Thomas Munro (Yale University)
Ovid is the definitive poet of Rome. Many of his works express, in one form or another, the strong ‘gravitational pull’ of the city. In his early erotic works, the city is the setting; the Ars Amatoria, for example, means nothing without Rome as its backdrop. In the Metamorphoses the inexorable direction of travel is towards Rome, and as Ovid meanders from myth to myth, we are pulled closer and closer to the city. Even in the exilic literature, the city makes its presence felt through its absence; a case in point is Tristia 1, where the general direction of travel away from Rome is persistently complicated by Ovid’s efforts to resist (most prominently in 1.1 and 1.3).
One collection seems, prima facie, to avoid this tendency, which characterizes the rest of Ovid’s oeuvre. The Heroides map out a wide-ranging mythical world, extending from Ithaca to Carthage, Naxos to Troy, without establishing a clear central point (such as Rome) or straightforwardly juxtaposing a second location (i.e., Tomis) with the capital. This presentation of a global village populated by letter-writers and (implied) letter-readers is not unproblematic. The Heroides consistently remind us of the risks and difficulties of communication across distance. On numerous occasions, Ovid draws attention to the failure of the communicative strategies being employed: Penelope’s epistle is the last of a series she claims to have sent the absent Ulysses, and we know that this too will fail, since her husband has already returned; abandoned by Theseus, Ariadne is forced to write her letter as a last resort, having failed to catch his attention by other means; in the cases of Briseis and Hypermnestra, Ovid dramatizes the risk that information contained in the letters might be obscured or damaged.
After briefly considering how the Heroides enact the difficulties of communicating over space, I will investigate the alternative communicative frameworks constructed by the collection as a whole, building primarily on the work of Fulkerson (2005) and Armstrong (2006). The Heroides may express the difficulties of writing under a global empire, but the prospect of communication is not entirely hopeless. While traditional forms of communication breakdown as a consequence of the friction of distance, and binary channels fails to convey information in an effective or timely fashion, as in the examples given above Ovid dramatizes the power of literature to communicate across space. The characters of his collection are in constant dialogue with one another, as has been noted by Fulkerson, and elements of self-presentation in a given letter (e.g. Heroides 10) are frequently found in refracted and altered forms in other letters (e.g. Heroides 2). Ovid’s Heroides simultaneously map a global village and model methods of communication between different nodes in a diffuse network without reliance on a central point.