Given that virtually every Roman writer whose work survives was male, we rarely get any chance to consider things from a woman's perspective. The letters are written in the first person, so could almost be theatrical monologues. So we have Phaedra writing to her cold stepson Hippolytus, Medea to her faithless Jason, Briseis to the perma-sulking Achilles. Ovid's Heroines (Pollard's sensible translation of the title) have been abandoned and are desperate to make their voices heard. These letters from Greek heroines to their absent menfolk feel astonishingly contemporary, and unlike anything else in Latin poetry. So Clare Pollard was right to think she'd lighted on an excellent scheme when she decided the Heroides was in need of an update. The arch mischief of the Ars Amatoria, with its advice on where best to press thighs with a pretty girl (the races) and its metropolitan scorn for provincial manners, seems more modern, while Ted Hughes's peerless Tales from Ovidare entirely taken from the dark and shifting world of the Metamorphoses. E ven keen classicists might have given Ovid's Heroides a miss before now: they're hardly his best-loved work, and outside of the trusty Penguin Classics, they have often escaped notice.
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