The Art of Death in Ovid's Heroides

Abstract

Abstract Notwithstanding the focalization in Ovid's Heroides on love, one may also identify a consistent emphasis on death, as the letters grow to become a literary refuge for women who experience loss as well as physical and social isolation. Death plays a decisive role in the portrayal of the female writers as sympathetic victims. The fictionalization of death acts as a means of persuasion also for the poet, who situates his text against the background of Augustan politics. Writing about the art of death enables Ovid to implicitly defend the artists who had been defeated and violently silenced by power and renders his work an indispensable rhetorical tool for their literary survival.