'Heroides' Summary

The Heroides were long held in low esteem by literary scholars but, like other works by Ovid, were re-evaluated more positively in the late 20th century. Arguably some of Ovid's most influential works (see below), one point that has greatly contributed to their mystique—and to the reverberations they have produced within the writings of later generations—is directly attributable to Ovid himself. In the third book of his Ars Amatoria, Ovid argues that in writing these fictional epistolary poems in the personae of famous heroines, rather than from a first-person perspective, he created an entirely new literary genre. Recommending parts of his poetic output as suitable reading material to his assumed audience of Roman women, Ovid wrote of his Heroides: "vel tibi composita cantetur Epistola voce: | ignotum hoc aliis ille novavit opus" (Ars Amatoria 3.345–6: "Or let an Epistle be sung out by you in practiced voice: unknown to others, he [sc. Ovid] originated this sort of composition"). The full extent of Ovid's originality in this matter has been a point of scholarly contention: E. J. Kenney, for instance, notes that "novavit is ambiguous: either 'invented' or 'renewed', cunningly obscuring without explicitly disclaiming O[vid]'s debt to Propertius' Arethusa (4.3) for the original idea." In spite of various interpretations of Propertius 4.3, consensus nevertheless concedes to Ovid the lion's share of the credit in the thorough exploration of what was then a highly innovative poetic form.