Introduction 1 Reading dangerously: Phyllis, Dido, Ariadne, and Medea 2 Reading the future: Hypsipyle, Medea, and Oenone 3 Benefits of communal writing: Canace and Hypermestra 4 A feminine reading of epic: Briseis and Hermione 5 Reading magically: Deianira and Laodamia 6 Reading like a virgin: Phaedra and Ariadne 7 Caveat lector: thoughts on gender and power Appendix A The authenticity (and 'authenticity') of Heroides 15 Bibliography Index Index Locorum

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The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides

IN THE OVIDIAN CORPUS, reading and writing are dangerous if not done with great care. Ovid’s Laodamia, both hypersensitive and unlucky, is no exception: she shows herself to be an uncritical reader who misconstrues language in a fatal way. She is also a writer, and her carmen (Her. 13) is the “wrong” kind of carmen. The letter that she writes to her husband, Protesilaus, is intended to encourage him to return from the Trojan War, but (along with some of her other behaviors) it precipitates a chain of events that is fraught with supernatural, perhaps even deadly, coincidences. Laodamia’s suspicious nature leads her to create by her very words the situation she most fears. She is, ironically, a superstitious woman in a story full of events that serve only to increase her superstition.1 Yet she herself contributes to these circumstances, most notably by creating a statue of her still-living husband and worshiping it. Because she loses control over her text, the multiple representations that Laodamia creates prove catastrophic for both Protesilaus and herself. This essay explores the literary use of erotic magic imagery in Ovid’s Heroides 13 and suggests that the ambiguity of the word carmen (“poem, magic spell”) seduces its protagonist into unwittingly replicating (and perhaps even causing) the death of her husband. The key to unlocking the magical referents of the poem lies in the wax imago2 of Protesilaus and in Laodamia’s account of her behavior during his absence. Commentators and critics have often marked her actions as peculiar, but few offer convincing interpretations, and the imago has received infrequent treatment. Most discussions of the poem to date treat isolated actions of Laodamia and therefore fail to make sense of the poem as a whole.

(Un)sympathetic Magic: A Study of Heroides 13

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Ovid's Heroides and the Ethopoeia

summary: Through a detailed analysis of key passages in Heroides 14, this ar ticle seeks to show that Hypermestras letter, generally considered to be peculiar and rhetorically ineffective, is in fact cleverly designed to elicit distinct re sponses from its two potential readers. Either the letter will be read by Lynceus, its addressee, who will return to save Hypermestra from her father, Danaus, or (more likely) the letter will be intercepted by Danaus, who will find in it infor mation written to convince him that he has mistakenly imprisoned his daugh ter. Hypermestra s hitherto unnoticed sophistication in epistolography prefig ures her larger success: she survives to found a royal line at Argos.

Chain(ed) Mail: Hypermestra and the Dual Readership of Heroides 14

Scribentis imagines in Ovidian Authorship and Scholarship. A study of the Epistula Sapphus (Heroides 15)

Ovids Heroides: Studien zur inneren Form und zur Motivation. Inaugural-Dissertation der Philosophischen Fakultät der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

Eberhard Oppel

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Ovids Heroides: Studien zur inneren Form und zur Motivation. Inaugural-Dissertation der Philosophischen Fakultät der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg