Ovid's Heroides and Tristia: Voices from Exile
1997; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1017/s0048671x00002058
ISSN2202-932X
Autores Tópico(s)Organic Chemistry Synthesis Methods
Resumoexulis haec uox est: praebet mihi littera linguam, et si non liceat scribere, rautus ero. Epist. ex Pont. 2.6.3f. This is the exile's voice; the written word gives me a tongue, and if writing is forbidden, I shall be dumb. Ovid's exilic persona reveals itself over the course of his correspondence as a literary pastiche of other texts and identities. We hear the narrator's voice in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto echoing that of Horace and Propertius, Homer's Odysseus and Vergil's Aeneas. These allusions to canonical works are widely recognised and catalogued. But equally crucial to Ovid's self-presentation are allusions to his own previous masterpieces. I interpret his choice of the letter form for the exile poems as not only an allusion to, but also an authorial statement of identification—on some level—with his earlier epistolary work, the Heroides . The Heroides may be read as letters from exile, epistulae ex exilio in which Ovid pursues his fascination with the genre of letters and the subject of abandonment through literary characters; the Tristia take that fascination one step further as the author himself, in letters to loved ones, writes from the position of an abandoned hero of sorts.
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