Shona Edwards, University of Adelaide
Ovid’s Heroides 7, Dido’s letter to Aeneas, opens with Dido’s representation of herself as a white swan singing by a river: Sic ubi fata vocant, udis abiectus in herbis/ ad vada Maeandri concinit albus olor (1-2). Nowhere else in the Heroides is this swan image used. The ‘swan-song’ topos can be traced through Roman and Greek literature, back to Aeschylus Agamemnon (1444-46), where Clytemnestra likens Cassandra’s lament to a dying swan’s cry. Scholars are thus readily inclined to argue that Ovid is straightforwardly employing this image at the start of Heroides 7 as foreshadowing, to suggest the imminence of Dido’s death, as Ovid’s Dido writes her letter moments before her suicide. (Alekou 2021:35, Hill 2004:127, Knox 1995: 203). While Ovid clearly uses the swan image to indicate that Dido is indeed composing a suicide letter, this paper will argue that the image has far deeper implications for Dido’s character and her role as the author of a letter which previous scholarship has yet to explore.
This paper explores three aspects of Ovid’s use of the dying swan image in Heroides 7: the swan song as an omen of imminent death, its connection to prophecy, and its use as a symbol of poetic immortality. For Ovid’s Dido, the Agamemnon intertext suggests a kind of literary prophetic power, one in which she ‘reads’ forward into the second half of the Aeneid. Then by examining how Ovid’s fellow poets Horace (C. 2.20 and 4.2), Propertius (2.34, 3.3) and Tibullus (1.3) employ the swan image, this paper demonstrates how this association shapes Dido’s character, psychology and purpose. For these authors, the swans come to represent the poets themselves, and so Ovid’s Dido, in deploying the swan image, aligns herself with the authorial power of the poets themselves.
Ovid’s own engagement with the swans of these lyric and elegiac forebearers can be seen beyond the Heroides, from his earlier work (Amores 2.6, Ars Amatoria 3.809-812) through to his exile poetry (Tristia 4.8.1-4, 5.1.11-13). Ovid inherits the swan and goose opposition as an indication of genre choice. The swan image therefore reinforces the generic transformation taking place in Heroides 7, from Virgil’s epic into Ovid’s elegiac epistolary.
Ultimately, this paper argues that Ovid’s use of the swan image in Heroides 7 embodies Ovid’s broader thematic interest in the poetic legacy and authorial power of poets, from his early poetry through to his exile poetry. The swan image is intimately tied to the self-written epitaph which ends Dido’s letter poem and significantly resonates with the tradition of epitaphs in Roman elegy and in Ovid’s own exile works. It is the swan image and the epitaph together which ensures Dido’s still powerful agency in the final moments before her death, ensuring her legacy beyond her tragic end in Aeneid 4.