Ovid’s Early Poetry: From his Single Heroides to his Remedia Amoris by Thea S. Thorsen (review)

The connections between Ovid’s Amores, Ars Amatoria, and Remedia Amoris are well known. The Heroides, however, have only occasionally been integrated into our portrait of “early Ovid.” Thorsen’s aim is to turn this situation on its head: starting from the premise that the lack of solid information about Ovid’s career means that it is both plausible and worthwhile to attempt an integrated reading of the early poems, and in particular, of the Heroides in relation to the rest, Thorsen asserts a bold thesis: that Heroides 15, the Epistula Sapphus ad Phaonem (henceforth EP), is not only demonstrably authentic as a work of Ovid, but also that, as the last of the single epistles, it serves not only as sphragis but also as a nexus for the many themes and motifs that recur throughout Ovid’s poetry.

The book falls into two sections: in the first, Thorsen argues for the authenticity of Heroides 15, offering an overview of its manuscript and scholarly history and demonstrating the flaws in earlier attempts to deauthorize the EP; in the second, she rereads the remainder of the early oeuvre through the lens of the EP, finding verbal, thematic, and philosophical parallels everywhere between this letter and the other elegies. The boldness of the thesis is thus matched by its riskiness: the value of the entire undertaking either stands or falls on a single point, the authenticity of Heroides 15. Thorsen clearly hopes to mount so inexhaustible a supply of supporting “evidence” as to make her thesis an inevitable conclusion.

I wish I could say that Thorsen has achieved her goal: I like the idea of treating the EP as authentically Ovidian, since reading the poem as “Ovid’s transvestite self-portrait” (7) has a certain appeal—comparable to Catullus’ use of Ariadne, the feminized Gallus, and Laodamia in the longer poems (an avenue not explored by Thorsen) to define both an emotional voice and a poetic tradition. But Thorsen’s “proofs” repeatedly fail to persuade, based as they are, again and again, on flimsy circumstantial evidence. A crucial instance exemplifies many others, namely Thorsen’s argument for the placement of Sappho’s letter at the end of a collection of fifteen epistulae (9–22). It is generally agreed that the position of this poem in the tradition was first asserted by Daniel Heinsius in his edition of 1629; Thorsen acknowledges this, but also considers an assortment of medieval testimonia and marginal notes that allude to Ovid’s Sappho in a series in which her name follows that of several other heroines featured in earlier epistles (for example, Phaedra and Dido). Thorsen argues that Sappho’s repeated appearance at (or near) the end of such lists demonstrates that this placement long preceded Heinsius; she also uses the evidence of Amores 2.18.21–34, in which two catalogues of epistulae are listed in abbreviated form, in both of which Penelope is mentioned first and Sappho last. Since the position of the letter of Penelope is uncontested, argues Thorsen, that of the letter of Sappho is equally clear.

Aside from the problems surrounding the reading of Amores 2.18.26, there remains the glaring fact that the two lists in 2.18 are far from complete or comprehensive; even more important, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that not only Heinsius’ but also all the earlier allusions to Ovid’s heroines could not have used Amores 2.18 to guide their own ordering. Thorsen, on 21–22, rejects R. Tarrant’s claim, found in ‘The Authenticity of the Letter of Sappho to Phaon,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 85 (1981), 133–53, that this listing guided Heinsius, but never adequately disproves it. Here as elsewhere, Thorsen’s argument would have benefitted immensely from access to Irene Peirano’s recent book, The Rhetoric of the Roman Fake: Latin Pseudepigrapha...