Reading and Writing the Heroides

Abstract

A more accurate title for this paper might have been Reading, Writing, Editing, and Translating the because it will treat not only of the polar relationship between reader and writer but also of the mediating roles represented by those sometimes troublesome interpreters who stand between them. Accordingly, I will be drawing attention to certain more or less traditional literary issues as well as to a set of philological problems that have tended to inhibit the appreciation of these poems as literature-namely, those problems that crop up in the debate over the authenticity of certain poems and parts of poems in the collection. There are no doubt many reasons why the Heroides have in modem times tended until recently to suffer from low critical esteem and to be studied comparatively little as literature, but one reason is surely lack of consensus about the form that Ovid intended for the collection as a whole and for the individual poems it comprises.2 Most Latinists, I