Ovid's Heroides and the Augustan Principate by Megan O. Drinkwater (review)

Reviewed by: Ovid's Heroides and the Augustan Principate by Megan O. Drinkwater Mariapia Pietropaolo Ovid's Heroides and the Augustan Principate. By Megan O. Drinkwater. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. 2022. Pp. x, 179. There is a tendency in Ovidian criticism to downplay the significance of the historical context in the interpretation of the Heroides and to focus instead on the literary significance of their intertextual context. In her new book, Megan O. Drinkwater proposes to change that trend, arguing, compellingly and lucidly, that the Heroides can be fruitfully read from a perspective capable of grounding the texts in the historical and political context of their time of composition: the single letters in the turbulent years of the principate and the double letters in the period of the poet's exile. Drinkwater's approach hinges on this relative chronology and on the supposition that in his exile, when he completed the collection, the poet himself re-read his single letters as anticipating the hardships of his forced alienation from Rome. Drinkwater argues that Ovid's translation of literary figures from epic and tragedy into elegy, and his adoption of their feminine perspective in the imaginary authorship of the Heroides, can be read as a commentary on the diminished power and voice of Roman citizens in the political discourse of the principate (5). Just as the fictional "poet-speaker" of elegy comments on contemporary events without being a simple stand-in for the poet, so the feminine speakers of the Heroides can function as "a convenient mask from behind which inconvenient truths may be safely uttered" (8). Ovid creates the distance needed to counter potential accusations of subversive intent in his interpretation of the conventional [End Page 179] narrative of the history of Rome. Drinkwater argues that the Heroides call on us to be "resisting readers" of that narrative (97). By using this expression, she raises the issue of the political significance of intertextuality in the letters and questions the critical utility of an exclusively philological understanding of the intertextual self-positioning of the imaginary authors of the letters. Drinkwater examines the letters that involve characters from the literary tradition of the Trojan war and its aftermath. She begins with Heroides 7 because, through the Virgilian intertext, Dido has a connection to contemporary Rome. She then goes further back in the history of the Trojan war with the letters of Penelope, Briseis, Oenone, and finally Paris and Helen, but the further she gets from Rome, the closer she ties details of the letters to Augustus and to specific aspects of his reign. Drinkwater presents Ovid's Dido as a sceptical reader of the overall message of the Aeneid. Ovid modifies Virgil's Dido's speech, thereby casting doubt on the reliability of the Aeneid's narrative of Rome. The Ovidian Dido uses the language of the Aeneid, but she does so to question Aeneas' commitment to his historical destiny. This Dido's reading of the events of the Aeneid runs counter to the pro-Augustan ideology embodied in Virgil's epic narrative (15), potentially destabilizing the political discourse of Rome's origin and history. Moving on to Heroides 1, Drinkwater reads Penelope's letter to Ulysses against the background of post-civil war Italy. Drinkwater points out that in his later works Ovid engages with the text and thereby "retrospectively inscribes Penelope's letter into an overtly political context and signals a political reading as possible already at the time of composition" (41). The intent to enter the political discourse of the principate is further supported by intertextual links with Virgil and Propertius. By using this hermeneutical approach, Drinkwater shows that Ovid comments on the civil wars and on the transition from the republic to the principate. She focuses on Penelope's preoccupation with her status as Ulysses' wife and reads it in relation to the citizens' preoccupation with the Augustan diminishment of the power of the senate and of the agency of individual citizens. Ovid's Penelope suggests that the Trojan war was not worth the sacrifices that it caused, while Ovid, by analogy, implies the same thing about the...

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