Commentary
Ovid’s Heroides are a chain of letters notionally
composed by means of mythological heroines and heroes
in elegiac couplets, the meter function ofLatin love elegy. The salient characteristic of original-
ity in this Ovidian collection is the aggregate
of the epistolary mode with elegiac style and
mythological subject remember. Most Roman love
elegy is spoken via a primary-individual lover recognized,
in vast terms, with the poet himself. The love
elegist speaks as a lover defined generically and
conventionally within a literary fiction of amor
(love/ardour), and accordingly handiest in a complicated
way can the lover/speaker represent the bio-
graphical writer. Still, the phrases of the fiction
work to merge the identities of lover and poet.
In Ovid’s H
