ABSTRACT
Within a decade it was so well known in Rome that Ovid, fitting the story of Dido to the general plot of the Heroides, could exploit his audiences familiarity with Virgil in order to make something new of Didos wretched fate. In fact, the more one reads the Heroides, the more one realizes that Ovid speaker has regularly become a modern woman with a gift for artful argument instead of an antique heroine, and the more one relishes the way Ovid has drawn from noble subjects of epic and tragedy the charming portraits he has created. It is the art both of learned allusion and playful anachronism. The fifteen monologues, therefore, represent a first productive blend of elegiac and grand poetry for Ovid, anticipating as much as two decades the final masterpiece of blending, the Metamorphoses. But long before proceeding to that ultimate development, Ovid experimented with a new and also creative way of extending the range of the Heroides.
