, Hypsipyle also makes a bitter and all too brief reference to her own safe harbour (her own safe love) as she wonders: if unfriendly gales were to push him and his new companion into her port again (6. 142), how could he ever meet her eyes again, standing on the seashore with their two babies (6. 141–6)? The reference is inevitably overshadowed by the vehemence of Hypsipyle's feelings of hatred for Medea—but not before it has managed to add an extra nuance to her narrative. We are subtly reminded of that abiding place and the securing side of amor that Hypsipyle had generously offered to Jason and which had already come up earlier in her reminiscing: urbe virum iuvi, tectoque animoque recepi! ‘I helped a man in my city, and in my home and in my heart I received him!’ (6. 55). It is worth noting, however, how the same image can trigger reactions of a significantly different nature, as in the case of 12. 23–5 and Medea's own use of the motif of the protective harbour: iussus inexpertam Colchos advertere puppim / intrasti patriae regna beata meae. / hoc illic Medea fui, nova nupta quod hic est, ‘commanded to nagivate your untried boat to Colchis, you entered the happy realms of my native land. There I, Medea, was what here your new bride is.’ A different type of regret emerges in the above lines. Medea's statement evinces nostalgia for a lost abode and a lost placidity, altogether prior to and incompatible with the presence of Jason and of erotic love. Ovid himself will resume the theme of Medea's patrimonial and pre-erotic

73

Compare here, for example, the similar brief signal of safety in Dido's letter: fluctibus eiectum tuta statione recepi / vixque bene audito nomine regna dedi, ‘I received you cast ashore by the waves, and gave you my throne, having hardly heard your name’ (7.89–90).

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land in Metamorphoses 7. 1–71, where the terse reference and subtle regret of Her. 12 will be expanded into a long and volatile soliloquy of loss. For this aspect of the Heroides' discourse, see the concluding section of the present chapter. The list of such references to harmony and completion is far from exhausted. Hermione also has such a paradise stored in her memory that she can evoke as an ultimate resistance to the powerlessness of her captivity. The narrative time of her letter has found her wedded to Pyrrhus, Achilles' son, as a result of Menelaus' will (8. 33). From her personal point of view, the imposed wedding is an unlawful confinement of her freedom and body: Pyrrhus habet captam, ‘Pyrrhus holds me captive’ (8. 103). And therefore Hermione spends distraught and tearful nights in her sorrowful bed shrinking away from her hated husband (8. 109–14). In the wedlock that has been imposed on her at present, Hermione is condemned to endure a sorrowful bed and a hated presence—that of Pyrrhus. But the comparison with her previous union with Orestes is most poignant: cum tibi nubebam, nulli mea taeda nocebat, ‘when I was your wife, my marriage harmed no one’ (8. 35)—quite unlike her present cohabitation, that union brought harm and tears to nobody. That union, also, would not upset the parental, and generally ancestral, order: Menelaus and Helen would consent to it in memory of their own persecuted love, while Tyndareus' will—following which Hermione was promised to Orestes—would thus be sanctioned. Even the divine order is evoked by Hermione in defence of their suspended union, as she addresses the absent son of Agamemnon: si medios numeres, a Iove quintus eris, ‘should you count those in between, you will be found to be fifth from Jove’ (8. 48). The invocation of the gods links Hermione's paradisiac vision to that of Phyllis, whose discourse of loss is marked by a similarly painful memory of the now absent signals of trust: she too was building her paradise with a solid trust in gods, oaths, affectionate gestures, and reassuring words. However, nothing of the above has remained intact after the breach between the meanings and the words employed to signify them, a breach which was bound to plunge the heroine into pitiful misery. An


49

indignant Phyllis is thus left wondering about the promises cunningly constructed by Demophoon's lying lips: iura fidesque ubi nunc, commissaque dextera dextrae, quique erat in falso plurimus ore deus? promissus socios ubi nunc Hymenaeus in annos, perque tuum mihi iurasti—nisi fictus et ille est— concita qui ventis aequora mulcet, avum, per Venerem nimiumque mihi facientia tela— Iunonemque, toris quae praesidet alma maritis

Where now are your vows and your honour and your right hand joined with my right hand, and the talk of god that so often was on your lying lips? Where now is Hymenaeus who was promised for our years together? … You swore to me by your ancestor—unless he too is a fiction—who soothes the sea when it is stirred by the winds, and by Venus and her weapons that are abundantly effective against me, … and by Juno, the nourishing deity who presides over the bridal couch. (2. 31–41)

The conclusion that Phyllis hates to have reached is that Poseidon, Venus, and Juno, ‘plurim [i] de[i]’ and solid embodiment of that perfect state for which the heroines yearn, even though they cannot attain it, have now turned to hollow names, uttered and soiled by Demophoon's lying lips at the point of his departure. And yet, these very gods have also been notorious for wreaking havoc on the heroines' lives and interests.74 One might justly wonder: where does this faith in the Eden-like rectitude of the gods stem from? The answer I want to suggest requires more attention to Oenone's narrative. Like Hermione and Phyllis, Oenone too has experienced the gods' egocentric preoccupations invading and messing up her happy life with Paris, that day when evil first came into their bliss. After Venus had used Helen of Sparta as a trophy exchanged for Paris' favourable judgement in the beauty contest set up by Juno, Minerva, and herself, Oenone's cloudless union with Paris was pushed to its end (5. 33–40). And yet her writing counteracts these bleak memories with a vivid

74

In the case of Phaedra, for example, Poseidon will actively push Hippolytus to his death, as we learn from Euripides' Hippolytus, while Juno's share in the plight of Dido cannot be underestimated.

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description of that dismantled perfect union. In fact, the bliss of those harmonious times eminently features in the opening motifs of Oenone's letter. Presence and immediacy define this paradisiac imagery and render it emblematic of the topos that I am exploring in this section: saepe greges inter requievimus arbore tecti, mixtaque cum foliis praebuit herba torum; saepe super stramen faenoque iacentibus alto defensa est humili cana pruina casa. quis tibi monstrabat saltus venatibus aptos, et tegeret catulos qua fera rupe suos? retia saepe comes maculis distincta tetendi; saepe citos egi per iuga longa canes. Often we have rested among our flocks sheltered under the trees, and the grass mingled with leaves afforded us a bed; often a humble hut kept the white frost off, for us lying upon the straw and the deep hay. Who showed to you the glens best suited for hunting, and also beneath what rock the wild animal concealed her cubs? Often, as your companion, I spread the nets with their wondrous mesh; often I led the speeding hounds over the long mountain ridge. (5. 13–20)75

Lying in Eden-like contentment on the soft bed of Nature under the shade of the tall trees: this aspect of Oenone's desire links her dream with images of pastoral innocence and the pastoral genre. Virgil's tenth Eclogue is one celebrated example of this sort, with Gallus' vision of his pastoral beloved (be it Phyllis or Amyntas) and the perfect simplicity that they could share: mecum inter salices lenta sub vite iaceret; serta mihi Phyllis legeret, cantaret Amyntas. hic gelidi fontes, hic mollia prata, Lycori, hic nemus; hic ipso tecum consumerer aevo. My darling would be lying next to me among the willows and under the creeping vine. Phyllis would pluck me flowers for a wreath, Amyntas would sing me songs. Here are cool springs, Lycoris, here are soft meadows, here a grove. Here with you, only the passage of time would waste me away. (Virg. Ecl. 10. 40–3)

75

Note here how the experience is several steps removed from the text, the narrator, and the readers: it is Oenone's barely contained indignation at Paris' forgetfulness of her benign influence that triggers this extended imagery of paradisiac, but forsaken, love; section 3.3 below resumes this discussion.


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Oenone's idyllic description and the Virgilian imagery can easily fuse into one another. Oenone's own mountainous whereabouts and life grant her access to the rural setting that is evoked by Gallus' fantasies, merging her with the other rustic figures that live and act within the green boundaries of the pastoral landscape. In fact, later in her letter, Oenone herself will explicitly lay claims to that pastoral love by calling Paris a poor shepherd (at cum pauper eras armentaque pastor agebas / nulla nisi Oenone pauperis uxor erat, ‘when you were poor and tended a flock as a shepherd, no one but Oenone was the wife of the poor man’, 5. 79–80). Inaccessibility and a strong link between nature, immediacy, and innocence seem to be major components of the heroines' fantasies of deliverance from their present plight, but would also be a suitable description of the pastoral world and the pastoral genre, which traditionally associated itself with ideals of simplicity, purity, and immediacy within the boundaries of one's self as well as in communication with others. It should not escape our attention, however, that the pastoral genre is also notoriously replete with urban figures in rustic dress, shepherd-poets fretting over the inaccessibility of the paradise to which they aspire. The bucolic genre, in both its Greek and Roman version, is more about pining for innocence and immediacy than about attaining them. Innocence and its symbolic expressions are placed at a critical distance from the protagonists, as well as from the readers of these stories.76 Alongside its unattainable character, this rustic protection and enclosure also has a claustrophobic and limiting side to it. Yielding to pastoral impulse requires the letting go of one's fixed—and also urban, and also sophisticated—identity and subjection. Nevertheless, as Simichidas in Theocritus' seventh Idyll clearly demonstrates, most of the inhabitants of this world are not ready (or willing) to give up this individuality for the sake of ‘fusion’. The pastoral world is built upon this tension of the two conflicting attitudes, just as the world of the Heroides is—Oenone's case, explored above, was a striking example. Even more importantly for the Heroides' world, the pastoral pattern interweaves themes of initiation, learning, and education of various kinds. Virgil's

76

Cf. e.g. Miles (1977).

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Eclogues are particularly instructive in this respect.77 And above all, attitudes to love and desire are distinctly divided in the pastoral genre.78 It is exactly the intrinsic contradictions and disappointments of the bucolic genre that ring most true for the Heroides, whose rhetoric is typical of a Golden Age quest and nostalgia—motifs also famously associated with the bucolic genre. Indeed, all the paradisiac passages from the Heroides examined so far in this chapter share a yearning for sheltered, secure spaces and the conviction that only uninterrupted presence can provide the ultimate satisfaction and reassurance. However, in the standard idiom of both bucolic and the Golden Age, this shelter is almost never guaranteed; it is either scorned by the lover or belongs to a past and irrevocably lost stage. And the proximity and beneficence of the gods, another stereotypical Golden Age motif, is conspicuously absent in these lapsed paradises. So, for example, Ariadne complains that heaven is full of fearful visions of gods, and Hermione tries in vain to find an explanation for the gods' hostility. Hypsipyle, in turn, is forced by the dynamics of her doomed love affair to recognize that the Furies, rather than Juno or Hymenaeus, supervised her now broken wedlock with Jason.79 Yearning for the gods' benevolence in a discourse of Golden Age nostalgia all but points at the arch-text of such a description, namely Catullus 64 and the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Divine participation, which will be converted to a distant memory in the Heroides' ‘fallen’ stories, can be found here in an unsullied form. The gods are present at this wedding as a harmonious whole, generously offering their favours to the newly wedded couple: we are told that Zeus himself granted his permission for this marriage (l. 27). Oceanus and Tethys have also given their consent to the union, to the celebration of which the whole of Thessaly was invited (11. 29–34). What is most prominent in this rhetoric of contentment is its emphatic dating: those were the happy, vanished days of the Golden Age (11. 23, 31); physical and mental proximity with the gods is

77

Cf. here Leach (1974: esp. 1–50) on the conflicts in which the Virgilian pastoral is articulated.

78

On this, cf. T. G. Rosenmeyer (1969) 77–85 and passim ; Poggioli (1974).

79

See 10.95; 8.87–88; 6.45–6 respectively.


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explicitly connected with this perfect and for ever lost age (ll. 384–408). One is prompted to think that they have at last come across the locus of a pure and paradigmatic attachment. And yet, with all its joy and immediacy, the specific example is not free of ambiguities, as has been widely recognized.80 Neither Ovid, nor the reader, nor even the heroines themselves (considering the abundance of myths they are meant to know) would be able to rejoice fully in the bliss of this union. For its notorious and detrimental consequences form a bleak and readily available background to such a reading of the poem. We are led to the understanding that, even though emphatically idealized, the world of the Catullan poem fails to point to an unblemished and impeccable closeness. Whatever the differences between Catullus 64 and the Heroides, the former makes a disheartening precedent for the Ovidian collection, whose own representations of ‘true love’ suffer from an overarching sense of loss and insidious schisms that undermine their innocent signifiers. One is prompted to reconsider loving harmony, itself, as a notion and as a possibility within the ancient system of thought and we are led to ask: what is disturbing this idyllic tranquillity from flourishing in benign innocence? The suggestion I am going to make in the following section is: Art.

2. DIC MIHI, QUID FECI, NISI NON SAPIENTER AMAVI? (HER. 2. 27): TRAINED IN THE CRAFT OF LOVE Cosmogony, as we have seen in the passage from Empedocles discussed in the previous section, offers surprising insight into these unstable idylls of love. Since the time of Hesiod's Theogony, Eros has been a primordial deity coming into existence after Chaos, wide-chested Earth, and dim Tartarus (Theog. 116–20). We are not going to follow the details of life's advent on the planet as they evolve in the Hesiodic text. What is important to retain from this passage is that even before

80

Cf. here Bramble (1970); Peden (1987); Janan (1994) 107–12; Fitzgerald (1995) 140–68. However, note e.g. Jenkyns (1982) with the opposite side of the argument.

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Aphrodite emerged out of the sea (Theog. 192–206), a primary Eros was already there when the first entities started to separate from the initial cloud of the universe. That is, even from that primeval stage, Eros was connected with ‘pushing apart’ as well as ‘bringing together’.81 This whole imagery is recalled in a celebrated passage from Aristophanes' Birds where the chorus of the Birds offer an explanation for their origin.82 What the Birds are mainly interested in getting across is that they are the offspring of love (see e.g. 699, 703–4). But the message that mostly concerns us here is that Eros is held responsible for the rising of Earth, Sky, and all other primordial entities: in other words, Eros was the one to invent boundaries and edges for the hitherto undifferentiated universe. For all their differences, Hesiod and Aristophanes concur in drawing our attention to love's creative capacity. By conferring upon the dyad of Eros and Aphrodite a primordial role in the world's original constructions, the texts symbolically point at a kind of ‘skilful’ and ‘knowledgeable’ love, which jars with the imagined simplicity of the dreamlike Golden Age. This love ‘makes things’ and this is exactly the concept of love that shapes the protagonists' emotions in the Heroides and dominates their discourse. Indeed, art blends with love in a powerful and almost oppressive manner in the course of the heroines' narrative. Clinging to their desire for unperturbed and immediate happiness in a world not yet contaminated by vices and cares, the heroines deny their shrewdness and dexterity in matters of love. Phaedra's obstinate case is most eloquent for the point I am making here. I shall have more to say in the following chapters of the wild and fearful nature of her passion for Hippolytus.83 However, what is particularly pertinent at this moment is Phaedra's persistent disavowal of the craftiness that comes to the fore at the onset of her love for her stepson. Even though her whole letter opens with an elaborate account of her troubled rite of passage into writing,84

81

On this idea, cf. also Vernant (1990) esp. 465–9. On the role of Aphrodite in ancient Greek cosmology in general, see e.g. Bonnafé (1985); Rudhardt (1986).

82

Aristoph. Av. 693 ff.; see Dunbar (1995: ad loc.) for the range of cosmological speculation drawn upon in the passage.

83

Cf. e.g. 4. 19–20, 47–50, 69–70.

84

4. 7–16; see also Ch. 5.1 below.


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Phaedra will nevertheless rush into undermining the art that has been emerging from within her amorous frenzy.85 She deludes herself that her love is an uncontrollable, roaming fury in unambiguous contrast with love as technique and knowledge. She renounces the skills she is at the very moment engaged in practising, fervently claiming for herself the image of the uninitiated, whose ‘untried heart’ stifles under the pressure of love: sic male vixque subit primos rude pectus amores, sarcinaque haec animo non sedet apta meo. ars fit, ubi a teneris crimen condiscitur annis; cui venit exacto tempore, peius amat. So badly and with difficulty my inexperienced heart submits to passion, and this weight sits heavily on my soul. When this fault is learned from a tender age it becomes an art; but she to whom love comes when time has passed, loves more destructively. (4. 23–6)

And this is not the first time that the heroines unashamedly advertise their gullible timidity in matters of love. Often, the lack of expertise is connected with an emphasis on the youth of the love-stricken heroine. Briseis, for example, while submissively resigned, still wistfully contemplates possible modes of reaction to her separation from Achilles. But any resources she may come up with are to be immediately dismissed because of her inexperienced vulnerability: saepe ego decepto volui custode reverti, / sed, me qui timidam prenderet, hostis erat, ‘often I wished to return, having deceived my guardian, but the enemy was there to seize me, a frightened girl’ (3. 17–18).86 However, the most unambiguous formulation belongs to Phyllis' letter: fallere credentem non est operosa puellam gloria. simplicitas digna favore fuit. It is no hard-earned glory to deceive a naïve girl. My simplicity deserved charity. (2. 63–4)

And yet, it will only take a few couplets for the narrative to change dramatically. Straight after her indignant reference to

85

As a hint at the authorial superframe, note also here the typically Ovidian gesture of the ironic denunciation of artifice.

86

Cf. also 6. 21–2; 21. 116, 121–2.

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her maiden simplicity, Phyllis will give a compact demonstration of her astute knowledge of the mythical ambiguities pertaining to Demophoon's family tree, listing Theseus' great accomplishments on the way to Athens from the court of Pittheus in elaborate detail (2. 67–74). The long catalogue concludes with a wistful remark: of all of Theseus' achievements, the one that Demophoon admires the most is the abandonment of Ariadne at Naxos; and this for Phyllis is the strongest and saddest proof of Demophoon's likeness to his father (2. 75–8). But such a probing Phyllis can hardly be compared with the image that she claimed for herself only a couple of lines earlier, i.e. that of a simple maiden lamenting over the slighted trust which she had naïvely placed in her cunning lover. In a similar way, Briseis' letter tries to de-emphasize right from the opening lines the craft that has invaded the heroine's life with the onset of her infatuation for Achilles. As a prologue to her flowing eloquence,87 Briseis prefixes a disclaimer of authority: Quam legis, a rapta Briseide littera venit, / vix bene barbarica Graeca notata manu, ‘The letter that you read comes from stolen Briseis, scarcely properly written in Greek by her barbarian hand’ (3. 1–2). And yet, the paths of her thought, as we see them developing in the course of her letter, hardly justify this appeal to illiteracy—after all she writes perfectly good Latin.88 And the examples of confusion are far from being exhausted by the above references. The heroines' discourse appears helplessly contradictory when it comes to this matter, and Phaedra's lips lapse into acknowledging the contradiction. She may have spent several lines in an effort to establish her artlessness; and yet, while stubbornly preserving her right to ignorance, she is—in her own words—launched into new arts: iam quoque—vix credes—ignotas mittor in artes, ‘now too—you would hardly believe it—I am pushed into arts I did not know’ (4. 37). Her love is conscius—indeed a very knowledgeable amour. Phaedra knows about her lovesickness, that frenzy that has surged upon her after her fatal meeting with Hippolytus in Eleusis by the shrine of

87

For more on the eloquence and ingenuity of Briseis' epistle, see Ch. 4.5 below.

88

Contrast here, e.g. Tristia 5.7b.55–60; 5.12.53–63 where Ovid himself appears far more troubled by his difficulties with Latin in exile. I elaborate on this in Spentzou (forthcoming).


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Ceres. She may be swirling in erotic madness, a Bacchic figure let loose on the mountains (4. 47–50), but, an author herself, she has expertly given a name to her delirious aberrations: namque mihi referunt, cum se furor ille remisit, / omnia; me tacitam conscius uritamor, ‘for they tell me all about it when this fury has subsided; and I stay silent, knowing that it is love that burns me’ (4. 51–2). Phaedra is not the only heroine who claims knowledge on matters of love. Oenone, as well, leaves no space for doubt in her strikingly indomitable letter. She may have been a mountain nymph well known to the Phrygian forests (5. 3), but she was certainly a skilled one. In her case, love has brought skill and a good deal of training. It was Apollo, the builder of Troy, who fell in love with her and then let her into the mystical knowledge of the herbs of the mountain (5. 145–8). Love and skill are thus archetypically and ominously connected in that ancestral love affair between the god and the nymph. That is, innocence is already lost for Oenone long before this letter and her love affair with Paris started—it was exchanged with the knowledge of life in the woods. It is true that the craft she gained does not at the moment seem adequate for Oenone to cope with her scorned affection for Paris. Thus, she deplores her ‘skilled helplessness’ (me miseram, quod amor non est medicabilis herbis! / deficior prudens artis ab arte mea, ‘unhappy me, that love cannot be cured by herbs! I am failed by the art I so well know’, 5. 149–50).89 But her letter is a wise narrative supported (and contaminated) by knowledge, and particularly a knowledge explicitly associated with love. The link is most unambiguously made in the middle of her indignant critique of Helen's story. Oenone has just concluded her account of Helen's adventure with Theseus with a derogatory comment on the amorous behaviour of the Spartan queen. She then proceeds to anticipate a possible question and objection. In her own phrasing: unde hoc compererim tam bene, quaeris? amo, ‘do you ask from where I have learned this so well? I am in love’ (5. 130). The short statement gets easily diffused in the flow of rhetorical exclamations from Oenone, but not without suggesting an important equation between love and experience, blending in it the knowledge of the myth and the knowledge of amor.

89

For more on the erudite use of the motif of amor immedicabilis in Her. 5, see Casali (1992).

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To put it in other words, in this very effort to grasp a lost paradise the heroines get almost ‘too good’ (i.e. too erudite) for it. The symbolic overtones built into the Thracians' rejection of Phyllis as a result of her love affair with Demophoon should not pass unheeded: art unsettles its victims and whoever has breached innocence always has to flee from shelter. Phyllis' Thracian retreat has suffered disruption by the cunning upsurge of love; fallen Phyllis therefore ‘has to leave’. And, what is most symbolic, from now on she is considered apt for learned Athens (doctas Athenas, 2. 83), birthplace of Demophoon and the cradle of arts and culture. The point gains lucidity if compared with Medea's soliloquy in Met. 7. 11–71. Lines 53–8 are of particular relevance to our case: nempe pater saevus, nempe est mea barbara tellus, / … / maximus intra me deus est. non magna relinquam, / magna sequar; … / notitiamque loci melioris et oppida, quorum / hic quoque fama viget, cultusque artesque locorum, ‘truly, my father is fierce, and my land is barbarous, … the mightiest god is in my heart; I shall leave behind things of small significance, and follow significant things. … And I shall learn of a better land and cities whose fame thrives even here, and culture and arts.’ The association is telling: maximus deus, the god of love, converts Medea into a fervent pilgrim of culture and arts. Back in the Heroides, Hypsipyle also seems to be thinking along similar lines when talking about Medea in 6. 136: deseruit Colchos; me mea Lemnos habet, ‘she abandoned Colchis, but my Lemnos still has me’. This time it is Medea who ‘had to go’ as a result of her initiation into the art of love. By juxtaposing Medea's desertion of Colchis to her own loyalty to her land of innocence, Hypsipyle believes she has captured a form of the paradise that haunts the collective memory of the heroines. And yet, the success of the contrast is all too brief: Hypsipyle's love appears repeatedly blemished in her letter and her own paradise fallen and inadequate.90 Is paradise, after all, no more than an always already framed device of lapsed thought? A paradox seems to reign over the heroines' narratives. Stricken by grief they mourn over a lost paradise of idyllic tranquillity and contentment. Even if it is not always easy to make full sense of their peculiar and esoteric paths of thought, still, all the letters

90

Cf. e.g. 6. 29, 45–6, 76.


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seem unanimously motivated by the shared belief that love had once been the constituent feature of that ruined paradise. They therefore have devoted their story to re-establishing that peace and sylvan simplicity. And yet, the further they progress with this effort, the wider the distance that separates them from that paradise appears to be. The paradox lies in the heroines' crafty images: they are the product of loss, and a (sullied? unsatisfactory?) attempt to consider, remember, and recreate past purity.91 And yet, the heroines are uneasy with them, and resist their knowledge and also eros-as-knowledge. They obstinately nourish a delusion of ignorance in matters of affectionate love; we have already seen the tenacity with which Phyllis, Briseis, and Phaedra cling to their inexperience. We have also seen how strong signals of erotic recognition managed to smother this contrived ignorance.92 Regardless of their simulated incapacity, the heroines appear rather well read in the ‘artful’ matter of love.93 In spite of their resistance to it, erudition has crept into their minds and their discourse together with the pangs of eros. It is characteristic that even their uncontrollable erotic fury can exude ‘creative’ energy. This seems to be the case with Phyllis at 2. 45: at laceras etiam puppes furiosa refeci, ‘in my fury, I rebuilt your battered ships’. If nothing else, it was erotic love that triggered in the heart of the heroines the need for writing, as well as the desire for something (or better somebody) absent, instilling fear, doubts, and cares in a ‘lapsed’ life and a ‘lapsed’ diction which jar with the innocent ideal that motivated the heroines' discourse in the first place.94

91

Note the doomed character of the heroines' attempt to visualize a lost paradise: memory, more than anything else, undermines the pure images that it brings to the fore. True paradise should be timeless and not need the succour of memory. Memory, as (part of) the art which presents the paradisiac, by definition also defies its present existence.

92

But the ‘archetype’ of erotic innocence is yet to appear, with Longus' Daphnis and Chloe. The inextricable link between education and love will there be drawn in its ultimate form: immune from literary experience but also from the tradition of the pastoral landscape that surrounds them, the young lovers are rendered unable to make love. Cf. here Winkler (1990) 101–26; Goldhill (1995) 1–45.

93

For love as artful, cf. Plato, Symposium 203d; Callimachus, Aetia fr. 67. 1 with Pfeiffer (1949) ad loc.; Prop. 1. 1. 1–15 with Fedeli (1980) ad loc.

94

The ambiguities are not, of course, restricted to the Heroides : wouldn't, for example, (Virgilian) Dido have been nimium felix (‘ever so happy’), if it hadn't been for the Trojans' arrival in Carthage? But then, if her previous bliss was her solitary (independent) existence in Carthage, one should not ignore the already lapsed nature of that stage, coming after Sychaeus' death and her own exile. With this, compare Medea's nostalgic reference to the prosperous kingdom of her father (12. 24), considering them against passages such as Ap. Arg. 3. 451, 471, 752, which deal with the cares of love inflicted upon young Medea as a result of her falling in love with Jason.

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The association of knowledge and the fall is emphatically marked in a famous Golden Age description from Verg. Georg. 1. 121 ff. The poet has already discussed various matters regarding the cultivation of the land, and, in our extract, he draws the attention of the farmers to the dangers and deceit which lurk behind their occupation and which can perplex and defeat even the most industrious and experienced amongst them. The explanation which he gives for this tacit risk acknowledges and accounts for the destruction of Golden Age purity: ploughing and sowing can be devious and deceitful because the Father of Gods ordered that it be so. Determined ‘not to let his kingdom laze in torpid sloth’ he withheld the goods that were hitherto offered to mortals in abundance and instilled cares into their hearts. Thus he stirred in them the need for absent pleasures, holding the belief that such a want would bring skills previously dormant in them to the surface (Georg. 1. 121–34). Cares and shrewdness enter the previously strain-free life of humanity and in no time people have to turn to the sea in search of missing bliss (tunc alnos primum fluvii sensere cavatas, ‘then for the first time, the rivers carried ships of hollow alder’, 1. 136).95 Cunning, as well as love, can be the triggering power behind cares, while skill and desire have the potential to merge into a single symbolism in that they are both nourished in need and absence. What we have not got, we want and construct: with absence comes knowledge and skill. The very reasons for the destruction of the idyll of presence lead us to art.

95

For another famous ‘sailing away’ from the Golden Age, see Seneca, Medea 301 ff. with Nussbaum (1994) 464 ff. The sailing image is also implicated in the assailed amor of Catullus 64: long before Peleus met Thetis, the seas were injured by the ships' courses (64. 1–19). Cf. Curran (1969) esp. 185 f.


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3. HINC AMOR, HINC TIMOR EST; IPSUM TIMOR AUGET AMOREM (HER. 12. 61): LOVE AT WAR Linking desire with art pushes the heroines' angst-ridden diction in an altogether different direction. If love in the Heroides needs to be skilful in order to impress the protagonists' hearts and in order to play any role in the plot, then love must also register in their hearts as deceit and circuitous manipulation—at least to some extent. The association is a common one: the most famous example perhaps is Gorgias' Helen, but we can again go back to Hesiod. According to him, Aphrodite is characteristically invested from the very first day of her existence with a paradoxical blend of a real capacity for affinity and a predilection towards fraud. In Hesiod's own words, with a soothing gentleness and a deceiving smile (Theog. 203–6).96 Such links naturally shed doubt on love's capacity to achieve the perfect ϕιλότης (‘friendship and affection’) that haunts the heroines' minds and discourse. There comes a time when love is denounced as a fraudulent instigator of vice in a ‘fallen’ world. Oenone's letter includes a vehement attack on this descent from paradise triggered by Venus' ‘thanking’ present to Paris: illa dies fatum miserae mihi dixit, ab illa pessima mutati coepit amoris hiemps. That day declared the fate of wretched me; on that day began the worst winter of his changed love. (5. 33–4)

As Oenone proceeds to explain (ll. 35–8), that day was the day of Paris' judgement. But long before Oenone and the rest of the Greeks could have the chance to figure out what the exact consequences of Paris' encounter with the three goddesses would be, the young nymph and her family could sense that a new type of love had stormed into their lives. And this ‘mutated’, transformed, love was no longer immune from evil. Phyllis learns this

96

Cf. Vernant (1991) 97–8. Similarly, in the Works and Days treachery installed itself into people's relationships with the advent of the first woman, Pandora, whose αἱμύλιοι λόγοι (‘wily words’) and ἐπίκλοπον ἦθος (‘cunning character’) were designed to throw confusion into men's hearts and lives with their cunning nature (Hes. Op. 78). For more on the ‘mortal deviousness’ of Pandora's nature, cf. Zeitlin (1995) with Sharrock (1991b: 173–6) on the misogynist aspect of Pandora's creation by Hephaestus.

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bitter lesson and her response to the shattering of idealized amor is even more poignant. No longer doubting the treachery of the affection that Demophoon had offered her in abundance, she wishes that a statue of him be erected in the midst of Athens accompanied by the following harsh and condemning line: HIC EST, CUIUS AMANS HOSPITA CAPTA DOLO EST

‘This is he whose loving hostess was overcome by his trickery’ (2. 74). What Oenone calls the nefas, or ‘crime’, of love (5. 40) will become clearer in the letter of Hypsipyle, which features another mutatum amorem and provides an even more explicit illustration of the disastrous version of love that runs through the collection. The news of Medea's love affair with Jason has by now reached Lemnos, and Hypsipyle, nourishing in solitude her rejected love, ‘remembers’ how cunningly Medea had approached Jason. Her wrath shifts focus from Greek hero to barbarian princess:97 nec facie meritisque placet, sed carmina novit diraque cantata pabula falce metit. It is neither beauty nor merit that makes her agreeable, but she knows incantations and with her enchanted sickle she reaps the dreadful plants. (6. 83–4)

The list of Medea's perfidious acts is indeed a long one and takes up another ten indignant lines. What stirs Hypsipyle's anger the most is the memory of Medea's capacity to manipulate words and herbs to stir Jason's passion. This capacity makes Medea's desire for Jason a winning one, but this alone is enough to expose the improbity of her love; Medea with her malicious art triumphs where casta (‘chaste’, 73) and pudica (‘modest’, 134) Hypsipyle has failed. Love, art, distrust, and division cluster in these lines of Hypsipyle's angry letter. Once again, these ideas can be traced back to archaic Greece. Such distorted amor fits accurately (and ironically) the description of love to be found in Parmenides' image of Aphrodite (fr. 12 D–K), a passage reflecting similar preoccupations to the ones put forward in the Hesiodic and Aristophanic presentations of the goddess of love, discussed in the two previous sections of this chapter. In this fragment Parmenides explicitly connects

97

On Hypsipyle's (obsessive) preoccupation with Medea, cf. Verducci (1985) 63–6; Rosati (1988) esp. 305; Hinds (1993) 27–30.


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amorous affinity with division—Eros with Eris—and confers upon the goddess of love primordial status, just as Hesiod and Aristophanes had done. He also holds her responsible for the instabilities in the relationships of mortals and for the bitterness and discord that usually emerge from their union. Such perceptions of the cosmology of Eros are able to refine our ways of addressing the heroines' troubled experiences of love. In its creative capacity, love is symbolically connected with the rise of the individual and with individualistic, separatist thought. If Eros is responsible for people and things getting their own clear shapes, then he is also responsible for people and things recognizing their difference from one another. Love, as well as the imagery of it, is thus invested with a double (and conflicting) identity. It is Earth as well as Eden, division as much as fusion; or better, it is division even though it promised to be harmonious blend and fusion,98 and the Heroides' discourses have this lifting of the delusion recorded in their narrative twists. Of all the heroines, Oenone has the most painful experience of this puzzling transition. Her tutus (‘safe’) amor is blemished almost at the moment that it is registered, by the juxtaposed reference to Helen and her notoriously detrimental love.99 Whereas Oenone's marginal discourse seems to believe in Love-in-place-of-War, Helen of Troy and her turbulent story throws this dream into disarray, as a whole succession of texts seems fixed in a lapsed signifier, Love-as-War, when it comes to the queen of Sparta.100 Such powerful signals of the waning of love and the debasement of all related tokens of paradisiac harmony can hardly be

98

I would like here to refer in passing to an issue with much wider implications: a certain ‘distance’ is always needed for love and desire to exist. In that paradigmatic case where the total union between the two lovers was unconditionally achieved, death itself took the place of love and desire. I am obviously here referring to Narcissus, whose story Ovid will treat in Book 3 of the Metamorphoses. The issue cannot be exhausted in the space of a paragraph but cf. esp. Rosati (1983); Hardie (1988).

99

Oenone at this point seems not to know of (or seems to ignore?) the future turmoil stored up for Paris and Helen. But knowledge of this future and hence a different set of ambiguities in Oenone's discourse would be available to contemporary, literate, readers as they are to modern super-readers as well.

100

Cf. here Meagher (1995), who traces this ambivalent role of Helen's love within rituals and beliefs of the wider area of the ancient Near East.

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considered a novelty in the collection. Nevertheless, what is impressive and worth emphasizing in Oenone's letter is the way her thoughts fail to sustain the poetic form of immaculate purity, no matter how far backwards in her poetic time she seeks to go. This inability has a wider significance to be pursued in the next section.

4. BREAKING THE ILLUSION: THE HEROIDES' TAINTED PARADISES In the light of the imagery of tainted love discussed in the preceding pages, the heroines' paradisiac memories come up with scars that our initial and more credulous readings failed to notice. Oenone's idyllic reminiscing proves particularly vulnerable to this new scrutiny. Despite the abundance of symbolic descriptions of pastoral harmony in her letter, Paris' and her love was always already tainted, as the two lovers' legendary sylvan union appears marked (and marred) by disparity, even when at its peak. Oenone, for example, does not omit to mention Paris' humble background at the time of the blissful union and to juxtapose it self-righteously with her own mighty position in the hierarchy of forest life: nondum tantus eras, cum te contenta marito edita de magno flumine nympha fui. qui nunc Priamides—absit reverentia vero!— servus eras; servo nubere nympha tuli! You were not yet so great, when I—a nymph begotten by a great river—was content with you as a husband. You who are a son of Priam—let shyness stay away from truth!—were then a slave; I, a nymph, condescended to wed a slave! (5. 9–12)

And this is not just a one-off antagonistic outburst: only a few lines later the heroine recalls with resentment her didactic role in what was meant to be a paradigmatically impeccable affair (quis tibi monstrabat saltus venatibus aptos, / et tegeret catulos qua fera rupe suos? ‘Who showed to you the glens best suited for hunting, and also beneath what rock the wild animal concealed her cubs?’ 5. 17–18). This blend of love and indignation should be considered within the wider context of the heroines' language of love. We have already watched them referring to that bodily


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mingling that they once experienced with their lovers as the ultimate signifier of the absolute love that they had formerly reached together—notably amongst them, Oenone at 5. 43–8. In those cases, love did, in fact, seem to belong to the idiom of Golden Age nostalgia that permeates the collection. And yet, as Oenone's last memory suggests, even in that idyllic moment in their love affair the two lovers fall short of ideal perfection. The boundaries between them appear already sharpened and underlined by the process itself of love. But, if culture itself is indeed responsible for the segmentation of an otherwise innocent world, as has been argued,101 then the representation of prompt and spontaneous love, allegedly shared at some stage between Oenone and Paris, has already succumbed to the moulding effect of culture. Even though she obstinately seeks to articulate a discourse of innocence in her letter, Oenone's love appears always already stained by her awareness of the other's difference102 and by her expertise in the life of the forest, specifically its hunting code.103 In other words, Oenone's love is stained by the very artfulness whose signs I traced in the previous section. The unresolved grappling between purity and artifice in the heroines' narrative recurs in other letters. Laodamia's paradoxical suggestions, for example, vividly illustrate this open-ended shifting. Virtually every word of her grieving letter attests the decay of what she recalls as a perfect relationship with Protesilaus. Art and artifice play a significant role in the plot, in the form of Protesilaus' waxen image that Laodamia keeps in her chamber to remind her of her beloved (dum tamen arma geres diverso miles in orbe, / quae referat vultus est mihi cera tuos, ‘nonetheless, while you will be bearing arms in a far-away land, I have this waxen image to remind me of your face’, 13. 151–2). The effigy foreshadows Protesilaus' illusory appearance as a ghost, a well-known development in the myth, but it also explicitly stands as a substitute for the pure, unsullied form of the past affections between the two lovers:

101

Cf. e.g. Fowler (1996).

102

Cf. e.g. Ariadne in 10. 51–6, 73–5. Such statements, with their contorted symbols of love, form what one could call the idiom of separation, illustrating the decayed paradise for which the heroines mourn.

103

In an interesting reversal of the traditional elegiac motif; cf. here Knox (1995) ad loc.

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illi blanditias, illi tibi debita verba dicimus, amplexus accipit illa meos. crede mihi, plus est, quam quod videatur, imago; adde sonum cerae, Protesilaus erit. hanc specto teneoque sinu pro coniuge vero, et, tamquam possit verba referre, queror. I speak to it the blandishments and the words due to you, and it receives my embrace. Believe me, an image is more than what it appears to be; add voice to the wax and it will be Protesilaus. I look at it and hold it in my embrace in place of my real husband, and complain to it as if it could speak back to me. (13. 153–8)

What the description seems to suggest is that artifice has indeed crept into Laodamia's discourse but only as a symptom and a signifier of a flawed love. And yet, Laodamia's thoughts have already fallen prey to contradictions. Readers should still have in mind the memories of unspoiled love introduced only a few couplets earlier in the heroine's letter. And that picture can hardly be considered as artless: quando erit, ut lecto mecum bene iunctus in uno militiae referas splendida facta tuae? quae mihi dum referes, quamvis audire iuvabit, multa tamen capies oscula, multa dabis. semper in his apte narrantia verba resistunt; promptior est dulci lingua referre mora. When will it be that, tightly joined with me in the same bed, you tell me about your splendid deeds in the battlefield? And while you are recounting these to me, though it will please me to hear, nonetheless you will snatch many kisses, and will give many back. Well-told stories always halt at these. A tongue is more ready to recite after a sweet delay. (13. 117–22)

Kisses and words, lovemaking and storytelling, mingle and stumble over one another in Laodamia's vision of the perfect love: deceit has slipped into her paradise, tainting with ruse the perfect proximity of the latter. In turn, Protesilaus' own words become more cunning and eloquent under the pressure of love: promptior est dulci lingua referre mora, ‘more ready to speak is a tongue after a sweet delay’ (122). The epic narrative still intrudes: once again, this cannot be the desired return to Eden. Set against the wider controversy between innocence and deceit that I have been exploring in this section, Laodamia's


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contemplations corroborate the bond between art and love that runs through the Heroides spoiling their innocent visions. If the heroines obstinately insist that artifice had come into their lives only after a Golden Age period was over for them, such imagery as that which appears in Laodamia's letter exposes this conviction, taints their idealized paradise, and always places ruse already at the beginning, as I show in the next section. The wider connotations of Laodamia's ‘craftful’ memories should not pass unheeded. Insisting unconvincingly on the purity of her idealized paradise links her up with the web of Golden Age literature. Hippolytus, in Seneca's Phaedra, for instance, is a close parallel in this respect, offering a long and famous paradigm of a sylvan paradise in an unsuccessful effort to counteract the Nurse's exhortation to an amorous existence (ll. 483–564). His world and his character are very different from Laodamia's and the other heroines' life and mores.104 And yet, his Golden Age landscape shares the same deficiency as hers: both accounts of an ideal paradise fail to safeguard the imagined abodes from the contamination of skill and the fraud lurking behind that skill. We have already seen how Laodamia's bed and paradise are ‘invaded’ by the insidious deceit of Protesilaus' story-making.105 Similarly symbolic of inescapable damage is Hippolytus' paradisiac forest, which, nevertheless, is meant to counterbalance slavery, crime, guilt, and ambush, all of them stains that, according to his virginal mind, go hand in hand with a lapsed (urban) conscience and life of amorous encounters. His description features the main characteristics of a Golden Age kingdom—greed is unknown (496 ff.), blood is absent (498 ff.), while natural and uncultivated land offers to the content

104

I deliberately ignore for the moment what at first sight appears to be an irreconcilable difference between the paradise of Hippolytus and those of the heroines, namely that his is expressly virginal while theirs are eagerly erotic. In fact, Hippolytus' chaste forest is directly relevant to the Heroides and will play a central role in the rest of this section; the craft of hunting in the forest furnishes us with one of the most explicit links between the virginal retreat of Hippolytus and the amorous abode of the Heroides. Cf. also n. 49 below.

105

And, of course, Protesilaus' story inevitably brings to mind another legendary storytelling with notoriously pernicious impact on its audience, namely Aeneas' narration of the events at Troy to love-struck Dido in Books 2–3 and 4.1–5 of the Aeneid.

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wanderer an easy meal (515 ff.). And more importantly, just like the Ovidian heroines, Seneca's Hippolytus also firmly believes in a landscape of innocence: non alia magis est libera et vitio carens ritusque melius vita quae priscos colat, quam quae relictis moenibus silvas amat. There is no other life so free of restraints and blemish, none which better tends the ancient rites, than that which loves the woods, leaving the cities behind. (483–5)

And yet, just as in the heroines' case, invincible craft beleaguers Hippolytus' idyllic recess: in his proudly unrefined abode, birds are singing and the mountain ashes murmur as they move gently in the breeze (507–9). A tacit, literally whispering, kind of art has crept into the primitive landscape, just as, in Her. 13. 115 ff., Protesilaus' bedtime storytelling had slyly tainted the (re)union of the two lovers in Laodamia's fantasies of that cherished moment. In the case of Senecan Hippolytus, in particular, Nature herself and her creations seem to have taken up the role of the excluded artist in a manner that is, in fact, characteristically Ovidian: simulaverat artem ingenio natura suo, ‘Nature, by her own innate qualities, had imitated art’, as Ovid himself would put it in the Metamorphoses (3. 158–9).106 And the trope of Nature's takeover takes us even deeper into the maze of Golden Age poetry evoked by the heroines' fantasies, as it recalls another famous garden celebrated for the inextricable mingling of desire, art, and rusticity within its protected boundaries, namely the garden of Daphnis and Chloe in Longus' work.107 Such landscape descriptions are not uncommon in Greek and especially Roman thought,108 but the passages selected above all share a fundamental belief of great importance for a broader appreciation of the heroines' idyllic fantasies. In particular, they all expose the precariousness that mars the famously innocent retreats, as they get defiled through the competence, shrewdness,

106

Cf. also the grove of Proserpina in Met. 5. 385 ff. For an extended metapoetic approach to this locus amoenus, see Hinds (1987b) 25–48 and passim.

107

On the subtle interplay between the erotic and the aesthetic in that garden, see Zeitlin (1994) esp. 157–63.

108

On Roman gardens both real and literary, see Grimal (1969); Jashemski (1993); Farrar (1998); Cima and La Rocca (1998).


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and audacity of art. And this reminder is of direct relevance to the heroines' visions, explaining much about the structural failures and inherent contradictions of their idealized shelters. Love cannot help but be knowledge, memory, expertise, and eventually writing for the heroines, as skill, perplexity, danger, and cares creep into their paradises, disguised under the veil of a Golden Age affection. The ambiguity of such an idyllic topography is paradigmatically marked in Ariadne's case. It is in her story that guiles of art, like the ones which had slipped into Laodamia's conjugal chamber, take their most destructive form and create an upheaval capable of turning bliss into hell for the abandoned heroine. Symbolically stranded on the borderline of a land, Ariadne mourns and depicts the decay of her paradise. What until the previous evening was for her a landscape of bliss, turns overnight into a hostile land marred by her lover's treachery. The indisputable sign of absolute affinity, sleeping next to one another, in Ariadne's story proves at the same time a device of escape and a piece of trickery concocted by Theseus, concealing within its misleading honesty the seeds of deception. Ariadne is not short of expressions of grief over her downfall from paradise. In fact, she has barely begun her letter when she embarks on a painstaking description of her awakening to a degraded world: tempus erat, vitrea quo primum terra pruina / spargitur et tectae fronde queruntur aves, ‘it was the time when the earth is first sprinkled by crystal hoar-frost, and the birds hidden in the leaves start their complaints’ (10. 7–8). And the indignant outburst lasts for several more couplets (9–16). Tempus erat: we can hardly ignore the intertextual connotations of this laconic introduction that features typically in instances where evil is about to wreak havoc on people's nocturnal serenity.109 Unsuspecting and vulnerable contentment and an impending catastrophe is what the intertextual history of this phrase suggests, thus accurately capturing Ariadne's passage from the security of her conjugal bed to the horror of abandonment by Theseus. Even before Ariadne has had the chance to fully comprehend the harsh reality, the birds hidden in the branches have started their morning ‘complaint’ (1. 8), ominously foreshadowing the heroine's lament about to commence.

109

Cf. famously Verg. Aen. 2. 268; Ov. Met. 6. 587; 10. 446.

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Hardly able to digest the sudden change of fate in her hitherto felicitous lot, Ariadne sets off upon a frenzied roaming about the narrow shore (ll. 19–24). Eventually, she will spot a high rock hanging nearby and rush up there to get a view over the wide sea and of Theseus as he abandons the island and herself under full sail (ll. 25–30). The severe reality is suddenly displayed to her eyes with crude lucidity: Theseus is abandoning their abode. Despite her initial incredulity and the intense pain that this discovery brings with it, Ariadne will eventually manage to face the hard truth. As Theseus' departure gradually sinks in, we witness a radical difference in her perception of the island of Naxos: paradise becomes an eerie and hostile no-man's-land, suddenly and with no warning: iam iam venturos aut hac aut suspicor illac, qui lanient avido viscera dente, lupos. quis scit an et fulvos tellus alat ista leones? forsitan et saevas tigridas insula habet. et freta dicuntur magnas expellere phocas! quis vetat et gladios per latus ire meum? Every moment I suspect that, this way or the other, wolves are about to come and tear my entrails with greedy teeth. Who knows whether this land nourishes tawny lions, as well? Perhaps this island also breeds savage tigers. And the seas are also said to thrust out huge seals. Who would forbid the sword from piercing my side? (10. 83–8)

The idyllic bliss that Ariadne was living in until that very dawn has now given way to a pitiless and agonizing suspense. Prey to as yet invisible but pending evils, the heroine wanders aimlessly around and tries to devise some explanation that could account adequately for the fall—for her own, Theseus', and ultimately the readers', sake. Her confused reasoning traces back Theseus' mesmerizing words of love (tum mihi dicebas: ‘per ego ipsa pericula iuro / te fore, dum nostrum vivet uterque, meam’, ‘you told me then: “by these very dangers I swear that you shall be my own, while you and I both live”’, 10. 73–4), treacherously offered (crudelis … data poscenti, nomen inane, fides! ‘cruel promise, an empty name, given at request’, 10. 116). Once again, fading Golden Age imagery lingers in the past tense of the heroines' poetic memory. In spite of Theseus' solemn oath to eternal ‘fusing’ love,110 the two lovers at present lead two separate

110

For more on eros as a melting experience, see section 3.1 above.


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lives (vivimus, et non sum, Theseu, tua, ‘we are alive and still I am not yours, Theseus’, 10. 75). The taint of the paradise now takes a very specific form. It is division and emotional and physical distance that have assailed Ariadne's landscape of desire, bred and animated by the hollow substance of Theseus' artful pledges of eternal attachment, the nomina inania (‘empty words’; cf. also l. 116), which also may be the songs of love themselves, and thus emerge as double-sided coins of affirmation and treachery all at once. Indeed, the letter resonates with fear and apprehension inspired by the very island that had briefly served as a haven of love for Theseus and Ariadne.111 However, no sign can deliver the message of fall more convincingly than the two lovers' abandoned bed and, time and again, Ariadne will feel this irresistible urge to interrupt her pointless wandering and return to that faithless bed112 which attests with its emptiness to the corrupted nature of Theseus' love: saepe torum repeto, qui nos acceperat ambos, sed non acceptos exhibiturus erat, et tua, quae possum pro te, vestigia tango strataque quae membris intepuere tuis. incumbo, lacrimisque toro manante profusis, ‘pressimus,’ exclamo, ‘te duo—redde duos! venimus huc ambo; cur non discedimus ambo?’ Often I return to the bed that had us both, but it was not going to show again those it had received. And I touch your imprint in place of you, wherever I can, and the coverlet which had been warmed by your limbs. I fling myself upon the bed drenched with my flowing tears, and I exclaim, ‘We two have pressed you; give back these two. We both have come here; why cannot we both depart?’ (10. 51–7)

111

See esp. 10. 93–5. A parallel thought: in many ways, Heroides 10 can be considered one of the bleakest narratives of the collection, but it is certainly not the most tragic (compared, for example, with Canace's); and yet, it is distinctly lacking in happy (even if lost) memories. This lack mirrors a paradise particularly flawed from the very beginning, since it rested on a trick (the thread that brought them all out of the Labyrinth) as well as an erotic perversion (the Minotaur).

112

See here 10. 58: perfide, pars nostri, lectule, maior ubi est? (‘faithless couch, where is [he], the greater part of my existence?’). The phrase echoes an earlier distich of the epistle: conterrita surgo / membraque sunt viduo praecipitata toro (‘I get up in terror and throw myself onto my empty bed’, 13–14).

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The bed imagery leads us back to Oenone's idyllic union (5. 13–30) discussed earlier on as the Golden Age locus par excellence of the whole collection. At first sight, the two topographies appear to have nothing in common. Oenone's contented repose on Nature's bed in the forest's shelter by the side of Paris seems to re-enact the unaffected peace associated with Golden Age purity, a state sorely missed and bitterly recalled when Ariadne is faced with her own abandoned and faithless bed. And yet, a fresh reading of Oenone's memories can call into question the apparent candour and spontaneity which dominate them. Indeed, a series of dexterous gestures mark the rupture of the two youngsters' rustic world. Eros is an adroit teacher, and under such expert guidance Paris has devised elaborate expressions of unmistakable elegiac art to proclaim the urge of love within him. First and foremost amongst those expressions is the carving of his beloved's name on the beech trees, as Oenone has many a time noticed (incisae servant a te mea nomina fagi, ‘the beech trees, cut by you, still retain my name’, 5. 21). And also, the two lovers' rustic activities are already marred by bloodshed. Oenone still vividly remembers how she and Paris would spend their days stretching their nets and locating likely terrain for hunting wild animals. Disruption and strife have already spoiled their paradise and, even more importantly, they appear as a natural part of the couple's proximity, as another signal of their perfect union. Last but not least, it was Oenone who let Paris into the secrets of the hunter's art: quis tibi monstrabat saltus venatibus aptos? ‘who showed to you the glens suitable for hunting?’ (5.17)—teaching becomes one of the tropes for an amorous life; life and art are, once more, inextricably linked in the Heroides. The imagery tugs us to Senecan Hippolytus and his vision of an innocent life in the woods. The whole passage—a paradigmatic Golden Age discussed earlier on in this section—resists firmly the possible invasions of cultured life. And yet, Hippolytus' retreat only too quickly proves to be a fragile one: there is a craft that is allowed to penetrate this sanctuary of artlessness of his, and, most significantly, this is none other than the art of hunting. Hippolytus himself admits that much, even if inadvertently, when he juxtaposes his vision of the ideal subject, a man devoted


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to the pure life of Nature, with the Nurse's injunctions for an amorous life: callidas tantum feris struxisse fraudes novit, ‘he only knows how to make cunning snares for the wild beasts’ (Sen. Phaedra 502).113 Ovidian Phaedra will also expose the precariousness of Hippolytus' retreat. Her frenetic discourse may jump from one point to another in an unstable and unpredictable fashion, but when she comes to remember Hippolytus' devotion to the innocent life in the woods, her narration becomes a clear-minded attack on his stubborn and solitary abode.114 Unlike his woods, her woods are essentially erotic, witnesses of a long list of love affairs at all times. Aurora and Cephalus, Venus and Adonis, Atalanta and Oeneus, to name a few, have enjoyed (or suffered through) their passion in such woods (4. 93–100).115 Encouraged by these memories, Phaedra is eager to stand by Hippolytus (ipsa comes veniam …, ‘I will come as your attendant’, 4. 103) and finishes her account with a plea to him to let the two of them join the company of the legendary lovers: nos quoque quam primum turba numeremur in ista! ‘let us, too, be numbered in this throng, as soon as possible!’ (4. 101). In spite of her stubborn refusal to accept the artful nature of her passion,116 her vision of love, in this instance, is hardly craftless and Phaedra sounds only too sure about it. Love is an art and if you take it away the forest is just too plain a place: si Venerem tollas, rustica silva tua est, ‘If you remove Venus, your woods are very plain’ (4. 102). In parenthesis, and so that we do justice to the multivalence of this message, suffice it to remember here that Phaedra had already used images from the world of hunting when first revealing her burning desire to follow Hippolytus into the woods: in nemus ire libet pressisque in retia cervis/hortari celeris per iuga summa canes, ‘I want to go to the grove and, the stags subdued by the nets,

113

Seneca becomes particularly relevant again; cf. Phaedra 42: another idyllic recess is violated as Hippolytus tracks the traces of the prey that he intends to hunt. See also Segal (1983: 242 ff.) on this and on the widespread tension marking the Golden Age loci throughout Phaedra.

114

Cf. here Casali (1995a: 6), who suggests that, through such an attack, ‘Ovid's Phaedra takes up the function of Euripides' nurse, in the style of the elegiac lena. ’

115

On the unhappy connotations of these love affairs and their impact on Ovid's text, see Casali (1995a) 6–7.

116

Constantly contradicting herself in the process: cf. e.g. 4. 26–7, 37, and see section 3.2 above.

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cheer the swift hounds over the mountain ridges’ (4. 41 ff.). Hunting in that instance was an ambivalent signal of celibacy as well as erotic fury for Phaedra, the very thing that had also happened in Oenone's mind, as explored above. Of course, Phaedra in that passage echoes the well-known, frenzied wish of the Euripidean Phaedra to go off hunting in Hippolytus' forest (Eur. Hipp. 208 ff.).117 As a projected answer to the Senecan passages explored above, Phaedra's passionate images in Her. 4 manage to sow doubt in Hippolytus' unperturbed forest. And this is not the only way in which crafty love creeps into Hippolytus' brittle visions of celibacy in the Senecan play, as the highly suggestive imagery of the budding flowers caressed by the running waters of the river at 513–14 intimates: … sive per flores novos fugiente dulcis murmurat rivo sonus (‘or other times a sweet murmur [can be heard] from the river that runs past the fresh flowers’). Equally, Hippolytus' own images of hunting expose Oenone's fantasies of paradisiac love. Once more, love appears flawed and its assumed purity proves inadequate and too fragile to sustain the heroines' rhetoric of innocence. Empedocles becomes relevant again: love brings things (and people) together and strife drives them apart, as two contrasting as well as inseparable cosmic forces, and the Greek philosopher's corpus provides several instances of their ominous blend.118 Oenone is not the only heroine who fails to picture the perfect paradise in her narrative. Her stained memories of life in the forest are only one example (albeit an impressive one) in a series of such blemished paradises which dominate the collection and disrupt its eager rhetoric of innocence. And Dido's grappling with the memories of her own destroyed haven is perhaps the example of paradise lost in the Heroides that most powerfully suggests that the heroines' ideal retreats were never really there; that ambivalence was already there from the very beginning. The dead end in Dido's fantasies is most explicitly exposed at the point in her letter when she pleads with Aeneas to stop his endless wandering and settle beside her in her Tyrian kingdom:

117

The motif also gestures at the distraught rampage in the woods (more ferae, ‘as wild creatures live their life’) famously longed for by Virgil's Dido (Aen. 4. 551), a much disputed passage on which see Austin (1955) ad loc.

118

See also Wright (1995) 30–48.


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Hos potius populos in dotem, ambage remissa, accipe et advectas Pygmalionis opes. Ilion in Tyriam transfer felicius urbem resque loco regis sceptraque sacra tene! si tibi mens avida est belli, si quaerit Iulus, unde suo partus Marte triumphus eat, quem superet, nequid desit, praebebimus hostem; hic pacis leges, hic locus arma capit. Cease your wanderings and accept this people for dowry, and Pygmalion's wealth which I transported here. More propitiously, transfer Ilium to a Tyrian city and enjoy the kingdom—as if it was your kingdom—and the sacred sceptre. If your heart is greedy for war, if Iulus is wondering from where a triumph, born of his skill at war, may be gained, so that he misses nothing, we will provide him with an enemy to subdue. This place can hold both the laws of peace and the arms of war. (7. 149–56).

The description of Dido's paradise starts with an explicit code of simplicity: ambage remissa. The Tyrian queen invites Aeneas to abandon his rambling fate and accept the refuge that she offers him in Carthage. In her vision of paradise there is an enticing life lying ahead for Aeneas and his own people, a lure hard to resist for the Trojan survivor to give up his travelling lot and his great mission. He is promised wealth, the kingly sceptre, and a shelter capable of safeguarding a carefree and joyous childhood for his son Iulus/Ascanius. On a distinctly Elysian note, Dido also appeals to the gods—the Trojan penates that accompanied Aeneas in his flight from fire-gutted Troy—eager to enlist their favourable auspices for the paradise that she is trying to construct. And, of course, the succour of Venus and her winged son features as a necessary part of this uplifting vision. However, Dido's delightful rehearsal of the paradise in store is blurred by ambivalence. A second reading of this idyllic description uncovers blemishes in the narrative. The same line that spoke about the laws of peace also accommodates, in its second half, the laws of war (hic pacis leges, hic locus arma capit, ‘this place can hold both the laws of peace and the weapons of war’, 156). The message is clear in its ambiguity: Dido's paradise is a place of war as well as peace: Aeneas and Ascanius will not lack opportunities for practising their martial arts within its boundaries. Whatever the differences between the above passages, they all

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suggest that vice has entered the enchanted world of the Heroides' letters in a variety of forms. One is prompted to consider formulating the ‘inadequacy’ in even wider terms. It is a general psychological and emotional retreat ‘before’ history and the vices of civilized life that appears increasingly impossible as a goal in the heroines' vision—a message eagerly emphasizing the inaccessibility of a prior Golden Age, that Ovid himself may have wished to pass to his emperor just as eagerly as the heroines did to their absent darlings.119 Indeed, even if Aeneas or the other absent lovers could have been talked into ceasing their maritime wanderings, it was the wanderings of literary memory that incessantly upset the heroines' innocuous fantasies. It is important to notice here that it is exactly by ardently desiring to retreat to the flawless old times that the heroines allow the corrosive and culpable memories to emerge and assail the accounts of perfection which nourish their rhetoric of innocence. So, for example, a shadow is already cast over Hermione's idealized reminiscences of Orestes' prowess, as the memory of his bloodstained past comes back to her mind together with his achievements (nec virtute cares. arma invidiosa tulisti / sed tibi—quid faceres?—induit illa pater, ‘and you are not lacking virtue; but you have assumed arms for a hateful cause. Yet, what could you do? Your father placed them in your hand’, 8. 49–50).120 Hermione and the other heroines recollect their past happiness in an effort to conjure up a refuge against the turmoil of their present malaise. And yet, instead of leading their frenetic discourse to the desired mooring, such a remembrance goes astray, lost in the ambages of the literary memory triggered by the reminiscing. To illustrate the point further with two distinctive examples: while retracing their steps in search of lost innocence, Hermione and Phaedra keep moving further away from it, the former wistfully recapturing the unhappy fates of the Tantalid women of her line (8. 65–74), the latter unwillingly conjuring up in her distraught narrative the heavy toll paid to love by her female ancestors (4. 53–66).121

119

For more on the relation of the Heroides to Augustan ideology, see e.g. Arena (1995).

120

Note here the presence of Euripides' Orestes in the background, with the near-murder of Hermione by the hero—see e.g. lines 1211–13, 1216–18, 1348.

121

For more on Phaedra's unlucky ancestors, see Casali (1995a) 10–11.


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5. TALES OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE grande doloris ingenium est, miserisque venit sollertia rebus. Great talents are triggered by distress, and sadness breeds skill. (Ov. Met. 6. 574–5) It is then little wonder, indeed, that such knowledge and memory are unwelcome, even if inescapable, to the heroines. Characteristically—as well as highly ironically—Hermione wonders explicitly about the role of memory, as soon as she has finished revisiting in every significant detail the unlucky loves in her family line: vix equidem memini, memini tamen. omnia luctus, omnia solliciti plena timoris erant. As far as I am concerned, I hardly remember, still I do remember. All was full of mourning, full of stirred-up fear. (8. 75–6)122

Even if referring specifically to the notorious occasion of her mother's flight from Sparta at Paris' side, such a statement at the very end of a long list of betrayed love affairs offers a symbolic representation of the pith and marrow of the heroines' vision of lost wholeness. Even though their discourse is replete with overtones and rhetorical modes pointing to the lost ideal of love, their perceptions of it and memories about it fall short both of this ideal and of their own deepest desires. As Hermione's formulation tersely describes, the heroines' memories of this idealized erotic love are marred by grief, anxiety, and fear. Hypsipyle's letter is permeated by such stains: credula res amor est, ‘love is a credulous thing’ (6. 21), timidum quod amat, ‘love is fearful’ (6. 29), and her paradise has always been marred by uncertainty (non equidem secura fui, ‘I have never been free from care’, 6. 79). Phaedra's epistle is most eloquent in this respect, especially in 4. 149–55, when the surge of amor has swept away from her all previous loftiness and any sense of modesty. The very ideal of love that, up to now, was assumed to have

122

vix equidem memini, memini tamen …: note the literarily self-conscious character of this memory.

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remained unscathed despite the heroines' current malaise and therefore capable of supporting their Golden Age reminiscences is now presented scarred and maimed. A fresh reading of the collection at this point is able to locate traces of this dark potential of love in more than one instance. Not only is love ultimately indefinable in the discourse of the Heroides, it gradually turns menacing as well, and Dido's letter exemplifies this shift. After having revived with painstaking detail the turbulent course of her life so far, Dido eventually resorts to cursing Aeneas' own arrival in her land: ‘sed iubet ire deus.’ vellem, vetuisset adire, Punica nec Teucris pressa fuisset humus! ‘But a god commands me to go.’ I wish he had forbidden you to come and that the Punic soil had not been trodden by the Trojans! (7. 139–40)

Dido's dismissive attitude here sets up a stark contrast with the other heroines' longing for the heroes' arrival, as explored in the earlier sections of this chapter. For once, we are explicitly prompted at this point to perceive the hero's love as the violation of a paradise rather than the construction of one. And it is significant that this explicit acknowledgement of the violent side of love should come from Dido of all the heroines. The Virgilian intertext with the famous imagery of love assaulting Lavinia's face can hardly be ignored (Aen. 12. 67–9).123 A similar twofold possibility also flickers in Medea's terse mention of Jason's entry into her life (iussus inexpertam Colchos advertere puppim / intrasti patriae regna beata meae, ‘ordered to steer your unproved ship to Colchis, you entered the happy realms of my land’, 12. 23–4). Ovid himself will resume the theme of Medea's patrimonial—and pre-erotic—land in the Metamorphoses. In a gesture of significance for the Ovidian poetics, Ovid will there expand into a long and volatile soliloquy of loss what was a laconic and subtle expression of regret in the Heroides (Met. 7. 1–71). Importantly, both passages invite a double interpretation. Alongside frustration at the lost opportunity for conjugal harmony, Medea's soliloquy in the Heroides also evinces nostalgia for a lost placidity altogether prior to and

123

On the complex role of love in this last passage, see Lyne (1987) 114–22.


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incompatible with the presence of Jason and erotic love, a second meaning which will be made more explicit in the Metamorphoses. What both Dido and Medea here suggest is a type of love capable of violating, as much as sublimating, the paradise of the heroines. As a first consequence of this, the heroines should be imagined to distrust, as well as crave for, love. As a second, their loving paradises should be considered ominous as much as blissful. In the light of this new reading, Phaedra's love-encompassing forest (p. 73 above) lends itself to an interesting reappraisal. At first sight, nothing seems to be able to upset the erotic tranquillity of the woods. But Phaedra's enumeration of the figures whose love was sanctioned in the forest culminates with the Arcadian huntress, Atalanta. And according to a different version, Atalanta's erotic life in the forest was once coloured by resistance and legendary battles over her feelings.124 Because texts live in and through other texts, and ancient literature expressly throve on this intertextual game of hide and seek, the traces of that strife are always already inscribed in Atalanta's present happiness—dormant, but for that reason symbolic of the tacit disruption hanging over the idyllic sylvan retreats cherished in the heroines' narratives.125 Even if love in the Elysian woods is portrayed with the brightest colours throughout the collection, it is not immune from cruelty and division hovering in the background. And the famous intertext about the menacing quality of the woods is, of course, Aeneid 4, multiply echoed (and criticized) in Heroides 7.126 The heroines' despair over their tough lot has been central to the discussion in this chapter. But Dido's and Medea's angst and the discussion it triggered just above suggest that this agony is of a somewhat different sort. This is no longer a schism between the steadiness of love and its vicissitudes that threaten to stain the heroines' abode, but rather a discord between erotic attachment and virginal independence. Cydippe's narration aptly illustrates this lurking threat of love that impends over a seemingly sheltered landscape. Strolling round the holy precincts in false

124

See Prop. 1. 1. 9–15 with Fedeli (1980) ad loc., and cf. AA 2. 185–92.

125

Cf. here Segal (1969) passim, on the lurking nature of danger in the innocent paradises of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

126

On this see Desmond (1993) esp. 61–3.

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peace of mind and chaperoned by her loyal nurse (21. 95–102), Cydippe will still be pierced by Acontius' gaze and her simple, chaste nature will thus be irrevocably thrown into disarray: forsitan haec spectans a te spectabar, Aconti, / visaque simplicitas est mea posse capi, ‘Perhaps as I was beholding these things, I was beheld by you, Acontius, and my simplicity seemed to you prone to be ensnared’ (21. 103–4). Her safe landscape is no longer pure but has been assailed by the latent power of erotic passion.127 No longer comfortable in her infringed paradise, Cydippe will seek refuge in Diana's sanctuary in an effort to protect her innocence. And yet Acontius' infatuation will manage to invade this paradigmatically virginal dwelling, as his confession of love inscribed on the apple lands in front of the young girl's feet: in templum redeo gradibus sublime Dianae— tutior hoc ecquis debuit esse locus? mittitur ante pedes malum cum carmine tali— I return to the temple of Diana, with its grand staircase; what place could be safer than this? An apple is thrown in front of my feet, with this sort of charm inscribed on it. (21. 105–7)

Despite the chaste environment, Cydippe is finally smitten by the cares of erotic yearning. The two young lovers are forced into a long-distance relationship only vicariously consummated through their letter-writing. In this light, Cydippe's letter is unexpectedly ambivalent. Rather than filling the lines with declarations of fondness, Cydippe spends a good part of her narrative denouncing Acontius' crafty attack. In fact, her letter is articulated on an unsettled contrast: she misses her lost virginal innocence just as much as she misses her beloved. Further readings of the other letters can locate a similar double-mindedness and confusion. In the course of her letter, Phaedra turns to both Diana and Venus, invoking them to stand by her side.128 Similarly, Phyllis is racked by shame for having

127

Cf. the topos of the tacitly sinister landscape, paradigmatically exemplified by Moschus, Europa 65 ff. On this see Nisbet (1987) 248 n. 32, and cf. Hom. Hym. Dem. 6 ff.; OV . Fast. 4. 437; Theoc. Id. 13. 39 ff.; Ap. Arg. 3. 887 ff. and Prop. 1. 20. 33 ff. with Bramble (1974) 91–2.

128

Cf. e.g. 4. 39 f., 167. The specific ambiguity brings to mind another heroine, Penelope, and her twofold comparison with both Artemis and Aphrodite in the Odyssey. On this cf. Felson-Rubin (1994) esp. 34–7.


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allowed Demophoon in her bed (2. 57–60), while at the same time pining over him and his prolonged absence throughout her narration. There seems to be a niche in these letters where this virginal purity usurps the role that amor itself used to play in the heroines' mental and poetic journey towards abstract (and absent) wholeness. Oenone's letter and her way of referring to Helen's faithless love is worth special mention here. While predicting the pain that Helen's impious lust will eventually bring to Paris, just as it has done to Menelaus (5. 99–103), Oenone cannot hide her bitter distrust in the cunning of love: nulla reparabilis arte laesa pudicitia est; deperit illa semel, ‘once violated, chastity cannot be repaired by any skill; it is lost for ever’ (5. 103–4). Strong signs of independence are evinced here, as in 2. 143 (stat nece matura tenerum pensare pudorem, ‘I have decided to atone for my youthful chastity with an adult death’) by an even more defiant Phyllis. The readers who know their Metamorphoses will not fail to recognize the ominous links between these assertive passages and the stories of independent females in that epic, such as (in)famously Io, Callisto, and Philomela, whose fates are discussed in De Luce (1993) as examples of an independence threatening to the world of male dominance and therefore ultimately ‘punished’.129 And yet, for all the disturbing overtones, in these passages of the Heroides passionate yearning for the other has just been measured against virginal self-containment and has been found wanting. Craving for purity in any form is, of course, nothing more than a nostalgic mode for the heroines: it can never be obtained. As has been suggested in the course of this chapter, the paradises longed for in the Ovidian collection always already contain the seeds of art. But the proposition functions the other way round as well. That is, the heroines' paradise is inherently artistic and therefore also essentially erotic. It is Dido, of all the heroines, who confuses her love and her art most ‘successfully’ in her narrative and especially in her direct invocation to Venus early in her epistle:

129

On virginal independence and the cultural pressures around it, as illustrated in the story of Phaedra and Hippolytus, see also Zeitlin (1985) 66–79 and passim.

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parce, Venus, nurui, durumque amplectere fratrem, frater Amor, castris militet ille tuis! aut ego, quem coepi (neque enim dedignor) amorem, materiam curae praebeat ille meae! Venus, show mercy to your daughter-in-law, and you, brother Eros, embrace your stern brother and let him fight in your camp! Or else I will fight in your camp, for the love I have started to feel (and I will not deny that), and make him supply me with the material for my care! (7. 31–4)

Cupid is summoned to embrace his brother Aeneas and drag him into the camp of amor. But the metapoetic value of this summons should not pass unnoticed: the same lines also suggest that love is called upon to pleat Aeneas' image (am-plectere fratrem) and thus succour Dido in her weaving as well as her wooing.130 And the image rounds up by repeating the same suggestion with even more precision: materiam curae praebeat ille meae! In other words, Dido in the passage discussed just above invites Aeneas to become the material for the care and attentions of her creative mind, as well as her adoring heart.131 The conflict between the virginal and the erotic is not to be reconciled within the discourse of the Heroides. To the extent that this relates directly to their plucking up the courage to write, their yearning for and awe at the pen incessantly coexist throughout the collection. The heroines' nostalgic clinging to a lost virginity is also a writer's wary coming to writing. No wonder: writing opens up a path to a miraculous and invincible world of delusions and deceit. Upon entering this fanciful world, you lose your integrity for ever, the crafty illusions shatter your self to little pieces as you set out to follow the giddiness of the artistic caprice. Dido knows it only too well: fallor, et ista mihi falso iactatur imago, ‘I am deceived, and this deceitful image is tossed in front of my eyes’ (7. 35).132 And yet, at the same time,

130

Cf. here Aen. 7. 475–510 on Sylvia and her metapoetic love for her stag, with Putnam (1995) for an intricate discussion on the loss of innocence conveyed by the episode.

131

Cf. also Ovid to Corinna in Am. 1. 3. 19, te mihi materiem felicem in carmina praebe, ‘grant me yourself, a happy subject for my poems’, with McKeown (1989) ad loc.

132

Cf. also Laodamia: aucupor in lecto mendaces caelibe somnos; / dum careo veris gaudia falsa iuvant, ‘I snatch a false sleep in my celibate bed; while I lack true joys, false ones please me’ (13. 107–8).


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she has already yielded to this cheating as well as tempting adventure, exuberant as much as exhausting. She has given up her wholeness for the challenge of her own wor(l)d. Is it also possible that she, as well as the other heroines, is thus painfully exacting her revenge for the tame role assigned to her by previous authorities, just as Philomela, wounded weaver and the paradigm of violated heroine, will do in the Metamorphoses?


4 The Heroines in the Chora of Writing

133

1. THE (ELEGIAC) LOVE OF A STATUE ‘For the loved being becomes a leaden figure, a dream creature who does not speak and silence, in dreams, is death.’ Barthes (1979) .168 Discussing issues connected with tragic knowledge and passion, Ruth Padel suggests: ‘Movement matters all over tragedy, in many different ways. Twists of plots are described in terms of “movement” by the critical vocabulary established by Aristotle. Tragic conflicts are movement.’134 Padel's statement not only reiterates but also transcends the familiar dichotomy between epic/tragic action and elegiac inertia. As becomes obvious a few lines further down, Padel is particularly concerned with movement as a symbol of inner action played out in tragedy in the light of a cultural background that ‘saw passion as movement in itself: inner movement, which led to inner conflict, inner hurt’.135 It is this broader understanding of movement that informs my discourse in this chapter and renders the Heroides' inertia particularly evident. Stranded in a lonely land, whose literal or emotional isolation is an eloquent signifier of their static poetic lot, the heroines invite a hermeneutics of hermeticism, just as the notorious commotion of their tragic and epic models is now stifled within the stark lines of enclosure that encircle (literally or metaphorically) the Ovidian poems (be they the ocean that surrounds Ariadne's deserted island, Pyrrhus' enforced marriage to Hermione, the waves that beat the shore of

133

I use the transliteration ‘chora ’ when referring to the use of this Platonic notion in later, mainly feminist, criticism.

134

Padel (1992) 65 (my emphasis).

135

Padel (1992) 65.

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THE HEROINES IN THE CHORA OF WRITING

abandoned Phyllis' homeland, the hostile guards outside Medea's jail-palace, or Hypermestra's forced retreat due to her faithfulness to Lynceus).136 There is indeed far too little will for life in statements like Phyllis' wish to have her lot engraved on the massive stone of her tomb: PHYLLIDA DEMOPHOON LETO DEDIT HOSPES AMANTEM;

ille necis causam praebuit, ipsa manum.

Demophoon, the guest, sentenced to death Phyllis who loved him. He supplied the cause of her death, and she the hand. (2. 147–8)137

And the closure is sealed in Oenone's letter: incisae servant a te mea nomina fagi, / et legor OENONE falce notata tua, ‘the beech-trees, cut by you, retain my name, and I, Oenone, am read out as yours, marked by your pruning hook’ (5.21–2).138 Most symbolically, what Oenone considers a solid proof of Paris' love is at the same time an unmistakable arrest of her vitality, and an arrest in which Ovid is implicated just as much as Paris. The carving of the beloved's name had already been famously used by Hellenistic lovers/poets,139 and had been a fate common to elegiac mistresses ever since.140 The motif thus associates Paris with poets such as Gallus and Propertius, and therefore also with Ovid. In other words, Oenone is loved but also trapped in the rigid finality of already written and asserted stories: because of her status of elegiac mistress, Oenone is cherished and simultaneously deprived of life.141 Laodamia's emotional farewell to her husband offers another

136

The halting of time has, indeed, been noticed by the critics, who have naturally equated it with the poems' typically elegiac sloth. Cf. W. S. Anderson (1973) esp. 54; Desmond (1993) esp. 60.

137

See also 7. 195–6 where Dido expresses the same desire to have her story inscribed on her grave. On the closural emphasis of this passage cf. Desmond (1993) 60. Interestingly, Ovid himself will reiterate this ‘arrest’ at Fast. 3. 549–50.

138

On the issue of petrifying or statuizing a woman see esp. Sharrock (1991a); Too (1996); P. A. Rosenmeyer (2001b) with further bibliography at n. 5.

139

See e.g. Call. Aet. fr. 73; Theoc. Id. 18. 47–8.

140

Cf. Verg. Ecl. 10. 52–4; Prop. 1. 18. 21–2. For more on this stereotypical elegiac posture see Fedeli (1980) ad loc.; Ross (1975) 73.

141

Trapped in the bark of the tree, Oenone here foreshadows another Ovidian heroine, with a strikingly similar plight, namely Daphne in Met. 1. 548–52, whose metamorphosis into a laurel may have saved her at a first level, but also ‘immobilizes’ her into her established myth, as one more trophy of Apollo's male signifying power.


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striking example of how the Ovidian narrative has deflated the heroines' energy. There is hardly any doubt that the lovers' parting is emotionally overladen. Miserably standing on the seashore while Protesilaus' fleet is sailing away, Laodamia laments the loss of her beloved (13. 12–16). And yet, at this very moment, the text switches its narrative mode to what could well be the description of a painting, unmistakably alluding to the emblem of a painted heroine in abandonment, namely Ariadne in Catullus 64, extracts from which will be discussed below. And thus it blocks the intensity of Laodamia's emotions at the very moment that they were about to be channelled out: dum potui spectare virum, spectare iuvabat, sumque tuos oculos usque secuta meis; ut te non poteram, poteram tua vela videre, vela diu vultus detinuere meos. As long as I could see my man, it gave me pleasure to look at him, and I followed your eyes continually with my own. When I could no longer see you, I still could see your sails, and for long your sails held my eyes fixed on them. (13. 17–20)

Vela … vultus detinuere meos: the text itself arrests Laodamia's feelings just as Protesilaus' eyes and sails trap her eyes, holding her up on the seashore, a(n e)motionless figure emerging in a painting that immobilizes her ‘movement of mind’.142 Medea's description of her first ever contact with Jason, that first fateful meeting that triggered the unhappy string of events in her hitherto blissful life, is marked (and numbed) by a similar ‘spatial languidity’. Medea has just entered the room where Aeetes has been conversing with the Argonauts and has just set eyes on them: accipit hospitio iuvenes Aeeta Pelasgos, et premitis pictos corpora Graia toros. tunc ego te vidi, tunc coepi scire, quis esses; illa fuit mentis prima ruina meae. et vidi et perii; … ....... abstulerant oculi lumina nostra tui.

142

Patricia Rosenmeyer alerts me here to the possibility of our reading the moment as a proper ekphrasis, adding an external perspective, an objective comment that intensifies and explains Laodamia's subjective outpouring that we have just witnessed.

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Aeetes received you Pelasgian youths hospitably; and you Greeks pressed your bodies on the decorated couches. Then I saw you, and then I began to know who you were. That was the beginning of the downfall of my soul. I saw you and I perished.… Your eyes had robbed me of my light. (12.29–36)

The scene is replete with signs of Medea's excitement as well as with overtones of its doomed character, for the consumption of the aware reader. Vidi et perii: the phrase is recognizable as a standard locus of passionate and unrequited love.143 But at the same time, it directly alludes to a characteristic lack of voice and, subsequently, expression, as a result of such an infatuation, as famously in Sappho (… ὤς με ϕώναισ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ἒν ἔτ᾽ εἴκει, [‘when I look at you for a brief moment,] it is no longer possible for me to speak to you’, fr. 31. 7–8 L–P) and Catullus (lingua sed torpet, ‘my tongue is numb’, 51. 9). Ominously ‘muted’ in this intertextual life of hers, Medea studies intensely the Argonauts' robust bodies sluggishly resting on the embroidered sofas (pictos toros). The pictured couches inevitably bring to mind another famous embroidered bed, ornate with images from other well-known (and doomed) love stories: talibus amplifice vestis decorata figuris / pulvinar complexa suo velabat amictu, ‘richly adorned with such figures, the tapestry embraced and covered with its folds the royal couch’ (Cat. 64. 265–6, on Thetis' wedding). Pictoriality and reality are closely intertwined in the passage, as the energy of the scene (and of the Argonauts) is overwritten by the textual and intertextual inertia that infiltrates the imagery. Medea's stunned ‘muteness’ is mirrored in Heroides 6. It is characteristic that just at the moment when Hypsipyle attempts to recall the epic events, speech is snatched away from her, just as the stranger's description begins embedded in Hypsipyle's own discourse. Even so, Hypsipyle receives the stranger's message with eagerness (ut tactum vix bene limen erat,/‘Aesonides,’ dixi, ‘quid agit meus?’, ‘scarcely had he reached the threshold when I cried, how is my Jason, the son of Aeson?’, 6. 24–5). And yet, reflecting the stranger's impressions and point of view, the narration fails to appease Hypsipyle's agony:

143

Note here the long journey from Homer to Ovid: Hom. Il. 14. 294; Sappho, fr. 31. 7–9 L–P; Theoc. Id. 2. 82–3; Cat. 51. 6–9; Verg. Ecl. 8. 37–42. On the intricate interaction of the Ovidian passage with its antecedents, see Hinds (1993) 21–7.


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singula dum narrat, studio cursuque loquendi detegit ingenio vulnera nostra suo. While narrating each thing, with his keenness and in the thread of his discourse he reveals with his spirited manner the wounds open inside me. (6. 39–40)

Singula dum narrat: a conflict of wider significance has just been suggested. In the manner of an epic narrator,144 the stranger studiously engages himself with every detail regarding the events in Colchis and Jason's adventurous encounter with Aeetes and the Golden Ram. However, his eager discourse fails to engage Hypsipyle, who reduces his detailed descriptions to a compressed and devitalized summary: narrat aenipedes Martis arasse boves, vipereos dentes in humum pro semine iactos, et subito natos arma tulisse viros— terrigenas populos civili Marte peremptos inplesse aetatis fata diurna suae. devictus serpens… He tells me that the bronze-hoofed oxen of Mars had ploughed, that the serpent's teeth were cast into the earth as seed, that the men suddenly sprung forth bore arms—that these earth-born people, extinguished in civil warfare, filled their allotment of life in one day. The conquered dragon… (6. 32–7)

Dragons, miracles, frenzy, combats, and slaughter are all condensed in five high-density lines which appear even more strikingly condensed when juxtaposed to their long, epic arch-model in Apollonius' Argonautica 3. The persistent perfect infinitives and perfect participles arrest the energy and mobility suggested by the subject-matter of these lines: the reader is tempted to mistake aenipedes boves for a series of bronze-hoofed oxen as part of a pictorial representation commemorating the mythic event.145 And yet Hypsipyle's hazy recall is only proportionate to the distance that separates her from the stranger's narrative world. If the stranger (another authorial surrogate of an epic poet) recounts in epic detail the story of the Argonauts,

144

Cf. e.g. Verg. Aen. 6. 723; Verg. Georg. 3. 285.

145

In narratological terms Ovid's discourse here oscillates between narration and description. In this intermediate type of discourse the narrated action freezes while being described: cf. e.g. Ricardou (1967); Mickelsen (1981) esp. 64–5; Chatelaine (1986); Mosher (1991).

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his is not the story that Hypsipyle would produce had speech not been snatched away from her at the crucial moment. His enthusiasm is her despair and his excitement her own deadening pain, just as the eagerness of his speech reveals the wounds of her heart: detegit ingenio vulnera nostra suo (6. 40). And yet the ambiguity inherent in the above passages should not pass unheeded. Steeped in the language of impotent emotionality, such instances justify, at first level, the critics' easy dismissal of the collection. But it is also through these very instances that the heroines manage to put forward a clear, if cloaked, complaint about their previously fixed lot, a covert feminine voice erupting from within Ovid's text. Penelope's voice is, in this sense, paradigmatic. Even though indignant at the role of the waiting faithful wife that centuries of later literature reserved for her, she, nonetheless, cannot go beyond her closed stasis. She is an immortal artefact (like Keats's ‘forever young’ figure on a vase) rather than a living creature, trapped in the resolution of her established artistic image. Her heart may pound each time rumours about Odysseus' achievements reach Ithaca, but this excitement cannot last long, smothered by her perennial (literary) lot of the lamenting widow: sed mihi quid prodest vestris disiecta lacertis/Ilios …/si maneo, qualis Troia durante manebam? ‘but of what use is it to me that Ilion lies in ruins by your might,…if I remain as I was while Troy held out?’ (1.47–9). Resignation and defiance inextricably blend in this passage which brings to mind another well-known lament of a ‘trapped’ heroine, Ariadne of Catullus 64. 164–6. ‘Inwardly tossing great waves of troubles’ (p. 62), Ariadne stands by the shores and wonders what brought on her abandonment: sed quid ego ignaris nequiquam conqueror auris, externata malo, quae nullis sensibus auctae nec missas audire queunt nec reddere voces? But why should I, distressed by calamity, complain in vain to the indifferent winds, which are endowed with no feeling and can neither hear nor return the cries sent to them?

That passage is of course echoed in Ariadne's other lament in Fasti 3. 463–4, memorably discussed by Conte (1986: 60–3): having already exchanged her faithless spouse (and—as I would add—her literary fixedness in Catullus' embroidered bed-cover)


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for Bacchus, Ariadne looks back at her previous misery: ‘quid flebam rustica?…/utiliter nobis perfidus ille fuit’, ‘“why did I weep like a country girl? … His lies were my gain”’.146 A certain difference is, however, worth noticing. Ariadne externata from Catullus has now become Ariadne rustica in Ovid; weeping over forgotten promises is no longer a manifestation of just and powerful rage, but repetitive and boring (artistic) plainness. In this context, Penelope's lament in Heroides 1 emerges as a deeply self-conscious statement on artistic matters. To phrase it in reverse order: just like Penelope in the Heroides, Catullan Ariadne has no hope of release from her static destiny but can only gaze at the sea that gave Theseus an escape route, trapped in rocklike inertia—a compressed segment herself, strikingly unlike the lengthy models of the majority of the Heroides, as Barchiesi (1986: 101) remarks: saxea ut effigies Bacchantis, prospicit, eheu, / prospicit et magnis curarum fluctuat undis, ‘like a stone figure of a Bacchanal she looks forth, alas, looks forth and rages with great tides of trouble’ (Cat. 64. 61–2). And yet, gazing with wistful adoration at the fleeing companions from the seashore is not simply a sign of resigned astonishment. In cases like Medea's, gazing is also the device which will ultimately shake the young girl out of passivity. As Jason and his companions take leave, following the dinner during which Aeetes disclosed the daunting tasks awaiting them in exchange for the Golden Fleece, Medea's gaze has captured the hero's departure. But her gaze is not the resigned gaze of Catullus' Ariadne that we discussed above. Instead, it transforms Medea into an agent and a speaking subject in this world where she is put to live, a writing as well as a written puella (‘young girl’) whispering another further voice in Aeetes' (and Ovid's) masterful text: tristis abis; oculis abeuntem prosequor udis, et dixit tenui murmure lingua: ‘vale!’ You go away filled with sadness. I follow you, as you depart, with tearful eyes, and my tongue utters with a soft murmur: ‘farewell!’ (12. 55–6).

Even more striking is Phaedra's adoring-and-arresting gaze in Heroides 4. Smitten by Hippolytus the very moment she caught

146

Cf. Barchiesi (1986) 95.

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sight of him in Eleusis, she burns with desire, elaborately and passionately described in her letter, as she recalls a particular visit of his to the grove of Demeter indelibly imprinted on her mind: candida vestis erat, praecincti flore capilli, flava verecundus tinxerat ora rubor, ....... te tuus iste rigor positique sine arte capilli et levis egregio pulvis in ore decet. sive ferocis equi luctantia colla recurvas, exiguo flexos miror in orbe pedes; seu lentum valido torques hastile lacerto, ora ferox in se versa lacertus habet, sive tenes lato venabula cornea ferro. denique nostra iuvat lumina, quidquid agis. Your clothes were white, your hair was wreathed with flowers, a bashful blush had tinted your golden face.… This severity of yours befits you, and your hair arranged without art, and the light dust on your exquisite face are seemly. Whether you bend the fighting neck of the dauntless steed, I admire his hooves turning in a tight circle; or whether you hurl your ready javelin with a strong arm, or brandish your cornel hunting-spear with its broad iron tip, your valiant arm has my eyes turned upon it. In a word, whatever you do delights my eyes. (4. 71–84)

The erotic gaze of desire has been traditionally associated with the assertion of patriarchal power. The gaze focused on a woman has been repeatedly read as accentuating the woman's passivity, just as it reduces her to the state of an inanimate object.147 Betraying signs of tacit vigour, Medea's visual fixation with Jason and Phaedra's long and sensual depiction of Hippolytus' physical charms signify the potential for a reversal of the traditional power relations between the impotent heroines and the all-powerful heroes. Despite their secondary role in their respective stories so far, Medea's and Phaedra's gazes are powerful gazes. In a move towards usurping the famous grand narratives in order to appropriate them into a new creation where the gaze does not trap and immobilize, their gaze rather registers reactions and

147

The issue has been extensively discussed in modern feminist theory: see e.g. Mulvey (1975); De Lauretis (1987); Kaplan (1983). For an interesting discussion of male and female gazing in the context of ancient Greek literature and the Greek novels in particular, see Egger (1994).


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thoughts of a feminine mind as it observes the desired object moving along the known lines of myth.148 The subtext of this unsettling erotic gaze confers upon the heroines a sense of authority, while through their physical adoration, the heroes become the object of a different desire and a different discourse alongside Ovid's discourse. But more on that in the following section.

2. FEMINA MOBILIOR VENTIS (CALPURNIUS, ECLOGUES 3. 10): AWAKENINGS Catullus' quasi-petrified Ariadne has a direct parallel in the Heroides. In 10. 49–50, Ariadne passively confirms the tale of tamed enclosure famously linked with her: …mare prospiciens in saxo frigida sedi, quamque lapis sedes, tam lapis ipsa fui. Looking down upon the sea, I sat, chilled, on the cliff; and I was as much a stone as my seat was a rock.

And yet, even though petrified in her artistic confinement, Ariadne is also almost as ‘real’ thanks to the very art involved in her making, which has skilfully blended in her posture statuesque qualities and a strong urge for life. The sight of Theseus' sailing away—i.e. her first encounter with the established route of the myth—keeps her petrified in her impotent role: ut vidi haud dignam quae me vidisse putarem, / frigidior glacie semianimisque fui, ‘as I saw a sight I thought I did not by any means deserve to see, I grew colder than ice and was only half-alive’ (10. 31–2). And yet a certain energy pushes her out of her artistic limbo: nec languere diu patitur dolor; excitor illo, /excitor et summa Thesea voce voco, ‘nor does grief allow me to languish for long; it rouses me, it excites me and I cry for Theseus at the top of my voice’ (10. 33–4). Ariadne's passage from the world of inanimate things to that of living beings obviously foreshadows another famous rite of passage from apathy to animation, namely that of Pygmalion's eburnea puella (‘ivory girl’) from Metamorphoses 10. Indeed,

148

This has been suggested as a feature of the feminine gaze, in particular: see e.g. Stehle (1990) for an excellent discussion of the gaze in Sappho's poems, and duBois (1984) on fr. 16 (L–P).

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Pygmalion's ivory statue is breathtakingly ‘real’, as we are told straight from the beginning of the story: virginis est verae facies, quam vivere credas / … ars adeo latet arte sua, ‘the face is that of a real maiden, who you would think was alive…so his art is concealed by his art’ (Met. 10. 250–2). Pygmalion admires, desires, and looks after the ivory body as if it was alive (10. 252–9), regularly checking whether it is flesh or ivory (an sit/corpus an illud ebur, ‘whether it is flesh or ivory’, 10. 254–5). Like Ariadne in the Heroides, eburnea puella eventually warms up (visa tepere est, 10. 281), ‘the hardness of her body vanishing as the ivory grows soft beneath his touch’ (temptatum mollescit ebur positque rigore). As if in a miracle, she wakes up and ‘shyly raises her eyes to see, together with the sky, the face of her lover-creator’ (timidumque ad lumina lumen/attollens pariter cum caelo vidit amantem, 10. 293–4). Critics have rightly observed that the story single-mindedly emphasizes Pygmalion's total mastery over the beloved creation.149 However, Ariadne in Heroides 10 frustrates the anticipation of this discursive, as well as emotional, control. Diverging from its famous parallel, Ariadne in the Heroides ‘wakes up’ due to the lack of her lover's kisses rather than because of them, animated due to her separation from him rather than her blissful union with him (or what criticism has termed his mastery over her). Ariadne's coming to her senses as a result of Theseus' unexpected and unaccounted absence is a vivid image to be found right at the beginning of the poem: incertum vigilans ac somno languida movi Thesea prensuras semisupina manus— nullus erat! referoque manus iterumque retempto ........ excussere metus somnum; conterrita surgo. Not fully awake, and still sluggish from sleep, half- reclining I stretched my hands to embrace Theseus. There was no Theseus! I draw back my hands and try again.… Fear drives my sleep away. I rise in terror. (10. 9–13)

However, this passage gives an interesting twist to its well- known model. The heroine wakes up, like another ‘ivory girl’, but the curtain falls once Pygmalion/Ovid leans over her; she becomes flesh, another person, just as the lover/poet's authority

149

Cf. e.g. Sharrock (1991a); Sharrock (1991b) esp. 169–73.


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fades away like Theseus' sails which disappear on the horizon. In fact, Ariadne's defiant ‘awakening’ gains wider significance within the broader context of love elegy. It may be that many of the heroines ‘wake up’ in terror to face the hard consequences of abandonment, but these awakenings are also a straightforward means for the heroines to condemn and renounce their placid role as mythical exempla.150 The example that springs to mind most readily is the opening lines of Propertius 1. 3 introducing ‘the girl of Cnossus lying limp on a deserted beach, while Theseus' keel receded’ (Thesea iacuit cedente carina/languida desertis Cnosia litoribus, 1.3. 1–2).151 At any rate, the heroines' awakenings feature prominently in the narratives. In sharp contrast with their tame role as exempla in elegy, the heroines' animation suggests the onset of a certain energy absent in the previous versions of these stories. If Ovid has been at a fundamental level the author of these letters, the heroines' dramatic awakening has a disturbing but unfailing symbolism. Ovid's letters now become the heroines' letters, just as the heroines not only are the word but they also attempt to write the word that makes the world that they live in.152 Ariadne's first timid and staggering steps are hampered by the deep sand, as she first attempts to explore the disturbingly unfamiliar environment that surrounds her:

150

Contrast here Verducci (1985: esp. 248 f., 255 ff.), who openly derides Ovidian Ariadne's elation, considering its allusion to the figure of the Catullan Ariadne a rather crude juxtaposition of the bathetic with the decent.

151

Setting the mythical exempla of elegy and the heroines against one another, I accept the widely suggested supposition that these exempla have a normative function within their elegiac environments. However, I am not unaware of the complex significance of these exempla, when, for example, they come in direct conflict with their context, as repeatedly in the Ars Amatoria. See, for example, Sharrock (1994a) e.g. 94, 104–11; (1994b) 113–17.

152

Once again, the specific device speaks for the timelessness of some aspects of the heroines' stories, which I suggested in my methodological sections. Carson (1986) takes a similar line in her attempt to make sense of the anonymous Latin romance Apollonius of Tyre, which relates the love of Apollonius for the daughter of the king of Pentapolis; see esp. p. 97 on the role of the heroine's letter-writing: ‘The page is taken over by the heroine. She commandeers … [her assigned plot] and constructs for herself the love story that she wishes the novel to tell … as if she herself was the novelist, as if letters themselves were an inescapably erotic form of understanding.’ See also Carson (1986: 91–7) generally on the letter-writing topos as a trope of love in ancient literature.

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nunc huc, nunc illuc, et utroque sine ordine, curro; alta puellares tardat harena pedes. Now this way, now that, and without plan both ways, I run, and the deep sand delays my girlish feet. (10. 19–20)

Classical literature has frequently argued for the reciprocity between walking and creative thought, from Aristotle's περίπατος to the Callimachean untrodden paths and the wandering lovers of Roman love elegy.153 And a stiff narrative pace is hardly surprising in the heroines' circumstances: the past weighs heavy on their shoulders, as they attempt to make their own way into life. Taking up one's fate also means taking up responsibility for one's dark motives and shameful deeds. Of all the Heroides, Medea's letter features the most eloquent expression of authorial conscience. It is the time when the Colchian princess attempts to explain her brother's murder. But including it in her own words, now that she has ‘woken’ and tries to take responsibility for her story, is amazingly difficult, as she herself admits: quod facere ausa mea est, non audet scribere dextra, ‘what my right hand has dared to do, it does not dare to write’ (12. 115). The distinction between an author's responsibility and that of a character could hardly be more emphatic, and it is here played out upon the background of the Apollonian epic which had already worked out the same division. Book 4 of the Argonautica is Medea's action book (in some ways even more so than Book 3 where Medea's autonomy is more debatable) and a brief look emphasizes the distance that Medea appears to have kept from some of its most painful developments. In this book she ruthlessly suggests the plot against her brother's life, but cunningly tries to transfer the responsibility: αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ κεῖνόν γε τεὰς ἐς χεῖρας ἱκέσθαι/μειλίξω. … ἔνθ᾽ εἴ τοι τόδε ἔργον ἐϕανδάνει, οὔτι μεγαίρω/ κτεῖνέ τε, ‘I will cajole him into coming into your hands. … If this deed satisfies you, I do not object to it, slay him…’

153

For a striking modern parallel, cf. Bennet (1992), suggesting that walking in Wordsworth's poetry provides an important (and overlooked) signifier of Wordsworthian narrative. Just like Ariadne, Wordsworth's narrator is also hindered, not by deep sand, but by slippery turf: Across a bare wide Common I was toiling/ With languid steps that by the slippery turf / Were baffled (‘The Excursion’ 1. 21–3). Walking becomes slow and stressful, just like Ariadne's girlish steps—and so does composing, quite unambiguously:…a hundred times when in these wanderings / I have been busy with the toil of verse /—Great pains and little progress (‘The Prelude’ 4. 101–3).


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(Arg. 4. 415–20). A little later we are informed that during all the time that Jason was busy murdering her brother, Medea had her eyes turned away, covering them with a veil, as though not seeing could exempt her from any responsibility for her brother's death: αὐτίκα Αἰσονίδης πυκινοῦ ἔκπαλτο λόχοιο / γυμνὸν ἀνα- σχόμενος παλάμῃ ξίϕος. αἶψα δὲ κούρη / ἔμπαλιν ὄμματ᾽ ἔνεικε, καλυψαμένη ὀθόνῃσιν, / μὴ ϕόνον ἀθρήσειε κασιγνήτοιο τυπέντος, ‘and straight away Aeson's son leapt from the thick ambush, raising in his hand the naked sword, and quickly the maiden turned her eyes away and covered them with her veil so that she should not have to see the blood of her brother as he was smitten’ (Arg. 4. 464–7). However, Medea's deep involvement is present in a metaphoric subtext, in spite of her distanced portrayal at the manifest level. Just as Apsyrtus was breathing out his life with his hands covered in his own blood, τῆς δὲ καλύπτρην / ἀργυϕέην καὶ πέπλον ἀλευομένης ἐρύθηνεν, ‘he stained red the silver veil and robe of his sister even though she shrank away’ (Arg. 4. 473–4). To return to our text: assuming responsibility is, indeed, a traumatic experience for the heroines in more than one way: the first direct contact with the world that contained them so far is ruthlessly cruel. In the form of the departing heroes, the myth seems to be trailing away into a path that pays no attention to their own wishes and desires. For some, plunging into the wide sea comes as a natural reaction, an effort to meet their companion and thus become part of the progressing myth. Of all the heroines, Phyllis explains this urge with remarkable eloquence. Heavy in soul she treads the rocks along the seashore by day and by night, eagerly staring at the wide sea in the hope of distinguishing sails coming from afar. And when a ship does appear on the horizon she rushes forth, barely contained by the waves. And as the sails advance, her senses abandon her and she falls in her handmaid's arms. In despair, she often thought of throwing herself into the sea, letting the waves bear her away and cast her up on Demophoon's shores, to meet his eyes before she dies (2. 121–36).154 And yet, this reckless desire stumbles over the punitive Law of the Father—not an actual individual, but a signifier and a trope

154

Alcyone in Met. 11. 710–48 inevitably comes to mind.

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of phallic authority and knowledge.155 This block is evident in the opening of Hermione's letter to Orestes. Deeply nostalgic for Orestes, her first and absent love, Hermione is, nonetheless, a captive to the decisions made by the jury of the Greek leaders after the fall of Troy. The male law has decided that she is to marry Achilles' son, Pyrrhus. But Hermione considers herself a captive of Pyrrhus—her second husband and unwanted suitor—and loathes this arrangement that blatantly ignores the desire of her own heart, while sending a passionate appeal to Orestes for help (8. 1–5, 15–16). However, the absent addressees of the heroines' letters are not meant to reappear: the classical authorities have consigned these women and their will to no more than a secondary role. (In fact, Orestes is the one exception in that he is eventually reunited with his beloved, but not before a great deal of wandering which compels him to go off by himself just like the other heroes, despite Hermione's pleas.) The heroes move away into the wide sea in search of new adventures and never come back. This bitter truth circumscribes Dido's futile attempts to persuade Aeneas to stay. Established already in the opening lines of her letter, it is also vividly present in its concluding thoughts: facta fugis, facienda petis; quaerenda per orbem altera, quaesita est altera terra tibi. ....... nempe ut pervenias, quo cupis, hospes eris; utque latet vitatque tuas abstrusa carinas, vix tibi continget terra petita seni. You flee what is achieved, and you seek what is to be achieved; another land in the wide world has to be sought, once one land has been reached and taken by you.…To be sure, should you arrive where you wish, you will be a stranger. And the land you are seeking will always lurk hidden and will elude your ship, and you will hardly reach it in your old age. (7. 13–14, 146–8)

Nobody can deny the heroes' never-ending wandering in the wide world: women's propriety is endless time as they wait and live in hope of a future reunion, but they have the space in which to move and progress. But that is not the whole story, as I hope to show in the next section.

155

For more on the discourse of the Law of the Father see Pucci (1992) esp. 1–15.


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3. WOMEN'S TIME IN THE PLATONIC χώρα Time and space are real Beings, a Male and a Female Time is a Man, Space is a woman… (Blake 1966 edn.: 614) Book 7 of Plato's Republic opens with a famous image. Socrates' interlocutors are prompted to imagine people dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern. Their legs and necks are fettered, and their backs turned towards the light (Pl. Rep. 514a3–b1). They cannot see the world outside but only dim shadows cast on a wall opposite them by a fire burning higher up. As a result, the only images available to these fettered men are shadows cast on the wall of the cave, and thus this is the only world they know (Rep. 515b9–c1). The lengthy description reflects Plato's unflattering view on his contemporaries' education.156 The symbolism behind the imagery appears quite unambiguous: fettered in the cave, the people are prisoners of ignorance, with a blurred understanding of this world. In contrast, venturing out of the cave, however bewildering and overwhelming it would seem to those accustomed only to dim reflections, allows them to enter reality, gain education and reason, and ultimately contemplate the divine. At first sight, one would assume that this image bears no relation to the Heroides. However, the analogies between this derided cave and the heroines' secluded spaces gradually become noticeable to the attentive reader: is the heroes' departure from the erotic enclave offered by the heroines a way for them to discover and define their own identity, and ‘become truly themselves’? Are the forsaken heroines sacrificed on the altar of male self-advancement? Tracing intertexts for the heroines' degrading isolation brings us into contact with another famous enclosure from the Platonic corpus. I here refer to the imagery of the ‘receptacle and nurse of all things’, from Timaeus, foregrounded as the third ontological kind that constitutes the Universe, together with the source and

156

Cf. Socrates' own reason for introducing the cave image: μετὰ ταῦτα δή, εἶπον ἀπείκασον τοιούτῳ πάθει τὴν ἡμετέραν ϕύσιν παιδείας τε πέρι καὶ ἀπαιδευσίας, ‘after all this, picture now human nature in reference to education and ignorance, comparing it to the following misfortune’ (Rep. 7. 514a1–3).

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the offspring, or else, the model and the copy (Pl. Tim. 48e2–49a7). Mirroring the lack of intelligence and knowledge that defined life in the cave, as we saw in the Republic, the χώρα in Timaeus is characteristically portrayed as devoid of all forms and character, an ever-existing and all-encompassing place unaccountable for by reason, which we can only dimly perceive and which is marked by passivity and lack of individuality.157χώρα in this context does not partake in any creative activity, it ‘cannot write or draw or imprint or build the Types [that it receives within itself] … it is not autographic’ (Bergren 1992: 269). And the marked inertia of this space offers a striking parallel to the heroines' immobilized enclave, especially once Plato's own explicitly gendered presentation of χώρα is taken into account: ἐν δ᾽ οὖν τῷ παρόντι χρὴ γένη διανοηθῆναι τριττά, τὸ μὲν γιγνόμενον, τὸ δ᾽ ἐν ᾧ γίγνεται, τὸ δ᾽ ὅθεν ἀϕομοιούμενον ϕύεται τὸ γιγνόμενον. καὶ δὴ καὶ προσεικάσαι πρέπει τὸ μὲν δεχόμενον μητρί, τὸ δ᾽ ὅθεν πατρί, τὴν δὲ μεταξὺ τούτων ϕύσιν ἐκγόνῳ. For the moment, we must think of three species, that which becomes, that in which it becomes, and that to which what becomes is likened. In fact, we must compare the receptacle to the mother, the model to the father, and what they produce between themselves the offspring. (Tim. 50c7–d3)

However, a negative reading is always already vulnerable to an appropriative approach,158 and the rest of this section will suggest that sluggishness and repression cannot explain everything about Timaeus'—as well as the heroines'—feminine χώρα. A

157

See, for example, Tim. 52a8–b4: τρίτον δὲ αὖ γένος ὂν τὸ τῆς χώρας ἀεί, ϕθορὰν οὐ προσδεχόμενον, ἕδραν δὲ παρέχον ὅσα ἔχει γένεσιν πᾶσιν, αὐτὸ δὲ μετ᾽ ἀναισθησίας ἁπτὸν λογισμῷ τινι νόθῳ, μόγις πιστόν, πρὸς ὃ δὴ καὶ ὀνειροπολοῦμεν, ‘[there exists a] third species, the space which is eternal and unperishable, which provides a position from everything that comes to be and is touched without the senses by a spurious reasoning, and so is hard to believe in; we look at it indeed in a kind of dream’. See also Tim. 50e4–6: διὸ καὶ πάντων ἐκτὸς εἰδῶν εἶναι χρεὼν τὸ τὰ πάντα ἐκδεξόμενον ἐν αὑτῷ γένη, ‘therefore, anything that will receive in it every sort of species, must be devoid of any character’, with Lovibond (1994) 93–4.

158

For an excellent discussion of gendered prejudice emanating from such components in the Republic, see Lovibond (1994) esp. 94–9; but cf. Irigaray (1985: 243–364) for a strong appropriative reading of Plato's cave.


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more attentive reading of the relevant passages from Timaeus reveals significant inconsistencies that can tone down the strictures that seem to have dominated the narrative on the χώρα so far. It may have been that the Universe was created within an impassive receptacle, but this inert feminine space has also been active at a primordial time in the past, engaged in a double mobilization of herself and the forms that have been received by her. In no part of herself is she equally balanced, but she sways unevenly in every direction in turn, shaking her contents and being shaken by them: τὴν δὲ γενέσεως τιθήνη ὑγραινομένην καὶ πυρουμένην … παντοδαπὴν μὲν ἰδεῖν ϕαίνεσθαι, διὰ δὲ τὸ μήθ᾽ ὁμοίων δυνάμεων μήτε ἰσορρόπων ἐμπίπλασθαι κατ᾽ οὐδὲν αὐτῆς ἰσορροπεῖν, ἀλλ᾽ ἄνωμάλως πάντῃ ταλαντουμένην σείεσθαι μὲν ὑπ᾽ ἐκείνων αὐτήν, κινουμένην δ᾽ αὖ πάλιν ἐκεῖνα σείειν. and the nurse of becoming was moistened and in flames…and its visual appearance was varied; but as there was no homogeneity or balance in the forces that filled her, no part of her is in equilibrium, but she sways unevenly oscillating to and fro under the impact of these forces and, in turn, through her motion she sways them to and fro. (Tim. 52d5–e6)

Timaeus' full account of the features of χώρα (48e–69a5) blurs movement and torpor in what Ann Bergren calls a hysteron proteron order. But such unpredictable and unregulated activity in the interior of χώρα had to be smothered and ‘passified’ by the creator, the Demiurge. However, as Bergren also aptly wonders, if active and passive can be reversed, how irreversible can any ‘passification’ be?159 If this feminine space has from the very beginning been capable of ‘shaking again’, does its role in the creation not become instantly one of potential resistance, threatening, as it does, to shake the order of things neatly arranged by the creator, the fatherly figure of Tim. 50d2? The subversive potential of the Platonic χώρα has been expertly traced and exposed by recent French feminist writing. Reception of the Platonic notion by Julia Kristeva can enlighten and broaden our understanding of the uncontrollable drives in the heroines' policed living and creation in their repressed enclaves. The Platonic χώρα appears in Kristeva's critical discourse in relation to her attempt to define the signifying process,

159

For the fusion of movement and inertia in the interior of the χώρα see Bergren (1992) esp. 270–4 and passim.

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which, in her system of thought, is based on the interaction between the semiotic and the symbolic, notions which are modifications of the Lacanian Imaginary and Symbolic Orders. Following the Lacanian presuppositions, Kristeva's semiotic order is to be aligned with the prelinguistic, the oral, the maternal, and the feminine (and the pre-cosmic in Timaeus' pattern). On the other hand, the Symbolic Order is established within an environment which in Timaeus is the Universe created by the Source-the-Father, firmly rooted in explicit linguistic rules, clearly defined social bonds, and the paternal law and function. These two states are not successive, they operate simultaneously and they represent different modes of being-in-the-world, as well as registering the Subject's different experiences. But of the two, the semiotic is less bridled and more intuitive, articulated on a series of irregular pulses which are gathered in the chora, and which can never be caught up in the precision of the Symbolic, Linguistic Order and of traditional linguistic theory. Thus appropriated and redefined, Timaeus' χώρα becomes a location of mobility and rupture, and signals an alternative mode of being and creating, whose unauthorized pulses put pressure on the symmetrically seamed Symbolic Language and Symbolic Order.160 Kristeva's own description of the chora in Revolution in Poetic Language offers a sharp illustration of the elusive and ambiguous but intense modality of chora: We borrow the term chora from Plato's Timaeus to denote an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases. We differentiate this uncertain and indeterminate articulation from a disposition that already depends on representation, lends itself to phenomenological, spatial intuition and gives rise to a geometry. Although our theoretical description of the chora is itself part of the discourse of representation that offers it as evidence, the chora, as rupture and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality.161

Reflected on this fervent but loosely defined and barely controlled locality of the far and distant future, the Ovidian

160

For more on the signifying character of the Platonic chora in Kristeva's work, see e.g. Moi (1985) 161–5, and (1986) esp. 93–8; Sellers (1991) passim.

161

Moi (1986) 93–4.


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heroines' enclosure takes on a series of different associations no longer portrayed as merely an emblem of repressive stillness. Toril Moi's description of the chora brilliantly fits the bill: ‘[The chora] can be perceived only as pulsional pressure on symbolic language: as contradictions, meaninglessness, disruption, silences, and absences in the symbolic language.’ And so it is with the heroines' suppressed discourse: it is a discourse that disrupts and disputes the Symbolic accounts of the forefathers of the classical narratives, marking their absences, contradicting their complacent certainties, and occasionally keeping a silence that can muffle the clamour of boisterous epic and tragedy.162 This is a fine instance of intertextual wealth and complicity. Appropriated and redefined by a modern-age French feminist intellectual who brought to the fore its neglected energy, at once nourishing and maternal, Timaeus' tumbling receptacle from fifthcentury BC Athens encourages a recuperative reading of Ovid's Heroides from the early Roman Principate. That is, a sort of reading which would seek to locate and unleash this latent energy in the closely supervised female voices of the collection. Energy and restraint are symbolically interlaced at the very beginning of the collection, in the complaint that opens Penelope's letter, the first poem in the collection. Assigned by the patriarchal order to the domestic domain of the palace, where no public discourse is ever heard and no decisions are ever made,163 Penelope finds it hard to come to terms with the life of sloth and isolation. Her thoughts are permeated with curses for

162

The general tone of the discourse on the chora associates it with standard perceptions of gender in antiquity. We think above all of the table of Pythagorean opposites as a ν πλῆθος, … ἄρρεν θῆλυ, … given by Aristotle in Metaphysics 986 22–7: ἕτεροι δὲ … τὰς ἀρχὰς λέγουσιν εἶναι τὰς κατὰ συστοιχίαν λεγομένας, πέρας ἄπειρον, … @ εὐθὺ καμπύλον …, ‘others say that the principles in corresponding pairs are: limited, unlimited; … one, many; … male, female; … straight, bent …’. When the male moves straight it moves ahead in time, while the crooked female expands in space, making circles and other tentative, frequently contradicting, gestures largely indifferent to a linear progress. And if recursive, indirect, and spatial time is more female, so is a recursive and cyclical narrative. These images of women's time and story have been prominent in recent work by both classical critics (see e.g. Segal (1977) for very similar formulations of gendered time and subjectivity in Sophocles' Trachiniae ) and modern theorists as well (see, especially, Moi (1986) 188–98).

163

Cf. e.g. Telemachus' famous rebuke at Od. 1. 356–9 (echoing Il. 6. 490–3), with West (1988) ad loc.

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Paris, the man whose infamous deeds triggered the Trojan War, which deprived her of her husband. Her dulled mind is stuck on this one single thought: if Paris' ship had sunk on his way to Sparta she would not be lying cold and alone in her deserted bed, nor would she be seeking to deceive the spacious night (1. 7–10). Spatiosam fallere noctem, ‘beguiling the spacious night’ (1. 9): Timaeus' impassive receptacle makes its first (allegoric) appearance. Time in the sluggish seclusion of Penelope's bedroom makes staggering gestures in space, just as night plods along trapped in an endless waiting with no meaningful target or any visible progress to set it steadily ahead. But, of course, this is only part of the picture. If Ovid's guiding hand limits Penelope (and her pen) to powerless heaving in the seclusion of her room, this ostracism is ironically undermined by its very own demands. For, relegating Penelope to the claustrophobia of her small room, Ovid's (and Homer's) hegemonic discourse gives the heroine access to the unpredictable resourcefulness of the feminine χώρα. In the case of Penelope, the force of resistance gathers around the loom. Constantly weaving (and unweaving) the shroud for Odysseus' father, Laertes, Penelope has blocked the male leaders' linear determination by her erratic activity in her own χώρα—a tumbling, unpredictable space outside the tempo and the narrative of the all-powerful men, such as the suitors or even Ovid himself, who believe—falsely—that they are in control of her story and her narrative.164 To link up with the imagery from Timaeus, the myth of patriarchy cannot move on, because the heroine's receptacle is ‘shaking again’.

164

For a far-reaching exploration of Penelope's reclusion, see Cavarero (1995a) 11–30. Appropriating the figure of Penelope from within Plato's writings, Cavarero traces the way in which the solitary room where Penelope sits and weaves includes within itself the potential for its own transformation from a place of subdued confinement to a place of self-belonging, a feminine world available to Penelope and her maids only, which is at the same time vital (if not threatening) to the men's myth through its unpredictability, rather than domesticated due to its narrow focus.


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4. FROM LECTURE FÉMININE TO ÉCRITURE FÉMININE: THE HEROINES' COMING TO WRITING In the light of the above, an altogether different appreciation of the Heroides' enclosure becomes possible. Judged against the adventures of the heroes in the wide world, the collection's remote settings and plaintive voices, occupying centre-stage throughout the poems, can only be a poor substitute. If judgement is based on a linear perspective organized by tropes of departure, progression, and arrival, the heroines' secluded space can only be seen as a jail which smothers their futile pleas within its enclosure. Truly, a good part of the heroines' speech (those sections of their discourse in which Ovid's control of his discourse is most firm) reflects exactly this type of agony, with Ariadne as the paradigm of despair at the sight of the desert land that keeps her imprisoned. Having lost any hope of a reunion with Theseus, she shifts her attention to the quiet land that hosts her and, faced with a deadly stillness, her panic reaches a peak, as paralysing thoughts of a million lurking dangers inundate her mind (10. 79–88).165 The same extreme despondency is reflected in Medea's letter. Having just gone through in her mind one by one all the various ways in which she offered valuable help to Jason, Medea cannot help realizing Jason's deep ingratitude, shamefully endorsed by his latest order for her to withdraw from their common abode for the sake of a new bride. She is now under ‘house arrest’ in an alien palace; she writes the present letter in its constriction. Having willingly complied with the needs of a male order and myth which had prescribed a journey with maximum benefits for the hero at all costs, she now feels regretful, depressingly betrayed, and, most importantly, deprived of shelter. And her complaint describes a rejection all too familiar to most of the heroines: illa ego, quae tibi sum nunc denique barbara facta, nunc tibi sum pauper, nunc tibi visa nocens,

165

Such consternation is, of course, a regular motif of Ariadne's letter: cf. e.g. her similar fears in 10. 95–8. For more on Ariadne's emphatic solitude and agony throughout Her. 10, see Barchiesi (1986) 93–102; Hewig (1991); Bolton (1994).

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flammea subduxi medicato lumina somno, et tibi, quae raperes, vellera tuta dedi. proditus est genitor, regnum patriamque reliqui; munus, in exilio quod licet esse, tuli! I, who have in the end become a barbarian in your eyes, who now seem to you poor and a danger, I drew off you the flaming eyes [of the dragon] by a sleep induced by drugs, and I gave to you the fleece to take away in safety. My father was betrayed and I abandoned my kingdom and my country, and my reward is permission to live in exile! (12. 105–10)

Such an intense feeling of displacement as the one with which Medea's sorrowful reminiscing culminates tugs her back to Ariadne's letter and indignant discourse: accessus terra paterna negat. / ut rate felici pacata per aequora labar, / temperet ut ventos Aeolus—exul ero! ‘my father's land forbids me to approach. Even if I glide across the appeased ocean in a lucky craft, even if Aeolus could temper the wind, I will be an exile’ (10. 64–6). However, there are parts where Ovid himself loses his assertive manner and in a moment of bewilderment and hesitation he allows the discourse (and the heroines) to be seduced by the irresistible vigour of the feminine chora that lurks behind the images that he thinks he skilfully manipulates. And it is at these moments that the hitherto hostile seclusion is transformed into a decisively more congenial place for the heroines. Oenone is a characteristic case. Left behind after Paris' departure for Sparta, she spends her lonely days wandering around the thick woods that had witnessed her idyllic love affair with Hecuba's son until the ill-fated day of his encounter with Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. The trees with her name carved on them painfully remind her of her absent beloved (5. 21–2) and her present misery. And yet, when the horror of Helen's figure clinging to Paris' side strikes her tired eyes like a thunderstorm (5. 61–4), it is the very same woods that will shelter her wailing. This time, these woods are not filled with memories of a lost love and an absent lover, they are rather a place of repose and support (which, interestingly, resists the billows of the sea) where she can stay ‘close to herself ’, building a sense of her own self-belonging. tunc vero rupique sinus et pectora planxi, et secui madidas ungue rigente genas, inplevique sacram querulis ululatibus Iden illuc has lacrimas in mea saxa tuli.


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Then indeed I tore my clothes and beat my breast, and with my hard nails I furrowed my moist cheeks, and filled sacred Ida with wailing complaints. To that place, my rocks, I brought my tears. (5. 71–4)

The pathetic fallacy tugs us back to Ariadne's narrative. In spite of her immense horror at the sight of this utmost loneliness, another voice manages to slip through her despair, a voice which reminds Ariadne that this frighteningly isolated world can also offer sympathy and support against the heartlessness of Theseus' male order and its obsession with departure: interea toto clamavi in litore ‘Theseu!’: reddebant nomen concava saxa tuum, et quotiens ego te, totiens locus ipse vocabat. ipse locus miserae ferre volebat opem. In the meantime, I cried out ‘Theseus!’ all along the shore, and the hollow rocks returned your name, and as often as I called for you, so often the place itself called out your name. The whole place wanted to assist me in my misery. (10. 21–4)

Grief for Oenone and the other heroines is, no doubt, overwhelming and hardly bearable. At first, their numb minds can only prompt them to try and trace a sign of their faithless partners as they move away—some of them even attempt to throw themselves into the sea in a desperate desire to follow their fickle companions in their fixation with departure.166 But this infatuation will have its counterbalance. More emphatically than any of the other heroines, Dido cannot resist a warning about, or rather, a reminder of the dangers that wait for Aeneas out in the wide sea: quid, quasi nescires, insana quid aequora possint? expertae totiens tam male credis aquae? ut, pelago suadente viam, retinacula solvas, multa tamen latus tristia pontus habet. How could you—as if you did not know what the mad seas are capable of? Do you so foolishly trust the sea you have so often experienced? Should you even loosen the tether, as the calm sea coaxes you on, there is still a lot of trouble lurking in the wide ocean. (7. 53–6)

And yet, it is in the midst of this deep sorrow that their own (spatial, as I hope to show) time—and narrative—starts to be

166

See e.g. 2. 121–30; 5. 63–4; 6. 69–72; 10. 25–8; 13. 17–20.

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curved. As Oenone rambles furiously along the coastline we are reminded of other heroines and their despair, especially Laodamia. As Protesilaus sails away, heartbroken Laodamia, like Oenone, rushes to the edge of the seashore in a desperate effort to catch and prolong a glimpse of her beloved. As soon as the painful sight disappears from the remote horizon, Laodamia loses her consciousness (13. 21–4). But when she comes to her senses again, a new type of vigour takes possession of her; a ‘Bacchic’ frenzy that she is unable to contain: ut quas pampinea tetigisse Bicorniger hasta, / creditur, huc illuc, qua furor egit, eo, ‘like those whom the two-horned Bacchus is thought to have touched with his vine-leafed spear, I run here and there where madness leads me’ (13. 33–4). In a similar manner, Ariadne gets caught up in a demented, delirious rambling as soon as she realizes the irrevocable character of her desertion (nunc huc, nunc illuc, et utroque sine ordine curro, ‘now here, now there, and both ways without a plan, I run’, 10. 19). Gathering momentum which, like her loose hair, is diffused over the hitherto static and stagnant narrative, she sets off wandering about in a frenzied state (aut ego diffusis erravi sola capillis, / qualis ab Ogygio concita Baccha deo,…, ‘alone, with hair loose, I roamed like a Bacchante, stirred by the Ogygian god’, 10. 47–8). This certainly is not the buoyancy of a triumph. There is hardly anything that the heroines can feel triumphant about, at this moment: the master authorities have consigned them to no more than a secondary role. But it is a barely contained momentum channelled through a surge of tears that comes about as a result of the heroines' despair. Once again, Ariadne's description is particularly conducive to this reading, bursting as she does into tears just as Theseus is sailing away: iamque oculis ereptus eras, tum denique flevi, ‘and eventually, you were snatched away from my sight. Then, at last, I broke down in tears’ (10. 43). Theseus' linear (male) time, preoccupied with a new departure and another arrival, is superbly juxtaposed with her recursive, unbalanced energy in the interior of the tumbling chora, as metaphors of a gendered way of reading (and writing) the world. And this is not the only reference to Ariadne's tears, which will flow again abundantly when she is lying lonely and desperate in the double bed, only so recently abandoned by Theseus:


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incumbo, lacrimisque toro manante profusis, ‘pressimus,’ exclamo, ‘te duo—redde duos!’ I lie in bed and, drenching it with a torrent of tears, I exclaim: ‘there were two of us that pressed you; give back those two!’ (10. 55–6)167

If Ariadne breaks down when the last shred of hope has vanished from the horizon, together with Theseus' sails, Hermione weeps in order to release the deep anger that torments her as she waits in vain for Orestes to return and free her from her forced marriage with Pyrrhus: rumpor, et ora mihi pariter cum mente tumescunt, pectoraque inclusis ignibus usta dolent. ........ flere licet certe; flendo defundimus iram, perque sinum lacrimae fluminis instar eunt. has solas habeo semper semperque profundo. I burst with anger, and my face swells with rage as much as my soul, and my breast hurts burning with confined fire within.…At least, I am allowed to weep. By weeping I discharge my anger, and the tears flow down my chest as a river. These only I ever have and I ever let them pour forth. (8. 57–63)

It is exactly this intense despair and flowing excess that Hélène Cixous calls ‘venue à l'écriture’—‘coming to writing’ (Cixous 1991), feminine writing. Cixous's vision of feminine writing is in itself a continuum of passionate and sometimes rather mystic imagery meant to reflect the flowing urge that encompasses and represents the écriture féminine, and it is mainly due to her writings that the issue of a feminine writing came to occupy a centre position in the literary-philosophical circles of France in the 1970s. Throughout her work, Cixous emphasizes the impossibility of ‘arresting’ the feminine practice of writing (Cixous and Clement 1986: 92) and fervently seeks to transmit an acute sense of freedom connected with it. As she evangelistically asserts, for a woman the country of writing is a nowhere built on rage and desire, a place beyond compromise, only ‘sorties’ (ibid. 63), ‘ways out’, that are also assaults against the bonds of an origin, of

167

For more discussion on this particular scene of Ariadne's address to her bed, see Smith (1994) 250–2.

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a genre, and of (his)story. Truly, they are only utopian voyages and the passengers—exactly like Phyllis, as we saw above—end up trapped in the anguish of their deceived hopes. Yet, it is through such a reaffirmation that the women may ‘come to writing’. For Cixous the prolific moment is somehow magic: To fly/steal is a woman's gesture, to steal into language, to make it fly.…It is not just luck if the word ‘voler’ [in French] volleys between the vol of the theft and the vol of the flight…The woman partakes of bird and of burglar…scrambling spatial order, disorienting it, moving furniture, things and values around, breaking in, emptying structures, turning the selfsame, the proper upside-down.168

Obviously, the writing woman enjoys extraordinary freedom and power in Cixous's universe.169 I find it important, however, to stress that there is nothing essential in this puissance féminine.170 Trying to speak of the (writing) woman, one finds oneself inevitably trapped in a proliferation of tightly interwoven images, words, and sounds. There is no ‘essence’ and no ‘nature’; only men and women caught up in a web of old cultural determinations. In other words, if, according to Cixous, feminine texts are the texts that struggle to split the steady lines of a phallocentric logic, this disseminating power is attributed to a culturally constructed feminine economy that can be experienced by women and men alike.171 Let us now return to the text of the Heroides. If (im)possibly idiosyncratic at times, Cixous's poetic images of women's writing have a clear affinity with the patterns of flowing imagery recurrent, as we saw, throughout the Heroides. I quote from Coming to Writing: I say: You must have been loved by death to be born and move on to writing. The condition on which beginning to write becomes

168

Cixous and Clement (1986) 96.

169

Cf. Moi (1985) 117, and generally all her Cixous chapter (pp. 102–26). See also Conley (1984); Wilcox et al. (1990); Sellers (1991) passim.

170

Even more so in the light of the biologism that has been attributed to Cixous's feminine writing by certain of her readers. Cf. Moi (1985) 126 and passim ; Felski (1989).

171

Cf. Cornell (1990) 38: ‘Feminine economy seems to be more on the side of the expense, of a certain way of accepting the part of life which is uncertain, of enjoying possibility, of risking investments.’ For more on this, see part 1 of Wilcox et al. (1990).


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necessary—(and)—possible: losing everything, having once lost everything.…Writing—begins, without you, without I, without law, without knowing, without light, without hope, without bonds.172

But if the act of writing is the other side of death, Dido's wretched self-description obviously deserves more merit than that given to her by any reading of the Heroides mainly preoccupied by their irritating excess. I quote from Dido's letter: adspicias utinam, quae sit scribentis imago! scribimus, et gremio Troicus ensis adest, perque genas lacrimae strictum labuntur in ensem, qui iam pro lacrimis sanguine tinctus erit. I wish you could see the face of her who is writing this letter! I write, and the Trojan sword sits on my lap. Tears roll over my cheeks and fall onto the unsheathed sword, which soon will be soaked in blood instead of tears. (7. 183–6)

Song, sorrow, and blood form a tight bond in a piece of writing which so explicitly connects textuality with sexuality.173 In the light of such a powerful imagery, the heroines' streams of tears, discussed above, are transformed to a kind of carnal alphabet, uncontrollably flooding these heroines' scripts. In fact, the heroines themselves reiterate this textual physicality by explicitly linking their crying with their writing.174 Cixous is also explicit about this—in her own, idiosyncratic way: The text always comes to me in connection with the Source…Source: always there.…It opens the earth for me and I spring forth. It opens my body, and writing springs forth.…I don't ‘begin’ by ‘writing’: I don't write. Life [and tears, I add—E.S.] becomes text starting out of my body, I am already text. I go where the fundamental language is spoken, the body language into which all the tongues of things, acts, and beings translate themselves…recomposed into a book.175

172

Cixous (1991) 38.

173

In a characteristic contrast, W. S. Anderson (1973: 66) finds this argument pathetic.

174

Note, for example, the heroines' references to their letters having been stained by their tears. Cf. 3. 3–4; 4. 17.5–6.

175

Cixous (1991) 43, 52 (my italics).

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5. QUOD VOCI DEERAT, PLANGORE REPLEBAM; VERBERA CUM VERBIS MIXTA FUERE MEIS (HER. 10. 37–8): INTEMPERATE NARRATIVES AND A POETICS OF LOSS The heroines as well as Cixous point out, in their own particular ways, that there is an urge of love (and the loss and death this brings about) in feminine poetry which pushes the women to extremes. We may think of Helen as described in Menelaus' tale to Telemachus in the Odyssey (4. 266–89) and interpreted by Froma Zeitlin. The episode, in the course of which Helen imitated the voices of the wives of the hidden heroes, was supposedly acted in front of the Wooden Horse and Zeitlin reads it as a commentary on the art of performing: The story functions as a self-reflexive comment on the nature of fiction and mimesis which Helen embodies. Menelaus' story thus intimates the status of Helen's earlier story as fiction and suggests in the process that Helen and storytelling might be one and the same thing.…Helen is the figure who by her imitation of the different voices of different men's wives links Eros and poetics together under the rubric of mimesis.176

The heroines' full identity is by now revealed. Because they are lovers, they are ‘philosophers for all their life, and lovers of wisdom’, as Diotima would call them in Plato's Symposium. That is, as lovers of wisdom they are the lovers of the word, hence readers and writers in turn, in pursuit of creation and meaning, while in their desire for the beautiful their (love) letters are an inescapably erotic form of understanding. Love and loss merge with the heroines' feminine creativity in a fascinating blend. They are all, like Helen, notoriously squeezed by the constraints of their assigned space and role. And yet they are also stirred up, like her, by the creative passion conferred upon them just as their confinement furtively transforms into a vibrant feminine chora, seething with uneven commotion and unexpected vigour, and an unpredictable, and at times threatening, potential. Talking about potentially threatening creative outbursts stirred by love, one thinks above all of Phaedra. The passage I would like to discuss, briefly here, is her

176

Zeitlin (1981) 205 (my italics).


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own description of her artistic wanderings, performed under the pressure of love: iam quoque—vix credes—ignotas mittor in artes; est mihi per saevas impetus ire feras. ........ in nemus ire libet pressisque in retia cervis hortari celeris per iuga summa canes ........ saepe iuvat versare leves in pulvere currus torquentem frenis ora fugacis equi; nunc feror, ut Bacchi furiis Eleleides actae. Now too—you will scarcely believe this—I am launched upon arts I do not know; there is an urge within me to go amongst wild beasts.…it pleases me to go to the woods and having driven the deer into the net, to urge the swift hounds onto the highest ridge…often it delights me to turn the light chariot in the dust, twisting with the rein the head of the fleeing steed; now I am carried away, like Bacchantes driven by the fury of their god. (4. 37–47)

The self-reflexivity of the passage is most interesting: faithfully mirroring the creative tumult advocated with passion by Cixous, Phaedra ‘bursts into unknown arts’ (ignotas mittor in artes177) and wilfully enters Hippolytus' (and, of course, Ovid's) masculine wor(l)d. As we are told, one of her strongest desires while wandering in Hippolytus' forest is for a headlong charge on the saddle of an unbridled steed. Phaedra's erratic itinerary in this new art tugs us, once again, back to the unharnessed discourse and rhythms of the Platonic chora. And the contrast of her own recursive, uncertain time is even more manifest when one juxtaposes her frenetic wandering with her memories of Hippolytus' own firmness at the time when she fell in love with him in the course of a visit to Eleusis: candida vestis erat, praecincti flore capilli, flava verecundus tinxerat ora rubor, quemque vocant aliae vultum rigidumque trucemque, pro rigido Phaedra iudice fortis erat. ......... sive ferocis equi luctantia colla recurvas, exiguo flexos miror in orbe pedes;

177

The phrase is recalled in Met. 8. 188, on Daedalus' self-reflexive artistry.

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seu lentum valido torques hastile lacerto, ora ferox in se versa lacertus habet. Your clothes were white, your hair garlanded with flowers, a modest blush had tinted your golden face, and your countenance which others call harsh and ferocious, in Phaedra's judgement was strong instead of rigid.…Whether you bend the fighting neck of the dauntless steed, I admire his hooves turning in a tight circle; or whether you hurl your ready javelin with a strong arm, your valiant arm has my eyes turned upon it. (4. 71–82)

In this image of passionate eroticism, Hippolytus' controlled rigour reflects the standard conceptions of manliness in antiquity. And on the metapoetic level that this chapter has sustained, his firm manner matches the linear time and discourse that we have so far aligned with a sovereign male order. But the handicap of such oppositions cannot be ignored. Hippolytus may have dazzled Phaedra with his handsome sternness and his sure grip on his horse's intemperate outbursts. And yet, determinacy and certainty—even if apt qualities for a world-view or a wordplay—are always prone to be caught up in a sterile circle of inflexibility and single-mindedness: exiguo flexos miror in orbe pedes (80); resolution is only the other side of the coin of obstinacy. This claim is vividly illustrated in the letter of Briseis to Achilles. As becomes clear from the beginning, the heroine's elegiac lament is snagged on the rough divisions of a masculine world; events and feelings, words and selves all have their own rigorously fixed position in this phallic universe, each one in stubborn retreat and isolation from the others. And yet Briseis literally and metaphorically moves between these set positions, reaching beyond the edges of her lovers' possessive stubbornness, and therefore also beyond the edges of the words that she has at her command in her attempt to create her own text. Let us have a closer look at her ‘flight’. Even though an emphatically powerless figure in the masculine game of war and honour, she is, nevertheless, the one who moves continually from one fixed point to another, from Chryses and her fatherland to Achilles and then to Agamemnon, whereupon she now writes this letter, longing for her previous lover. Even though heavily impregnated by expressions of servility,178 her epistle nonetheless

178



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contains a passage of impressive confidence. This occurs when, overwhelmed by her entrapment and having just exposed what she sees as Achilles' self-complacent withdrawal, she then turns to the other Achaeans with a rhetorical appeal: mittite me, Danai! dominum legata rogabo multaque mandatis oscula mixta feram. plus ego quam Phoenix, plus quam facundus Ulixes, plus ego quam Teucri, credite, frater agam. Send me, Danaans! If you do send me, I will supplicate my lord, and carry many kisses mingled with my message. I shall achieve more than Phoenix, more than eloquent Odysseus, more than Teucer's brother, believe me. (3. 127–30)

Message, talking, kisses, and eloquence are mingled in this appeal of Briseis, underlining the double significance of the episode. Since Briseis' femininity is connected to motion and the unlimited (the very message also transmitted by the Pythagorean table we saw in an earlier section of the chapter), she is entitled and also privileged to transgress, cutting a path in the pursuit of some new (or some lost) whole—and I will come back to this in the concluding paragraphs of this chapter. But according to her other role of the artist, Briseis' erotic desire is in fact a desire for knowledge (knowledge of Homer?) and poetics. In a text centrally interested in exploring its own construction, Briseis' dramatic ‘stretching out’ for Achilles imitates the way metaphor stretches out over the text without pertinence, knocking down the semantic barriers and escaping the boundaries of the words, trustful of hidden or forgotten affinities amongst alienated meanings in a way reminiscent of Briseis' confidence that the old closeness between Achilles and herself will be enough to bend the present stubbornness of the retired Greek leader. What Briseis has demonstrated is that metaphor helps the Heroides to perform free, criss-crossing flights over the ‘separate’ words of the fixed narrative universe that gave them birth, fudging the solid edges that formed them, making incongruent feelings seem congruent and non-pertinent events seem plausible, possible, and desired. No wonder: it has been said that while meanings walk along the horizontal axis of metonymy, they actually dance when they find themselves on the vertical axis of metaphor. The imagery comes from a seminal study by

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Roman Jakobson (1956) on the two fundamental aspects of language: metonymy (occupying the horizontal axis, where things are linked to one another on the basis of their contiguity) and metaphor (occupying the vertical axis in the cross of representation, where things are linked by means of their similarity). In other words, it is exactly a dancer's vivacity that gives the heroines' (metaphorical) meanings and readings the fervour to suspend the fixed codes of the ‘grand’ genres, deviating and coercing incompatible events, feelings, or thoughts—for the sheer delight of it, for the pure adventure.179 Metonymical displacement constitutes only a poor substitute for such ambitious goals. This is, at least, how Medea feels when she gazes at her two children left behind in order to remind her of their father, Jason, the very figure that led her out of their common house and his life for the sake of another woman. Instead of comforting her, their resemblance to Jason makes her need to have him back again more acute and her present lot more unfair: si tibi sum vilis, communis respice natos; ....... et nimium similes tibi sunt, et imagine tangor, et quotiens video, lumina nostra madent. If I am cheap to you, be mindful of our common children.…They are too similar to you, and I am moved by their appearance, and as often as I look at them, my eyes fill with tears. (12. 187–90)

The metonymical touch cannot break the constraints of distance, whereas metaphor, like the heroines' romantic love, alerts them with a glimpse of the new possibilities that it encompasses. Hypsipyle is most emphatic in her eagerness to see her own words flow and fly away, set free to experiment and wander around Pythagoras' female ἄπειρον (‘unlimited’; see also n. 30 above). Thus it is through the tears, the flowing substance of her writing that we discussed earlier on, that she can ‘see further than has ever been possible’: per lacrimas specto, cupidaeque faventia menti longius adsueto lumina nostra vident. Through my tears I gaze at you, and my eyes, favourable to my eager soul, see further than usual. (6. 71–2)

179

Cf. Dickey (1967).


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It is interesting that the heroes do not always seem to share the same eagerness, or capacity, to ‘see beyond’: one thinks, above all, of Ariadne's admonition to Theseus as he is gliding away in full sail, unperturbed by and unaware of Ariadne's heartbreaking grief back in Naxos: di facerent, ut me summa de puppe videres; movisset vultus maesta figura tuos! nunc quoque non oculis, sed, qua potes, adspice mente haerentem scopulo, quem vaga pulsat aqua. I wish the gods had granted you to see me from the high stern of your ship: my sad figure would have moved your features! Yet, even now look at me (not with your eyes, but, as much as you can, with your heart) clinging onto a rock that the roving water batters. (10. 133–6)

The appeal is indeed most striking. In free translation: ‘it is not what already exists but what you can imagine that should give you the material to picture me’. But Theseus cannot follow Ariadne's advice—is metaphor perhaps more of a feminine spur in language? I would not like to risk an oversimplifying response to this question. No doubt the discourse of many highly androcentric artists displays an intriguing range of metaphorical thought. But in a certain sense, this is beyond the focus of the present argument. As I also pointed out in Chapter one, the target of this study is not to provide a manual of transcendental gender behaviours for the sake of abstract classification. My remarks on gender in this chapter, as well as throughout this book, are always meant to reflect suggestions inherent in the tropes and figures of the actual texts that I discuss. More importantly, they are constructed in accordance with the opinions, fears, expectations, and guesses of the textual subjects they explore. I should thus not like to suggest that metaphor has an inherent, ahistorical association with feminine discourse.180 But I will

180

Challenging and tricky at the same time, metaphor and metonymy in their widest possible dimensions, as polarized drives behind modern narratives, have attracted the attention of several critics. See, for instance, MacArthur (1990); Brooks (1984) esp. 3–61; Gallop (1982) esp. 15–32, 92–112; Kermode (1967); Lacan (1966), each of them offering their own, often conflicting and at times idiosyncratic, interpretation of the nature of the metaphor–metonymy pair. I hope to address this issue, especially in its relation to gender and classical literature, at greater length in another study.

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suggest that metaphorical thought features as a particularly powerful mode of resistance in these heroines' struggle for reform—which, I should add, also enhances the appropriateness of my own interpretative metaphors used throughout the present book. Metaphorical thought demonstrates a certain defiance, which parallels the defiance exhibited by Phaedra's unleashed energy and Briseis' multiple ‘connectedness’, as discussed above. As a drastic linguistic operation, metaphor upsets linear order with its images gliding in ebbs and flows while demanding a continual restlessness of the mind.181 The heroines' own creative and spatial indulgence, looking back to Pythagoras' ‘crooked’ and ‘unlimited’ feminine spirit, and forward to Cixous's billowing imagery, renders metaphor a most appropriate tool in their effort to revamp the old stories.182 Metaphor thus features as an illustration of the untamed modes and tropes of the Platonic chora. By linking the heroines' crooked discourse with the metaphorical mode in language, we find our attention tugged back to the core quality of the heroines' feminine writing. Briseis' transference from one place of dire antagonism to another in the unyielding and inflexible Homeric world of male honour symbolically reflects the polyphonic inclusiveness of both metaphor and écriture féminine. Aptly reminding us of the Aristotelian ‘transference’ involved in every metaphoric act, Ann Carson's insight into the metaphoric gestures of language is particularly relevant to my point:

181

Cf. here Ancona (1989) with interesting observations on the ways in which the figurative features of the language used in Hor. Od. 1. 23 undercut the dominant frame of the dispassionate discourse of the male poet. On the subversion of polarities and, generally, the deconstruction of concepts through metaphors, cf. Derrida (1976a) 207–71.

182

As an interesting contemporary quasi-parallel that cannot help but accentuate the metapoetic innuendoes in Phaedra's or Briseis' freelance expedition, I quote Virginia Woolf (1977 edn.: 9–10), and especially part of her description of feminine imagination: ‘Thought—to call it by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither, amongst the reflections and the weeds…until the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line.…laid on the grass how small it was…and as it darted and sank and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still.’


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‘To give names to nameless things by transference [metaphora] from things kindred or similar in appearance' is how Aristotle describes the function of metaphor (Rh. 3. 2. 1405a34).…Metaphoric sense…works…through…a ‘semantic impertinence’.…The violation allows a new pertinence or congruence to emerge, which is the metaphoric meaning. How does the new pertinence emerge?…A virtuoso act of imagination brings the two things together, sees their incongruence, then sees also a new congruence.…Thus, tension of an acute kind informs this mental action. It demands of the mind a ‘stereoscopic vision’…that is, an ability to hold in equipoise two perspectives at once.183

But the ‘ability to hold in equipoise two perspectives at once’ is exactly what Hélène Cixous proclaims as the main strength of her vision of feminine writing. Relinquishing the stubborn fixation on a masterful self with uncompromising boundaries—and, hence, self-contained identity and self-complacent needs—she advocates écriture féminine, as ‘the endeavour to “write the other” in ways which refuse to appropriate or annihilate the other's difference in order to create and glorify the self…’.184 The association I have been exploring now starts crystallizing: if metaphor is more of a female urge in the heroines' language, it is so because it does not seek to strangle the other (word)—it rather needs the other's alterity in order to ‘live’. And the heroines also know that the heroes cannot stay. Dido is most explicit: certius ibis, / nec te, si cupies, ipsa manere sinam, ‘with greatest safety you will depart. Nor will I let you stay, even if you desire to stay’ (7. 173–4). If the heroines' feminine (elegiac) writing seeks to create another word for the world that brought them to life, it does it in a profoundly ‘loving’ way: naming this world means loving its word, as Cixous would put it, treasuring the experience instead of twisting it arrogantly in the sweep of (over-certain) authorial understanding. In this sense, the heroines' absent companions, texts themselves, are spun from fragments left by their authors' forbearing restraint from imposing a final form on their textual weave.185 It is only rarely and with the greatest of difficulty that this ‘letting go’ comes to the surface of the discourse of the abandoned heroines. But when

183

Carson (1986) 73.

184

Sellers (1991) 142.

185

Like Penelope—to use a famous name—with her endless weaving and secretive unweaving in the upper rooms of the palace.

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it does make it onto the page, even if only to be withdrawn straight away, a strong sign of feminine assertion slips through the weave of Ovid's text, as in the narrative of Laodamia. Overwhelmed by fears (spes bona sollicito victa timore cadit, ‘good hope is defeated by anxious fear’, 13. 124), her discourse is replete with heartbreaking appeals to the Danaans to change the ill-fated route of their journey to Troy (e.g. 13. 131–2: quo ruitis, Danai? ventos audite vetantis! / non subiti casus, numinis ista mora est, ‘where do you rush headlong, Danaans? Heed the winds that forbid you to sail! It is not a sudden chance but a divine will that brings this delay’). And yet, a striking turn takes place in the following lines, just as Laodamia's wailing appeal sharply shifts its expected course: sed quid ago? revoco? revocaminis omen abesto, blandaque conpositas aura secundet aquas! But what am I doing? Do I call you back? Far be from me the omen of calling you back, and may a fair wind further a calm sea for your journey! (13. 135–6)

Even though prompted to give up her demand for Protesilaus' immediate return through fear of a bad omen, nonetheless Laodamia has had the bravery to release her word and ‘pardon’ its (his) restlessness, just as she tries to renounce the ambition of a final exegesis and to accept the tempestuous order of things.186 Her love (poetry) can only thrive in the desire (for the writing) of the other, as Cixous envisaged it. And this other, like the words linked by metaphor, will always have to be kept at a certain distance, so that its alterity can survive—this polyphonic alterity in which the heroines and their feminine script thrive, even though they find it hardly bearable. Hypermestra's case is striking in this respect: in a story where the union literally reserves death for the unaware companion, Hypermestra will have to withdraw to a solitude comparable to that of Penelope's endless night in an empty bed (as discussed earlier), the price for saving Lyceus' alterity and indeed his life: sanguis abit, mentemque calor corpusque relinquit, / inque novo iacui frigida

186

With this symbolic relinquishing of control, contrast the male elegists' stereotypical need for control of their mistresses. One thinks above all of Ovid's first book of Amores, brilliantly capturing the lover's obsessive need for manipulation of his beloved and the contours of their love affair.


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facta toro, ‘my blood left me, and warmth abandoned my soul and my body, and newly married I lay stiffened in my bed’ (14. 37–8). But contrary to what happened in Penelope's case, Hypermestra has Lynceus actually lying next to her, even if he is oblivious of her mental and emotional ordeal: ipse iacebas, / quemque tibi dederant vina, soporis eras, ‘you, yourself, lay in the grip of the sleep the wine had given you’ (14. 41–2). In this chapter, I have deliberately put aside any prior knowledge of these myths in an effort to foreground the heroines' own merit, hitherto largely subjected to this prior knowledge. However, master frames and super-readers cannot, and should not, be altogether discarded. According to these master frames, nearly all these stories are bound to end in a disconcerting way. And yet, as long as the heroines feature in this male plotting, a space of female creativity has emerged—with Canace's ill-fated labour as the paradigm187—resonant with echoes of an idiom distinctly different from that of their male authors. The discourse it has produced is mostly shared by women and mainly belongs to them, a microcosm of faithful nurses, loving sisters, and loyal maids, who shared the pain, the excitement, and the dangers of this daring feminine writing: Dido's sister, Anna, Cydippe's loyal attendant, or Canace's faithful old nurse. But once (re)visited, this impulsive space emanates strength of expression and will, and has given intimations of a different order that puts epic and tragedy into another perspective. As a counter-paradigm, in the one case where concord in this female world is disrupted, i.e. in Hypermestra's case, writing becomes excessively and exceptionally difficult. Note for example the strikingly defeatist note on which Hypermestra's letter concludes: scribere plura libet, sed pondere lapsa catenae / est manus, et vires subtrahit ipse timor, ‘it would please me to write more, but my hand has fallen with the weight of my chains, and fear itself draws away my strength' (14. 131–2). The bleak phrase jars with the narratives of the other heroines, who have always indulged in delusions of the liberating power of their letters. Is it perhaps because, unlike most of the other heroines, Hypermestra has also lost the support of her sisters, who chose to kill their husbands? At least, this is what transpires from Hypermestra's own lament:

187

For more on Canace's baby/book see Ch. 5 below.

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quique dati leto, quaeque dedere, fleo; / nam mihi quot fratres, totidem periere sorores / accipiat lacrimas utraque turba meas, ‘I weep for those who were given to death and for those who gave them to death. For I have lost as many sisters as the brothers that were killed. Let both lots receive my tears’ (14. 116–18).188 Of course, like Protesilaus and his comrades, the heroes will finally embark on the ship of their established myth, moving on to meet the telos (‘fulfilment’) of their destined fate. Ovid and the other master authorities regain full control of the story that was tossed about in the shaking chora of the heroines' retreat; now the myth is departing again according to the known male wish. And yet, the old grandeur has lost a bit of its shine. The loss is indelibly marked in Demophoon's and Paris' tearful faces at the time of the departure. Phyllis' memories of the heart-rending farewell are particularly poignant: illa meis oculis species abeuntis inhaeret / … / ausus es amplecti colloque infusus amantis / oscula per longas iungere pressa moras / cumque tuis lacrimis lacrimas confundere nostras, ‘your image, as you were departing, is impressed upon my eyes…you dared to embrace me and throwing yourself round the neck of her who loved you, to join your lips with mine pressed in lingering kisses, and to mingle your tears with mine’ (2. 91–5). As Oenone recollects, the same harrowing scene revolved at the time of Paris' own departure: oscula dimissae quotiens repetita dedisti! / quam vix sustinuit dicere lingua ‘vale’! ‘how often you returned for more kisses after you had parted from me! how your tongue could hardly bear to say “farewell”!’ (5. 51–2). Mirroring the myth itself, according to a well-known motif, the ship of the heroes progresses again towards a grander telos. But the saddened faces of Paris and Demophoon reflect a discourse ‘grieving’ for the abandonment of the female order.

188

For a different explanation of this, however, cf. the scholia on Euripides' Hec. 886 with the suggestion that Lynceus avenged his brothers by killing Hypermestra's sisters.

5 Postcards Home: The Heroides as Letters Nihil habebam, quod scriberem. Neque enim novi quicquam audieram et ad tuas omne rescripseram pridie. Sed, cum me aegritudo non solum somno privaret, verum ne vigilare quidem sine summo dolore pateretur, tecum ut quasi loquerer, in quo uno acquiesco, hoc nescio quid nullo argumento proposito scribere institui. I have nothing to write about. I have heard no news and I replied to all your letters yesterday. But, since my distress of mind not only prevented me from sleeping but also made my vigil a torment, I started writing this with no particular subject, but so that I can talk to you, which is my only relief. Cicero, Ad Att. 9. 10. 1. Epistularum genera multa esse non ignoras, sed unum illud certissimum, cuius causa inventa res ipsa est, ut certiores faceremus absentes, si quid esset, quod eos scire aut nostra aut ipsorum interesset. You surely know that there are many kinds of letters. However, there is one kind about which there is no doubt—for letter-writing was invented for this reason: to inform the absent ones about things pertaining either to us or to them that they need to know. Cicero, Ad Fam. 2. 4. 1. La lettre, l'épître, qui n'est pas un genre mais tous les genres, la littérature même. The letter, the epistle, which is not one genre but all the genres, literature itself. J. Derrida, ‘Envois’, La Carte postale The present chapter focuses on those features of the Heroides which are directly related to their epistolary form, in an attempt

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THE HEROIDES AS LETTERS

to explore the ways in which letter-writing and letter-reading creates and manipulates meaning in the Ovidian collection.189 In stressing the epistolary element within the collection's generic multivalence, my arguments draw on insights concerning the epistolary novel, a genre distinguished in modern times with acknowledged debts to Ovid's Heroides.190 Letters as a structured transformation of reality had played an important role in social relationships from the beginning of writing, and were widely practised by Greek and Roman writers, who also repeatedly attempted to provide a theoretical framework for the genre.191 Letters play an important part in the tradition of the ancient Greek novel. Parts of the Alexander Romance, for instance, are in effect an epistolary novel, while the pseudonymous collection of Chion of Heraclea certainly deserves a special mention here, as a major surviving example of the ancient epistolary novel.192 But the genre as a sequence of epistolary narratives wholly or partially responsible for the construction of a fictive plot flourished mainly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Western Europe with works such as Guilleragues's Lettres portugaises, Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse, Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, and Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela. Contemporary criticism has seen a boom in studies exploring the technique of letter-writing in such novels, in its aesthetic as well as social aspects, and with more or less explicit emphasis on

189

As already mentioned in Ch. 2.1, the seminal study on the epistolary form in the Heroides, with specific emphasis on Her. 1, is Kennedy (1984). Henderson (1986) is also methodologically important for his discussion of the inherently and essentially ‘purloined’ character of these letters/stories. Cf. also Jacobson (1974: 337–8), who suggests that the Heroides ' ‘static character’ is to a large extent due to their epistolary nature. Other critics have noticed inconsistencies in the epistolary conventions adopted by the heroines, such as abrupt changes of addressee or self-addresses incorporated in the midst of the letter: cf. Steinmetz (1987: 133), but note also W. S. Anderson (1973: 66) on the letter form as a device designed to keep the flow of these poems uninterrupted. For a recent more congenial approach to such tensions, see Smith (1994) esp. 267 and passim.

190

For literary imitations of the Heroides in modern times, see Carocci (1988); Greenhut (1988).

191

See e.g. Malherbe (1988); P. A. Rosenmeyer (2001a) esp. 19–35. On ancient epistolary theorists, cf. also Jacobson (1974) 335–6.

192

For an analytical discussion of ancient Greek epistolary novels in general, and of Chion's collection as a form of epistolary novel in particular, cf. P. A. Rosenmeyer (1994).


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letters created by females.193 Epistolary fictions are professed confessions, first-person narratives whose creator speaks and acts on stage rather than from behind the curtains. Surrogates of the artist through their letter-writing, and as they grapple with the difficulties of getting their voice across, the composers of the Ovidian letters actually ‘think aloud’ about the form, nature, goals, and aspirations of epistolary storytelling. Thus, their dilemmas and aspirations may be compared or contrasted with the dilemmas and aspirations of the modern novelists and their fictive surrogates. This chapter will try to keep a constant eye on the gendered identity of these letters, even though it will not make it its sole focus. Gender on its own cannot explain away all the intertwined facets and challenges of letter-writing, a highly intricate and ambiguous procedure capable of frustrating all individual feelings of power and control. And yet, even though one should not push the connection too far, both modern and ancient thought seem to have accepted a certain link between letter-writing and femininity. This link has acquired different connotations at different stages of cultural development. The epistolary novel fell into a certain decline in the nineteenth century when it got entangled in the polarities traditionally sustained around gender and it was then that letter-writing started to be viewed as a genre not worthy of being classified amongst the virile, public (and important) genres. Thus letters gradually came to be thought a private (and inferior, in this sense) occupation of the mind more suitable to women, a means of enduring the various separations and absences dominating their life because of the traditional restraints of their position and social role.194 Well into the twentieth century, and in a society significantly different in its values and treatment of the two genders, Barthes used the same link between women and separation in order to bring the two genders closer rather than separate them, destabilizing the traditional image. And the picture that emerges from the following piece of prose is remarkably ambiguous. On the one hand, bearing the absence and carrying its (epistolary) discourse is a restrained ‘woman's thing’, but on the other it is also a human

193

Cf. e.g. Altman (1982); Goldsmith (1989); Kamuf (1982); Kauffman (1986); MacArthur (1990); Perry (1980).

194

Cf. French (1986).

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skill, one of those capacities taken up by men when they attempt to transcend the boundaries of their gender: Historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by the Woman. Woman is sedentary, Man hunts, journeys; … It is Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction … it follows that in any man who utters the other's absence something feminine is declared: this man who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminised. (Barthes 1979: 13–14)

Even though the association of letter-writing with women is less explicit in antiquity, ancient fiction also invites gendered readings along similar lines. Agamemnon's letters in Euripides' Iphigeneia in Aulis and Phaedra's letters in the Euripidean Hippolytus, but also Deianira's parcel/message in Sophocles' Trachiniae, all exploit the possibilities of a letter's trajectory in ingenious ways. I will begin with some remarks on the Iphigeneia, where it is a man who writes the letters. I do not mean to give to these letters normative behaviour value against which to judge the heroines' letters. But they constitute a striking example of a letter's latent but powerful role in a plot and a story, and this alone makes them a most pertinent introduction to a chapter explicitly preoccupied with the Ovidian letters' tacit strengths. This all-too-brief presentation will evoke a number of issues related to epistolary storytelling and give the reader an intimation of the concerns which will preoccupy this chapter. After this introductory section, I will focus mainly on the double Heroides.195 The opening of Iphigeneia in Aulis is dominated by a letter already written before the dramatic time of the play has started running. It is Agamemnon who has written it and sent it to his wife Clytemnestra with an invitation for her and their daughter to come to Aulis in order that Iphigeneia may marry Achilles. The letter is already on its way but the audience is very soon informed that this is really an invitation to death for Iphigeneia, as Agamemnon is racked by remorse at the thought of the fraud he consented to in company with Menelaus, Odysseus, and Calchas (IA 49–114). The letter has already departed on its deceitful mission but Agamemnon, torn by guilt for having condemned

195

For a more thorough exploration of the letters in Iphigeneia in Aulis, see P. A. Rosenmeyer (2001a) 80–8.


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his own child to death, decides to change the story. Thus he sends a new letter entrusted to the hands of his loyal old attendant, in order to catch the previous one and cancel its narrative by revealing the truth and the real mission awaiting Iphigeneia in Aulis. The incident prompts us to reflect on the inherently ambiguous nature of the letter: inscribed as it is on the tablet, the story behind it is by definition unstable and vulnerable. It can be lost or purloined and, in the case of Agamemnon, ‘opened and resealed’ with a new story in it, as the Greek leader characteristically says of his second attempt at letter-writing (IA 107–10). There is something intrinsically fickle about letters and the stories they purport to establish. No matter how many messages are delivered, they cannot bring the protagonists face to face for a final and irrevocable solution. They often invite rethinking and changes of mind as they set off on an uncertain itinerary, giving their authors the time to brood over them and spend whole nights in agony, as Agamemnon does in Iphigeneia in Aulis. As we shall see, deferral and agonizing doubts are amongst the fundamental elements of the epistles of the Heroides. What is important to notice at this point is that these doubts and rethinking are explicitly considered unsuitable for a man and especially for a leader. The point is made twice in the first 500 lines. In the first scene of the play Agamemnon's old servant finds his master uncontrollably crying and at the same time writing, erasing, sealing, and unsealing a letter (35–40). But as the old man has already made clear, ‘he does not like this repining in a king’ (28). Similar patterns of behaviour reserved for ‘royal manliness’ will soon be invoked again by Menelaus. Having intercepted Agamemnon's second (rewritten) letter-invitation for Clytemnestra to bring their daughter Iphigeneia to Aulis (303 ff.), he pitilessly exposes his brother's lack of royal spirit, as betrayed by his indecision and indeterminacy (334–75). To write, dispatch, and let go would be a royal and manly act: but can one ever really do this with a letter?

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1. MANUS OFFICIUM LONGIUS AEGRA NEGAT (HER. 21. 246): DIALOGUE RITARDANDO With these presumptions lingering in the background, I now pass on to the Heroides. My main focus here will be on the ‘double’ Heroides, namely the letters exchanged between Paris and Helen, Hero and Leander, and Acontius and Cydippe. It will be these three double ‘confrontations’ that will dictate my exegetic plot for this chapter and only a small number of select extracts from the single Heroides will be inserted into the discussion as ‘corroborative evidence’—as voices that seem to reflect on Helen's, Hero's, and Cydippe's concerns with remarkable understanding. This section will argue that similar gendered stereotypes to the ones that I detected above in Euripides' play are also at work in the Ovidian epistles. The heroines seem more attuned than the heroes to the twists of a letter and somewhat more capable of making sense of—even ‘enjoying’, in a resigned sort of way—the instabilities of such a narrative: women doubt and tarry while men are obsessed with the end. The obvious person to start with is Paris. A scan through his letter is enough to establish him as an over-certain and confident pursuer. His trip, far from being a fallible wandering, is presented as an accurately calculated pursuit: nam neque tristis hiems neque nos huc appulit error, ‘for neither a dismal storm nor a mistake has pushed me here’ (16. 29). Indeed, his hyper-confident conscience interprets all incidents as signs favourable to his pursuits sent by the gods. Already from the opening of his long letter, he seems to have grasped the importance of the prize that he is after, but he does not, for a second, question his right to it. He boldly swears to the persistence of his desire. It was Venus that instilled this determination in him, when he chose her as the most beautiful one amongst the three goddesses on Mount Ida.196 And as he could no longer comfort himself with the hope of Helen, he sailed out to meet and obtain his object of desire (16.105–6). In the light of the previous paragraphs, it is little wonder that

196

For various expressions of Paris' self-assurance, see 16. 15–16, 19–20, 129–30, 163–4, 169–70.


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the device of a letter is predominantly a nuisance to Paris, as it reminds him of the distance that separates him from the deepest desire of his heart. Truly, he has resorted to it as the only bridge that can convey his feelings to Helen, having in fact complied obediently with Ovid's own explicit advice from the Ars Amatoria 1. 437–44 where Ovid addresses male lovers with the suggestion that a letter abundant in promises should reach the woman before their own first appearance in front of her: cera tuae primum conscia mentis eat … promittas facito: quid enim promittere laedit? ‘let the wax that knows your mind precede … and make promises: what harm is there in promises?’197 But, ultimately, he cannot hide his dissatisfaction with the letter's deficiencies as well as his preference for other more unmediated ways of communication: te mihi meque tibi communia gaudia iungant; candidior medio nox erit illa die. tunc ego iurabo quaevis tibi numina meque adstringam verbis in sacra vestra meis. tunc ego, si non est fallax fiducia nostri, efficiam praesens, ut mea regna petas. Let shared delights join you to me and me to you; that night will be brighter than the middle of the day. Then I will swear to you by whatever gods you wish and by my own words I will bind myself to what you hold sacred. Then, unless my self- confidence deceives me, by being there, I will make you want to come with me to my own realm. (16. 319–24)

Leander's letter is also soaked in its author's impatience. The hero repeatedly complains about his restrictive family, the sweeping winds, the swollen sea, and everything else that prevents him from crossing the Hellespont in order to meet his beloved Hero.198 And 1. 124 eloquently condenses his hastiness: invitus certe nunc moror urbe mea, ‘certainly against my will I tarry now in my own town’. And Acontius, the third and last male letter-writer of our collection, appears similarly impatient as well. Suffice it at this point to draw attention to the resolute way Acontius imposed his ‘letter’ on his beloved Cydippe, by throwing the inscribed apple in front of her feet and therefore

197

For more links between Her. 16. 16–18 and AA 1 see Barchiesi (1995) 325.

198

See e.g. 18. 9–12, 37–46, 183–6.

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forcing her to read it—thus taking the oath of marrying him, which was embedded in the inscription. (20.9–20) In contrast, the female correspondents of the three double Heroides exhibit a distinctly different artistic profile as letter-writers. Without underestimating their desperate desire for a happy ending uncircuitously expressed in all three letters, Helen, Hero, and Cydippe appear more capable of handling the letters' ‘pending’ economy and its lack of immediate gratification. We could even suggest that they are themselves the agents of this literary as well as erotic holding back. It is as if there is a narrative time pertaining specifically to the letters, cherished only by the women but completely unheeded by the men entangled in these stories. On a more explicit metaliterary level, this time seems to fall outside the established plot of the master male narratives of the past. It rather belongs to the new stories endorsed by the heroines who tarry in their own world—and their own word—and hesitate to move towards meeting their established (but shattering) fate and the plot prepared for them.199 Helen's and Hero's letters provide the most striking illustrations of this. Even though Paris' letter and its advances have obviously thrown her into a state of deep shock, Helen cannot keep herself from the temptation of writing (back). But the letter in her own hands becomes an ambiguous tool of approximation as well as resistance at the same time. If the mere fact of her having not refused to read his first letter was interpreted by Paris as a clear, even though faint, signal of her alliance in the plot that he is trying to establish between them (16. 13–14), her direct response here must necessarily be acknowledged as a big narrative push in their story. And yet throughout her letter Helen appears aggressive and resentful. She admits her vulnerability to Paris and his words (and, as I would add, to Ovid's authorial intentions): desine molle, precor, verbis convellere pectus, ‘I beg you, stop rending my soft breast with your words’, 17. 111; but she also does not attempt to hide her disapproval of his scheming. She wishes to present herself as Menelaus' faithful wife and exhibits ostentatious indignation at the Trojan prince's indecent proposal.200 If Paris' phallic determinacy urges him to a

199

Cf. Barchiesi (1987) on how the Heroides ' narrative time fills in gaps in the narrative time established by the traditional treatments of these myths.

200

That is, if she is telling the truth, a question that I do not wish to sort out since (a ) there is no undisputed way to answer it and (b ) this lack of a clear answer is part of the letter's indomitable and precarious character that I wish to promote.


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fast and clear-cut solution, Helen is not interested in advancing the plot, as it has been fixed for her by previous authorities. She does not yield to a meeting with Paris, considering such a step as a premature development (sed nimium properas, ‘but you are too hasty’, 17. 263), and refuses to give way to her desire (sed amare repugno / illum, quem fieri vix puto posse meum, ‘but I refuse to love a man I hardly believe can be mine’, 17. 137–8). Instead her letter is a story of semi-developed characters and a private drama of selfawareness, replete with expressions of doubt and deferral in the margin of the ‘official’ plot. Just like Paris, Helen also appears attentive to one of Ovid's own pieces of advice from the Ars Amatoria, according to which she is supposed to tarry and fill her delayed letter with hopes joined with fears: postque brevem rescribe moram: mora semper amantes / incitat, exiguum si modo tempus habet. / sed neque te facilem iuveni promitte roganti / nec tamen e duro quod petit ille, nega …, ‘reply after a small delay: waiting always stirs lovers, if their flame has lasted only a short time. But neither promise yourself easily to the youth that is begging you, nor yet deny stubbornly what he asks’ (AA 3. 473–6). In the light of my metapoetic reading of the heroines' procrastinating response to their predetermined fate, such advice from Ovid himself includes an element of ironic self-referentiality. Helen's vision of her self-as-an-artist is communicated most eloquently in 17. 127–8 as she recollects the events that led to Paris' arrival in Sparta. She can hardly believe that she was worthy of becoming the trophy in the divine competition. But: sed nihil infirmo; faveo quoque laudibus istis— nam mens, vox quare, quod cupit, esse neget? But I do not deny anything; I even support these praises. For why should my voice deny that to be, which my mind desires?

‘Why should my voice deny what I much desire?’ The voice referred to here is none other than Helen's artistic utterance, constituted by the pleas and thoughts inscribed in her letter. And it is these thoughts and feelings that are allowed, whereas the ‘real’ ones are not. Constrained by her royal bonds, Helen tries to

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consume her desire in her letter. For her a letter is more than just an irksome substitute for ‘real life’, as the male correspondents discussed above seem to believe, for it can also be a proper stage of its own, upon which life is acted, but with fewer constraints and more freedom, digressions, and defiance. Hero's letter makes this point even clearer. It is true that the heroine appears to be suffering from the separation at least as much as her secret fiancé. And the start of her letter finds Hero clad—by Ovid—in the frail qualities typically assigned to the ‘female condition’ in antiquity (urimur igne pari, sed sum tibi viribus inpar. / fortius ingenium suspicor esse viris. / ut corpus, teneris ita mens infirma puellis, ‘we burn with equal fires but I am not equal to you in strength. I believe that men have a stronger disposition. Tender women's soul is frail, just as their body also is’, 19. 5–7). But if we believe that everything we shall witness in Hero's epistle is impotent and resigned emotionality, we are wrong. Undoubtedly the whole letter seethes with pain and complaints, but it also reveals at points a strength dissonant from Ovid's initial prescription. In the secret life of hers that is shared only by her loyal old nurse, the young girl would regularly bypass the vigilant presence of the family, and go down to the shore where Leander is in vain expected to arrive. There, ‘with words almost his own’ she chastises the swollen waves that constrain her beloved on the other side of the Hellespont (corripio verbis aequora paene tuis, ‘I scold the sea with words almost your own’, 19. 22). We are tempted to understand that the ‘words’ Hero desperately clings to are the phrases and thoughts from Leander's letters that she has learned by heart. Since the sea—and her master author—do not allow her to meet her lover, Hero lives her affair through the letters that the two lovers are obliged to exchange as a substitute for their frustrated meetings. Indeed, Leander's writings feature once again later on in her letter as the basis for their distant love affair: et facias placidum per mare tutus iter— dummodo sis idem, dum sic, ut scribis, amemur, flammaque non fiat frigidus illa cinis. And only make a safe journey through a placid sea—so long as you stay intact, so long as we love each other, as you write, and our flame does not become chilled ashes. (19. 92–4)


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In other words: ‘do not attempt to cross the swollen sea lest something happen to you in the course of this risky adventure. Stay away, do not struggle to be with me, so that you remain alive and hence we are allowed to carry on loving each other in our letters.’ Helen's and Hero's efforts to establish with their writings a life ‘on the margins’ bring to mind another story of feminine defiance put into action through the art of letter-writing, that of Byblis' love for her brother Caunus in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Like Phaedra, Byblis decides to create her own story by sending a revelatory letter to Caunus, with disastrous effects on both siblings. The process of her coming to writing will come up again in the last section of this chapter: here I merely draw attention to the ominous and metapoetical wording used for her artistic effort: talia nequiquam perarantem plena reliquit / cera manum summusque in margine versus adhaesit, ‘the full wax deserted her hand, as it ploughed through such things in vain, and the last line clung on the edge’ (Met. 9. 564–5). Byblis' overflowing story ultimately had to develop in the edges of her paper—a ‘redundancy’ that links her story to Hero's story discussed in the main text. And the moral of the stories: is there something that assigns women's writing to the margin? Living one's life through writing:201 in the narrative progress of such a ‘performance’, there is no centre and no great moments around which the narrative is constructed, only retrospective memories of past landmarks and excited anticipation of delightful events yet to come. Such a life presupposes distance and keeps people apart, while it allows the protagonists to move back and forth without consistency. In such a narrative the authors waver between trust and distrust, admiration and bitterness; like, above all, Hypsipyle and Dido, whose hearts, still affected

201

Cf. Altman (1982: 13–46), who maps out the ways in which epistolary mediation and a vicarious experience of life through letter-writing work in the particular novels that she examines. In particular, young Mitsou in Colette's Mitsou, ou comment l'esprit vient aux filles resembles Hero in many respects. The letters that she writes to Robert, her lover, work throughout the novel as the medium for her self-development. Letters and writing are an event in her life, as much as love is. She and Robert gradually become skilled readers and writers, so that when they meet up in the end they ironically long for the mediation and tardiness of their epistolary romance, unused ‘to the passion of their voices’.

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by the great infatuation they had once felt for Jason and Aeneas, respectively, grapple with their wrath as the heroes have now ruthlessly abandoned them.202 Their feelings are further blurred as memories of their (lost) strength and independence mingle with their overwhelming present powerlessness in a hapless discourse—Phyllis' and Oenone's letters include exemplary passages in this respect.203 In the course of this haphazard writing, even the personae of the interlocutors merge into one another in a nebulous pattern that cannot promise a smooth narrative progress. Phyllis' letter is paradigmatic of all the contradictions encompassed in such a fusion: ei mihi! si, quae sim Phyllis et unde, rogas— quae tibi, Demophoon, longis erroribus acto Threicios portus hospitiumque dedi, cuius opes auxere meae, cui dives egenti munera multa dedi, multa datura fui; quae tibi subieci latissima regna Lycurgi … (2. 106–11) And so on, and so forth. In paraphrase: ‘Do you want to know who I am? I am she who picked you up, gave you shelter, gave you gifts, promised you a big land to rule over.’ The passage was supposed to be predominantly about Phyllis, yet the discourse is dominated by Demophoon's ungrateful figure. But ultimately it is the heroine's generous spirit and agency that reigns over the paragraph. The ‘I’ is given through ‘you’—or else, there is no way of talking about ‘I’ without admitting the ‘you’ in the discourse. But this is only consistent with the true nature of a letter—and with the nature of love elegy. The (love) letter is always addressed to somebody, one writes for somebody but also one writes predominantly about oneself. In other words, one cannot even begin to write about the other without letting one's self creep into the talk; or write about one's self without bringing in ‘you’. Deianira's letter can perhaps shed more light on this dense description. Her letter was meant to be a desperate attempt at persuasion, a final appeal to Hercules to reconsider his conjugal disloyalty. Very soon though, Hercules' figure lapses to the back of Deianira's mind and she yields to indignation at her personal

202

Cf. e.g. 6. 75–8; 7. 61–2.

203

Cf. e.g. 2. 45–8; 5. 9–32.


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ordeal. As a result, the letter turns into an angry rant—before it becomes a suicide note after Deianira realizes (under circumstances more or less obscure to the reader) that Hercules is in fact dead, poisoned by the love charm that she herself had sent him. This seems to have been dispatched before the beginning of this letter, even though we do not hear about it until 9. 144. There seem to be neither distinct aims nor recognizable progress, nor even any real sense of a beginning or an end, in her letter, as indeed in the letters of all the other heroines mentioned above.204 As modern scholarship has put it, very relevantly to the Heroides (if ungrammatically), ‘the letter always stays in medias res and in medias personas’ (H. Brown 1977: 581). Deianira and the other abandoned women whose epistolary soliloquies we read in the corpus of the Heroides have no premeditated pattern for their writing. Rather, they yield to fragmentary images that they choose to see while they lurch from extreme to extreme, indulging the conflicting impulses of their hearts, indifferent to narrative rules or other external changes.205 The letter patiently registers all these conflicts, drawing out of its authors diligently kept secrets that speech has not managed to extract, as Phaedra makes clear: his arcana notis terra pelagoque feruntur, ‘in these characters secrets are carried over land and sea’ (4. 5), whereas ter tecum conata loqui ter inutilis haesit / lingua, ter in primo destitit ore sonus, ‘three times I tried to speak to you, three times my tongue was tied, unable to be of any use, three times the sound ceased at the very edge of my lips’ (4. 7–8). It all has to do with the letter's ‘position as a halfway point’ (Altman 1982: 42), more specifically with what Janet Altman in her study of modern epistolary novels has seen as the paradox of epistolarity, namely that ‘the epistolary narrative thrives in an atmosphere of contrary possibilities’ (p. 188). Viewed in these terms, epistolary discourse invites a gendered reading. One of the most distinctive and persistent features of modern decon-structionist theory has been its assault on binary thinking and the

204

The open-endedness of the letter is ironically marked by Deianira herself, who persistently emphasizes the deferral of her own death: inpia quid dubitas Deianira mori? ‘Impious Deianira, why do you hesitate to die?’ (9. 146, 152, 158, 164).

205

For further insights about such a hermetic style of writing, cf. Abbot (1980).

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oppositions underlying Western philosophy from ancient times to the present.206 A primary example of the ancient roots of this philosophical construction is the Pythagorean table of the ten pairs of opposite principles of the universe which was discussed earlier.207 Modern feminist theory has taken this further. More particularly, it has suggested that the female (not as a biological category but in the sense of the feminine economy that I discussed in Chapter 4.4) appears able to surpass and fudge these fundamental polarities without taking sides, and capable of wavering between set positions. Cixous is generally considered as the best-known representative of this line of enquiry.208 No wonder then that the heroines appear more at ease with the whimsical nature of their letters. As Barthes has also put it in his own personal style, ‘it is Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction’ (1979: 14). In other words, it is the woman who dares bring the conflicting sides of the self to the fore. This is certainly not the way a noble free citizen—incarnating the Platonic ideal of masculinity—is supposed to tell a story: as Plato remarks in the Republic (431b9–c3), emotional diversity, instability, and unpredictability are ignoble traits altogether, associated with women, slaves, and hoi polloi. However, if the above thoughts have suggested possible differences between the heroines and the heroes of the Ovidian collection when taking up the pen, they cannot of course suggest that grappling with a letter's uncontrollable itinerary was not also men's business in the Ovidian heroic world of our collection. In this world, both men and women are struggling with their letter's aberrant trajectory, entangled in its dichotomies, short-sightedness, and unpredictability. It may be that the men (Ovid, his fictional surrogates, and male critics alike209) have believed at one point that they are better judges and in better control of the technique (as we saw in the case of Paris' excessive certainty or Acontius' epistolary dart), but in the end they also have to face the letter's jerky, incomplete, and shifting narrative. All the

206

Cf. e.g. Norris (1982); Norris (1990).

207

See Ch. 4.3 above.

208

For more on this, see esp. Cixous (1991).

209

Cf. e.g. Jacobson (1974) 338: ‘The Heroides are timeless by virtue of having no context, no traditional limits in time. … But it is this calculated choice that produces as well one of the Heroides ’ major artistic problems, the imposed static nature, the lack of movement,…prov[ing] a large and difficult obstacle.'


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protagonists, and the collection as a whole, can be seen to be implicated in ‘feminine’ confusion and its contradictory signals. Phaedra's and Oenone's consecutive and contrasting views seem to me a striking case. I will briefly go through them, before juxtaposing their writing with Leander's. We have already come across Phaedra's trust in the power of an epistle. For her, the letter has a power of revelation and disclosure of things that the lips cannot utter in the other's presence. The letter can travel where a cloistered voice cannot (4. 5), and even an enemy reads the letters sent by his enemy (1. 6), and finally, if the lips resist an erotic confession at all costs, the irresistible urge of love finds a willing accomplice in a letter (1. 10).210 Oenone, on the other hand, cannot help contemplating the letter's inevitable precariousness: the letter's existence does not also automatically guarantee its reception and the communication of two souls. A letter is vulnerable to being lost, forged, or purloined and the opening lines of Oenone's epistle to Paris overtly admit its author's helplessness. Despite the eagerness of her hurt feelings, she cannot hide her apprehension regarding the efficacy of her written complaint. And, of course, the main obstacle is the possible censorship by Paris' new spouse, Helen, who has the power to stop the letter from being read, as Oenone has, naturally, little difficulty in believing (5. 1–4). Such contradictions make conclusions impossible to draw. Whereas one epistle resonates with its author's trust in its ability to intervene in her story by plotting a change, the next one begins with an agonizing recognition of such a letter's (and its author's) powerlessness.211 Leander's words capture superbly this inherent and irreconcilable ambiguity of the letter. He is still in the early stages of his letter, when he starts contradicting himself. At

210

Note how in these thoughts of Phaedra the tormenting as well as liberating writing of a love letter blends with the turmoil of a poet's elegiac initiation, as famously described in Am. 1. 1. 21–30. On this see Smith (1994) 264 ff.

211

Note how Phaedra's confidence—as well as the whole paradox I am describing here—is undercut once one chooses to notice the Ovidian authorial irony in the background. Phaedra is, in a sense, wrong: her letter is not going to be accepted by Hippolytus. Furthermore, Euripides' Hippolytus has taught us that the two letters of the heroine (the present one to Hippolytus and a consequent one to his father Theseus) are meant to bring up not only revelations but also lies, distortion, and ultimately death. Cf. Casali (1995a) 1–3.

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the moment when his epistle starts to give him an illusion of proximity and contact, the very epistle, his own writing, reminds him of the distance that separates him from his beloved. The transition from comfort to despair is impressively abrupt: protinus haec scribens, ‘felix, i, littera!’ dixi, ‘iam tibi formosam porriget illa manum. forsitan admotis etiam tangere labellis, rumpere dum niveo vincula dente volet.’ talibus exiguo dictis mihi murmure verbis, cetera cum charta dextra locuta mea est. at quanto mallem, quam scriberet, illa nataret, meque per adsuetas sedula ferret aquas! At once, writing this, I said ‘Go, happy letter! Soon she will stretch her beautiful hand to you. Perhaps she will want to touch you with her advancing lips, while at the same time wanting to break the seal with her white teeth.’ Such words spoken by me with soft murmur, the rest my hand uttered with the paper. But how much I would prefer that my hand would swim rather than write, and bring me, eagerly, across the wonted waters! (18. 15–22).212

Imprinted on the very first and the very last elegiac couplets of the epistle, this inconsistency encompasses the whole of Leander's letter. Leander starts writing by expressing his grief and dissatisfaction at the distance that separates him from Hero, just as the storm rages—for the seventh night, we are told at 18. 25—and prevents him from crossing the Hellespont. Trapped as he is in delay, and waiting for what has seemed to him longer than a year (spatium mihi longius anno, ‘space longer than a year to me’, 1. 25), the silent signalling of the letter serves only as a very inadequate substitute for his voice, the ideal expression of his love. The letter is here a painful reminder of the absence and the impossibility of two people's encounter: Mittit Abydenus, quam mallet ferre, salutem, / si cadat unda maris, Sesti puella, tibi, ‘He of Abydos sends to you, maiden of Sestos, the greetings he would prefer to bring himself, should the waves of the sea calm down’ (18. 1–2). And yet, in the closing lines of his amorous discourse, he chooses to emphasize this same letter's vicarious capacity for intimacy and proximity. His letter will spend its night in bed

212

Patricia Rosenmeyer alerts me to the gendered inversion behind ll. 16–18: ‘instead of a man “opening up” the woman, Hero “loosens the bindings” on Leander himself (as well as on Leander's letter)’.


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with Hero, in his own place, more like a felicitous omen for their longed-for and much awaited reunion than a signifier of separation: interea pro me pernoctet epistula tecum, / quam precor ut minima prosequar ipse mora! ‘in the meantime, let my letter spend the night with you, in my place; I pray that I follow it myself with the smallest of delays!’ (18. 217–18). In a sense it all comes down to the choices and beliefs of the critical language employed to discuss these poems. Writing (and examining) private letters has been a gesture of rigid separation between the two genders—such an occupation verifies women's consignment to the individual, homely sphere, while the man goes out and ‘hunts’.213 But when such letters are attributed to a man, then writing (and studying) them is an authorial (and critical) posture that seeks to bring the two genders closer and to enhance their interdependency rather than underline their isolation. Whatever Ovid himself thought of their occupation, Paris, Leander, and Acontius do not live up to the traditional expectations of their gender while writing and reading their love letters. It seems as if in Roman eyes, when men write letters these are supposed to be about matters of state or perhaps amicitia (‘friendship’), but when they write about love or other private affairs and they become unstable and emotional about them, they already undermine their full masculine identity. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, this was exactly what the servant and Menelaus in Iphigeneia in Aulis thought about Agamemnon. Another characteristic passage, in this respect, is the opening of Plautus' Pseudolus with Pseudolus, the slave, clearly amused by his master Calidorus' inappropriate trepidation and feeble heart (11. 3–132). The same point can be made—and has been made—about the figure of the elegiac poet/lover himself who very often has to resort to a letter in his effort to approach and mollify his haughty mistress. It is for such reasons that love elegy has been considered a classic example of gender disruption, though the nature of that imbalance has been very differently read, as I explained in Chapter 2.3 above.

213

I use the term generically, as summing up the traditional public character of masculinity. Cf. here Hero's remark of 19. 9–10: vos modo venando, modo rus geniale colendo/ponitis in varia tempora longa mora, ‘you [men], sometimes by hunting, and other times by tending the joyous farmland, put a lot of hours in the various tasks that delay you’.

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2. SIC MIHI RES EADEM VULNUS OPEMQUE FERET (OVID, TRISTIA 2. 20): THE ‘HEROIC’ LETTERS AND THE PLATONIC PHARMAKON As has become obvious, I hope, from my discussion so far, the letter as principal device of these stories is at once a powerful and vulnerable, devoted and shifty, sensitive and fallible, means of communication. All these overlapping pairs of contradictions merge into one predominant ambivalence: defining themselves in terms of polarities, the epistles are ultimately poised between their ability to promise and their capacity to frustrate human encounters, that is, between speech and writing, presence and absence. Seen in such terms, the anxieties and indecisions behind these lacunose epistolary romances echo the Platonic dilemmas about writing as outlined mainly in Phaedrus214 and famously discussed by Derrida in ‘Plato's Pharmacy’ (1981: 61–173). I now briefly recapitulate these Platonic ideas, and then attempt with their help to reformulate the epistolary ambiguities that I detect in the Ovidian corpus. When, towards the end of Phaedrus, Socrates is asked to express an opinion on the propriety and impropriety of writing, he recounts the myth of Theuth, the inventor of writing (274c–275b), and adopts an unfavourable attitude towards writing, as opposed to speech: δεινὸν γάρ που, ὦ Φαῖδρε, τοῦτ᾽ ἔχει γραϕή, … δόξαις μὲν ἂν ὥς τι ϕρονοῦντας αὐτοὺς [τοὺς λόγους] λέγειν, ἐὰν δέ τι ἔρῃ τῶν λεγομένων βουλόμενος μαθεῖν, ἕν τι σημαίνει μόνον ταὐτὸν ἀεί. ὅταν δὲ ἅπαξ γραϕῇ, κυλινδεῖται μὲν πανταχοῦ πᾶς λόγος ὁμοίως παρὰ τοῖς ἐπαΐουσιν, ὡς δ᾽ αὔτως παρ᾽ οἷς οὐδὲν προσήκει, καὶ οὐκ ἐπίσταται λέγειν οἷς δεῖ γε καὶ μή. πλημ- μελούμενος δὲ καὶ οὐκ ἐν δίκῃ λοιδορηθεὶς τοῦ πατρὸς ἀεὶ δεῖται βοηθοῦ. αὐτὸς γὰρ οὔτ᾽ ἀμύνασθαι οὔτε βοηθῆσαι δυνατὸς αὐτῷ. Writing, Phaedrus, has this wondrous quality … You might think that [written words] spoke as if they could reflect, but if you ask them wishing to find out more about their sayings, they always point out one and the same thing. And every word, once written, tumbles alike amongst those who understand and those who have no concern about it. And it

214

Further discussion on the issue is found in Plato's Timaeus, Republic, and Sophist.


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does not know to whom it ought to speak and to whom it ought not. And when wronged and unjustly reviled, it always needs its father to help it. For it has power on its own, neither to protect nor to help itself. (275d4–e5).

For the needs of the Platonic image, fathers and sons (and daughters?) are transformed into discursive tropes, narrative modes pointing at different and conflicting attitudes towards meaning and truth.215 The father is the origin of the λόγος or ‘speech’, that is a discursive authority linked with narratives of certainty, guidance, and assertion. Pietro Pucci (1992: 9) eloquently captures this narrative potential of the paternal figure—in a description reminiscent also of paternal presence and significance in the Heroides: The Father figure is the figure of the anchorage of any discourse to fixed origin, to a transcendental signified…the figure around whose constitution and fabrication the possibility of truth pivots for every discourse in our world.216

To return to Plato: Socrates' view, taken at face value, constitutes an apparently unambiguous depreciation of writing. And yet a more persistent reading exposes inconsistencies in the Platonic text which subvert its meaning. The Platonic—or Derridean—notion most pertinent to my argument is that of the ϕάρμακον (pharmakon), introduced by Socrates in the Phaedrus as he relates the myth of Theuth in order to illustrate the nature of γραϕή (‘writing’), as opposed to that of living λόγος (‘speech’). It is during Theuth's effort to introduce letters and writing in Egypt that pharmakon makes its first appearance: μνήμης τε γὰρ καὶ σοϕίας ϕάρμακον ηὑρέθη, ‘the drug for memory and wisdom has been found’ (274e6). Theuth puts forward the reassuring and ‘healing’ side of the pharmakon, but Derrida (1981: 97) summarizes succinctly the ambivalent character of the word: Its translation by ‘remedy’ nonetheless erases, in going outside the Greek language, the other pole reserved in the word pharmakon. It cancels out the resources of ambiguity and makes more difficult, if not impossible, an understanding of the context…excluding from the text any leaning toward the magic virtues of a force whose effects are hard to

215

Cf. here Butler (1990) 142–9.

216

For the father as cultural and poetical signifier in Latin literature, see Fowler (1996).

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master, a dynamics that constantly surprises the one who tries to manipulate it as master and as subject.

Through Theuth's explanations (and with the help of Derrida),217 Plato has managed to invest writing with occult charm and fearful, even if tacit, power. It is not surprising then that the king is bent on being suspicious in the face of the new finding and sensitive to the latent harm that can be inflicted on people's minds once they set out practising it (275a). Like Socrates, Derrida also links the hostile reaction to a Father: ‘In so doing, god-the-king-that-speaks is acting like a Father. The pharmakon is here presented to the father and is by him rejected, belittled, abandoned, and disparaged. The father is always suspicious and watchful toward writing’ (Derrida 1981: 76). We should hold on to this last remark: fathers ‘are not on good terms’ with letters and writing. But what we find behind their arrogant rejection of the written messages is not so much assertive authority as disquietude and a sense of threat. Writing as a drug is not what it appears to be at first sight. Its rigid and meek taciturnity makes it more grievously dangerous: it can slip through barriers, ‘tumble in unpredictable ways’ (κυλινδεῖται μὲν πανταχοῦ, Phaedr. 275e), and, as Socrates noticed, reach people that it is not supposed to reach. In an image particularly suggestive for the far-reaching significance of Phaedrus' parable, Catullus (65. 19–23) also includes a strikingly Platonic—and Derridean—simile for writing, when he speaks about another apple which, of course, mirrors Acontius' inscribed device: ut missum sponsi furtivo munere malum / procurrit casto virginis e gremio, / quod miserae oblitae molli sub veste locatum, /…/ atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu…, ‘just as an apple sent as a secret gift from her betrothed falls out from the chaste bosom of the girl (put away in her soft robe and forgotten by her, poor girl)…and rushes forth on a headlong course, upwards and downwards’. Here the Heroides and Phaedrus start to be talking about similar things—so to speak: the heroines' letters and their epistolary technique prove to be most articulate exempla of the healing-at-the-same-time-as-poisoning nature of the Platonic

217

For more on the meaning and ambiguities of the pharmakon, see Derrida (1981) 95–117.


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ϕάρμακον. In the next section they are read as a way of turning into fiction Plato's ‘unsedentary’ theories on representation and communication. The place to start tracing writing's dangerous supplement218 is the story of Leander and Hero, and the two letters that the two young lovers exchange in the Ovidian collection, in a reckless attempt to counteract the physical distance that kept them apart in the course of their secretive affair. Leander starts by admitting that his regular tryst with Hero has been postponed for a number of nights because of his inability to escape his parents' attention. If he had sailed off together with the only seaman that dared ignore the storm, he would have attracted their attention and then the love affair of the two young people would have been forced to its closure (18: 9–14). The two youngsters' epistolary love affair is indeed heavily dominated by a parental figure: as a literal presence as well as a symbolic signifier of masterful authority. As both lovers make clear from an early point in their letters, the story they are trying to construct for themselves has to develop on the fringe of their domestic life. In fact, Leander's rare meetings with Hero have to be enjoyed always under the veil of night. And just as Aurora, Tithonus' wife, chases the night away, the two lovers hastily ply one another with disorderly kisses and part in tears, chased by the fear of Hero's family discovering them (18. 111–18). In a similar way, Cydippe's life has evolved under the vigilant supervision of the family and the close care of her mother, up until the moment when Acontius' clever but tricky words (i.e. his insidious apple:…malum/verba ferens doctis insidiosa notis, ‘an apple carrrying treacherous words in cunning letters’, 20. 209–210) landed in front of her feet, triggering her heart-troubles. Her self-description can be read as a symbolic ekphrasis, a description of an impeccable statue diligently adorned by the sure hands of an expert, self-confident artist:

218

The term is devised by Derrida (in his reading of Rousseau), who invested it with a role similar to that occupied by the pharmakon in his reading of Plato. In a manner recalling the double significance of the pharmakon, the two meanings of supplément in French—addition and replacement—signify the twofold effect of writing in people's communication, by being at the same time aggressive and piercing as well as external and secondary. Cf. Derrida (1976b) 141–64.

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comuntur nostrae matre iubente comae. ipsa dedit gemmas digitis et crinibus aurum, et vestes umeris induit ipsa meis. My hair is combed at the command of my mother. She herself puts gems on my fingers and gold in my long hair, and herself places robes around my shoulders. (21. 88–90)219

The multiple messages of the passage should not elude the reader. The girl's mother makes her ready for her imminent visit to Delos and the temple of Diana, where she is fated to be hit by Acontius' written dart. Endorsed by the artistry of her mother (and the family law), Cydippe steps into the world of written dissimulation wearing the candour of innocence and modest obedience. And although she cannot yet suspect the significance of this visit, she is nevertheless burning from barely contained anticipation which stirs her tame countenance (quo pede processi! quo me pede limine movi! / picta citae tetigi quo pede texta ratis! ‘With what a step I advanced! With what a step I set off from my threshold! With what a step I touched the painted deck of the fast ship!’ 21. 69–70). For such a reading, it is almost expected that, after having helped her mother with the first offerings to the gods, Cydippe will then wander off, astray amidst the temples, gradually disentangling herself from maternal vigilance: sedula me nutrix altas quoque ducit in aedes, erramusque vago per loca sacra pede. My diligent nurse leads me also into lofty temples and with straying steps we wander through the holy sites. (21. 95–6)

Time and setting seem appropriate for the irruption of writing into the girl's innocent life. Later on in her letter, she tries to convince herself that she had no involvement in this insidious act, since she had resumed her obedient place next to her mother in the temple of Diana before she was pierced by Acontius' far-thrown dart: in templum redeo gradibus sublime Dianae—/tutior hoc ecquis debuit esse locus? ‘I return to the temple of Diana with its lofty steps; what place should be safer than this?’ (21. 105–6). But it is already too late: her swerving stroll had already met the aberrant trajectory of writing and its power to break through all

219

Note that Cydippe will explicitly refer to herself as a statue when, sick in bed, she turns her attention to her ailing body: 21. 214 ff.


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boundaries, no matter how carefully raised, as Cydippe realizes (ut iaculo scriptis eminus icta tuis, ‘pierced by your letter, a dart thrown from afar’, 21. 212). So, if Acontius is not allowed to communicate his love to Cydippe in spoken words, a tacit γραϕή (‘writing’) will perform the task for him surreptitiously and perniciously, slipping through where living words are too loud to pass unheeded. The cure turns out to be a poison. Acontius' inscribed apple rushes unsought into Cydippe's rustic life (mittitur ante pedes malum cum carmine tali, ‘an apple is thrown before my feet with an inscription like this’, 21. 107). Encouraged by her nurse, the innocent girl overcomes her initial hesitation and reads the laconic message, blushing and confused as she hears herself pronouncing the marriage oath (21. 110–12). The actual oath is never fully replayed in either Cydippe's or Acontius' letter.220 We only witness Acontius refuting any possible blame for his discreet—and, I should add, cunning—message (scripta mihi caute littera crimen erit? ‘will this letter of mine, written discreetly, be considered a crime?’ 20. 38).221 The discretion that Acontius refers to here reflects the letter's ability to creep on stage unnoticed; but this is exactly its irresistible force. The letter's invasive appearance wreaks havoc in the securely arranged life of Cydippe and her family. The young girl falls ill and spends her days in bed thin and wasted, three times attempting and three times failing to carry through the preparations for her arranged marriage. The reaction of the maiden's environment is most eloquent: the family (and its law) tries to account for the disruption and to accommodate it within its desire for order and stability. One of them would contend and some other negate in an assertive discourse with no room for doubt, constructed with the sole aim of accommodating the unpredictable events within the law's desire for order and stability:

220

Cf. Barchiesi (1993: 357–9) on some intertextual connotations stemming from the omission of the oath.

221

See also P. A. Rosenmeyer (1996: 26) elaborating further on Acontius' cunning: ‘[Cydippe] is forced to submit to his version of events. Finally she confesses that she has indeed told her mother all…the words at 21.240 with which she describes her final action reflect images of bondages to the oath itself. She gives willingly (do libens ) her bound hands (manus vinctas ) into the power of Acontius' oath (in tua vota ).’

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accidere haec aliquis casu contendit, at alter acceptum superis hunc negat esse virum; One contends that this happens through chance, but another decrees that my [future] husband is not acceptable to the heavenly gods. (21. 49–50)

Their narratives are an agonizing attempt to recover the lost confidence in facts and restore a meaningful telos (‘fulfilment’) for the story that they have been preparing for Cydippe, and which was disturbed by the randomness of the noiseless222 and yet pernicious message of Acontius tossed in front of the girl's feet, in the Platonic manner. And yet, as Cydippe hastens to add, causa latet, ‘the cause lies hidden’, even if mala nostra patent, ‘my malaise is evident’ (21. 53): in other words, however assertive, the stories of those who have not read Acontius' letter fail to understand and master the girl's inexplicable plight. It is exactly during this indecisive suspension of the grand narratives that Cydippe ‘learns’ to read and to write—more specifically, takes up letter-writing and letter-reading, forfeiting the bliss and innocence that permeated her life up to the day that Acontius' learned words invaded her peaceful world.223 The mischievous character of such an endeavour is all too clear for Cydippe. With Acontius' ‘piercing’ apple still vivid in her mind, she can scarcely harness her overwhelming fear as she reads through his letter: Pertimui, scriptumque tuum sine murmure legi, iuraret ne quos inscia lingua deos. I was very frightened and read your message without a murmur, lest my tongue unaware should swear by some divinity. (21. 1–2)

This excessive cautiousness links Cydippe with an otherwise dissimilar character and an altogether different story, namely Helen and the story of her seduction by Paris as recounted in their own exchange of letters. Straight from the beginning, Helen appears as conscious as Cydippe of the dangers involved in reading and as threatened as she by the clandestine message lying in front of her. The opening of her letter is explicit and

222

Noiseless but, of course, read aloud, enacted by Cydippe, if we are to follow Svenbro (1993).

223

Cf. e.g. 21. 103–4, 121–2.


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emphatic: Paris' letter has profaned her eyes, tampered with the faith of a lawful wife, and violated the codes of Menelaus' hospitality—and behind it, the law of order ruling Helen's disciplined life (17. 1–4). However, as we saw, non rescribenti gloria visa levis (17. 2), the ‘honour from not reacting seemed rather poor’ to Helen. Therefore, she not only acknowledges and reads Paris' letter, but also responds to this tacit sedition of the silent written words with more writing—i.e. more latent disobedience. All three female correspondents of the ‘double’ Heroides are well aware that writing back to their learned intruders will send out clear signals of a rebellious intent. It suffices to focus here on Hero (19. 33–48, 151–5) furtively composing her letter under the flickering light of the night lamp in the retreat of her chamber and with the sole company and comfort of her aged nurse: her image is a clear mise en abyme (of her letter and her story) gradually reconstructed in the interior of her own writing. But the other heroines (of the ‘single’ Heroides) also know well that to circumvent their imposed seclusion and take up writing as a means of reaching out for their absent beloved is a straight-forward act of resistance against the authorities that keep them confined. Suffice it to recall here the ‘cloistered’ lives of Phaedra, Hermione, Canace, and Hypermestra at the time of their ‘rebellious’ letter-writing. However, the emblematic image of a letter's deceit is to be found in the description of letterwriting in Cydippe's epistle. Resignation dominates the letter. Lying in deep languor with her vigilant (as much as worried) parents and husband-to-be at her bedside and with imminent death threatening her weary limbs,224 Cydippe does not respond to her relatives' heartening words. Yet she is stirred at the thought of a meek and hidden letter that could deliver her silent message to her absent beloved. The manœuvre is executed with the help of Cydippe's nurse, who will assist the young girl's attempt at her own hesitant storytelling. Taking advantage of the minimal freedom given to her during the hours of her sleep, Cydippe defeats parental vigilance and spends this rare time of solitude in writing, with the nurse on the lookout by the door. Each time the

224

Cf. esp. 21. 13–18, 169–74, 189–92.

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conspiracy is threatened with discovery, Cydippe hides the rebellious, as much as vulnerable, letter in her trembling bosom. In a metaliterary reading of this agonizing procedure, she proceeds with unsteady hand on her frail, intermittent, and stumbling γραϕή (‘writing’):225 nunc timor accedit, ne quis nisi conscia nutrix colloquii nobis sentiat esse vices. ante fores sedet haec quid agamque rogantibus intus, ut possim tuto scribere, ‘dormit’, ait. mox, ubi, secreti longi causa optima, somnus credibilis tarda desinit esse mora, iamque venire videt quos non admittere durum est, excreat et dicta dat mihi signa nota. sicut erant, properans verba inperfecta relinquo, et tegitur trepido littera coepta sinu. Now fear befalls me, lest somebody apart from my nurse, who knows the plot, realize that we have an exchange of communication. She sits in front of the door and says, ‘she is asleep’, to all those who ask what I am doing inside my chamber, so that I can write safely. Presently, when sleep, the best reason for a lengthy retreat, stops being a plausible excuse for my endless tarrying, and she sees somebody coming whom it would be hard to stop, she coughs and warns me with a prearranged signal. In haste I abandon the words unfinished as they are, and the letter I have started is hidden in my trembling bosom. (21. 17–26)

Ovid himself will confirm the letter's latent penetrability a few years later in his Ars Amatoria. Significantly, the passage I have in mind comes from the third book, the book of advice addressed to women, and the reference to the letter—the second in the course of that particular book226—features prominently in the poet's instructions on how a woman can escape her guardian's watchful eye and communicate with her excluded lover: tot licet observent adsit modo certa voluntas, quot fuerant Argo lumina, verba dabis. scilicet obstabit custos ne scribere possis, sumendae detur cum tibi tempus aquae? conscia cum possit scriptas portare tabellas, quas tegat in tepido fascia lata sinu?

225

Cf. Barchiesi (1993: 356–7), who associates Cydippe's condition as well as her manner of writing with the main principles of Callimachean art.

226

Cf. also AA 3.467–98.


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Even though as many keep vigil as Argo had eyes (so your determination had better be firm), you will deceive them. Undoubtedly, your guardian will present you with obstacles to prevent you from writing. When are you allowed time to take a bath? When can an accomplice [your nurse] carry a written tablet hidden in her warm bosom by a wide band? (AA 3. 617–22)

Ovid's guidance in the Ars Amatoria echoes the passage of Cydippe's letter discussed just above. Cydippe's fake sleep has been replaced here with a fake bath, but the conspiracy develops in both cases along similar routes, heavily dependent on the determined, as well as secretive, assistance of a confidante. In the extract from the Ars, Ovid explores devices which can help a letter slip through the barrier of a vigilant husband; it can be written in fresh ‘milk’, which would be revealed solely by charcoal, it can also be carried in the bosom of the nurse or in her stockings under her feet, and if all else fails to escape the guard's attention, it can ultimately be inscribed on the confidante's body (AA 3. 621–30). No matter how many impediments it meets on the way, the letter will finally find a way through. Cydippe, Hero, Helen (and Ovid himself) all make it clear: the letter is a powerful dose of pharmakon. But it is Cydippe who epitomizes the verdict when she attempts to explain to her lover the cause of her ailment: certe ego convalui nondum de vulnere tali, ut iaculo scriptis eminus icta tuis. Certainly, I have not yet recovered from such a wound, smitten by your letter, as by a far-thrown dart.227 (21. 211–12)

Seeing the heroines' letters as more or less potent potions of the Platonic pharmakon obscures rather than clarifies these letters' character and their role in the protagonists' lives. It is exactly in the nature of the never fully adequate but always indispensable pharmakon to avoid control and decipherment and it is only unpredictable and unsettled ‘objects’ that can be considered as pharmaka. It is natural then that the letters, like authentic elixirs, come to have an ambiguous position, much hated and much desired, in the consciousness of their authors. The contradiction is gradually appreciated as one reads through the heroines'

227

Note that ‘Acontius’ means ‘dart’ in Greek.

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emotions. We saw Phaedra rejoicing in the freedom of her letter, unaware of the disaster that this very letter was going to bring into her life. Similarly, Hypsipyle considers herself hard done by in lacking the happiness of receiving a letter from Jason. In her conscience, it is only a letter that can endure most adversities and prevail against them (quamlibet adverso signatur epistula vento, ‘a letter can be written in the face of a wind as contrary as can be’, 6. 7). And it is always the written word that validates and fixes the dispersed tidings of rumours, ultimately convincing the sceptical ones: o ego, si possem timide credentibus ista ‘ipse mihi scripsit’ dicere, quanta forem! How proud I would be, if I could say to all those who are hesitant to believe such things, ‘he himself has written to me’! (6. 15–16)

In a similar spirit, Hero sent her letter as a sweet consolation for Leander in the solitary hours of delay. As she explains, when presence is ruled out by the circumstances, a letter can offer a soothing delusion of companionship: interea nanti, quoniam freta pervia non sunt, leniat invisas littera missa moras. In the meantime, since the strait cannot be crossed by swimming, let this letter alleviate the hateful delay. (19. 209–10)

However, things are far from clear-cut: even though letter- writing is acknowledged explicitly as the only ‘voice’ available to the protagonists, the main motif underlying all the epistles is grief for the insurmountable limitations of the letter. Laodamia's piece, for example, is haunted by memories of violently interrupted meetings and direct talking: oscula plura viro mandataque plura dedissem; et sunt quae volui dicere multa tibi. I could have given my husband more kisses and more commands, and there are many things I wanted to tell you. (13.7–8)

and again, a little later: linguaque mandantis verba inperfecta reliquit; vix illud potui dicere triste ‘vale!’ And my tongue leaves half-finished the words of instruction; I was scarcely able to say a sad ‘farewell!’ (13. 13–14)


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Once again, things are not clear-cut: it is precisely the very presence of the heroes and the craving for proximity that will be dismissed as devious in other parts of the heroines' letters, inviting their caution and raising their doubts. Oral communication can be trifling, fickle, and inane because of its airy character, and the heroines' letters are replete with bitter reflections on the false hopes that the heroes' ‘lying lips’, ‘hollow words’, and ‘deceiving tongue’ had once raised in their hearts.228

3. SED TAMEN ET LACRIMAE PONDERA VOCIS HABENT (HER. 3.4): (WOMEN'S) WRITING AND (WOMEN'S) BODY Classical literature from very early on seems to have grasped the danger of the distortions of communication inherent in the letter. Already the first sign of literacy in the archaic Greek literary corpus, Bellerophon's σήματα λυγρά (‘written characters’) in Iliad 6.168, is tainted by an act of fraud which will result in the hero's own death.229 If the epistolary stories explored here have ultimately become stories about the desire for and the vicissitudes of communication, can there not be an unequivocal system of signs, a transparent language to deliver the ‘truth’? Is there no way to escape the polarity of distrust versus trust, deceit versus honesty, that seems to haunt the collection and its protagonists? Briseis' epistle becomes particularly relevant at this point. Even though the letter is mostly dominated by the heroine's subservient feelings, there is a point in the middle of her long wailing where she seems to believe that she knows the way to pierce through Achilles' closed heart and this belief somewhat manages to lift her spirit. Revived by this newly found hope, Briseis prompts the rest of the Danaans to let her visit the Greek leader's retreat and attempt a reconciliation. Her confidence does not rely on words—in fact, she explicitly distances herself from the well-known, verbal tactics of Odysseus and the others. As she makes clear, she wants to ‘talk’ to Achilles in a more physical way:

228

See, for example, 2.31–2; 6. 109–10; 7.81–2 respectively.

229

For more on the ambiguities and distortions of the letter with special attention to Greek tragedy, see e.g. Goff (1990) esp. 94–104; Segal (1994) 89–109.

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mittite me, Danai! dominum legata rogabo multaque mandatis oscula mixta feram. plus ego quam Phoenix, plus quam facundus Ulixes, plus ego quam Teucri, credite, frater agam. est aliquid, collum solitis tetigisse lacertis, praesentisque oculos admonuisse sui. sis licet inmitis matrisque ferocior undis, ut taceam, lacrimis conminuere meis. Send me [to him], Greeks! As your envoy, I will entreat my lord, and will take him many kisses mixed with commands. I will achieve more than Phoenix (believe me) and eloquent Odysseus, and the brother of Teucer. It is of some avail to have touched his neck with familiar arms and to have reminded his eyes of my existence. Even if you are cruel and fiercer than your mother's waves, you will be broken down by my tears, even if I stay silent. (3.127–34)

In the above lines Briseis presents an expressive code that relies on physical contact and consists in bodily signs, a code that can circumvent the fallacies of both speech and writing. In fact, Briseis is not the only heroine to deploy this different mode of expression in an effort to rescue her story from the stalemate to which it was led by the shortcomings of verbal semiotics. The affair of Paris and Helen is the most eloquent example in this respect. In their case, nodding, smiling, growing pale, or letting their cups slip through their fingers out of lovesickness constitute a dynamic and powerful code of expression, which intersects with writing and speech in order to create an advanced and more efficient signalling system, capable of connoting without denoting their guilty feelings. The only straightforward contact that the couple appear to have made is the exchange of their two letters. Nevertheless, what comes out of the flashbacks in Paris' letter is that their ‘correspondence’ had already started in a different language long before their affair was endorsed by ink. The signalling medium was Paris' eyes gazing up straight at Helen, or avoiding her, or almost bursting into tears, all indices of his hope, disappointment, and despair that Helen will not fail to perceive.230 Noticing this level of communication makes it easier for us to understand why the letter starts with Paris' somewhat unexpected remark that this is his first attempt to declare his passion for Helen, and

230

For more on the furtive intimations between the couple, see 16. 213–62.


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yet he feels that he has nothing new to say (eloquar, an flammae non est opus indice notae …? ‘will I speak, or is there no need to disclose a flame already known?’ 16.3). But the occasion that encompasses all signalling codes together is when Paris loosens his inhibition with the help of a few drinks and bursts into a hail of erotic confessions in all possible modes. At first—as a perfect Ovidian surrogate would do—he devises love stories that mirror his own illicit one (a, quotiens aliquem narravi potus amorem, ‘ah, how often, being drunk, I told the story of some love’, 16. 243). But it is the power of his eyes to express what the lips feel inhibited from that takes his clandestine message across to his beloved and bridges the gap that the words cannot fill (ad vulnus referens singula verba meum/indiciumque mei ficto sub nomine feci! ‘referring with every word to my own wound, I pointed to myself under a false name!’ 16. 244–5). And yet more ruses of this nature are to be revealed in Helen's letter: Paris often embarrasses her by his rather too eloquent lascivious sighs and looks (17. 77–9), while occasionally his passion would feature prominently in signals with his fingers or his ‘almost speaking’ eyebrows: supercilio paene loquente (17. 81–2). Most embarrassing of all messages for Helen is when Paris occasionally drinks from the side of the goblet that Helen has previously drunk from (17. 80),231 until one day he traces ‘I love’ on the table with wine.232 Stunned by this blunt declaration of amorous feelings, Helen has to ask for confirmation by using her eyes—as she says, she already knew that thus one may also speak: orbe quoque in mensae legi sub nomine nostro, quod deducta mero littera fecit, AMO. credere me tamen hoc oculo renuente negavi— ei mihi, iam didici sic ego posse loqui! I have also read on the round table under my name what your letters, traced in wine, have shaped: I LOVE. Still, I refused to believe it with a disapproving eye—ah, me, I have now learned that I also can speak this way! (17. 87–90)

231

Cf. here Paris himself admitting in his own letter that he could not resist snatching from little Hermione's lips the kisses that Helen had just bestowed on her daughter (oscula si natae dederas, ego protinus illa/Hermiones tenero laetus ab ore tuli, ‘if you had given kisses to your daughter, I straight away stole them with joy from Hermione's tender lips', 16. 255–6).

232

On the gesture as one of the standard topoi of love elegy, see McKeown (1989) on Ov. Am. 1.4.20.

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The image has come out in a distinctively Platonic fashion: writing creeps in literally under the eyes of Menelaus (the King—the Father). Its character is subversive and revelatory at the same time but it is not capable of establishing itself without help, in the typical Platonic manner. It is exactly this help coming directly from the body, though, that suggests a break-down of the Platonic opposition forged by the two conflicting and irreconcilable systems of writing and speech. A breakthrough seems to have been reached: as Paris and Helen point out, there is a way to overcome the impasse of the polarities that ancient culture has imposed on the codes of communication, blending bodily signs with those of speech and writing in a new inclusive system. And yet the story itself has incorporated within its own narrative the seed of its own subversion. It is important to notice in Helen's behaviour her mixed feelings towards this surreptitious body language. She has to admit that she likes what she sees but at the same time she cannot help feeling in awe of it all. The thought of letting Paris approach her in a furtive meeting in order to exhibit the full potential of this language also makes her distrustful—especially since this language is already communicated to her in a treacherous way: quod petis, ut furtim praesentes ista loquamur, scimus, quid captes conloquiumque voces; sed nimium properas, et adhuc tua messis in herba est. As for what you are asking, that we talk about these things in private, face to face, I know what you are after and what you call discussion. But you are too hasty, and your harvest is still in the blade. (17.261–3)

Indeed, Helen is quite right in being guarded—if Paris' ‘speech’ turned out a fraud, this would only be a déjà-vu for the heroines. Medea has also felt that she was deceived by an impostor's simulated tenderness: Haec animum—et quota pars haec sunt!—movere puellae simplicis, et dextrae dextera iuncta meae. These words—and how small a part this is of them!—moved the soul of a simple girl, and your right hand, too, joined to mine. (12.89–90)

A very similar complaint is to be found in Phyllis' letter: credidimus lacrimis—an et hae simulare docentur? hae quoque habent artes, quaque iubentur, eunt?


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I believed in your tears—are these too instructed to pretend? Is there art in these too, and do they flow wherever they are bidden? (2. 51–2)

Are we then left with no option other than to admit that we have reached a dead end? The fantasy of an uncontroversial and effective language haunts the Ovidian collection from beginning to end. As we saw, the affirmation of stable meaning flickered before our eyes at various points, but this promise of clarity always proved to have been simultaneously offered and with-drawn, undermined by the same devices that brought it into existence. In self-reflexive, self-referential terms, the protagonists of this collection, for all their erudition and poetic self- consciousness, are haunted by the ever present and never realized possibility of an uncontroversial, ‘genuine’, and ‘untarnished’ language that could bond them together. But the venture is a priori damned and the turmoil we have witnessed reflects their inability to abandon their own artistic circuits in order to construct a wor(l)d of guileless candour.233 So each one of them will have to admit, like Oenone: deficior prudens artis ab arte mea, ‘skilled in my art, I am deserted by the very act I know’ (5.150). One final remark is left lingering after all the above: the only creative act that seems to prevail, after words, sounds, nods, and tears have revealed their simulated and deceptive nature, appears to be birth itself. It is Canace, above all the heroines, who puts this suggestion forward adeptly when she explains with poignant vividness in her letter to Macareus how she held back the agonizing words that were surging up in her mouth and forced herself to drink her tears while at the same time giving birth to their incestuous baby: nescia, quae faceret subitos mihi causa dolores, et rudis234 ad partus et nova miles eram. ....... contineo gemitus elapsaque verba reprendo et cogor lacrimas conbibere ipsa meas.

I did not know what caused the sudden pangs in me, being ignorant about childbirth and a raw recruit to military service.…I repress my

233

And a very modern inability, for that matter: cf.—(in)famously—De Man (1983) esp. 1–17.

234

See OLD s.v. esp. 2, and note the metaliterary connotations of the word (rudis : ‘not improved by art, unwrought, unpolished’ etc.).

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groans and restrain the words that slip through, and force myself to drink my own tears. (11. 47–54)

In fact, we have already been encouraged from the very beginning of her letter to link in our minds her written word and the newborn baby. In the dense and blurred images that are all Canace's distraught mind can come up with, the future has already become present and the letter has already been stained by the blood of its writer, who imagines herself pierced by the unsheathed blade that she ominously holds in her hand. But this image unmistakably hints at a birth. Canace's little ‘book’ sitting in her lap is all stained by the blood of its mistress, like an embryo when coming out of the maternal womb. oblitus a dominae caede libellus erit. dextra tenet calamum, strictum tenet altera ferrum, et iacet in gremio charta soluta meo. My little book has been defiled by its mistress's slaughter. My right hand holds the pen, and the other an unsheathed sword, and the paper lies unrolled in my lap. (11. 2–4)

The ‘body of (and in) the letter’ is yet more eagerly yearned for, in the case of Cydippe. She has already read the oath from Acontius' apple and at the time has fallen ill, because she has not satisfied the will of Diana in whose temple she unwittingly read the oath to marry Acontius. Languishing in bed as a result, the young girl attempts to elaborate her response to Acontius' ‘attack’. Painfully created as a result of hard labour, her letter nestles in her trembling bosom, like a tender baby, each time a member of the family attempts to enter the room. Pale Cydippe and her defenceless baby/letter here form a fitting image of the frail but persistent female strength that this chapter (and the whole book) has been exploring. If the young girl's family carries with it the semiotic potential of the Law of the Father, then Cydippe's baby/letter, and the candid infantilism that goes with it, signifies the heroines' desire to defy the treacherous artifice of the hegemonic (patriarchal) discourse that holds them in its tight grip.235

235

Cf. Antiphanes, Sappho (fr. 194 K–A): ‘There is a feminine being who keeps her babies safe under her breasts, and they, although without a voice, send forth a cry, heard loudly,… which reaches those mortals they wish to reach, but others, even though present, are not permitted to hear. … The feminine being, then, is a letter, and the babies within her are letters of the alphabet she carries around. …’ More extensively on this, see P. A. Rosenmeyer (2001a) 91–3.


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The cross-references between the two passages do not stop here. Canace's bodily feebleness, as a result of her pregnancy, mirrors Cydippe's physical exhaustion. Where Canace admits that the colour has fled from her shrunken face (11. 27), Cydippe emphasizes her pallor and thinness (21. 15–16).236 In fact, both poems anticipate another scene of Ovidian artistic labour, that of Byblis in Metamorphoses 9. 454–665. A ‘heroine’ is preparing to write her own letter, once again lying in bed, pallid and emaciated, and her vocabulary is suggestive of birth: ei mihi! quo labor? quem mens mea concipit ignem? ‘ah me! where am I slipping? What fire does my heart conceive?’ (9. 520).237 By elaborating on the metaliterary connotations of birth, this last part of the chapter has become predominantly feminocentric. Admittedly, however, centring a feminist discourse on the feminine body has attracted, and still attracts, a great deal of scepticism from critics. The main inhibition against it is the danger of such a discourse lapsing into a self-propagating and limiting essentialism that devitalizes women's strength and would ultimately disconnect women and feminist theory from active forms of intervention into society. As Elaine Showalter puts it, ‘Organic or biological criticism is the most extreme statement of gender difference … [and] risks a return to crude essentialism … that oppressed women in the past.’238 Indeed, the early forms of such an appropriation are already discernible in the classical world. As we have seen, Plato in Timaeus 49–51 pictures mother and motherhood as ‘the receptacle and nurse of all becoming’ that is shapeless, characterless, powerless, and artless.239 Moreover, writing and the tablet as metaphors for the female body have undoubtedly been used in ancient literature in ways demeaning for women.240 And yet, I would argue that

236

Gracilis and pallida Cydippe is, apart from an authentic Callimachean artist, a woman in labour as well.

237

Farrell (1998: 317–23) deals extensively and intelligently with the intricacies of writing and disclosure in Byblis' case.

238

Showalter (1986b) 250.

239

See Ch. 4.3 above.

240

Cf. duBois (1991) 130–66.

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producing a feminist discourse for antiquity cannot exhaust itself by focusing on women's oppression: it also ought to uncover signs of female strength as they slip through the gaps of the master narratives.241 Such a critical discourse, for example, tries to disentangle sexual economies from pure anatomy by emphasizing the interchangeability of the various biological imageries between the two genders. In such a way, the sexual differences become cultural indices, bonding just as much as dividing men and women in a society, for which gender is a nuanced, complex, and therefore challenging issue. Ovid himself offers a striking instance of this fluidity with an image in Tristia particularly relevant to the Heroides. In circumstances of unbearable solitude, echoing the Heroides' adverse position, the exiled poet turns motherly and carnal as, by throwing his own books onto the pyre, he assimilates himself to Althaea, Meleager's mother, while burning the log on whose preservation her own son's life depended: haec ego discedens, sicut bene multa meorum, ipse mea posui maestus in igne manu. utque cremasse suum fertur sub stipite natum Thestias et melior matre fuisse soror. sic ego non meritos mecum peritura libellos imposui rapidis viscera nostra rogis.

These, together with many of my other verses, I put with my own hand in the fire, as I was departing, filled with sorrow. Just as Thestius' daughter is said to have burned her own son along with the log and thus to have proved a better sister than mother, so I placed upon the devouring pyre the books that did not deserve this fate, my own flesh destined to die with me. (Tr. 1. 7. 15–20)

Subsequently, Ovid will hold his Muses accountable for his exile. In fact, nowhere in Tristia does he attempt to conceal his mixed feelings about their inspiration (and his own verses), that brought him fame and disgrace at the same time. He is not sure what the real value of his books is and, most importantly, what their capacity for communication can be. My suggestion is that, following the example of Canace, Cydippe, and Byblis, Ovid has

241

For such a recuperative reading of Plato's Timaeus, see Cavarero (1995a) 81–101. On textuality, sexuality, and women's strength, see also Gubar (1986). For a modern approach to the complexities of the opposition mater /iality vs. discourse, see Butler (1993) 27–55.


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here resorted to the instinct of maternal procreation just as he faces difficulties in taking up the pen and his discourses have eluded his control in order to lead their independent, whimsical way. It is noteworthy that in Tristia 3. 14 he calls his abandoned books ‘his own body’ and ‘his own offspring’ while begging an unnamed friend of his to look after them: retine corpus in urbe meum … stirps haec progeniesque mea est (3. 14. 8, 14).242 Just as the heroines embrace language in a rather desperate attempt at maternal jouissance, Ovid also becomes motherly, in an effort to recuperate his discourses and attain a ‘natural’ relationship with them unmediated by guile and artifice. Of course, the dream will not prosper. A recurrent motif of the Tristia is Ovid's inability to produce any more poetry in the hardship of his exile (as he complains in writing…). Similarly, Canace will lose her newly born language very soon, while Byblis' ‘baby’ will very early get muddled up in ambiguity, inconsistencies, and deferral, all inevitable (and Lacanian) signs of its starting its life in the bonds of society. Ovid's description of the tardiness of Byblis' artistic ‘labour’ does not attempt to conceal the messiness: incipit et dubitat; scribit damnatque tabellas; et notat et delet; mutat culpatque probatque inque vicem sumptas ponit positasque resumit.

She starts, and then hesitates; writes and renounces what she has written; writes and erases; changes, condemns, approves; in turn she puts down the tablets she has picked up, and having put them down she picks them up again. (Met. 9. 523–5)

But this is not what matters for this approach. What matters instead is that, in the Ovidian world, motherhood can sustain a dream of ‘purity’ within an artistically contaminated and incredulous society. For the purposes of this discussion, motherhood is a trope open for appropriation and replete with potential: we can all hold on to a belief in our ability to write the existing anew. And in a world which has called all unyielding truths and targets into question, like Ovid's (and ours), it is at least as important to invent, enthuse, and believe in, as it is to attain.

242

Cf. e.g. Davisson (1984); Hinds (1985) 20, 22.


6 A Splintery Frame: the Heroides as Short Stories Like a child suffering from healthy neglect, the short story survives. Nadine Gordimer Laodamia's emotional address to Protesilaus closes with a plea of acknowledged brevity: ultima mandato claudetur epistula parvo si tibi cura mei, sit tibi cura tui!

I will conclude my last letter with a brief command. If you care about me, care about your own self! (13. 165–6)243

Laodamia is not the only heroine to belittle explicitly her written message. In a similar way, Briseis hastens to make it clear just after the opening lines that her letter will be a brief complaint, should she be allowed to express one: Si mihi pauca queri de te dominoque viroque fas est, de domino pauca viroque querar.

If it is lawful to complain a little about my lord and husband, I shall indeed complain a little about my lord and husband. (3. 5–6)244

At first sight, both messages appear to be no more than a

243

Note the striking duplicity of the above lines: as well as being unfailingly closural (mandato claudetur … parvo, ‘I will conclude … with a brief command’), the distich is at the same time an attempt to replay the whole story that is about to end and, thus, an attempt to open up the closed moment. Cf. here Desmond (1993) with a similar comment on Her. 7: even though ‘rhetorically amplif[ying] Vergil's text’ (p. 58), ‘Heroides 7 … expressly seek[s] to produce closure’ (p. 60).

244

The elaborate rhetoric of the couplet has been considered by some critics incompatible with its desperate content. See e.g. Palmer (1898) ad loc. For a more accommodating approach, see Barchiesi (1992) ad loc.; Smith (1994) 259–60.

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courteous and coaxing appeal to the absent lovers to whom they are addressed: as they rush to make explicit, Laodamia and Briseis intend to burden their lords with only brief complaints. And the servile tone of such apostrophes has not passed unnoticed by the critics, who have used such instances to support their view of the domesticated character of the collection as a whole.245 However, a more comprehensive look at those statements puts them into a different perspective. The letters of the Heroides are the heroines' own stories, their own modes of recounting whatever happened, what was and what is important according to them, who is to blame for their present malaise. In other words, these complaints are actually the heroines' own (and short) making of the myth, and especially of those aspects of it which the heroines suspect will never make it into the heroes' (and the dominant authors') grand narratives. Ariadne is particularly expressive at 10. 126–9, communicating her disbelief that Theseus would incorporate her own (short) story in his proud narration of his glorious deeds in Crete (cum … bene narraris letum taurique virique / sectaque per dubias saxea tecta vias / me quoque narrato sola tellure relictam! ‘when you have gloriously narrated the death of him, both bull and a man, and the rocky dwelling divided into perplexing passages, talk about me, as well, abandoned in a solitary land!’). And rightly so: while the letters position themselves within pre-existing longer stories,246 the positions they occupy are blank points in the narratives of the arch-models, interstices between the ‘major’, ‘important’ events.247 In the light of the above suggestions, I would like in this chapter to consider the Heroides as short stories. At first sight, such a goal may seem to exhaust itself in an examination of their ‘sources’, a ground already multiply tackled, as I explained in Chapter 2.1. However, the aspects of brevity that I would like to address in this chapter involve more than Quellenforschung; brevity, as I

245

On Briseis' ‘psychopathology of slavery’, see e.g. Verducci (1985: esp. 110–12), who finds Ovid's servile heroine an unlucky parody of her Homeric model (even if the latter makes only sporadic appearances in the Iliad ).

246

Cf. e.g. Kennedy (1984: 416 ff.) on the narrative time of Penelope's letter within the established myth; Casali (1995b: 508 n. 10) on the narrative relation of Deianira's letter with its own model-text.

247

Barchiesi (1987) 65–6.


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envisage it here, works as a catalyst that sets off a complex war of supremacy within the collection. Admittedly, the wider frame of the established myth eludes the heroines' attention in the enclosed space of their small story. Canace's short story constitutes perhaps the most severe case of a heroine's restricted awareness of the wider frame of the myth. At the very moment that she is about to take her own life, overwhelmed by the unyielding cruelty of her father, Macareus is successfully pleading with Aeolus for her life. Plunged in despair in her room, Canace is totally oblivious of this development.248 However, such restrained abodes and the small stories that are woven inside them are also remarkably free in certain other ways: due to their limited vision, these stories can bring a closure that the grand form cannot achieve, because of its constant preoccupation with ‘future glory’, just as they can also deny the closure, denying the big telos that the grand form cannot avoid.249 To put it in other words, by exploring these nuggets of myth in parallel to their authorial predecessors one finds oneself tracing intricate games of power, just as these slim pieces of myth-making are linked to their model-texts in a consciously polemical relationship working on two levels. On the level of the plot, the battle focuses around conflicts of gender as the heroines' short stories are set against the established and dominant destinies, plots, and discourses of the grand narratives.250 And on a second level, conflicts of genre—obviously reminiscent of the pose of subversive ‘littleness’ famously established by the neoteric recusatio—are set off by the very brevity of these short stories, a separate, parallel set of hierarchical unrests in the collection. On either level, these short stories invite a reading of themselves as symbols of concentrated, and often threatening, strength, which, nevertheless, has often been underrated by criticism.251

248

On this see Williams (1992); Casali (1995b) 509–11.

249

Cf. Jacobson (1974: 352–4), who observes a ‘reduction of great, cataclysmic events and myths to the narrow, egocentric world of the heroines’ whose reality is made up of a number of individual perspectives that render the external circumstances almost meaningless.

250

For a different formulation of this distinction, see Barchiesi (1987) 87.

251

Cf. e.g. Casali (1995a: esp. 1, 5) with rather unfavourable comments on the elegiac reduction of these poems; Desmond (1993: 59 and passim ) on Dido's excessive and powerless emotionality in the compressed and retrospective Heroides 7.

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It is exactly this last suggestion that allows Ovid, the extradiegetic author, back on stage again. To put it briefly, brevity has to do with Ovid just as much as it has to do with the heroines. A slender voice may register as a signal of a different and less authoritative poetic programme on the part of the heroines, but it is also a defining quality of elegy, and this is really Ovid's (or, at least, the Ovidian author's) concern.252 But if, for the needs of this chapter, Ovid, the elegist, is implicated in the resistance of the Heroides, so also are the male protagonists: once more, as in the case of Chapter 5, the heroes' own writings from the double Heroides become relevant, especially in passages such as 17. 87–8. In this passage, Helen remembers Paris' furtive advances and especially a gesture of his with unmistakable elegiac credentials (orbe quoque in mensae legi sub nomine nostro / quod deducta mero littera fecit, AMO, ‘on the round table, I have also read under my name what your letters, traced in wine, have shaped: I love’). However, these (elegiac) writings are now a potential source of consensus—rather than conflict—between Ovid and the heroines. They join forces in a common wish to subvert the elevated longer forms of epic and tragedy. Tracing the rules of this mutual understanding provides an appropriate ending for a study keen to explore issues of voice and power, as this book is. In spite of his return, Ovid does not simply resume the authorial control that the devices of this book have so far denied him. The aim of this study has been to facilitate and enhance the heroines' voices, assist them in their eager attempt to assert their autonomous expression. But Ovid never gets entirely cast away. The heroines' short stories reveal the heroines' daring protest against the mega-narratives of the past, but their fervent rhetoric also encompasses their creator. This is a somewhat different reading of the power struggles that sustain the Ovidian collection and does not compromise the heroines' distinct experiences. Separating the different strands that constitute poetic utterance is a superb way to listen carefully to the nuances of these individual strands, and especially the neglected ones, as this book has tried to do so far. But, at its best, power holding involves sharing power. What is more, focusing

252

On the association of the Heroides ' elegiac metre with smallness and tenderness, see Spoth (1992) 222.


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on those instances in the text where the different voices seem to work together yields fine examples of subtle power-juggling. It also reminds the reader of the fact that assertiveness and autonomy are not drives born in a vacuum but are often rooted in shared awareness and grow as a result of complex negotiations backstage. Hero's and Leander's epistles are characteristic examples of this shared awareness: Briseis' complaint may have been brief, as we saw above, but so is Hero's slender weaving, an unmistakable emblem for her poetic task: paucaque cum tacta perfeci stamina terra…, ‘and when I have finished a few threads and the spindle has touched the ground…’ (19. 49). And at the same time, even if rich in delights, the night of love is all too brief in Leander's mind (quo brevius spatium nobis ad furta dabatur, / hoc magis est cautum, ne foret illud iners, ‘the briefer the space that was given to us for our stolen love, the more we made sure that it would not pass idly’, 18. 109–110), his reference to the scarcity of erotic time naturally coming after a detailed description (18. 75–104) of his reckless crossing of the Hellespont in order to meet his beloved. Leander will resume his reminiscing on past happy times in a somewhat different form several lines further on in his letter. As he becomes increasingly eager to prove to Hero the solidity of his love, he starts counting in nights the time that the two spend apart: sit tumidum paucis etiamnunc noctibus aequor, / ire per invitas experiemur aquas, ‘let the sea be swollen still for these few nights, and I shall try to cross the unfriendly waves’ (18. 193–4); if in the earlier passage Leander's talk was about the short nights of their love, his thoughts are now preoccupied with those few nights without love. In both cases what emerges is a typical expression of elegiac love, by means of which Leander takes up the role of the elegiac poet as well as that of the lover.253 Interestingly, Hero's letter will also feature the same double representation: indeed, Leander's imagery of love matches the vicarious erotic visions that seize his beloved while she sleeps in her empty bed and briefly dreams of his nightly coming (19. 55–64). And the disappointment he feels over the forbidding reality and the

253

Cf. e.g. Cat. 68a. 5–6; 68b. 83–4, 145–6; Prop. 1. 10. 1–10; 2. 15. Fulfilled or unsatisfied, in all these cases, elegiac love is an issue of the night. Exceptionally, as in Amores 1.5, the erotic scene is siesta time.

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short and vicarious erotic pleasure will soon wash over her too: me miseram! brevis est haec et non vera voluptas; / nam tu cum somno semper abire soles, ‘poor me! these are brief, and not real, pleasures; for you keep departing together with my sleep’ (19. 65–6).254 And the similarities between the two lovers' letters are not yet exhausted. Hero, too, will naturally shift her attention to the watery obstacle, the sea that unites and at the same time divides the couple: seducit terras haec brevis unda duas, ‘this narrow strip of sea separates the two lands’ (19.142). To paraphrase her words: the scant waters that separate the two lands give a narrow space for a ‘slender’ story to be constructed, in the margins of the allowed and acceptable patterns of the two youngsters' lives. It is these very divisive waters that prompt the two lovers' letters into existence, a prompt of distinctively elegiac making. Notably, the line recalls Gallus, the doomed elegiac poet: uno tellures dividit amne duas, ‘two lands divided by one river’ (fr. 1). The heroines' stories are a brief matter indeed, and, as we have seen, this is stated time and again in the course of the letters, literally as well as metaphorically. Sometimes the recognition comes from witnesses rather than the protagonists themselves. A good example here is the mildly condescending tone of Patroclus' address to Briseis at Her. 3. 24: ‘quid fles? hic parvo tempore’, dixit, ‘eris’, ‘“why do you weep?”, he said, “You will be back in a short while”’. The line is offered as comfort for the bereaved barbarian slave, who has just been ordered to leave Achilles' abode and move to Agamemnon's tent. Patroclus literally suggests that the time of pain for Briseis will only be brief; we, however, are invited to understand that the span of her own story will also be brief: a short story.255 However, if the message is steady and clear, its deliverer cannot be so clearly defined. As we saw above, Hero's appreciation of the brevity of her story is matched by that of her male counterpart. And at the same time, they both explicitly appropriate in their loving discourse the modes and diction of an

254

The motif of the deserted bed is generically significant elsewhere in the collection. Cf. here Penelope similarly despairing at her abandoned bed in 1. 7, with Barchiesi (1987: 71–4) on the elegiac transformation of the epic figure of Penelope through this motif.

255

On Patroclus' intervention, contrast also Verducci (1985) 107.


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elegiac poet. One suggestion appears inevitable: the brevity of the poems is attributable not only to the heroines but also to Ovid (and thus the heroes of the double epistles, as his male authorial surrogates). I do not wish to separate identities and assign words and roles, and I shall maintain this ambiguity in the course of the following pages. Whatever the position and the impact of these short stories in the wider frame of the myth, it is important and significant that we do not separate the agents at work in the background. I would like to leave this thought lingering on in the course of the chapter, but I will return to it in the end.

1. QUOTA PARS HAEC SUNT! (HER. 12. 89): THE WORLD IN SMALL PIECES Defining the basic features of the heroines' short stories is a complex task. And the difficulty is enhanced by the reticence of antiquity itself. Different periods, of course, placed their own emphasis on shortness and worked on its symbolism in various ways, while some genres claimed a special relationship with brevity in contrast to others—elegy and epyllion featuring prominently amongst them. Neither the short story as a distinct genre nor a theory attached to it existed in the classical world; they are both a modern development of the last one and a half centuries,256 and the genre has proved elusive and hard to pin down ever since.257 Compared to their long models, the Heroides, qua elegies, are naturally short. And yet, it seems fair to say that they also are in some ways ill at ease with their short form. Various aspects of this uneasiness have already been discussed by critics exploring the Heroides' generic blend—as mainly epic and tragic representations in elegiac dress.258 I shall try to account for some of this

256

On the theory and practice of the modern short story, cf. e.g. Bonheim (1982); Lohafer (1983); Lohafer and Clarey (1989); Shaw (1992); May (1994) and (1995).

257

Of course, it is not an absolute necessity for a genre to have an ‘essence’, but even fixing the appropriate bundle of properties has proved difficult. A lot of the complexity seems to emanate from the undecided relationship of the short story with the longer forms of art to which it often responds, sometimes antagonizing, and at other times incorporating their features in a new form. Cf. May (1995) 107–42.

258

Cf. e.g. Casali (1995b: 508–9) on Her. 9. 115–16, 139–42: ‘Actually Ovid condenses in three distichs the long and complex narrative development of Trachiniae, which begins with the first stasimon: the fight with Achelous (497–530), with tragic irony, prepares the reader for the other, dramatically more important, fight, the combat with Nessus, which will be at the centre of the play until Hyllos' arrival. Here, everything is compressed in three distichs: too compressed.’ For more on this generic ‘impropriety’ of the elegized epic figures in the Heroides, see Barchiesi (1987: esp. 71 and passim ), and Rosati (1991) specifically on Paris and Protesilaus.

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uneasiness with the aid of an ad hoc critical idiom on the short story, prompted by the texts themselves. Not surprisingly, given the critical confusion regarding the short story just outlined, modern theorists appear divided in their views on the interaction between short and long forms. Some short stories adopt a cloistered style of writing (i.e. shut out the rest of the world), while others gain their full potential only by reference to a web of wider narratives and plots. The heroines' fragmented stories seem to belong to the second group: they converse with and at the same time defy their famous predecessors. They thus recall the cult of the fragment as formulated within German Romanticism by Schlegel and others,259 and while I would not want to push the links with Romanticism too far, the brief discourses of the heroines recall the typically Romantic products of lonely outcasts. Seen from this angle, the heroines are clearly reflected in what Frank O'Connor saw as the essence of the short story: ‘By its very nature [the short story is] remote from the community—romantic, individualistic, and intransigent.’260 This ‘inward’ movement at work behind these miniature plots is transparent in Hypsipyle's letter. Her memories of the first meeting with Jason and the other Argonauts and of the subsequent hospitality offered to them, do not allow for any other participant: urbe virum iuvi, tectoque animoque recepi! ‘I helped the man in my city, and received him in my house and in my heart’ (6. 55). And yet there have been quite a few other contributors to that plot, in fact the entire female population of Lemnos. Apollonius Rhodius is generous with the details in Argonautica 1. As soon as Argo, the Argonauts' ship, appears in the distance (1. 633 ff.) the whole population rushes down to the

259

Cf. Levinson (1986) with further references.

260

O'Connor (1963) 21.


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shore, openly hostile to the intruders. Understandably so, since they were thought to be the Thracian men arriving to exact revenge for the Thracian maids that the Lemnian women had killed, together with their own husbands, upon discovering their secret affairs. Hypsipyle stands prominent amongst them, carrying her father's arms (1. 637–8), in an image with clear epic credentials. After the Argonauts' identity is disclosed, the issue becomes public and the decision over their fate is entrusted to the general assembly of the Lemnian women (Λημνιάδες δὲ γυναῖκες ἀνὰ πτόλιν ἶζον ἰοῦσαι / εἰς ἀγορήν …, ‘the Lemnian women came to the city and sat in assembly …’, 1. 653). The meeting results in the women's decision to offer the Argonauts hospitality, and Hypsipyle undertakes the task of communicating it to them. Once again, public considerations underpin her actions. As she instructs Iphinoe to summon Jason, Hypsipyle is portrayed as a leader whose personal emotions come second to the public good: ὄρσο μοι, ᾽Ιϕινόη, τοῦδ᾽ ἀνέρος ἀντιόωσα, ἡμέτερόνδε μολεῖν, ὅστις στόλου ἡγεμονεύει, ὄϕρα τί οἱ δήμοιο ἔπος θυμηδὲς ἐνίσπω.

Go, on my behalf, Iphinoe, and tell the man who commands this fleet, to come to my place in order for me to tell him of a decision of the people which will please him. (Arg. 1.703–5)261

Similar public preoccupations prevail when she welcomes Jason into the city a little later in the book (1. 793 ff.) for, once again, she chooses an idiom that foregrounds the city and its citizens above anything else. Of course, elsewhere in the narrative Hypsipyle will also react in a less firm and more ambivalent and uneven manner that will often place her at odds with her context. Nevertheless, she will never match the introversion of Ovidian Hypsipyle. Hypsipyle in Apollonius (re)acts in a world of epic, a world to which her Ovidian counterpart does not have direct access. As far as Ovid's Hypsipyle is concerned, figures and events appear faded through a diminutive filter. It is significant to notice how the details of Jason's deeds in Colchis get subordinated to Hypsipyle's personal turmoil. Jason's epic story with all its wonders comes up time and again in her reclusive narrative—but it never survives the flattening processing

261

On the underlined public character of Hypsipyle's appearance in this instance, see Hunter (1993) 49–51.

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of her hermetic viewpoint. The case is best illustrated when the Thessalian stranger arrives at her abode with news of the Argonauts' expedition (6. 23 ff.). The events emerge on the surface of her discourse framed by a single concern that halts, dominates, and eventually supersedes the stranger's narration with its overwhelming agony: ‘vivit? an,’ exclamo … / ‘vivit’ ait. … iurare coegi … iterum, si vivat Jason, / quaerimus, ‘“Is he alive?” I exclaim … “he is alive”, he says… I made him take an oath…and a second time I ask whether Jason is alive' (6. 28–38). Despite her angst, Hypsipyle will straight away make a new effort to recall and include the details of the big story in her own short plot. But very soon her thoughts (and her discourse) will slip into considerations of a personal character, covering over the intrusive point of view of the Thessalian newcomer: singula dum narrat, studio cursuque loquendi detegit ingenio vulnera nostra suo While narrating each thing, with his keenness and in the thread of his discourse he reveals with his spirited manner the wounds open inside me. (6.39–40)

The horizon gets increasingly narrow as we read on in the Heroides. The world of myth celebrated in the past by proud, grand narratives has now lost its vivacity, once crammed into the heroines' spasmodic and egocentric discourse. There are various modes in which this indifference is demonstrated in the collection. Oenone could be considered as the emblem of the heroines' hazy grasp of the outside world, when she calls Helen a heifer, most probably due to her unchaste behaviour, but cannot be sure of Theseus' name: illam de patria Theseus—nisi nomine fallor—/nescio quis Theseus abstulit ante sua, ‘Theseus—unless I am mistaken in the name—a certain Theseus before this carried her away from her country’ (5. 127–8). But it is in Medea's letter that the reclusive isolation of the rest of the Heroides is thematized. At the end of a long lament over the injustice imposed upon her by fate, Medea turns her angry thoughts to her enforced removal from the royal palace in Corinth (iussa domo cessi natis comitata duobus, ‘at your command, I withdrew from our home accompanied by our two children’, 12. 135). Banished from the palace and her conjugal bed, she seeks shelter under a different roof, reminiscing about times past of happiness and glory, with her


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children as sole companions and—as she bitterly admits—her eternal love for Jason (12. 136). Only pale tidings of the outside world reach her in her new abode. In metapoetical terms, her discourse resists, or fails to comprehend, the narratives and messages of the genres that created Medea. The dramatic events of Jason's marriage to Creusa, Creon's daughter, resoundingly established by Euripides in his Medea, are now symbolically reduced to fragmented visions and muffled sounds. Medea resists, as much as possible, the invasion of her poetic endeavour by the tragic events. Her own (short) story was intended to give expression to her neglected and unrequited private wishes, ignoring the turbulent facts of her tragic lot (me quoque, quidquid erat, potius nescire iuvabat, ‘to me, too, it was more pleasing not to know, whatever it was’, 12. 147). Incidentally, (Apollonian) epic does not fit in Medea's story, either: ei mihi! cur umquam iuvenalibus acta lacertis/Phrixeam petiit Pelias arbor ovem? ‘poor me! why did the ship, made of wood from Pelion, and driven by youthful arms, ever seek the sheep of Phrixus?’ (12. 7–8). Does Medea here resent her introduction into Greek myth (and its principles?) altogether?262 And yet none of the heroines succeeds in keeping her own speech immune from such dominant influences from the past, and Medea will eventually bid the younger of her sons to find out about the ‘blurred noises’. The boy opens the double door which encloses Medea's wor(l)d and lets the noises from Jason's wedding procession enter, as symbols of the mega-plots already deposited in the readers' (and Medea's) cultural knowledge (sed tamquam scirem, mens mea tristis erat, ‘as if I knew, my heart was sad’, 12. 148). However, the heroines' stories still manage to construct a microcosm that twists their grand plots, and fore-grounds a different code of writing. It is a world and a sort of writing that build upon different expressions of minuteness, as they contrast with the traditional values that nourished the lengthy narratives of the heroines' past. The private, the domestic, and, ultimately, the elegiac counteract the public, the martial, and the epic in these new versions. Hypsipyle and Dido are especially eloquent in this respect. They live worlds apart, and there is much that distinguishes the one from the other. And yet they construct their stories on a

262

Cf. also Rosati (1989) 235 n. 4.

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similar ploy—they both imagine themselves as mothers. If Dido leaves the possibility lingering without either confirming or denying it (forsitan et gravidam Didon, scelerate, relinquas, ‘perhaps, villainous man, you are leaving behind a pregnant Dido’, 7.133), Hypsipyle is unambiguous. In her story, Jason has already recognized his children: his last words to her upon leaving Lemnos for Colchis were a pledge of love and responsibility regarding the children that Hypsipyle already carries within her: quod tamen e nobis gravida celatur in alvo, / vivat…, ‘may the weight from me that is concealed in your womb live…’ (6. 61–2). In both cases, the heroines place themselves at pointed variance with their arch-models: Dido's strategy is a bold development of the Virgilian parvulus (‘little’) Aeneas (Aen. 4. 328), while Hypsipyle's children are only mentioned as a hypothetical case by Hypsipyle herself in Argonautica 1. 897–8: λίπε δ᾽ ἧμιν ἔπος, τό κεν ἐξανύσαιμι / πρόϕρων, ἢν ἄρα δή με θεοὶ δώωσι τεκέσθαι, ‘and leave me some guidance, which I will follow gladly if gods grant me a child’. Children and motherhood, in general, become tokens of recognition for the microcosm that Dido and Hypsipyle attempt to juxtapose with the worlds of Aeneas and Jason. And importantly, gendered as it may be, this microcosm deploys signifiers of a less combatant genre that are meant to disturb and contaminate the codes of the epic. In other words, this is also a generic conflict and Ovid, the elegist, has his own reasons to experiment with the epics of Virgil and Apollonius. Such mitigating signals were not altogether absent from the epic predecessors of the Heroides. In fact, Homer's Iliad has a striking example of this sort to offer. At 6.390 ff. the little son of Hector and Andromache reacts as a catalyst that silences the epic hero (and the epic voice): ἤτοι ὁ μὲν μείδησεν ἰδὼν ἐς παῖδα σιωπῇ, ‘and he smiled in silence as he looked on his son’ (1. 404). Hector then removes his helmet in order to take his son in his arms, since his glittering armament frightens the little child (466–73). The symbolic potential of these images should not pass unheeded. The sight of the child silences Hector's epic idiom, who then takes off his epic headgear to approach the frail signifier of love. Hector's (and Homer's) silence is the gap through which Andromache's voice and short story can slip. Yet, their impact and energy was diffused in the large narratives. Argonautica 1 is characteristic, in this respect:


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while in Heroides 6 the presence of the children is concocted in an effort to domesticate the epic story in an elegiac fashion, in Argonautica 1 the same hypothesis is subservient to concerns pertaining to the epic code. In Argonautica 1 the children cannot simply serve as a private token of love between the couple: rather, Hypsipyle's male offspring, if he ever comes, is destined to move away from his mother and to be placed at the service of Jason's family (1. 904–7). The resemblance of this imagery to Jason's own past is clear; in Argonautica children are always destined to be trained to become heroes. This is not how the female protagonists of the Heroides view the world: in their marginalized existence public concerns and collective destiny have now become private stories of loss and mourning. Nowhere else in the collection is this message transmitted more clearly than in Hypsipyle's description of Jason's departure from Lemnos. My argument here is based on a close comparison of the farewell passage in Ovid and its counterpart from Apollonius. This comparison suggests that what was in Argonautica a scene of public commotion is filtered through Hypsipyle's elegiac eyes to produce a scene that concerns merely two sweethearts about to part from one another. This reductive view becomes evident through a little detail in Hypsipyle's narration: ultimus e sociis sacram conscendis in Argon, ‘last of all your companions you embarked on sacred Argo’ (6. 65). According to Hypsipyle's memories, Jason was the last to enter the Argo (reluctantly—we are meant to infer). But this is not how Apollonius had registered the events. According to him, Jason was the first to enter the boat, leading his comrades into the second part of the expedition: ἦ, καὶ ἔβαιν᾽ ἐπὶ νῆα παροίτατος. ὧς δὲ καὶ ἄλλοι / βαῖνον ἀριστῆες, ‘he spoke and then boarded the ship first, and the other heroes followed’ (1. 910–11). The difference between the two texts has rightly been attributed to the romantic touch of the Heroides' text.263 But it also connotes Hypsipyle's restrictive view of the events: even though conspicuous in Apollonius' account, the noble chiefs of Jason pass unnoticed in Ovid's text. They may have gone first, but in any case they cannot interfere in the personal space between Hypsipyle and her deserting lover.

263

Cf. here Knox (1995) s.v., and compare Valerius' Argonautica 2. 425. The scholia on Apollonius 1. 910 also comment on Jason's leading role.

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One does not want to push too far an argument for the differences that distance elegy from epic. Current criticism has successfully shown that there is plenty of interaction between the two genres.264 However, the renowned grandiosity of the mythical events can only glitter less after having gone through the ‘short-sighted’ lens of the Heroides' short stories. These short versions can be exceptionally introverted and egocentric. I would offer as a paradigm of this introspection a passage from Propertius 4. 3, a well-known parallel to the Heroides' hybrid species.265 Arethusa has been painstakingly ruminating over Lycotas' sufferings on the battlefield. First, she wonders whether the military corslet bruises his tender arms (4. 3. 23), then she worries that the heavy spear blisters his hands, unused as they are to war (4. 3. 24), and finally, troubled with care, she recollects rumours which report that his face is drawn and deformed due to the discomfort of his harsh life at the front (diceris et macie vultum tenuasse, ‘they say your face is emaciated and drawn’, 4. 3. 27). And yet, ultimately, her own private concerns have the last word, overshadowing the military motifs and the public concerns about the war: sed opto/e desiderio sit color iste meo, ‘but I hope this paleness comes from missing me’ (4. 3. 27–8). It is all reduced eventually to that final elegiac disyllable meo.

2. ET QUERIMUR PARVAS NOCTIBUS ESSE MORAS (HER. 18. 114): SHORT STORIES AND THE PLOT OF DELAY Haste and tarrying alternate at the end of Leander's description of his furtive reunions with Hero in the secrecy of the night. As night mingles with the day, and Aurora gets ready to chase darkness away, the couple hastily ply kisses, ‘complaining that the lingering of the night was far too short’ (et querimur parvas noctibus esse moras, 18. 114). And Leander procrastinates in the company of his beloved until the nurse forces him to abandon the tower that had given shelter to the secret tryst of the two lovers

264

As notably Hinds (1987b).

265

The poem has triggered controversy mainly in regard to its dating and its relationship to the Heroides: cf. Courtney (1969). On the parallels between Propertius' poem and the Ovidian corpus, see Fedeli (1965) s.v., who believes that there is no conclusive evidence regarding who ‘imitates’ whom.


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(atque ita cunctatus monitu nutricis amaro / frigida deserta litora turre peto, ‘so, tarrying until the nurse's bitter reminder forces me to go, I head for the chilly shore, leaving the tower behind’, 18. 115–16). Even when left on her own, because the tempest has prevented Leander from swimming across, Hero keeps vigil in the silence of the slow night (feminea tardas fallimus arte moras, ‘and with feminine arts we deceive the slow-moving hours of delay’, 19. 38). The motif was introduced by Penelope at the very beginning of the collection, as she recollects her father Icarius' persistently pressurizing her to abandon her endless delay: me pater I carius viduo discedere lecto / cogit et immensas increpat usque moras, ‘My father Icarius puts pressure upon me to abandon the empty bed and reproves me for my endless delay’ (1. 81–2). I suggest that this mora is the appropriate time for the stories under discussion here. During its reign and under its influence, action is suspended and time moves slowly. But what makes this delay particularly interesting is its interaction with the traditional mythical frame that surrounds these plots. Seen within these boundaries, the Heroides' short stories are a delay in the charting of what we may call ‘official time’. The nights are full of significance for the secret story of Leander and Hero, and yet the official narrative around their lives would bypass these bits of time in a gross summary. As I shall go on to show, several of the Heroides have given centre-stage to this discordance, which, moreover, becomes especially challenging in the cases of those heroines who can be readily judged against a background of an established ‘model’ in past literature. It can thus be suggested that the heroines' stories slow down the inexorable passage of time and the relentless rhythm of a world that seems to possess only too little understanding, if any at all, of their own interests and the plots that they aspire to weave in the margins of the grand narratives to which they belong. The contrast between time and narrative pace for the heroes on the one hand and for the heroines on the other is most eloquently inscribed in the myth of Dido. As Aeneid 4 progresses, Dido and Aeneas gradually move on their separate paths, that of a lover and a warrior respectively. They belong to different worlds and different genres, both of which are registered in Aeneid 4 in a way that reveals an emphatic difference between the pace of the two

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distinct stories. The onset of the change is marked by Mercury coming to Aeneas as Jupiter's messenger (Aen. 4. 260ff). Mercury finds Aeneas supervising the building site of the new Carthage and chastises him for having given in to ‘idle’ occupations—a proper elegiac otium—inappropriate to his epic destiny: quid struis? aut qua spe Libycis teris otia terris? ‘what are you doing? And in what hope are you wasting time here in Libya?’ (Aen. 4. 271). From this moment Aeneas is burning with haste (ardet abire fuga…, ‘he burns with a desire to flee’, 4. 281). He is perhaps momentarily delayed by some hesitation on how to break the news to Dido, but his story is now galloping, boosted by his determination. Faced with the wreckage of her hopes, Dido struggles to slow the time down. She and Aeneas are unambiguously contrasted in ll. 553–5: tantos illa suo rumpebat pectore questus: Aeneas celsa in puppi iam certus eundi carpebat somnos… Such reproaches were bursting through her chest. And high on the poop of his ship Aeneas was sleeping, now determined to leave.

Indeed, both Aeneid 4 and Heroides 7 are replete with Dido's heart-rending wail over the loneliness of her unrequited love. Her own rhythm is painstakingly slow and staggering in an attempt to encompass doubts and express pain, subtleties that do not exist in Aeneas' story, except as weak and momentary glimpses of his previous elegiac role. In Heroides 7 we meet with an explicit, if feeble, attempt by Dido to protract the myth, slowing down the pace of fastrunning events. I refer to the moment when, as a last resort, Dido begs Aeneas to defer his departure for just a short period and asks for just a little bit of time: et socii requiem poscunt, laniataque classis postulat exiguas semirefecta moras; pro meritis et siqua tibi debebimus ultra, pro spe coniugii tempora parva peto. Your companions, too, require some rest, and your battered fleet, semirepaired, demands a little delay. In return for my services, and if, besides that, I owe you anything, I ask for a little time, in place of my hope of marrying you. (7. 175–8)266

266

Cf. also a similar plea at 7. 73: da breve saevitiae spatium pelagique tuaeque, ‘give a brief respite from the rage of the sea and of your mind’.


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The key feature of the heroines' stories has come up again: Dido is pleading for some mora, some delay in the inexorable running of the events. It is true that she presents this delay as a necessary respite for Aeneas' fatigued comrades and his shattered fleet. And yet straight away she will admit the real need for this delay: during Aeneas' repose, and while the divinely boosted myth will be temporarily on hold, she will use these brief moments of sluggishness to register her own short story of sorrow and endurance (dum freta mitescunt et amor, dum tempore et usu / fortiter edisco tristia posse pati, ‘until the sea and love grow mild, until by the passage of time and through gaining experience I learn the capacity to endure bravely my sorrow’, 7. 179–80). Of course, this attempt is futile. Dido is aware of Aeneas' certainty and admits to it twice in the opening of her letter: certus es…(7. 7, 9). In fact, her whole letter constructs a story articulated on exactly its very futility, as she explains from the beginning: nec quia te nostra sperem prece posse moveri, / adloquor, ‘nor do I address you in the hope that you can be moved by my entreaty’ (7. 3–4). Her story has no practical value in the epic.267 It also has no proper time in it. Dido makes it explicit that she writes with Aeneas' sword on her lap: scribimus, et gremio Troicus ensis adest, ‘I write and in my lap there is the Trojan sword’ (7. 184). Critics cannot agree on the moment where, in the ‘official’ narrative, this letter should be situated.268 It is important to note, though, that none of the propositions regarding the letter's narrative moment can be ruled out. Rather, it seems that the epistle encompasses within itself various segments of the traditional myth, which then coexist in a blurred, and not necessarily linear, synthesis, through the course of the letter.269 However, the image of Dido writing with Aeneas' sword on her lap allows us to associate Dido's letter with her final moments. The reader knows already from the Aeneid that when Dido unsheathes Aeneas' sword (Aen. 4. 646), the end of her story has already come and she is only bound to be living what must be her last

267

Cf. Knox (1995) 201–2.

268

Barchiesi (1987: 85–6) sees the space for such a letter created by the reference to consecutive messages delivered to Aeneas by Anna, Dido's sister, at Aen. 4. 437–8. Palmer (1898) ad loc. situates the narrative moment of Her. 7 at Aen. 4. 413–14.

269

This, arguably, is the case with all the single Heroides. Cf. Kennedy (1984) 415–16; Barchiesi (1987) 85.

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doomed moments. Heroides 7, then, clearly stretches these last doomed moments into what is Dido's own story, a nugget of defiance in the margin of her inscribed myth. Reading Canace's letter, as she also writes with a weapon in her other hand, burning with incestuous and forbidden love for her brother, we feel that she would endorse this defiance: dextra tenet calamum, strictum tenet altera ferrum, / et iacet in gremio charta soluta meo, ‘my right hand holds the pen; the other holds an unsheathed sword; and the paper lies unrolled in my lap’ (11. 3–4). Is the association of the pen and the sword (with its phallic connotations) in the case of both heroines a symbolic acknowledgement of the defiant character of their writing? (or an acceptance of the Law of the Father?). Linking the various stories of the Heroides has been both a methodological principle and a challenge throughout this study. Each story has of course its own peculiarities, its own course, and ultimately its own degree of resolution—and yet they all reiterate with different emphases some messages that unite them all. In our case, the message is about the relationship of the large with the small in literature. And even though the time for conclusions has not yet come, I would like to suggest at this point that a similar delay runs through the other stories in the Heroides too. The distinction is qualitative more than anything else: it appears as if these stories can only exist because of the retardation of the established running of events. Without focusing on the brevity of the stories and its unsettling function in the context of these stories' larger frames, Barchiesi270 attributes this delay to the lack of understanding of the official myth on the part of the heroines and, consequently, to the discrepancy between the facts already registered in the heroines' ‘previous’ lives and their own elegiac code.271 But the ‘redundant’ character of the heroines' stories acquires a new significance when viewed through the twin lenses of genre and gender. Oenone's letter is characteristic. There is no evidence that the story of Oenone was established before the Hellenistic age, but the myth was represented after that period in several

270

(1987) 71, 81, and passim.

271

For a study of Penelope's and Briseis' stories along these lines, see Barchiesi (1987) 71–81.


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versions.272 Though largely lost, none of these versions seems to have placed a focus on Oenone similar to that in Ovid. It is the time just after the shocking arrival of Paris at Troy with Helen at his side, and Heroides 5 depicts Oenone's turmoil over the spectacle of the recklessly happy couple. The heroine also spends several lines reminiscing over the past days of bliss she shared with Paris. In both cases, the Oenone of the Heroides occupies a spot neglected by her previous configurations, since neither of the topics appear in the mainstream tradition. Oenone is usually connected with Paris' last days after receiving a fatal wound during the Trojan War. Readers were expected to recall that, fatally wounded in the conflict, Paris pleaded with his former fiancée for medical help but was offered none and so was left to die alone. This incident in Oenone's life has a recognizable time in the grand narratives, because of its consequences for the events of the official chart.273 But her humble life with Paris before these disasters does not register—there is no pause in the past narratives at this point. Once again in the collection, a heroine delays the officially charted time, as Oenone stretches her neglected life and memories into a long lament.

3. IAM MARE TURBARI TRABIBUS SAEVASQUE VIDEBIS CONLUCERE FACES … (AEN. 4. 566–7): EMBEDDED STORIES AND DANGEROUS VOICES The previous sections of this chapter have traced the signs of brevity in the heroines' stories, deliberately keeping selfawareness at a low level. However, what are presented as necessities accepted and/or choices taken by the fictive protagonists also present a question of poetic principles. And what the Heroides' selective accounts put forward is a world whose continuity is fragmented into small morsels, segmented impressions, and fractions of events that reflect the heroines' embedded point of view, as they perceive and write their letters from within the larger frames of their established myths. At first sight, the reader's attention is drawn by the limitations of these embedded

272

On the sources of Oenone's story, see Knox (1995) 140; Stinton (1965) 42 n. 2; Jacobson (1974) 176 n. 2; Kenney (1995) 194 and n. 42.

273

Cf. Knox (1995) 141.

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narrations. On second inspection, though, this hierarchical relationship between the frame and the insert turns out to be more complex. The pages that follow will attempt to chart some of these complexities. As we have seen, Dido starts her letter with a bitter admission of its doomed character: nec quia te nostra sperem prece posse moveri, / adloquor, ‘nor do I address you because I hope you can be moved by my entreaty’ (7. 3–4). Aeneas has already announced his decision to leave Carthage, and Dido writes this letter as a desperate attempt to break his resolution. Recent criticism has already noticed that the heroine's resigned manner registered so early in the narration complies with the view of Dido that is built up in the rest of the Ovidian corpus. According to this view, ‘Dido was betrayed by the man she took in’.274 As a result, the mode that suits her grave situation most is that of imploring, and the only recognizable voice that comes through is lament. Dido is certainly not the only heroine to admit in the course of her epistle that she forgoes her fight for better treatment in the mythical world. More often than not, these ‘tiny’ and ‘undemanding’ stories have managed to impress neither the heroes nor, on a metapoetic level, the modern critics, who all happily acquiesce in a rather complacent assertion of the redundant character of the Heroides. Once again, narrative superiority prevents the appreciation: the critics are super-readers who know the endings of the myths that the heroines grapple with in a state of total immersion, and therefore their understanding of the events is inevitably coloured by this superior knowledge.275 There is, of course, much that is valid and true in this view. The full identity of the collection can only be captured in relation to the previous literature that gave the letters their raison d'être. And yet such a privileged point of view can also generate misconceptions that obscure rather than illuminate the character of the poems. It is almost tautological that the Heroides are one side of a dialogue, letters appealing to absent lovers. However, the symbolism of this appeal has not been appreciated enough. On a metaphorical level, the Heroides expand their appeal to include

274

Knox (1995: 202), who also gives references to Dido's story from the Ars Amatoria, Metamorphoses, and Tristia.

275

Cf. esp. Barchiesi (1987) 66, 69, and passim ; also Ch. 2.1 above.


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previous authorities, readers, and critics of past and present alike. But the main body of the collection is left without response—in fact at all levels. At this very point the brevity of the epistles, when fully appreciated, makes a real difference, unsettling the apparent hierarchies. The strength of the heroines and the Heroides is not irrelevant to their notorious weakness, that is, their embeddedness and lack of periscopic vision, which is both the cause and the effect of their brevity. Let us elaborate this further. As fragments of the larger myths, the stories of the Heroides are emphatically associated with multiple lines of enclosure. The most immediate one directly relates to the heroines' abandonment, as a result of which they are relegated to a physically constraining space. In fact, just as the whole collection talks mainly about their claustrophobic lives, it would be fair to suggest that the settings of the poems find cohesion under the common denominator of enclosure.276 Quite naturally, circumscription limits the heroines' knowledge of events. Like Arachne, who symbolically interweaves her signature within the web of her creation in Metamorphoses 6, the heroines are deprived of the possibility of ever catching an overview of their artefact, enmeshed as they are in the web of their own narration. And yet, in more ways than one, their stifling restraint is their unlimited freedom. Thanks to this very ignorance, destined to raise a smile with the critics, their hermetic discourse is under no obligation to conform to the landmarks of their ancestral myths. Penelope underlines this emancipation most vividly: sed mihi quid prodest vestris disiecta lacertis Ilios et, murus quod fuit, esse solum, si maneo, qualis Troia durante manebam, virque mihi dempto fine carendus abest? diruta sunt aliis, uni mihi Pergama restant.

But what benefit is there for me now that Ilion lies in ruins at your hands and what was a wall is now levelled land, if I stay what I was while Troy was still standing, and my husband is away and must be missed for ever? Pergamum is demolished for others, for me alone it still stand. (1. 47–51)

The message is heard loud and clear: ‘for others Pergamum has

276

For a discussion of these confined settings, see Ch. 4 above.

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been brought low; for me alone it stands’. And, significantly, it comes just after a summary of the events of the Trojan War had reached her via her son Telemachus: omnia namque tuo senior te quaerere misso / rettulerat nato Nestor, at ille mihi, ‘all these old Nestor recounted to your son whom I had sent to ask about you, and he told me’ (1. 37–8). The reference to Nestor and the allusion to Odyssey 4 symbolically acknowledge previous epic narrations; we are meant to understand that her discourse will make space for mediated (epic) accounts of the battles and the conflicts before and inside Ilion. But soon the vivid sequence of events is muddled just as the epic code gets squeezed into the narrow room of her own compressed (in)difference. This blend of generic sensitivities is most notable in 1. 28–33. Contemplating with envy the stories told by other warriors safely returned home (illi victa suis Troica fata canunt. / mirantur iustique senes trepidaeque puellae;/narrantis coniunx pendet ab ore viri, ‘and they sing of the fate of Troy that has succumbed to their own; righteous elders and timid girls admire; the wife hangs on the lips of her husband, as he tells his story’, 1. 28–30), Penelope directly alludes to Dido in Aen. 4. 79 and, hence, to Virgil's epic narration. Note, though, how an unfailing elegiac signal creeps into this trace of an epic narration in the next couplet: atque aliquis posita monstrat fera proelia mensa, / pingit et exiguo Pergama tota mero: / hac ibat Simois…, ‘and someone maps out the fierce battle on the laid table and draws the whole of Pergamum, tracing it with a thin line of wine: here rolled Simois…’ (1. 31–3). At times, the conflict of genres becomes even more pronounced and Laodamia's letter has an eloquent case of uneasy and unnatural blending to offer, as she presents us with her dream: to be in bed with Protesilaus, listening to his epic narrations blended with kisses of erotic passion: quando erit, ut lecto mecum bene iunctus in uno / militiae referas splendida facta tuae? / quae mihi dum referes, quamvis audire iuvabit, / multa tamen capies oscula, multa dabis, ‘when will it be that, closely joined with me in the same bed, you will talk to me about your glorious deeds on the battlefield? And while you recount these, though it will please me to listen, you will still snatch many kisses and give back many’ (13. 117–20). Victims of the same war, Penelope and Laodamia


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also share the same inward constitution as they mourn their lost ones: what matters to them is their little, lived reality rather than the faded rumours that barely reach their isolation. Theirs is a little story, a series of little inserts that ignore, and also veil, the larger frames. This is typical of the Heroides as a whole. As short stories and as segments, their tales cannot have the certainty of the official ending inscribed in them.277 They finish ‘before the End’ but for this very reason they can also indulge in their own closure. Indeed, most of the heroines have a deluding end to cherish or to long for. Their fractured awareness allows for various fantastic denouements to penetrate their discourse. Of all the heroines Deianira's personal and subjective understanding of an ending is communicated the most explicitly. At an early moment in her narration, where the heroine is lamenting the loss of Hercules' virility in his infatuation for Iole, she has no doubt that this ‘baseness’ will stain Hercules' life and fame for ever: quid nisi notitia est misero quaesita pudori, si cumulas turpi facta priora nota? ....... coepisti melius quam desinis; ultima primis cedunt; dissimiles hic vir et ille puer.

What have you gained but notoriety for your wretched shame, if you add to your previous deeds an ugly mark?…You started better than you end; your last deeds are inferior to your first; the man you are now and the boy you were then are not the same. (9. 19–24)

The partial and egocentric vision so typical of the Heroides as a whole is brilliantly exemplified in the above passage, since it is already well known from Sophocles' Trachiniae that a different and more painful end awaits Hercules. The established denouement will ultimately be incorporated in her narration—a turn which illuminates further the nature of the heroine's short story and for this we will revisit it later. But, at this stage, Deianira's fragmented storytelling and awareness of the plot does not yet allow her access to this information, and therefore can only register a false closure. The surveying reader (and critic), of course, will smile condescendingly at this erroneous conviction.278 Similar false endings are communicated in other

277

See e.g. Barchiesi (1987) 67–8 and passim.

278

As Meleager in Bacchylides' fifth ode also did. On the ironies and multiple connotations offered to the learned reader between the lines of Bacchylides' ‘short-sighted’ narration of Hercules' life, see Roberts (1997) 424–8.

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heroines' letters with different degrees of explicitness and precision. Hypsipyle's own closural statement is somewhat less unequivocal than Deianira's and only indirectly implied as she dismisses the idea of ever sending her children to Jason and his new barbarian wife: plus est Medea noverca; / Medeae faciunt ad scelus omne manus, ‘Medea is more than a stepmother; the hands of Medea are capable of any crime’ (6. 127–8). On the other hand, Oenone's self-deluding closure is much harder to miss, as she attempts to build her own desired ending in vows of eternal love and perennial solidarity (et tua, quod superest temporis, esse precor, ‘and yours I pray to be, till the end of time’, 5. 158). Of course, the larger frame of her story exposes her self-deceit: one of Oenone's (in)famous acts as registered in mainstream mythology is her notorious refusal to offer timely medical assistance with Paris' wound in the final stages of the Trojan War. Once again, an attempt at closure is led astray by the embedded knowledge of the heroine. No matter how determined these attempts at closure are, the audience cannot forget how the stories have ‘officially’ ended. Indeed, the narrative structure of the letters is constantly threatened by their frame and their ‘future reflexive’,279 which had already been communicated to the interpretative community long before the Heroides came to being.280 And the heroines themselves are not unaware of the implacable ‘fate’ that directs their myth, a fate which cannot be reversed but only deferred. Their defiant narrations are therefore arts of delay—as Phyllis puts it succinctly (2. 21–2). Like the rest of the heroines she also indulges in possible endings that could account in the least painful way for Demophoon's failure to return. And yet, as well as being the principal figure in her own short story, she is also a critic of it: saepe fui mendax pro te mihi, ‘often I have deceived myself, defending you’ (2. 11). And she has no illusions regarding her fantasies: denique fidus amor, quidquid properantibus obstat, / finxit, ‘in one word, my faithful love for you tried to imagine anything that could hinder those in haste’ (2. 21–2).

279

In words borrowed from the title of Barchiesi (1993).

280



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In the name of this delay, the heroines cry, despair, hope, and delude themselves. In accordance with its superior knowledge of the received endings and the interpretative implications of this knowledge, the audience is (and has already been) tempted to ignore what can only be relegated to the sphere of the fantastic. And yet, ‘like a child suffering from healthy neglect, the short story survives’. What I would like to suggest in the pages that follow is that the recursions of the heroines' short stories, even though futile and unable to affect the official endings, do not slip past unnoticed by these official, assertive versions. Their imprints and the prospects they try to track down can be traced already in the body of the long authorial narratives. Even more, these traces suggest that those narratives were not only aware but also often apprehensive of the potential of such frail and short stories. Amongst all the ‘source’ texts, Mercury's appearance to Aeneas in Aeneid 4, already mentioned in section 6.2 above, offers a strikingly explicit admission of this wariness, especially at the point where Jupiter's messenger warns Aeneas of Dido's black and frenzied thoughts, advising him to respond with extreme caution: ‘nate dea, potes hoc sub casu ducere somnos, nec quae te circum stent deinde pericula cernis…? ........ illa dolos dirumque nefas in pectore versat, certa mori, variosque irarum concitat aestus.’

‘Son of the goddess, can you carry on sleeping in this crisis? And do you not discern what dangers surround you…? She is brooding some trick, some dreadful crime, determined to die, and she stirs several different tides of anger within her.’ (4. 560–4)

But Dido's mania lurking in her chest is, in fact, the very sign-post to the narrative space of her letter in the Heroides. As we have seen, it is precisely this inane tempus (‘empty time’) of her frenzy that accommodates her letter and her story; the same ‘empty time’ that has disturbed Jupiter enough to prompt him to send Mercury down to draw Aeneas' attention to it. At first sight, both the Aeneid and the Heroides seek to impress upon us that this is all about an erratic story of female madness and indecision. But, as Mercury's stern warning barely conceals, a frightening

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story, nonetheless, and one that could potentially unsettle and change the smooth development of the myth.281 Admitting the strength of these short stories, as Mercury does almost subconsciously when he speaks to Aeneas about Dido, is, at first sight, a paradoxical assumption in stark conflict with the heroines' powerless state. And yet, even when much derided, the trace of the heroines' stories is also an awesome and awkward nuance inserted into the narrative twists of the grand narratives. These stories' strength is of an unusual sort, brought up not by loud assertions but by their compressed, tacit, and silenced nature, and the paragraphs that follow will, I hope, make this supposition clear. If the concept of a certain power emanating from the Heroides is hard to comprehend and definitely unusual as an interpretative line, their compression has long been noticed. It is their double elegiac and epistolary form that readily accounts for this compression. As elegies, they have a restricted focus, because the elegiac idiom almost by definition allows only a partial view of the world. They also condense the flow of the narrative enunciation in their fragmenting capacity as letters.282 However, the explosive potential of this compression has not been equally appreciated. In the taciturnity of their restraint the heroines store up grief which gradually turns into menacing anger. Medea is a most accurate and ominous manifestation of this. Love and outrage mingle in her disturbed mind, especially when she recalls the shameful events that led to her exclusion from the palace that she had shared with Jason since their arrival in Corinth (12. 133–6). Locked up behind the double door of the new abode that shelters her and at the same time defines her boundaries as well as her freedom, she pours her anger into a

281

Such an attitude, though, is rather rare amongst critics, who focus their attention only on these letters' inability to change the final turn of these myths. Note recently Casali (1995a) 1: ‘In the Heroides problems of communication are important in themselves, but, after the gratuitous letters by Penelope, Phyllis and Briseis, this [Her. 4] is the first (and it will remain the only one) in which the complication always caused by an epistolary intrusion into the body of the story is superimposed on a pre-existent problem.’

282

Cf. Barchiesi (1987) esp. 68, 84, 89. For more on the epistolary nature of the collection, see also Ch. 5 above.


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letter which lurches from wailing to pleading and vice versa. But if her love cannot ever abandon her, her narrative finishes with a note of barely disguised menace: ingentis parturit ira minas, ‘my anger is pregnant with enormous threats’ (12. 208). She makes no attempt to conceal that this anger is destined for destruction: quo feret ira, sequar! ‘and where my anger leads me, I will follow!’ (12. 209); and she concludes with a stern warning: nescio quid certe mens mea maius agit, ‘my mind, for sure, is conceiving something significant, the exact nature of which I do not know’ (12. 212). The two lines combined leave no space for doubts: we are explicitly advised to expect some major disaster to strike. The letter concludes at this point, but not before the Corinthian aftermath of the story has been unequivocally prefigured for the knowledgeable readers, who are then prompted to pore over Euripides' piece, to follow up the hints.283 And such a reading reveals Ovidian elegy and Euripidean tragedy entangled in an intricate web of cross-referencing, with Medea's short elegy disturbingly discernible between the tragic lines. The interrelationship is especially evident within the setting of the two stories, just as Euripides' opening scenes introduce Medea in her Ovidian environment. The elegiac enclave of Medea's narrative past and literary future is here openly enacted through the theatrical structure of the play itself. The tragedy indeed starts with Medea brooding on her imposed retirement—as well as on the composition of Heroides 12, as a readily available (prospective) intertext. Her first public statement in Euripides' play (ll. 96–7) is a death wish along the lines of the opening of Heroides 12. And yet Medea refuses to open up to offers of help. The Nurse's prologue (1–48) portrays a hermetic Medea, totally abandoned to grief at the loss of her husband's love and the unjust treatment she has had to endure. Nobody seems to understand her frame of mind and this lack of knowledge is manifest in the discussion of the Nurse with the Tutor in the early stages of the play (49–95). However, everybody is openly worried about her silent grief. It is the Nurse who first voices this anxiety very early in the play, describing Medea as a desolate woman capable

283

For a fine self-conscious reading of the foreshadowing quality of the passage, see Hinds (1993: 39–43), who suggests that the opus maius that Medea has in mind is actually her appearance on the past-yet-soon-to-follow tragic stage.

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of evil plans (δέδοικα δ᾽ αὐτὴν μή τι βουλεύσῃ νέον / βαρεῖα γὰρ ϕρήν …, ‘I fear lest she is forming some dreadful purpose in her burdened mind’, Med. 37–8). But Medea's silent suffering is causing embarrassment and apprehension to enemies as well as to friends. It is no wonder, then, that when Creon arrives on stage to inform Medea that a decision has been taken to exile her (271 ff.), he will not for a moment drop his guard, even when faced with Medea's soothing words. As he explains, he is suspicious of her cunning but, more than anything else, he is disturbed by her silent depression: λέγεις ἀκοῦσαι μαλθάκ᾽, ἀλλ᾽ ἔσω ϕρενῶν ὀρρωδία μοι μή τι βουλεύῃς κακόν, τοσῶιδε δ᾽ ἧσσον ἢ πάρος πέποιθά σοι. γυνὴ γὰρ ὀξύθυμος, ὡς δ᾽ αὔτως ἀνήρ, ῥάιων ϕυλάσσειν ἢ σιωπηλὸς σοϕή.

Your words are gentle. But in my mind, I shudder, thinking that you might be brewing something horrible. In fact, I trust you much less now than before. A woman of hot temper (just like a man) is easier to guard than a quiet and clever one. (Med. 316–20)

The latent thoughts that Medea stirs around in her mind in the enclosure of her palace have brought about Creon's solicitude. Just like the Nurse, he senses that Medea has something evil in mind and therefore he has come up with the decree of her exile, in an effort to shield himself and his own people from the threatening μῆτις (‘plan’) of the Colchian woman. Several scenes later and at her own request, Jason himself will confront Medea. As expected, the meeting does not bridge the huge gap that divides the former spouses, but Jason's words leave no doubt that Medea's uncommunicative stubbornness under house arrest is the main reason for her imminent expulsion. Medea herself, ἀρὰς τυράννοις ἀνοσίους ἀρωμένη, ‘invoking profane curses upon the King’ (607), blocking all avenues to reconciliation or at least compromise, triggered Creon's decision to exile her. Enclosure, evil thoughts, and a desperate, as well as angry, idiom have rendered the dominant tragic figures fearful and disbelieving of Medea. Are not these figures that directly refer to Medea's letter in the Ovidian collection? Deeds and words, thoughts and artifice, are ominously confused each time a character in Euripides' play attempts to describe the disturbed


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Medea—we have already seen such ambiguous passages on the part of the Nurse, Creon, and Jason. Medea has conceived something powerful and vengeful in the solitude of her seething sorrow and indignation. Is it possible that this could have been a letter—Heroides 12? Truly, there is no explicit evidence for any such letter anywhere in the play; we only have the mixed reactions of the rest of the characters towards its hypothesis. Creon and Jason, as we have already seen, are wary of it, while the Nurse seems to view art as a healing response to grief: στυγίους δὲ βροτῶν οὐδεὶς λύπας ηὓρετο μούσῃ καὶ πολυχόρδοις ᾠδαῖς παύειν, ἐξ ὧν θάνατοι δειναί τε τύχαι σϕάλλουσι δόμους. καίτοι τάδε μὲν κέρδος ἀκεῖσθαι μολπαῖσι βροτούς.

But no one has found yet the way to banish the bitterness and pain of life with music and many-toned odes. Pain and sorrow are the cause of deaths and disasters that destroy families. And yet, it would be good if song were to be used to cure the sorrows of people. (Med. 195–200)

There is no chance that Medea will have her grief turned into song as she grapples in vain with her abandonment. However, what she can do is register her grief by means of a different art, that of letter-writing, in an attempt to break through her seclusion. Reading Medea in the light of the Heroides makes us see that a letter like Heroides 12 would be an appropriate symbolic expression of what seems needed, feared, or hoped at different moments and by different people in the course of the tragedy. I will not pursue further these suggestions. Nevertheless, whether with a letter or without it, the menacing picture of a mourning, tragic Medea284 multiply foreshadows (or rather recalls?) that of Medea in the Heroides. The generic interrelationship between Heroides 12 and tragedy in general—Euripidean and Senecan, as well as the (lost) Ovidian one—has been discussed by critics focusing especially on issues related to performance.285 But there is another, neglected, point where

284

For further aspects of Medea's dangerous rhetoric and deeds in Euripides, cf. Rabinowitz (1993) 125–54; and cf. in general Foley (1989) 61 n. 1; Boedeker (1997).

285

Cf. here Hinds (1993: 38–9), who brings to the fore the dramatic features of the epistle.

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tragedy and Heroides 12 cross paths. In this case, Medea's avoidance of the limelight, and the uncertainty and sense of foreboding that her withdrawal has engendered in those that surround her, brings Heroides to mind. Medea is explicitly forced ‘out’ twice: once by the Chorus of Corinthian women when they prompt the Nurse to get her out of the palace (180–1), and then by Creon, when he breaks to her the news of her exile (321). A potential evil plan makes both the Chorus and the King wary. But as Creon—just above—admits, these plans are inextricably tied up with her rhetoric, her words, her Ovidian letter after all.286 The rest of the tragedy is well known. Medea is ushered out to take her role in the play. But the horrific acts yet to follow seem to have been devised at the time of her mournful seclusion (and, thus, of her Ovidian recursive narrative), and it is this suppressed and embedded elegiac nugget that prepares the tragic scenes that will famously follow. In other words, Medea's truncated narrative from the Heroides is schematically (i.e. thematically) enclosed in the Euripidean play, upsetting the generic hierarchy just as it disturbs its tragic (splintery, even if arrogant) frame. So much for Medea. Although her narrative became an exemplary dangerous voice for the needs of this section, by no means is it the only one of its kind in the Ovidian collection. Deianira's epistle is another equally striking example. Her letter incorporates barely contained sarcasm and anger, unknown to her submissive tragic arch-model.287 It is not that Trachiniae is in any way short of adequate reasons and appropriately humiliating scenes for Deianira to voice her anger. But the tragic text, as if (sub)consciously aware of the explosive potential of such a short story, will persistently try to repress her indignation every time her speech slips into some lament or complaint regarding her unfair lot. In each one of these cases, the heroine is expected to stay silent, either because some messenger is about to take over and give his own account of things (εὐϕημίαν νῦν ἴσχ᾽. ἐπεὶ καταστεϕῆ / στείχονθ᾽ ὁρῶ τιν᾽ ἄνδρα πρὸς χάριν λόγων, ‘keep silence now, for I see a crowned man marching towards us bringing word’, Trach. 178–9), or out of the consideration that she is

286

Cf. here Rabinowitz (1993) 143–4.

287

Cf. e.g. 9. 23–4, 73–80, 101–2.


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presumed to have for her son's peace of mind (σιγᾶν ἂν ἁρμόζοι σε τὸν πλείω λόγον, / εἰ μή τι λέξεις παιδὶ τῷ σαυτῆς, ‘it is fitting that you are silent now, and speak no more, lest you divulge anything to your child’, 731–2). Unable to cope any longer with this suppressed pain and humiliation, Deianira finally chooses to respond to this unfair treatment by charging Lichas, Hercules' messenger, with taking to his infatuated lord the love charm that Nessus had given her upon dying, fatally wounded by Hercules' shaft. Heroides 9 is not allowed to revolve in the course of the tragedy. But its disturbing possibility is already inscribed in the tragic verse, with its presence suggested through the enforced silences of the latter. In fact, Heroides 9 does not only look back to the Sophoclean tragedy; it also looks forward to Ovid's own Metamorphoses 9, where the story of Deianira, Hercules, and Nessus is once again recounted. The fame ‘that loves adding the false to the truth’ has just brought Deianira the bad news about Hercules' passionate affair with Iole. What follows (Met. 9. 140–51) is a torrent of grief, indignation, and anger directed at the new couple—and therefore, an unfailing reminder of the heroine's epistle as well. Originally suppressed by Sophocles, the sense of loss of Heroides 9 is here once more released. Deianira lurches from one frame of mind to the other. She even almost decides to devise an evil plan, Iole's strangling, in a gesture that would prove the painful power of ‘slighted female love’: forte paro facinus, quantumque iniuria possit / femineusque dolor, iugulata paelice testor, ‘perhaps I can prepare some evil deed, and strangle his concubine, and prove how much destruction injustice, and female pain, can bring’ (Met. 9. 151–2). The alarming overtones of this statement fade when Deianira, conforming to her received myth, makes the somewhat different decision to send Hercules the love charm (ll. 153–5). But the destructive potential of Deianira's compressed and staggering wrath (and of Heroides 9, in this respect), which Trachiniae tried to ignore, has been unmistakably hinted at. No wonder that the myth and Hercules' life end the way they do: wasn't the love charm from Nessus intended as a reminder of the strength of Deianira's slighted love?

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4. THE END OF THE STORY? A lot has been suggested in the course of this chapter with regard to the relation between the Heroides and their model(s), between insert and frame in the big map of ancient myth. As it transpired, none of these suggestions could be definitive, mainly because of the complex character of the stories themselves. As retrospective narrations, the heroines' stories have often been seen as an attempt at possible closures which their previous configurations had had no chance (or the appropriate perspective) to achieve.288 There is, indeed, much that can be (and has been) said about the heroines' awareness of their own stories and of those of the other heroines. Hypsipyle is another good example: in many ways a more private and less public figure than her counterpart from Apollonius, she is nonetheless entitled to have an opinion on her myth as well as on Medea's myth, in a way inconceivable to Apollonian Hypsipyle.289 And yet, this is a circular argument: as fragments (and therefore episodic narrations), these narratives are entitled to ignore the need for closure, as Penelope strikingly does (diruta sunt aliis, uni mihi Pergama restant, ‘for others Pergamum is demolished; for me alone it still stands’, 1. 51), and in other instances they produce particularly weak (as well as self-deceiving) closure. Oenone's letter is exemplary in this respect, as the formal ending of her letter, and her narrative, pointedly stretches beyond any narrative boundaries, in a characteristic reference to an endless future: et tua, quod superest temporis, esse precor! ‘and yours I pray to be, till the end of time’ (5. 158). And yet, again, they barely hide their hybrid character, aspiring, as they do, to reassess incidents of a whole mythical circle, even though firmly grasped by the emotions of the moment. This doubleness, in fact, matches the other big clash in their discourse, namely that between the drive to make their letter ready for dispatch and the drive to go on ‘talking’, in order to keep their stories (and themselves) alive. Because of these ambivalent interests, the heroines

288

Desmond (1993: 60 and passim ) argues along these lines when exploring the gendered aspects of Dido's letter.

289

For more discussion of Hypsipyle's literary awareness, see Hinds (1993) 27–34; and for other instances of cross-referencing within the Heroides, see e.g. 4. 63–6; 6. 151; 17. 193–6; 20. 49, 69.


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lurch between self-enlightenment and self-deception, determined to end their lives and at the same time unable to give up the pen. Dido's and Canace's self-descriptions offer a catching illustration of this deferral of death through writing, in 7. 183–6 and 11. 3–4, respectively. Eros and Death operate their conflicting orbits within these narratives, striving for persistence and for closure, in turn.290 The vigour of these short stories lies in this very indecision and the unpredictability that it entails. This vigour does not guarantee narrative ‘success’ for them, but is capable of problematizing any complacent view on the interdependence between large and small in literature. The Heroides suggest that the small, if not always able to boycott its larger frame, can, nevertheless, shake the dominant world-view of this larger frame in various ways. It can vociferously advocate the need for some delay in the flow of events, or stubbornly struggle for the possibility of expanding moments famously compressed and closed in the (‘official’) myth. Thus, the Heroides' curtailed stories turn out to include a kind of destructive capacity that the ‘original’ versions had tried to muffle. In their recklessness, these short stories can be particularly threatening. For sure, they are transcended by the long narratives; but they are also inscribed in them, injecting them with apprehension that is noticeable, even if not always explicable. Future events are foreshadowed, blurring the boundaries between insert and frame, boundaries that are challenged by the short stories' faltering urge to circumvent the large frame and devise their own deviant endings.291 It is, I believe, symbolic of the pungency of the heroines' short stories that even when false, their defiant visions still carry unsettling communications and overtones of disturbing things to come. Hypsipyle, for example, unknowingly prepares the ground for the well-known death of Medea's children, as she distrusts the ability of the Colchian princess to be a good mother with her own children. Similarly, the very moment that Oenone expresses doubts about the adequacy of her medical skills to cure her wretched love, a future

290

On interaction between Freud's Eros and Thanatos as a model for plot, see Brooks (1984) esp. 90–112.

291

For aftermaths-within-the-texts in ancient and modern narratives, see Roberts (1997).

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inadequacy of these skills is already deposited in the text for the learned reader: Oenone's herbs will indeed be notoriously unavailable when needed to cure Paris' fatal wound. ‘True’ or ‘false’ alike, these narratives are manifestations of a less strongly teleological and more hesitant style of writing,292 potentially granting more control to their protagonists. These stories are the traces and drifting aspirations of what could have happened in a different wor(l)d. In a different wor(l)d—and a different genre. The strong telos that the heroines are fighting against is mainly an epic or a tragic telos, in opposition to their own less certain and less teleological elegiac compositions. Far from being solely a gender issue, this conflict also has an important generic side. It is no news that, as a Callimachean, Ovid was particularly interested in slenderness as well as in the witty critique of all traditional genres. And it is widely accepted that he (and to a lesser extent Propertius and Tibullus) is inclined to consider elegy as a significant Callimachean outpost. The Heroides offer an interesting and close interplay between the Callimachean beliefs and the female voice and this tugs us—once more and finally—to the figure of Ovid, the absent and ever-present author. In this last chapter, Ovid's interests are more intricately intertwined with the heroines' interests, in contrast to the perspectives discussed in the previous chapters, which placed them rather far apart. Looked at from the perspective of this chapter, the same lines in the Heroides can be a generic sign as well as a gendered remark, and the two aspects blend in these texts, as do the various authorial levels and multiple reading practices that I described at an earlier stage.293 We need to keep two things in mind: (a) the heroines' voices unremittingly struggle to be heard, whatever the intentions of the author of the Heroides may have been; and (b) we have no way of distinguishing safely and clearly between his voice and their voices. This conflation, though, is not meant to efface or downplay the tensions that were explored extensively in the previous chapters as essential qualities of these texts. But it does remind us that these (irreconciled) tensions are present in the very form of these poems—as well as, self-referentially, in this present book.

292

For these gendered formulations of time and writing in the Heroides, see Chs. 3 and 4.

293

See Ch. 2.


195

Medea fell for Jason the first moment she saw him reclining amongst the other Argonauts on an embroidered couch. The description of her love in Heroides 12 floods her passionate letter, a vertiginous journey of clashing emotions with one striking peak: et vidi et perii; nec notis ignibus arsi, ardet ut ad magnos pinea taeda deos.

I saw you and I perished; and I burned with a fire I knew not before, but as a torch made of pine-wood burns before the great gods (12. 33–4)

On a first level, this statement reads as the confession of a woman's unrequited love. But it is also the heroine's authorial warning about the explosive potential of her short story. And at the same time, it is Ovid's learned game with the worthiness of elegy, a genre ‘grandiose’ enough to reach the gods.294 This is a telling idiosyncrasy of the Heroides: that the reader cannot be sure whose story is actually told in these lines.

294

Ovid's generic suggestion in Her. 12. 33–4 cannot be fully appreciated without its (possible) model image from Apollonius, Arg. 3. 291–8, comparing Medea's love to the blazing fire that wondrously jerks up from the humble brand. The passage from Her. 12 is exceptionally rich in intertextual connotations; see Hinds (1993) 21–7.


Postscript: Writing on the Edge? It is difficult to provide an appropriate epilogue for a study whose main motive and interest has been the notion of transgression, and which has emphasized throughout how hard it is to get a woman to stop writing. I will, however, try to outline some of my criss-crossing. We have followed the heroines in their twin roles as lovers and writers, pursuing their darlings and their text. We saw their femininity managing to slip through their closed stasis and tearing the masculine fabric of Ovid's text, advertising a feminine rhetoric. Their nuances, however, gained substance only through a sympathetic reading, and my own sensitivity to their efforts due to my explicit situation as a female reader. I worked on the feminine reading and writing of the Heroides with the help of contemporary feminist thought. And yet, in a sense, the heroines themselves had a similar task to perform, as women gripped by the charm of texts which carried them through to an alien world. In our readings, the ‘outside’ is already included in the ‘inside’, destabilizing the polarity between the extrinsic and the intrinsic, between engaged and omniscient narration, between art and interpretation. Ironically, we can see the webs of this complicity reaching back to Ovid himself, who in Am. 2. 1. 1–6 invites an involved (and more feminine, as the imagery in this book has suggested) reading of his elegies: Hoc quoque composui Paelignis natus aquosis, ille ego nequitiae Naso poeta meae. hoc quoque iussit Amor—procul hinc, procul este, severi: non estis teneris apta theatra modis. me legat in sponsi facie non frigida virgo, et rudis ignoto tactus amore puer.

This too I, a son of the watery Sabellian land, have written, Ovid Naso, the poet of my worthlessness. This too Love ordered—austere ones stay away! You are not the right audience for my tender verses. Let a girl

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read me who thrills at the sight of her betrothed, and an untutored boy, touched by a love he did not know.

Whatever Ovid would have thought of the present book, I hope I have problematized the notions of cultural alienation and of anachronism in critical performance. Ancient writers were aware that their texts invite for themselves a turbulent story of reception. Ovid himself makes this clear in Am. 2. 4: in a gesture of honesty, and with a pun drawing upon the conflation of his love and the books of his elegies in the signifier of Amores, he admits his excitement at the thought of his verses' forthcoming erotic affairs: confiteor, siquid prodest delicta fateri; in mea nunc demens crimina fassus eo. ....... nam desunt vires ad me mihi iusque regendum; auferor, ut rapida concita puppis aqua. non est certa meos quae forma invitet amores: centum sunt causae, cur ego semper amem.

I confess—if there is any gain in confessing. Having revealed my crimes, I continue, seized by madness.… I lack the control and the laws by which to rule myself. I am swept away like a boat shaken violently on rapid waters. It is not clear what looks invite my loves. There are a hundred reasons why I am always in love. (Am. 2. 4. 3–10)

And the rest of the poem is devoted to a long list of future elegiac mistresses—or readers. Ovid's Heroides superbly narrativize this awareness. Their (and his?) message is a message of non-closure. And so (unsurprisingly) is mine. This book does not seek to provide a monolithic ‘explanation’ and a univocal interpretation of the Heroides. Hypsipyle, Medea, and Creusa, swapping places in Jason's heart, are the emblems of a non-arrogant, contingent reader who reads and writes afresh, submits her script, and withdraws in front of the readings to come. We saw the heroines striving to make their word prevalent, but they also know how to treasure the world that they are trying to name, without twisting it in a sweep of authorial understanding. Even though distraught, Dido makes this clear:

POSTSCRIPT: WRITING ON THE EDGE?

cum dabit aura viam, praebebis carbasa ventis; nunc levis eiectam continet alga ratem. tempus ut observem, manda mihi; certius ibis, nec te, si cupies, ipsa manere sinam. ........ pro meritis et siqua tibi debebimus ultra, pro spe coniugii tempora parva peto— dum freta mitescunt et amor, dum tempore et usu fortiter edisco tristia posse pati. (7. 171–80)

199

When the gales yield a passage, you shall open your sail to the winds; now only light seaweed surrounds your stranded ship. Trust me to look out for the right time; you will then depart with greater safety and I myself will not allow you to stay, not even if you yourself desire it. … In return for my kindnesses and in return for my hope of marrying you, even at the risk of being under further obligation to you, I seek only a little respite—until the sea and my love are assuaged; until by time and experience I learn to be able to endure my sorrows with fortitude.


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INDEX LOCORUM ALCAEUS ; fr. 10 (L-P) 13n. 2 ANTIPHANES ; Sappho fr. 194 (K-A) 156–7n. 42 APOLLONIUS RHODIUS ; Argonautica 1 172–31.633–705 168–91.793–833 1691.897–8 1721.904–7 1731.910–11 1733.451 60n. 303.471 60n. 303.752 60n. 303.887–90 80n. 634.415–20 96–74.464–7 974.473–4 97 ARISTOPHANES ; Aves 693–704 54n. 18 ARISTOTLE ; Rhetoric 3.2 1405a34 119; Metaphysics 986a22–27 103n. 30, 136 CALLIMACHUS ; Aetia fr. 67.1 59n. 29fr. 73 86n. 7 CALPURNIUS SICULUS ; Eclogues 3.10 93 CATULLUS ; 51.6–9 88n. 1164.1–19 60n. 3164.23–34 5264.52–203 8764.61–2 9164.62 9064.164–6 9064.265–6 8864.384–408 52–365.19–23 14268a.5–6 165n. 1168b.83–4 165n. 1168b.145–6 165n. 11 CICERO ; Ad Atticum 9.10.1 123; Ad Familiares 2.4.1 123 EMPEDOCLES ; fr. 17.5–8 (D-K) 46n. 7, 74 EURIPIDES ; Hippolytus 208–22 74856–80 137n. 23; Iphigenia in Aulis 28 127, 13935–40 12749–114 126–7

218

INDEX LOCORUM

107–110 127303–13 127334–75 127548–51 43; Medea 1–95 187–837–8 18896–7 187180–1 190195–200 189271–323 188316–20 188321 190607 188; Orestes 1211–13 76n. 561216–18 76n. 561348–52 76n. 56 GALLUS ; fr. 1 166 GORGIAS ; Helena 61 HESIOD ; Opera et dies 78 61n. 32; Theogonia 116–20 53121 46n. 8192–206 54203–6 61 HOMER ; Iliad 6.168 1516.390–473 1726.490–3 103n. 3114.294 88n. 11; Odyssey 1.356–9 103n. 314 1824.266–89 11220.57 46n. 823.343 46n. 8 HORACE ; Epistulae 1.20.1–4 28n. 33; Odes 1.23 118n. 49 HOMERIC HYMN TO DEMETER ; 6–14 80n. 63 LONGUS ; Daphnis and Chloe 59 n. 28,68 n. 43 LUCRETIUS ; De rerum natura 4.1101–20 46n. 5 MARTIAL ; Epigrams 1.3.9–11 28n. 333.68.11–12 40n. 537.88.3–4 40n. 5311.16.9–10 40n. 53 MOSCHUS ; Europa 65–71 80n. 63 OVID ; Amores 1. 120n. 561.1.21–30 137n. 221.3.19 82n. 671.4.20 153n. 44

INDEX LOCORUM

1.5 165n. 112.1.1–6 197–82.4.3–10 198; Ars Amatoria 1.437–44 129n. 92.185–92 79n. 603.345–6 13, 14n. 43.467–98 148n. 383.473–6 1313.617–30 148–9; Epistulae ex Ponto 2.6 26n. 31; Fasti 3.463–4 90–13.549–50 86n. 54.417–618 24n. 194.437 80n. 63; Heroides 1 91, 124n. 11.7–10 103–41.7 166n. 121.28–33 1821.37–8 1821.47–51 181–21.47–9 901.51 1921.59–62 281.81–2 1751.97 272.11 1842.21–2 1842.27 532.31–41 492.31–2 151n. 402.45–8 134n. 152.45 592.51–2 154–52.55 472.57–60 812.63–4 552.67–74 562.74 622.75–8 562.83 582.85–6 9–102.91–5 1222.93–5 45–62.106–11 1342.121–136 972.121–130 107n. 342.143 812.147–8 863 114–153.1–2 563.3–4 111n. 423.4 1513.5–6 1613.12 443.17–18 553.24 1663.69 273.75 273.127–34 151–23.127–30 114–154 186n. 394.5 135, 1374.6 1374.7–16 54–55n. 204.7–8 1354.10 1374.19–20 544.23–6 554.37–47 112–134.37 56, 73n. 524.39–40 80–81n. 644.41–2 73–44.47–50 54, 574.51–2 574.53–66 76–74.63–6 192n. 474.69–70 544.71–84 91–924.71–82 113–44.93–103 73, 794.105–8 424.149–55 77–8

219

220

INDEX LOCORUM

4.167 80–81n. 644.175–6 111n. 425 57n. 25, 178–95.1–4 1375.3 575.9–32 134n. 155.9–12 645.13–30 725.13–20 505.17–18 645.17 725.20–21 865.21 725.21–2 1065.33–40 495.33–8 615.40 625.43–8 455.43–8 655.51–2 1225.61–4 1065.63–4 107n. 345.68–70 445.71–74 106–75.79–80 515.89–90 45, 635.99–104 815.127–8 1705.130 575.145–8 57, 193–45.149–50 575.150 1555.158 184, 1926 172–36.7 1506.15–16 1506.21–2 55n. 226.21 776.24–6 886.28–38 1706.29 58n. 26, 776.32–7 896.39–40 89, 1706.40 906.45–6 52n. 15, 58n. 266.55 47, 1686.61–2 171–26.65 1736.69–72 107n. 346.71–2 1166.73 626.75–8 134n. 146.76 58n. 266.79 776.83–4 626.109–10 151n. 406.127–8 184, 1936.131–2 1936.134 626.136 586.141–6 476.151 192n. 477 79, 161n. 1, 163n. 9, 176–87.3–4 1777.3 1807.7 1777.9 1777.13–14 987.31–5 82–837.53–6 1077.61–2 134n. 147.73 176n. 247.81–2 151n. 407.89–90 47n. 97.93–6 36n. 497.103–106 217.133 171–27.139–40 787.146–8 987.149–56 74–57.158 35n. 467.171–80 198–97.173–4 119

INDEX LOCORUM

7.175–80 176–1777.183–6 111, 1937.184 1777.195–6 86n. 58.1–5 988.15–16 988.33 488.35 488.48 488.49–50 768.57–63 1098.65–74 768.75–6 778.87–8 52n. 158.103 488.109–14 489 134–5, 190–19.19–24 1839.23–4 190n. 459.73–80 190n. 459.101–2 190n. 459.115–116 167n. 169.139–42 167n. 169.144 1359.145 135n. 169.152 135n. 169.158 135n. 169.164 135n. 1610.7–8 69–7010.9–16 6910.9–13 9410.13–14 71n. 4810.19–24 7010.19–20 95–610.19 10810.21–4 10710.25–30 7010.25–28 107n. 3410.31–4 9310.37–8 11210.43–108 10.47–8 10810.49–50 9310.51–7 7110.51–6 65n. 3810.55–6 108–910.58 71n. 4810.64–6 10610.73–5 65n. 3810.73–4 7010.75 7110.79–88 10510.83–8 7010.93–5 71n. 4710.95–8 105n. 3310.95 52n. 1510.116 70–110.126–9 16210.133–6 11711 16311.2–4 15611.3–4 178, 19311.27 15711.47–54 155–612 32, 48, 187–9, 19512.7–8 17112.23–5 4712.23–4 7812.24 60n. 3012.29–36 87–8812.33–4 195n. 5212.55–6 9112.61 6112.89–91 15412.89 16712.105–11 4112.105–10 105–612.115 9612.131–6 4112.133–6 18612. 135–6 170–112.147–8 17112.187–90 11612.208–9 18712.212 18713.7–8 150

221

222

INDEX LOCORUM

13.12–20 86–713.13–14 15013.17–20 107n. 3413.21–4 10813.33–4 10813.107–8 82n. 6813.115–22 6813.117–22 66–6713.117–20 18213.124 12013.131–2 12013.135–6 12013.151–8 65–613.165–6 161n. 114.37–8 120–114.41–2 12114.116–18 121–214.131–2 12116 33n. 4216.3 15316.13–14 13016.15–16 128n. 816.16–18 129n. 916.19–20 128n. 816.29 12816.105–6 12816.129–30 128n. 816.163–4 128n. 816.169–70 128n. 816.213–62 152n. 4216.243–5 15316.255–6 153n. 4316.319–24 12917 33n. 4217.1–4 14717.1–2 2917.37–8 36n. 5017.77–82 15317.87–90 15317.87–8 16417.111 13017.119–20 36n. 5017.123–4 36n. 5017.127–8 13117.137–8 13117.141–4 3017.147–8 36n. 5017.165–6 3617.178 36n. 5017.193–6 192n. 4717.261–3 15417.263 13118.1–2 13818.9–14 14318.9–12 129n. 1018.15–22 137–818.16–18 138n. 2418.25 13818.37–46 129n. 1018.75–104 16518.109–10 16518.111–18 14318.114–16 174–518.124 12918.183–6 129n. 1018.193–4 16518.217–8 138–919.5–7 13219.9–10 139n. 2519.22 13219.33–48 14719.38 17519.49 16519.55–66 165–619.92–4 132–319.142 16619.151–5 14719.209–10 15020.9–20 129–3020.38 14520.49 192n. 4720.69 192n. 4720.209–10 14320.237–40 9

INDEX LOCORUM

21.1–2 14621.13–18 147n. 3621.15–16 15721.17–26 147–821.49–50 14621.53 14621.69–70 14421.88–90 143–421.95–107 79–8021.95–6 14421.103–4 146n. 3521.105–6 14421.107 14521.110–12 14521.116 55n. 2221.121–2 55n. 22, 146n. 3521.169–74 147n. 3621.189–92 147n. 3621.211–12 14921.212 14521.214–220 144n. 3121.240 145n. 3321.246 128; Metamorphoses 1.548–52 86n. 93.158–9 683.359–510 63n. 344.285–388 26n. 315.337–571 24n. 195.385–91 68n. 426.1–145 1806.574–5 776.587 69n. 457.1–71 48, 787.11–71 588.188 113n. 459.140–155 1919.454–665 1579.520 1579.523–5 1599.564–5 1339.670–797 26n. 3110.250–9 93–9410.281 9410.293–4 9410.446 69n. 4511.710–48 97n. 22; Tristia 1.7.15–18 1582.20 1402.253–4 40n. 532.279–312 40n. 533.14.8–14 159 PARMENIDES ; fr.12 D-K 62–63 PLATO ; Phaedrus 274c–275b 140274e6 141275a 142275d–e5 140–1275e 142; Republic 431b9–c3 136514a.1–515c1 99n. 24; Symposium 203d 59n. 29, 112; Timaeus 48e–69a5 10148e2–49a7 99–10049–51 157–8n. 5350c7–d3 10050d2 10150e4–6 100n. 2552a8–b4 100n. 2552d5–e6 101 PLAUTUS ; Pseudolus 3–132 139 PROPERTIUS ; Elegies 1.1.1–15 59n. 29

223

224

INDEX LOCORUM

1.1.9–15 79n. 601.3.1–2 951.10.1–10 165n. 111.18.21–2 86n. 81.20.33–38 80n. 632.15 165n. 114.2 254.3 25, 1744.3.23–8 174 SAPPHO ; fr. 16 L–P 93n. 16fr. 31.7–9 L–P 88n. 11; Scholion in Apollonium Rhodium 1.247–9 11.910 173n. 21 SENECA ; Medea 301–79 60n. 31; Phaedra 42 73n. 49483–564 67–8483–5 68502 73513–4 74 SOPHOCLES ; Trachiniae 178–9 190497–530 167–8n. 16731–2 190–1 STATIUS ; Silvae 3.5.44–9 14n. 4 THEOCRITUS ; Idylls 2.82–3 88n. 1113.39–45 80n. 6318.47–8 86n. 7 VALERIUS FLACCUS ; Argonautica 2.425 173n. 21 VIRGIL ; Aeneid 2.268 69n. 454 79, 175–64.1–5 67n. 414.79 18236 n. 494.260–78 176, 1854.281 1764.328 1724.469–73 36n. 494.551 74n. 534.553–5 1764.560–4 1854.566–7 1794.646 1774.657 59–60n. 306.473–5 216.723 89n. 127.475–510 82n. 6612.67–9 78; Eclogues 8.37–42 88n. 1110.40–3 5010.52–4 86n. 8; Georgics 1.121–136 603.285 89 n. 12

GENERAL INDEX abandonment 46–7, 70, 90, 181 absence 59, 60, 106 Acontius 9, 129–30, 136, 142 Activist feminism 4–5 Aeneas 175–8 Alexander romance 124 Altman, J. 135 Aphrodite 54, 61, 62 Apollonius Rhodius 89, 96, 168–9, 192 Arachne 181 Ariadne 27–8, 52, 69, 70–1, 90, 91, 93–6, 107, 108, 117, 162 Aristophanes 54 art 53, 54, 58, 59, 60, 65, 68; and cares 60; as fraud 66, 68, 69; of hunting 72; and wandering 113 authorial intention 2, 18 authorial irony 21, 34 authors in erasure 38, 119 Barchiesi, A. 2, 18, 20, 31, 91, 178 Barthes, R. 125–6, 136 Bellerophon 151 Bergren, A. 101 binary thinking 135; and feminist thought 136 biologism ; avoidance of 157; denial of 110 birth ; of book 156–7; as creative act 155 body, ; of book 156–7; and feminist thought 157–8 book as baby 155–7 brevity 162–3 Briseis 55, 56, 114–5, 118, 151–2, 161, 166 Byblis 157, 159 Callisto 81 Canace 39, 121, 147, 155–6, 157, 159, 163, 193 Carson, A. 118–9 Casali, S. 21 Catullus 52, 64, 88, 90, 142 Cixous, H. 6, 109–11, 120; and binary thinking 136 Clarissa (Richardson) 124 closure, 35, 43, 86, 163, ignorance of official183, 84, 192 Chion of Heraclea 124 Coming to Writing (Cixous) 109, 110 Conte, G. B. 19, 90–1 Confinement 112 cosmogony 53–4 Creon 188–9 crying and writing 111 cultus of love 30 Cupid 82 Cydippe 9, 39, 79–80, 143, 144, 145–6, 149, 156–7

Daphne 86n. 9 Daphnis and Chloe (Longus) 68 deceit 60, 67, 82, 151

226

GENERAL INDEX

Deianira 134–5, 184, 190–1 De Luce, J. 81 Demiurge 101 Derrida, J. 36–7, 141–3 Derridean supplement 142–3, 143n. 30; unpredictability of 142 Desmond, M. 35 Dido 21–2, 35–6, 74–6, 78, 81–2, 98, 107, 111, 119, 133–4, 171–2, 175–8, 180, 193, 198–9 Diotima 112 dissemination ; and feminine writing 110 displacement 106 elegiac addressee 27, 134 elegiac closure (see also closure)20, 86 elegiac counter-feminism 25 elegiac ego 25; intricacies of 27 elegiac puella 86; carved 106; ‘dismantling of ’ 20; oppression of 25; as reader 198 elegiac silence (in epic) 172 Empedocles 46, 53 enclosure (see also closure)1, 11, 27, 51, 85–6, 99, 181; break from 103, 104, 105; as freedom 181, 183; as threat 187–9 epic narrator 89, 89n. 12, 170, 182, 183 epistolarity 123–61 passim; and female writers 125n. 5; and gender 123–61passim esp.125–6, 128, 135, 139; paradox of 135 epistolary novel ; ancient 124, 124n. 4; modern 125, 135 epistolary theorists (ancient) 124n. 3 Eros 53; as narrative drive 192–3, 193n. 48; and poetics 112; as a teacher 72 essentialism 5–6, 8, 110, 110n. 38, 157 Euripides ; Iphigeneia in Aulis 126–7; Medea 187–9 exile, ; and inability to write 159 Farrell, J. 3, 31 female subjectivity (see also feminine economy, gender)25–6, 33, 106 female expression, awakening of 93–9 female microcosms 121; abandonment of 122 female ‘muteness’ (see also silence)85–8 feminine economy, ; culturally constructed 110, 110n. 39 feminine voice 2; breaking linearity 104; flow of 109, 116; inclusiveness of 118; recuperation of 17, 31, 90, 94–5, 158, 158n. 53; under supervision 103; suppression of 25, 35 feminine writing (see also feminine voice)29; as appropriation 36–7; as disruption

GENERAL INDEX

103–4; emergence of 30–1, 81–3, 93–5, 107–8, 144; lawlessness of 111; marginality of 132–3; as resistance 147, 178; strain of 11, 36, 81–3, 95–6, 107–8 Fetterley, J. 35 French feminism 2, 6 Furies 52 Gallus 50 Gaze ; male 4, 27, 92, 92n. 15; female 91–3, 93n. 16 gender (see also feminine economy, female subjectivity); cultural construction of 25–6, 37, 117–8, 132, 158; interplay with genre 194–5 gender mobility 24, 26, 158 gendered modes ; of writing 12, 31, 136; of reading 34, 35 gods 49, 52 Gold, B. 25 Golden Age nostalgia, 44–53; tensions in 73n. 49 Gorgias ; Helen 61 Lettres Portugaises (Guillerague) 124 Hallett, J. 24 Hector 172 Helen 29–30, 36–7, 57, 81, 130–1, 146, 147, 152–4, 164 Hellenistic poets/lovers 86, 86n. 7 Hermione 48, 52, 76, 77, 98, 147 Hero 39, 132, 150, 165, 174–5 heroes ; as elegists 164, 165 Heroides ; authenticity of 31–2; dismissal by critics 3, 13–6, 162, 180; elegiacity of 19; and generic fusion 13–4, 167–8, 195, 195n. 52; and humour 15; modern literary imitations of 124n. 2; reception of 32–3, 38 heroines ; against the official myths 162, 176, 178, 184, 193; ‘awakening’ 93–8; in consensus with Ovid (and heroes) 164, 165–7, 172; elegiac discourses of 155–6; in exile 39–42; and feminine narratives 6; as independent writers 3, 11, 16, 93–8, 131, 162; and knowledge 56, 57; and metapoetics 11–2, 18, 29–31, 76, 82, 97, 112, 119, 130, 148, 156–9, 171, 198–9; as resisting readers 38–41; restricted awareness of 163, 173, 179–80, 181; as twodimensional caricatures 14 Hesiod ; Theogony 53–4, 61 Homer ; Iliad 172; Odyssey 182 Hymenaeus 52 Hypermestra 120–1, 121–2, 147 Hypsipyle 47, 52, 58, 62, 72, 88–90, 116

227

228

GENERAL INDEX

identity 51, 99 ignorance 99 Imaginary Order 102 incest 156–7 initiation 51 innocence 11, 29, 51, 57, 72, 144 and Ch. 3passim; abandonment of 146; and danger 79, 79n. 61; in love 55, 59, 59n. 28; and virginal independence 79–80, 81; untenable 81–2 interpretation ; blend of with primary art 197; and continuity 7; and end of story 9–10; as interception 28, 39–40; and irony 8; and literary theory 7; and multiple readership 38–40; as transgression 42 intertextuality 2, 4, 10, 17–8; and heroines' concerns 37–8; and heroines' stories 69–70; and ideology 4, 20–1; limitations of 21–2 Io 81 isolation 85–6, 114 Jacobson, H. 14–5 Jacobson, R. 115–6 Keats, J. 90 Kennedy, D. 5, 8, 18, 21 Kristeva, J. 22–3, 33, 101, 102 labour of writing 155–7 lament 90; as metapoetic tool 91 language, ; as drama 23; physical 151–4; search for genuine 155–6; as transparent 151 La Nouvelle Héloise (Rousseau) 124 Laodamia 65–7, 87, 108, 120, 150, 161 Law of the Father 97–8, 144, 145, 178; defiance of 147–8, 156–7 Leander 129, 137–9, 143, 165–6, 174–5 lena 20 letter (see also letter writing and epistolarity); and addressee 134, 180; between speech and writing 140; between presence and absence 140; enduring nature of 150; as event 133–4; in medias res 135; precariousness of 137; and proximity 138; purloined 137; and revelations 137, 150; as unresolved discourse 135, 135n. 17 letter writing ; as comfort in delay 150; and deferral 127, 131, 138; and distance 129, 138; and life ‘in the margins’ 133; and plot 126–7; and resistance 130; vs speech 135 Liaisons Dangereures (Laclos) 124 linearity 108 love ; as art 54, 57, 57n. 25, 59n. 29, 62, 65, 73, 81; as fraud 61–2, 63, 66, 71,

GENERAL INDEX

78; as fusion 44–7, 63, 65; maimed 77–8; unrequited 88; as wisdom 112 Lucretia (Martial) 40 Madness 108 maenad 57, 91 manliness, ancient conceptions of 114 maternal procreation (see also motherhood)159 Medea 32, 40–2, 47–8, 58, 62, 78–9, 87–8, 96–7, 105–6, 154, 170–1, 186–9, 195 memory ; drug for 141; poetic 45, 46, 48, 67, 70, 74, 76, 77, 106, 134, metapoetics (see also heroines and metapoetics)18 metaphor, 115–9, 117n. 48; as dance 115–6; as defiance 118; as feminine spur in language 117–20; as interpretative tool 2, 3, 36–7, 39–42, 108, 141, 155–7, 180–1; and linear order 118; as tranference 118 metonymy 116–7, 117n. 48 mimesis 112 motherhood ; and purity 159; as receptacle 157 Muses, inspiration of 158 myth of Theuth 140 narratives, of past authority 38, 91, 92, 98, 104, 121, 122, 162, 164, 178; inadequacy of 145; suspension of 146 nostalgia 81 O'Connor, F. 168 Oenone 44–6, 49–50, 57, 61, 64–5, 72, 81, 106, 122, 134, 155, 178–9, 184, 192, 193–4 orality 102 Ovid, ; Amores 197, 198; Ars Amatoria 129, 131, 148–9; the elegist 164, 172; as extradiegetic author 164; Fasti 90–1; Metamorphoses 26, 48, 58, 68, 78–9, 93–4, 133, 157, 181, 191; Remedia Amoris 20; Tristia 158, 159 Padel, R. 85; Pamela (Richardson) 124 paradise, ; blemished 74–5; descent from 61, 64, 67, 69, 70 paradisiac imagery 48–51, 53, 58, 59, 67 Paris 128, 136, 152–4 Parmenides 62 pastoral ; genre 50, 51–2, 52n. 13; love 51, 64 pathetic fallacy 106–7 Peleus 52 Penelope 90, 91, 103, 104, 175, 181–2, 192 persuasion 3, 4 Phaedra 21, 42, 54–5, 56–7, 73–4, 76–7, 91–2, 112–4, 135, 137, 147–50 philia 61 Philomela 81

229

230

GENERAL INDEX

Phyllis 9–10, 46–7, 48–9, 55–6, 58, 61–2, 81, 86, 97, 122, 134, 154, 184 pictoriality 87–93 Plato ; Phaedrus 140–3; Republique 99, 136; Symposium 112; Timaeus 100–4, 157 Platonic chora 100–4; as active space 101, 106; appropriated by feminist discourse 101–2, 102n. 28; and creativity 112; as immobile enclave 100; and maternal energy 101–3; and metaphor 118; as pressure on the Symbolic Order 103; resourcefulness of 104; as rupture 102; as a threat 112–3; tumbling 108; unruly discourse in 113 Platonic pharmacon (see also Derridean supplement)141 Plautus, ; Pseudolus 139 postmodernism 17 praeceptor amoris 20 pre-erotic harmony 47 prelinguistic order 102 procrastination 174–5 Propertius 25, 95 Pygmalion 93–4 reading ; against the grain 4; as complicity 38–40, 197; and fear 146; involved, female 34–5, 197; as resistance 35 reception 8 retreat ; precariousness of 68–9, 80, 80n. 63 Roman gardens 68n. 44 Romanticism, German 168 Rosati, G. 19 Rosenmeyer, P. A. 9 rusticitas 30, 51, 68, 72 Sappho 88 Seeck, G. 17 self-reflexive character 155 Seneca ; Hippolytus 68, 72–4, 190–1 sexuality (see also gender); as cultural index 158; and physicality 111 silence, as threatening 187–90, 191 Shlegel, F. 168 short story ; as concentrated strength 163, 181, 183, 185–7, 193; as delay 175–8, 184–6; and elegiac discourse 166–7, 171, 174, 182, 186; as ‘empty time’ in meganarratives 185–6, 187–90; and epic genre 168–70, 171, 177, 194, 182; as female microcosm 170–4; as fragmentation 168, 177, 179, 183, 186, 192; and grand narratives 162, 163; intransigence of 168, 181; ‘inward’ movement of 168–72; as modern genre 167, 167ns. 14, 15, 168; and neoteric littleness 163, 194; as nuggets of myth 163; in seams of epic narration

GENERAL INDEX

172–3, 179; seclusion of 168, 170, 173; as threat 193 Showalter, E. 157 Smith, Alden R. 33 solitude 79 Sophocles ; Trachiniae 126, 190–1 speaking subject 22, 35, 91 speech ; guileful 143; as lying 49, 70 Symbolic Order 102 Telemachus 112 text ; and physicality 111; and subjectivity 19–24 Theocritus 51–2 Thetis 52 tragedy 85 transgression 197 utopian voyages 109 Venus 81 Verducci, F. 16 Virgil ; Aeneid 78, 79, 175–6, 182, 185–6; Eclogues 50–1, 52; Georgics 60 weeping as release 109 woman ; as statue 86, 86n. 6, 87, 143 Wooden Horse 112 writing (see also female writing, epistolarity); as dissimulation 143–5; as opposed to speech 140–1; as pharmacon 149, 153–4; as piercing 144–5; as poison 145; in solitude 147–8; as taciturnity 145, 149; validating orality 150; vulnerability of 148–9 writing in sisterhood 121; loss of 121–2 writing tablets ; a metaphor for female body 157–8 Zeitlin, F. 112

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