Heroides

The subtractive test is the book’s oldest charge, and it holds in part. Fifteen women in one situation use a shared repertory: the reproach, the recital of past favours, the catalogue of the man’s ingratitude, the prospect of death, the request that he return. Hermione, Laodamia and Hypermestra could go with little lost to what the book knows, and Phyllis and Oenone repeat Ariadne and Dido move for move. Against this, the strongest letters are each required: Penelope’s opening sets the book’s terms, a letter that asks not to be answered; Medea alone already holds the catastrophe in her hand; Canace writes with a pen in one hand and a sword in the other. Each of the double letters needs its answer. Variation on one situation is the design, and the design is partly what the charge describes. The cap is met, and only just.

Score: 7.5 / 10

What the book brings into the open can be stated, and it holds: the heroic story as lived by those it uses and leaves. Women who were incidents in another man’s epic or tragedy are given the speaking part, and rhetoric, persuasion and self-deception prove to be the instruments of the abandoned as of the powerful. Briseis writes to Achilles about the embassy of the ninth book of the Iliad, which offered her back with gifts, and the war story turns into a story about property. Dido makes Aeneas’s pietas a lover’s excuse. Held below the gate because the disclosure is made through ethopoeia, the school exercise of speaking as a character, and many letters render a mood and a position more than a condition; the irony of a reader who knows the end discloses more than any single voice does.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The elevation is real and intermittent, and it is pathos rather than grandeur. The heights: Ariadne on the rock, waving her veil at a ship that cannot see her, her cry returned by the empty shore; Dido’s swan singing by the Maeander, with Aeneas’s sword in her lap as she writes; Canace with the sword beside her and her newborn exposed; Medea’s last lines, which hold the murders unspoken in a threat. Hero’s lamp and Leander’s sea lift the double letters once. What holds the axis is frequency. The register is rhetoric, the wit cuts the pathos often and by design, and many letters run level from complaint to complaint without rising. A book that rises in five or six of its twenty-one pieces stands below a work that rises throughout.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The myths are all inherited, from Homer, the tragedians, Apollonius, Catullus 64 and the Aeneid. What the book builds out of them is one pattern, and that part is load-bearing: the woman left on the shore, writing to the one who sailed. Ariadne on Naxos, Dido at Carthage, Phyllis at the sea, Oenone on Ida and Hypsipyle on Lemnos are one figure in many particulars, and the figure outlived the book as an archetype of its own. The second construction is dramatic irony: Laodamia fearing for the first man ashore at Troy, Hypermestra in her cell, Deianira learning what the robe has done as she writes. Held below the gate because each letter evokes its myth whole from a source, the deserted woman was already in Catullus and Virgil, and the pattern is built across the book rather than within each letter.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Ovid claimed to have invented the form, and the claim is substantially just. Letters inside earlier poems were to hand, Propertius 4.3, Arethusa to Lycotas, the nearest of them, and so were the tragic monologue and the rhetorical schools’ suasoria and ethopoeia; but no one before him had made a book of verse letters from mythical women, or turned epic and tragedy round so that the incident speaks. The swerve is double, from narrative to monologue and from the hero to the one he leaves, and the double letters swerve again, into exchange. The stake was real: fifteen variations on one situation risked the monotony charged against them for centuries. Held at the gate rather than above it because the materials were inherited, elegy had already made the lover’s complaint its subject, and the wager was a young poet’s, smaller than the one he placed later in the Metamorphoses.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the book loses much of what it knows. A narrative would tell the end; the letter cannot know it, and the moment fixed before the catastrophe is the form’s chief instrument. The letter is also addressed and futile: Penelope asks Ulysses not to write back, Ariadne writes from an island with no messenger to a man on a ship, Dido to a man already gone. The writing becomes the subject, and the woman made the author of her own story is what the form says. The double letters add what the singles lack, a reply, and Helen’s answer shows persuasion working on her as she resists it. Held off the higher figures because in the weaker letters the form holds the complaint without adding to it, and the frame repeated fifteen times becomes at times a container.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence first, and the return has two phases. Through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the book was a school text, mined for rhetoric, morals and stories, glossed and imitated without end. From the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth it was read mainly as juvenilia and charged with monotony. Since the 1970s, from Jacobson’s book on the letters onward, a large criticism of the heroine as writer, of intertext and of gender has found what the older readings missed: the irony of the fixed moments, the writers as readers of their own sources, the women’s command of rhetoric. Questions stay open: how far wit undercuts the pathos, and whether the women write against their poets or are spoken through by one. Held below the higher figures because much of the yield is critical and intertextual, and a single letter, once its irony is seen, is less inexhaustible than the book.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The field is Latin poetry of the Augustan age, and behind it Greek and Latin literature to that date. The intrinsic force is a new genre made at one stroke, the verse letter of a mythical or historical figure, and a new stance towards the inherited stories, told from the margin by those they used. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide and lasting. A school text through the Middle Ages, the book shaped the female complaint in medieval poetry, Chaucer’s Dido and his Legend of Good Women, Boccaccio’s Fiammetta, the troubadour and courtly epistle; it founded the heroical epistle of Drayton’s England’s Heroical Epistles, Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard and a long European line of héroïdes; and it lives again in modern retellings of myth from the women’s side. Held below the higher figures because much of the reach runs through a sub-genre and the classroom, and the Metamorphoses carries the larger share of Ovid’s redirection of the field.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Two thousand years, read without a break: copied, taught and imitated through the Middle Ages, printed from the first decades of printing, translated into every major European language. The single letters survive whole in form. The charges are on form and on presence. Sappho’s letter came down apart from the rest; parts of the double letters are held to rest on late witnesses, and interpolation is suspected in places; the authorship of the fifteenth letter and of the pairs has been disputed. The book as read is a little less secure than a text handed down whole. And for a long stretch it was read mainly in the academy and dismissed as juvenilia, recovered only in the last half century, though the neglect was of esteem, not of presence: it stayed in print and in the schools. Those charges hold it a step below a whole text continuously read.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Judged on the Latin. The elegiac couplet in Ovid’s hands is as fluent and controlled as in any Latin poet: the sense closed within the couplet, the pentameter used to turn, cap or undercut the hexameter, antithesis and paradox set at the line’s end. The openings are made with care: Penelope’s two lines, and Dido’s swan, which declares the letter a dying song. Within the shared repertory the rhetoric is varied by character: Medea’s cold catalogue of what she did for Jason, Phaedra’s sophistical persuasion of Hippolytus, Helen’s reply that refuses and concedes in one sentence, Deianira’s refrain turning a letter into a lament. Held from the top on two charges: figures and arguments recur from letter to letter, and the wit is at times its own end where the situation asks for more. The finer sound of the verse is beyond this reading.

Score: 9.0 / 10

One law governs the single letters: a voice writing to an absence, at a fixed moment, from inside a story whose end the reader holds. Take the two most distant: Penelope’s patient reproach of a husband who will come home, and Medea’s threat to a husband she is about to destroy. They obey the same law, the writer’s ignorance or knowledge of the end measured against the reader’s. The range of tone inside it is wide, from the near comedy of Phaedra’s arguments to the horror of Canace’s. The double letters bend the law: the exchange, the lighter and more erotic register of Acontius and Cydippe, and the later date are felt as a second book attached to the first, though Hero and Leander keep the singles’ shadow of a death ahead. Sappho, a historical figure among mythical ones, is a further wrinkle. That seam holds the axis here.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Judged as a collection of short poems in one situation. Consciousness is held fully: each letter is a mind arguing with itself. Love comes in many forms: marital, adulterous, incestuous in Canace, a stepmother’s in Phaedra, the girl tricked by an oath in Cydippe. The family is there in Canace’s father and Hypermestra’s, and in Medea’s children; war and the state at the edge, Troy behind Penelope, Briseis, Laodamia, Oenone and Helen, Dido’s Carthage, the Danaids; the sacred in oaths, gods and Fate invoked; death in most letters. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: every order is seen from one vantage, the separated lover, and at one moment, the writing, so that war, the city and the gods are backdrop, not held in structure. The book holds more than a body of lyric and less than a narrative of its length.

Score: 7.3 / 10