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SABINUS, another of his intimates, who wrote answers to the Heroides, was equally conspicuous in heroic poetry. The title of his poem is not known. Some think it was Troezen; but the text is corrupt. Ovid implies that his rescripts to the Heroides were complete; it is a misfortune that we have lost them.
His tragedy of Medea had remained a single effort in dramatic form, unless the Heroides can be classed as dramatic monologues. The Medea, but for two fine single lines, is lost; but all the evidence is clear that Ovid had no natural turn for dramatic writing, and that it was merely a clever tour de force.
It is curious to find him banishing altogether a book that is, or certainly was, more extensively used in our schools than any other classic, the Heroides of Ovid. These, and such as these, then, are the books which our Roman boy would have to read. Composition would not be forgotten.
So, in the Heroides, the idea of the desolate and love-lorn Ariadne writing a letter from the barren isle of Naxos is in itself ridiculous, nor can all the pathos of her grief redeem the irony. Helen wishes she had had more practice in correspondence, so that she might perhaps touch her lover's chilly heart.
Ovid, who tried so many departments of poetry, also attempted Tragedy, and was the author of a Medea. To judge from the wordy and commonplace displays of passion in his Heroides, we might expect from him, in Tragedy, at most, a caricature of Euripides.
His productions, all written either in heroic or pentameter verse, are numerous, and on various subjects. It will be sufficient to mention them briefly. The Heroides consist of twenty-one Epistles, all which, except three, are feigned to be written from celebrated women of antiquity, to their husbands or lovers, such as Penelope to Ulysses, Dido to Aeneas, Sappho to Phaon, etc.
She promised, much to my delight, that he should be obeyed, but on my return from dinner I found her asleep, and sitting at her bedside I let her sleep on. When she awoke she said she would like to read a little; and as if by inspiration, I chanced to take up Coiardeau's 'Heroides', and we inflamed each other by reading the letters of Heloise and Abelard.
Among the works of Ovid himself were included at various times poems by other contemporary hands some, like the Consolatio ad Liviam, and the elegy on the Nut-tree, without any author's name; others of known authorship, like the continuation by Sabinus of Ovid's Heroides, in the form of replies addressed to the heroines by their lovers.
For ten or twelve years afterwards he continued to throw off elegiac poems, some light, others serious, but all alike in their easy polish, and written from the very first with complete and effortless mastery of the metre. To this period belong the Heroides, the later pieces in the Amores, the elaborate poem on the feminine toilet called De Medicamine Faciei, and other poems now lost.
She promised, much to my delight, that he should be obeyed, but on my return from dinner I found her asleep, and sitting at her bedside I let her sleep on. When she awoke she said she would like to read a little; and as if by inspiration, I chanced to take up Coiardeau's 'Heroides', and we inflamed each other by reading the letters of Heloise and Abelard.
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