Epistolary Fictions: Authorial identity inHeroides15

Abstract

Heroides15, Sappho's letter to Phaon, is an enigma in its present context for many different reasons. What is Sappho doing, heterosexualised, at the end of a string of elegiac epistles written by women plucked straight from myth and each given their fifteen minutes of fame? Despite the mythology that grew up around her, of which Phaon was a part, Sappho was a real woman and a real writer,theGreek love poetpar excellence; not only that, she was and is a figure who, in her poetic persona at least, is famous for communicating her love for women, not for the local ferryman. This Sappho looks verywritten, yet as the only heroine–writer, and as the love-poet often cited as Ovid's influential predecessor, she can represent the culmination and reification of theHeroides'illusion of female authorship.In doing so, Sappho functions asthecrucial figure in a collection of poems in which the Ovidian author writes in disguise; in what becomes finally a life or death situation, her poem radically questions the definition and definability of authorship, gender and identity. We are constantly asked, and are prompted to ask: Just how authentic, or how written is Sappho in this self-conscious erotic alignment of His ‘n’ Hers, Roman and Greek love poets? What is it for an Ovidian author conspicuously to write, through and over, the poetess whose work he recommends should be read alongside his own, and whose influence on his own writing and love-affairs he hints at on several occasions?