Between Lament and Irony. Some Cross-references in Ovid's Heroides 6 and 12 (Hypsipyle and Medea) (original) (raw)

The Emotions of Medea the Letter-Writer (Ovid, Heroides 12)

Greece and Rome, 2021

Medea fascinated Ovid more than any other female mythical figure. She features in the Ars Amatoria (1.336; 2.381–2), the Heroides (6.75, 127–8, 151; 12 passim; 17.229, 233), the Metamorphoses (7.1–424), and the Tristia (3.9). Ovid also composed a tragedy called Medea (Am. 2.18.13–16; Tr. 2.553–4), which unfortunately has not survived.1 In the Remedia amoris Medea is mentioned in a list of mythical men and women who would have been cured of their torturing love passion, if Ovid had been their praeceptor. Medea is not named, but the identification is obvious (Rem. am. 59–60): nec dolor armasset contra sua viscera matrem, / quae socii damno sanguinis ulta virum est (‘Nor would a mother's vengeance on her husband / have steeled her heart to slay their progeny’).

The Ovid’s Female Letter Missing from Euripides’ Tragedy

Годишен зборник на Филозофскиот факултет/The Annual of the Faculty of Philosophy in Skopje, 2018

This writing is an analysis of an epistolary poem (4.) from the collection "Heroides" by Ovid and of the tragedy "Hippolytus" by Euripides. The connection between these two poetic forms can be made on the basis of the mythological tradition regarding the content. However, what enables a deeper and broader hermeneutic analysis is the possibility to connect them in terms of their structure and intertwine them into a unique poetic form. Namely, regardless of the intentio auctoris, this female letter by Ovid has an intertextual potential to become part of Euripides' female play in a certain form of a pre-play. Furthermore, this meta collaboration between two poetic forms from different cultural provenances has the capacity to generate intergeneric similarities and dependences enabled by the letter, as a hybrid or unifying genre.

Ovid reads Euripides. The two Hippolytoi and Her. 4 Phaedra Hippolyto

Ovid was quit famous for his poetry works written in young age: Amores, Ars Amatoria and Heroides. The latter series of poems consists of some fictitious letters Ovid imagines having been written by famous heroines, like Medea, Phaedra, Hypsipyle. Scholars have already proved that Ovid read and appreciated the tragedies of Euripides, one of the most famous Athenian tragedians. Euripides wrote and staged in the theatre of Dionysus in Athens two tragedies named Ἱππόλυτος: the Ἱππόλυτος καλυπτόμενος, rejected by the Athenians judges and the audience because of its ‘immorality’ and the Ἱππόλυτος στεφανηφόρος (a second version), which won the first prize in 428 B. C. Ovid read these two different versions – unfortunately we are able to read only a few verses of the Ἱππόλυτος καλυπτόμενος through quotations from ancient authors – and used them as sources for composing the Heroidum epistula: Phaedra Hippolyto (as some scholars, like Wilamowitz, Leo, Paratore, have already illustrated). The aim of my work is to focus on the purely literary reasons for the use in the text of Phaedra's love letter of some verses, passages or scenes found in the two versions of the Ἱππόλυτος as allusions to these tragic texts. These types of allusions create a complex web of meanings alternating tragic echoes and more elegiac erotic situations (as G. Rosati illustrated). In doing so, Ovid constructed a beautiful and sophisticated framework, in order to establish a high level dialogue with his ideal reader: the first one being the educated reader, able to understand Ovid subtle poetic allusions due to his knowledge of Euripidean tragedies; and the other one being a reader sophisticated enough to perceive the innovation and complexity of such a literary work, in which the love letters were written by a woman to her lover, and not the opposite (as tradition would have required).

The Language of Reciprocity in Euripides' Medea

American Journal of Philology, 2001

In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article. EURIPIDES’ MEDEA is a character who is adept at speaking many languages. To the chorus of Corinthian women, she presents herself as a woman like any other, but with fewer resources; to Jason in the agon she speaks as if man to man, articulating her claim to the appropriate returns of charis and philia. Even when she addresses herself, in the great monologue, two distinct voices appear, that of the pitiful mother who loves her children and, opposed to this, the voice of the heroic warrior who demands revenge. The subject of this article will not be the versatility of Medea's speech, per se. Rather, I will consider the narrower but related issue of how—with what words and weapons—Medea enacts her revenge on Jason.

Euripides, Medea 1056-80, an Interpolation?

Department of Classics Ucb, 1990

is the story of a woman who, after having sacrificed everything for the man she loves, is betrayed by him. It is the tragedy of a woman who is too proud to bear this outrage, too intelligent not to find the most effective revenge, and too strong-willed not to carry through this revenge against enemies and friends-and against herself. Medea is not a tragic figure amidst the storms of her still aimless emotions at the beginning of the play; 2 neither does she appear tragic in the three successive encounters with men who are no match for her determination and intelligence. She becomes tragic in the moment when the desire for revenge, spurred by the triple goad of hatred, jealousy and slighted pride, 3 and assisted by her superior intelligence, is opposed by her maternal feelings and the clear awareness of what the revenge she intends means for her. This happens in the last and longest of her great monologues, at the moment when the old tutor has brought the news that Creusa has accepted the fatal presents, i.e. at the moment when the first part of the revenge, for which she has used Jason and the children, has been successful and Medea realizes that she now has to carry out the second part herself. Medea opens her monologue with an address to her children, full of grief and despair (1021-39). The moment of the last and definitive farewell evokes the dreams, promises, and hopes she once attached to the birth and rearing of her children (1026ff.). The impending unnatural and brutal separation calls forth agonizing pictures of happy and peaceful separations of mothers and children (1026f., 1032-35). Medea realizes and expresses what she previously did not fully realize or was forced to suppress, namely that the destruction of the children will destroy her own life too. 4 The naive and innocent smiles of the children (1040f.) shake Medea's resolution and lead to the first of several reversals: afia›: t¤ drãsv ("Alas! What shall I do?," 1042). Medea tries to persuade herself that she is still free to abandon the plan of revenge which would hurt her more than Jason, and to take the children with her (1044-48). The choppy style of the passage-a series of short, asyndetic sentences bursting out of her-and the urgent repetition of xair°tv bouleÊmata ("farewell to my plans") indicate both the intensity of her wish to spare the children and the strong emotional resistance which she has to overcome and which immediately reasserts itself: ka¤toi t¤ pãsxv; ("But what is wrong with me?," 1049).

"The Worst Husband": Discourses of Praise and Blame in Euripides' Medea

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