Ovid’s Heroines (Heroides in the original Latin) are among his more controversial writings. They could have been written early in his career, or quite late, and some have claimed that few of its letters were even written by him. Until the late nineteenth century, they were among his most popular works, at times better-known than his Metamorphoses. Bizarrely, it was after the critical attention they received during the nineteenth century that they started to decline in popularity.

Heroines consist of two series of letters, and Ovid claimed that they established a new genre of epistolary (poetic) fiction. The genre has developed considerably since, although it remains limited in scope and popularity.

The first series, consisting of letters 1 to 15, are fictional letters written by a woman, one of Ovid’s heroines, to her partner during a time of separation. Their situations vary considerably, from Penelope’s imminent reunion with her husband after twenty years apart, to several who knew that they could never be reunited and chose suicide.

The second series, letters 16 to 21, consists of three pairs of fictional letters, the first from the man to the woman, and the second from the woman to the man, in relationships where Ovid considers the woman to have been a heroine. They’re accounts of famous couples, whose lives weren’t necessarily ended because of their relationship. Indeed, the collection ends with the thoroughly positive story of Cydippe and Acontius, who seem to have lived happily thereafter.

The most recent literary critical examinations of Ovid’s letters consider them to have been highly innovative in their approach to gender and its roles. For a male Augustan poet to have even considered writing such a collection seems extraordinary. When you read the individual letters, many have deep insight, and a timelessness that’s exceptional among contemporary literature.

These Heroines have inspired many fine paintings and other works of art over the centuries, many of which share Ovid’s radical ideas on women and their roles. I hope that this series of articles reflects those paintings, and does justice to Ovid’s poetic epistles.

References

Wikipedia.
AS Kline’s translation.
The Latin Library‘s text in Latin.
Downloadable PDFs of Loeb Classical Library – L041 includes the Heroides in English and Latin.
Arthur Palmer’s edition and commentary (1898).

Murgatroyd, Paul, Reeves, Bridget, & Parker, Sarah (2017) Ovid’s Heroides, a New Translation and Critical Essays, Routledge. ISBN 978 1 138 72216 3. (Essential and comprehensive.)

Boyd, Barbara W (ed) (2002) Brill’s Companion to Ovid, Brill. ISBN 978 90 04 22676 0.
Hardie, Philip (2002) The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 77528 1.
Knox, Peter E (ed) (2009, 2013) A Companion to Ovid, Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978 1 118 45134 2.
Syme, Sir Ronald (1978) History in Ovid, Oxford UP. ISBN 019 814825 9.

Kenney, EJ (1996) Ovid Heroides, XVI-XXI, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 46623 3.
Knox, Peter E (1995) Ovid Heroides, Select Epistles, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 36834 6.
Palmer, A (ed) (1898, 2005) Ovid Heroides, vol 1, Latin text, Bristol Phoenix Press. ISBN 978 1 904675 05 0.
Palmer, A (ed) (1898, 2005) Ovid Heroides, vol 2, Commentary, Bristol Phoenix Press. ISBN 978 1 904675 06 8.

Gantz, Timothy (1993) Early Greek Myth, A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, vol 1, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 85360 9.
Gantz, Timothy (1993) Early Greek Myth, A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, vol 2, Johns Hopkins UP. ISBN 978 0 801 85362 3.
Morford, MPO, Lenardon, RJ, & Sham, M (2015) Classical Mythology, 10th ed., Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 19 999739 8.

1: Penelope to Ulysses, Penelope in Ithaca
She waited patiently and faithfully for his return from the war against Troy.

2: Phyllis to Demophoon, Abandonment, suicide and scandal
She fell in love with him as he was returning from Troy, but they couldn’t marry at the time, and he later abandoned her.

3: Briseis to Achilles, The anger of Achilles and the faithfulness of Briseis
Taken as a concubine after her family had been killed, she remained faithful to Achilles when taken by Agamemnon.

4: Phaedra to Hippolytus, Phaedra’s shame and a chariot accident
A stepmother who fell in love with her stepson.

5: Oenone to Paris, Paris’s jilted lover
Paris’s first wife, whom he abandoned when he abducted Helen to Troy.

6: Hypsipyle to Jason, Jason’s first abandoned wife
A queen he married then abandoned on his way to Colchis and the prize of the Golden Fleece.

7: Dido to Aeneas, Dido’s doomed affair
Widowed Queen of Carthage who wanted him to stay when he sailed off to found the precursor to Rome.

8: Hermione to Orestes, The Plight of Hermione
First agreed to marry Orestes, but forced to marry Pyrrhus instead, and a rival of Andromache.

9: Deianira to Hercules, Blood of a centaur and the troubled woman
Married to Hercules, when he left her for Iole, she sent him a tunic impregnated with toxic blood from the centaur Nessus.

10: Ariadne to Theseus, Ariadne’s revenge
She helped him kill the minotaur, then eloped with him to Naxos, where he abandoned her.

11: Canace to Macareus, Canace and Laodamia in secret
Pregnant from her incestuous relationship with her brother.

12: Medea to Jason, The many faces of Medea
Sorceress who ensured Jason won the Golden Fleece, but later abandoned, so she killed Jason’s next wife and her own two children.

13: Laodamia to Protesilaus, Canace and Laodamia in secret
Widow of the first Greek to land and engage the Trojans at the start of the war.

14: Hypermnestra to Lynceus, The crime of faithfulness
Refused to kill her newlywed husband.

15: Sappho to Phaon, Sappho and the ferryman
A well-known Lesbian who is claimed to have ended her life for the love of a ferryman.

16, 17: Paris to Helen, Helen to Paris, Helen of Troy: victim or villain? part 1 and part 2
Abducted or seduced by the Prince of Troy, she later helped the Greek forces take the city.

18, 19: Leander to Hero, Hero to Leander, Paintings of Forbidden Love: Hero and Leander
He swam the Hellespont to meet his lover, until one night it went wrong, he drowned and she killed herself.

20, 21: Acontius to Cydippe, Cydippe to Acontius, Cydippe’s apple of love
He tricked her into vowing to marry him using an apple bearing an inscription.

There’s more to classical Greek and Roman myths than rape, murder and metamorphoses. Sometimes they tell touching stories of true love, like that of Acontius and Cydippe. You won’t have heard of them, because their story is tucked away in a couple of imagined letters in Ovid’s Heroines (letters 20 and 21), and in his Art of Love (1, from line 457 on).

Acontius was a young man from the lovely Greek island of Keos, who fell hopelessly in love with the beautiful young woman Cydippe. Sadly, she was of higher social standing than he was, and such a marriage was unthinkable to her family. He devised an ingenious plan to trick her into making a commitment to him: he wrote the words I swear before Diana that I will marry only Acontius on an apple.

He then approached Cydippe when she was in the temple of Diana, and rolled the inscribed apple in front of her. Her nurse picked it up, and handed it to Cydippe to read his words aloud before the altar, so binding her to the vow.

The wonderful Swiss painter Angelica Kauffman exhibited a painting titled Acontius and Cydippe at the Royal Academy in London in 1771. Like so many of her paintings, it was wildly popular, but now appears to have been lost. A copy was made by someone from her circle, and that has survived, although it was earlier thought to show Orestes and Iphigenia.

This surviving version of Acontius and Cydippe Before the Altar of Diana shows Cydippe with Acontius behind her, armed with his inscribed apple, but there’s no sign of any nurse. Acontius holds his ingeniously inscribed apple high above Cydippe, apparently waiting for the perfect moment to drop it in front of her.

Kauffmann’s painting was engraved, and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm has what I understand to be a hand-coloured print made by the Swedish painter Johan Fredrik Martin.

That’s a fine narrative work that does the story justice, but pales in comparison to the painting of Cydippe in the Rijksmuseum, by a little-known Dutch artist Paulus Bor.

His Cydippe with Acontius’s Apple is undated, but probably from around 1630-40. It puts a different slant on the story: here, Cydippe leans on the altar, alone, the inscribed apple held up in her right hand. But she isn’t reading Acontius’ words: she has clearly already said those out aloud, and now seems to be thinking through the vow she has just made.

Bor paints the details of the altar exquisitely. Cydippe’s dress may be anachronistic, but Bor brings in the skull of a sacrificed goat and festoons of flowers.

She then seemingly overlooked this inadvertent commitment that she had made in front of Diana.

Sadly, Cydippe’s family had other ideas, and found her a prospective husband of appropriate status. Shortly before the couple were due to marry, Cydippe fell ill with a severe fever, and the proceedings had to be postponed. After she had recovered, a second attempt was made to marry the couple, but again Cydippe fell ill just before the ceremonies, and so the wedding had to be called off yet again.

Unsure of what to do next, Cydippe’s parents consulted the oracle at Delphi, who told them the whole story. Recognising the strength of the vow that she had made, Cydippe and her parents finally accepted the match, and Acontius and Cydippe married with the blessing of both families.

I still feel sure that some artist would have depicted some more of their story, but my reference sources only point to poetry and operas. These include an allusion in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, verse by Edward Bulwer Lytton and the artist and designer William Morris. There have been no less than six operas written about the story, including Hoffman’s Acontius und Cydippe, first performed in 1709. Apparently Angelica Kauffmann and Paulus Bor were alone among painters.