The original published form of Ovid's "Heroides"

If one takes any ordinary, complete edition of Ovid's series of poems which we call the Heroides, one finds there twenty-one consecutive poems which follow on one from another without any apparent division or break. I hope here to consider various aspects of this collection of poems, but especially this apparent lack of division of the collection into any smaller, more manageable type of unit, such as books containing a few poems at a time. While the first fifteen poems of the collection all take the form of letters from heroines, poems 16-21 are immediately and strikingly different, in that they consist of three pairs of letters, of which the three from women (poems 17, 19 and 21) are answers to three parallel letters from men (poems 16, 18 and 20). Some editors and commentators, while recognising the different nature of these last six letters, have seen nothing strange in the inclusion of the three letters from men in a collection bearing the name Heroides or Heroines. Thus L. C. Purser wrote of this problem:2 'The Second Series of Epistles (16 to 21), which contained letters from men as well as from women, probably in the first instance bore the simple title Epistulae; but when this Second Series was joined with the first into one work, the general title of Heroidum Epistulae was given to the whole collection.' Others and I think the balance of proba bility must incline towards them, because of the intrinsic difficulty of including three letters from men in a collection of poems called Letters of the Heroines others have thought either that poems 1—15 and 16-21 are two entirely separate works by Ovid, which their author simply never intended to be brought together, or even that the last six poems are not Ovid's at all,3 and that Ovid's Heroides are a collection of fifteen, to which a later imitator has added six further poems of the same type and style, with three from men to counterbalance the three from women. We must leave this problem there for the time being, though we shall return later to look again at these last six poems.