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Tragic irony in Ovid, Heroides 9 and 11

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Sergio Casall
Sergio Casall
Affiliation:
Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
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Extract

A dominant theme in the ninth of the Heroides, Deianira's letter to Hercules, is Deianira's indignation that Hercules has been defeated by a woman: first by Iole (especially in the first part of the letter: for example, lines 2, 5f., 1 If., 25f.); then by Omphale (especially in the section 103–18). The theme is exploited so insistently that Vessey, who regards the epistle as spurious, sees in this insistence a sign of the forger's clumsiness. consider the exploitation of the motive of‘victor victus’ in Heroides 9, on the contrary, as a strong sign of Ovidian authorship. From the very beginning of the letter, the reader is reminded that if a woman, Iole, has metaphorically destroyed Hercules, another woman is on the point of destroying Hercules in a much more real and literal way, and this woman is none other than Deianira herself. When Deianira writes the letter, she has just sent to Hercules the garment soaked in Nessus' poison that will provoke Hercules' horrible death (see 143–68): thus Deianira, rather than Iole or Omphale, is the woman who vanquishes the unvanquished hero. But this is not only a matter of dramatic irony based on the general lines of the story. Heroides 9 is an elegiac rewriting of Sophocles' Trachiniae (it is no coincidence that the letter opens with an allusion to Propertius 3.11), and at the same time is inserted in the time and the ‘body’ of the tragedy. Ironic prefiguration in Heroides is normally realized through intertextual anticipation: thefuture events that are prefigured are present in the texts of the model epic or tragedy. Deianira blames Hercules for bis defeat:

quern numquam Iuno seriesque immensa laborum

fregerit, huic Iolen imposuisse iugum (Her. 9.5f.)

quem non mille ferae, quern non Stheneleius hostis,

non potuit Iuno vincere, vincit amor. (Her. 9.25f.)

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , December 1995 , pp. 505 - 511
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1995

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References

1 Vessey, D. T. C. W., ‘Notes on Ovid, Heroides 9’, CQ 19 (1969), 349–61, pp. 351fCrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a detailed discussion of Deianira's epistle, see now my commentary (P.Ovidii Nasonis Heroidum Epistula IX: Herculi, Deianira, a cura di S.C. [Florence, 1995])Google Scholar.

2 The theme of ‘victor victus’ is obviously very common. But in line 2 ‘victorem victae’ is surely allusive to Prop. 3.11.16 ‘vicit victorem Candida forma virum’ (Penthesilea and Achilles): the example of a woman ruler which follows is actually Omphale, who enslaved Hercules (Prop.3.11.17–20). This is a passage that the new elegiac Deianira's ‘knows’ very well, just as she clearly knows Prop. 4.9.45–49. The opening distich of Deianira's letter (‘gratulor Oechaliam titulis accedere nostris, | victorem victae succubuisse queror’) has a programmatic value: the elegiac querela is superimposed to the ‘epic’ boast, but it is paradoxical that the very foundation of the elegiac code, the servitium amoris, is censured not only be means of the programmatic queror, but even through the allusion to Prop. 3.11, i.e. to an elegy aimed at justifying the servitium amoris (3.11.1 ‘quid mirare meam si versat femina vitam?’) and in which Hercules himself is mentioned as an exemplary model for the elegiac lover submitted to his domina.

3 For the concept of ‘elegiac rewriting’ (or better ‘elegiac transcodification’), in Heroides, and for that of ‘ironic prefiguration realized through intertextual anticipation’, see Kennedy, D. F., ‘The Epistolary Mode and the First of Ovid's Heroides’, CQ 34 (1984), 413–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barchiesi, A., ‘Narrativita e convenzione nelle Heroides’’, MD 19 (1987), 63–90Google Scholar = P. Ovidii Nasonis Heroidum Epistulae 1–3, a cura di A.B. (Florence, 1992), pp. 15–41 (fundamental)Google Scholar; Casali, S., ‘Enone, Apollo pastoree l'amore immedicabile’, MD 28 (1992), 85–100, esp. 85–94Google Scholar; Cucchiarelli, A., ‘Ma il giudice delle dee non era un pastore?’, MD 34 (1995), 135–152Google Scholar.

4 Translations by H. Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA, 1994).

5 An important medium between Sophocles' Trachiniae and Ovid's rewriting is Cicero's translation of Hercules' Sophoclean lament: see Cic. poet. frg. 34.1–5 Buechner: ‘ o multa dictu gravia, perpessu aspera | quae corpore exanclata atque ammo pertuli!|nec mini lunonis terroris inplacabilis | nee tantum invexit tristis Eurystheus mali, …’; 12–8 ‘hos non hostilis dextra, non terra edita | moles Gigantum, non biformato impetu | Centaurus ictus corpori inflixit meo, | non saeva terris gens relegata ultimis, ’. The same Priamel is also found in a monologue of Hercules dying, in TrGF adesp. F 653.54–7 Kannicht-Snell.

6 See Casali (n. 3), 93f.

7 Cf. Cic. poet. frg. 34.34f. Buechner ‘o pectora, o terga, o lacertorum tori, | vestrone pressu quondam Nemeaeus leo | frendens efflavit graviter extremum halitum?’.

8 This is the real meaning of the ‘perverse relationship’ noticed with some perplexity by Jacobson, H., Ovid's Heroides (Princeton, 1974), p. 239n. 32Google Scholar (‘the theme of the effeminate Hercules may have a perverse relationship to Trach. 1075, θήλυς ηϋρημαί).

9 ‘He was slain in battle with the Minyae before Deianira's marriage’ (.Palmer, A [Oxford, 1898] ad 1.)Google Scholar; but see Eur. Herc. 49f., 220, Where he is still alive after this battle; Cf. RE 1.1968.67ff.

10 The news of Hercules' death is given to Deianira by a ‘nuntia…| fama’ (lines 143f.). Heroides 9 is an elegiac transcodiflcation of atragedy: it is inserted in a precise point of the model-text, but also sets out to include in itself the whole of the model-text. In an elegiac epistle there is no space for messengers' speeches: they become famae, which articulate the letter's text (see lines 3, 119, 143), just as tragedy is articulated by messengers’ speeches. Nuntia fama is a Vergilian phrase (Aen. 4.188, 9.471; in Ovid cf. Her. 6.9, 16.38, Met. 14.726, Pont. 4.4.15f.; in later epic Val. Fl. 1.46f., Stat. Theb. 6.1). But here nuntia, said of fama, alludes exactly to messengers' (here, Hyllos') speeches(for this technical use oinuntius, i.e. messengers’ thesis, see e.g. Rhet. Her. 4.7). There is the same allusion to this technical use in another epistle that rewrites a tragedy: Her. 12.146 ‘quis vellet tanti nuntius esse mali?’, i.e. ‘who could want to reveal something so terrible?’, but also: ‘who could want to play the role of άγγελος?’.

11 This is a disputed passage: but, whatever interpretation we may accept, the ominous sense does not change: see Halleran, M., ‘Repetition and Irony at Sophocles, Trachiniae 574–81’, CP 83 (1988), 129–31Google Scholar, on tragic irony in έβαψεν.

12 ‘In letifero Eveno’ is the text restored by Heinsius. P andG ante corr. have ‘in letiferoque veneno’ they both are corrected in ‘in lerniferoque veneno’, that is the reading attested in the majority of the MSS. (note that Eveno plays on the sound of veneno: that the word is a possible substitute to remove the hiatus is no coincidence). For the discussion of the question and of the lengthening in occubuit, see Rosati, G., ‘Note al testo delle Heroides’, MD 24 (1990), 161–5Google Scholar.

13 For this point, see A. Barchiesi, quoted in Rosati (n. 12), 165 n. 16.

14 It is likely, if not attested, that Evenus, like Anigrus, becomes literally letifer after contact with Nessus' poison.

15 ‘Ovid's Canace: Dramatic Irony in Heroides 11’, CQ 42 (1992), 201–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 See, for example, L. C. Purser, in Palmer (n. 9), p. xix (‘The poet […] has no part here, the mother has it all’); Palmer, pp. 381 and 385; Wilkinson, L. P., Ovid Surveyed (Cambridge, 1962), p. 39Google Scholar. It goes without saying that all this emotion is highly suspicious. Verducci, Florence, Ovid's Toyshop of the Heart: Epistulae Heroidum(Princeton, 1985), pp. 224ffGoogle Scholar. has a much more ‘Ovidian’approach.

17 Though on the basis of quite other considerations, the possibility thatCanace's son is spared at the end of Euripides' Aiolos was pointed out by Lloyd-Jones, H., Gnomon 35 (1963), 444Google Scholar; see also Webster, T. B. L.,The Tragedies of Euripides (London, 1967), p. 159Google Scholar. H. Jacobson ([n. 8], p.162 n. 14) is over-hasty in his scepticism.