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Peter E. Knox, ed. Ovid: Heroides; Select Epistles. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. 329. (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics.) ISBN 0521-36279-2 (cloth). ISBN 0-521-36834-0 (paper). Price $24.95
The art of letter-writing is in abeyance today. Although it is so old that one might well wonder whether writing was not invented to make letters possible, the convenience of the telephone and the vulgarity of E-mail have now combined to drive it under cover. It is accorded its proper dignity only in the highest and most conservative circles; the formulae of business and the chat of gossip among friends do not count. Yet how noble a tradition it is that is betrayed. One thinks of the philosophical disquisitions of Epicurus and Seneca, the eloquent fervor of St. Paul, the passion of Heloise, the urbanity of Lord Chesterfield, Mine. de Stael, and the Abbe Galiani. Up to a short time ago letter-writing would seem to have penetrated every intellectual pursuit and social amenity. Two of the most charming pictures I know are Vermeer's study of a young woman absorbed in reading a letter at an open window and Fragonard's penetrating portrait of a girl studiously savoring what must be a love-letter. Are we so indifferent to the elegantly worded compliment, the shrewdly drawn encapsulation of a political event, the sardonic balancing of character and motive that once characterized the letter that we are willing to forego them indefinitely? One hopes not.
It may be salutary to have at this juncture a new publication of some of Ovid's Heroides edited by Peter E. Knox. Ovid was a master letter-writer all his life; the Heroides are the earliest of his works to survive and the Epistulae ex Ponto the latest. He was also a gifted pleader and a great poet. As the collection of the Heroides is usually offered to us, it consists of three distinct blocks: a series of fourteen letters in verse purporting to have been written by heroines of mythology to the husbands and lovers who are absent or have abandoned them, a letter from Sappho to Phaon that does not appear in any of the older manuscripts and whose place as fifteenth poem in the series is due entirely to Daniel Heinsius in his edition...