Читајући наново туђа писма : Митски свет Овидијевих Хероида
REREADING OTHER PEOPLE'S LETTERS: THE MYTHICAL WORLD OF OVID’S HEROIDES

Summary/Abstract: Ovid was writing his masterpiece as a complex work. Almost every verse in the Heroides is allusive, and how these allusions will be understood is left to the readers. Ovid’s innovation certainly can’t be disputed but we must remember that in ancient times the original did not mean leaving the tradition behind but rather recreating something new within its context. Ovid wrote Heroides within the framework of elegy and its verses, epistolography, ancient drama and rhetoric. Heroides are one of the rare works of Roman literature where the main role is entrusted to women, not men. For their long life they can thank their author who at the same time made them complex enough that we can read them in countless ways, and unattainable enough for critics who want to reduce them to one reading. The author owes them his literary self-portrait of an elegiac poet of love and a proud innovator convinced of his literary immortality. Ovid’s immortality in Heroides rests mostly on the skillful use of myth in the process of depicting the inner emotional state of his heroines and the agony they endured, no less than was the case with the most acclaimed Greek tragedians like Sophocles. Just as the Athenian women spoke through Sophocles’s works, so the voice of real Roman women comes to us through Ovid’s Heroides, their love, suffering, sorrow and hopes. Despite their exposed vulnerability, these women are not helpless but have an active creative power, unlike traditional female characters of Greek and Roman mythology, and by giving them the main role Ovid enabled them to become symbols of strong and emotional female nature of all historical periods.

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