Heroides

I've long been interested in Greek and Roman myths, but the complexity of the tales is forbidding. The family trees and the names (which over time have taken on the quality of parody) are so hopelessly intertwined it's difficult to keep it all straight. But I'm rolling up my sleeves and reading a few volumes, including the Heroides, by Ovid, who was one of the great Roman poets.

Ovid's more famous recitation of myth was Metamorphoses, but Heroides has its own pleasure. Told in epistolary form, it's a series of 22 letters from one character of myth to another, almost entirely from female to male, which is itself unusual. Some of these pairings are more familiar to us than others--Penelope and Ulysses, Medea to Jason, Paris back to Helen and Helen back to Paris, Leander to Hero. But others were completely alien to me. I had never heard of Hypsiple, for example, or Canace and Macareus.

I was fortunate to read the translation and introductory remarks by Harold Isbell. Not only are the poems extremely readable to the common ear (the word "slut" makes more than one appearance), the intros and footnotes are elucidating. In the intro to Acontius to Cydippe, a pair that is new to my knowledge, he sums up the letters: "The idea of law has never been far from any of these letters, whether it be a code deduced from self-perception or a law imposed by statute. And certainly the suggestion that the beloved ought to be bound suggests not only being tied with ropes but also the idea of a bond or a surety given to guarantee the performance of some act. The letters of the Heroides...are concerned with a great variety of deceits that tailor objective facts to subjective desires. In each of these letters there is some failure of imagination to effect a correspondence between the mind and the reality it hopes for."

Some of these letters are pretty juicy, too. In the Acontius/Cydippe example, the former blames the latter for being too beautiful and thus causing him to pursue her:

"Had you been one of the lesser beauty you would
Be sought more modestly. By your charm
I am driven to boldness. All of this
has been caused by you:"

So "blaming the victim" goes back thousands of years.

Other fun letters are Phaedra to Hippolytus. She was perhaps the original cougar, as she tried to seduce her stepson:

"Do not worry  that our love must be concealed,
only ask the help of Venus and
she will hide us in the mantle of kinship;
we will be praised for our embraces
and I will seem to be a good stepmother."

This is the plot of several adult films.

In Helen's letter to Paris (we are reminded that Paris abducted Helen, which started the Trojan War), Helen begins in a pissed off mode:

"Since my eyes have been outraged by your letter,
there is now no glory in silence.
You, an alien, have broken the sacred law
of hospitality so that you
might trifle with a lawful wife's faithfulness."

Isbell makes some interesting interpretations. Of Ariadne, who helped Theseus escape the Labyrinth only to be dumped on an island, Isbell says that she's really just having a prolonged sulk. Medea, who has been studied every which way, and differently in feminist views, is described by Isbell: "Medea is a woman of deep and abiding emotions, but as swiftly as they are felt they are as swiftly out of control. Such a person living always on the edge of madness cannot be tolerated in a society which prizes the rule of law, in both the state and its individual citizens." Sort of a, "we know Jason did you wrong, but you went overboard."

This is a pretty good introduction to Roman myths, in that the poems are short and a lot of the major actors are here. I recommend this Penguin Classics edition for the outstanding head and footnotes.