Authenticity and other textual problems in Heroides 16

Book section : Chapter

Ovid's double epistles are in many ways problematic for scholars. The collection of the Heroides as a whole is the most badly transmitted part of the Ovidian corpus, and by the time we reach the end of the collection we lack the evidence of increasing numbers of manuscripts, and at some points all of them: so the text is riddled with uncertainties. A major problem is caused by the couplets preserved in only a portion of the tradition: many of these are interpolations, but not necessarily all. In the case of poems 16 and 21 (the letters of Paris and of Cydippe respectively), we have lengthy passages transmitted only in late fifteenth-century printed editions and manuscripts derived from them. Above all, weighty arguments have been used to question Ovid's authorship not just of some of these poems, as is the case with the single epistles (Heroides 1–15), but all of them; and if they are by Ovid, when do they belong in his career as a poet, and how might answers to these questions affect our interpretation of what we read? These are the questions I shall be touching on in this paper.

Authors: Heyworth, S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Host title: Latin Literature and its Transmission
• Pages: 142-170
• Chapter number: 8
• Series: Cambridge Classical Studies
• Place of publication: Cambridge
• Publication date: 2015-12-05
• DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781316337066.009
• ISBN-10: 1107116279
• ISBN-13: 9781107116276
• Language: English
• Subtype: Chapter