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OVID'S HERMIONE: A KALEIDOSCOPIC HEROINE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2014
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Critics generally have not warmed to Heroides 8 (in which Hermione appeals to her husband, Orestes, to rescue her from Pyrrhus, who has claimed her as his promised bride, carried her off, and holds her prisoner). Jacobson opined that the poem is ‘not very successful’ and claimed that the lengthy argumentation is ‘rather boring, not to say sometimes silly and annoying’, while Palmer described it as ‘the feeblest and least poetical of all the Heroides’. However, scholars have largely neglected some typically Ovidian cleverness and complexity in kaleidoscopic play with character. Ovid's Hermione is Hermione, but she also takes on the guise of other mythological heroines, and she represents a complete inversion of an earlier depiction of Hermione. All of this gives the poem a distinct intellectual appeal to supplement the emotional impact, with witty touches to ensure that the epistle is not mawkish.
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References
1 Jacobson, H., Ovid's Heroides (Princeton, NJ, 1974), 55Google Scholar; Palmer, A., P. Ovidi Nasonis Heroides (Oxford, 1898 2), 351Google Scholar. Some have even doubted the piece's authenticity: see e.g. Knox, P.E., Ovid: Heroides: Select Epistles (Cambridge, 1995), 8–11Google Scholar, who speaks of awkwardness, oddness, and a mythological blunder. I am in the camp of those who believe that Ovid was the author (see e.g. Pestelli, A., P. Ovidii Nasonis Heroidum Epistula VIII [Florence, 2007], 30Google Scholar). Certainly the sophistication in the characterization here is just the kind of thing that one finds in Ovid and would be beyond most imitators. Whoever the author is, this aspect of the poem is diverting and worthy of note.
2 There is great pathos in Hermione's attempt to arouse pity for herself by dwelling (at 75–80 and 89–96) on her deprivation in girlhood of her father and especially her mother: see Jacobson [n. 1], 55–6). On top of that she is now without her beloved Orestes, when marriage to him was the only good thing in her life (101), and she is miserable and helpless in the power of the vicious Pyrrhus.
3 Most critics simply remark on the correspondences, but Jacobson (n. 1), 46–8, and Fulkerson, L., The Ovidian Heroine as Author (Cambridge, 2005), 87–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, go further than that. They both point to one of the variations on Briseis made by Ovid (see below), while Fulkerson maintains that Hermione models herself on the Briseis of Her. 3.
4 The text used is that of Showerman, G., Ovid: Heroides Amores, rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA, 1977)Google Scholar, which for the passages cited agrees with Dörrie, H., P. Ovidi Nasonis Epistulae Heroidum (Berlin and New York, 1971)Google Scholar.
5 This switch has been pointed out by Jacobson (n. 1), 48, and Fulkerson (n. 3), 90.
6 See especially Williams, G., ‘Writing in the mother-tongue: Hermione and Helen in Heroides 8 (a Tomitan approach)’, Ramus 26 (1997), 20–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pestelli (n. 1), 17, 79, 91, 104.
7 Pestelli (n. 1), 27–8, opines that Hermione resembles the Electra of Aeschylus and Sophocles, but the parallels which she cites are not close in theme, detail, or expression. The same objection applies to her theory that Ovid's Hermione echoes Andromache in Euripides' drama of that name.
8 For Hermione psyching up Orestes in Her. 8 see Jacobson (n. 1), 48–9.
9 Cf. Lindheim, S., Mail and Female (Madison, WI, 2003), 41–51Google Scholar, on Ovid's Penelope in Her. 1, emphasizing her own powerlessness and showing the extent of Ulysses' influence on each word that she writes.
10 Sex with Pyrrhus is clearly implied at 8.107–16.