Heroides

Lore & Background

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. 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 a new literary genre. The full extent of Ovid's originality has been a point of scholarly contention, with E. J. Kenney noting that the Latin word 'novavit' is ambiguous, either meaning 'invented' or 'renewed', and possibly obscuring Ovid's debt to Propertius' Arethusa (4.3).

Reader's Guide

The Heroides represent some of Ovid's earliest poetic efforts, with the most probable date of composition for the majority of the single Heroides ranging between c. 25 and 16 BC. Questions of authenticity have often inhibited literary appreciation, with scholars debating individual interpolations, authorship of entire poems by a possible Ovidian impersonator, and the relation of the Double Heroides to the singles. Despite these disputes, the tendency in scholarly readings from the later 1990s onward has been towards careful literary explication of individual letters, often assuming Ovidian authorship. The Heroides were popularized by the Loire valley poet Baudri of Bourgueil in the late eleventh century, and Héloïse used them as models in her famous letters to Peter Abelard. A French translation by Octavien de Saint-Gelais at the end of the 15th century introduced many non-Latin readers to the work and inspired later creative responses.

Did You Know?

• Ovid himself claimed in Ars Amatoria 3.345–6 that he originated this sort of composition, though the Latin term 'novavit' is ambiguous and may mean 'renewed' rather than 'invented'.