Ariadne’s elegiac letter to her faithless Theseus offers the epistolary mise en scène of the heroine’s lamentation previously versified by Catullus in his epyllion (carmen 64). The Ovidian text looks retrospectively at its predecessor and is inevitably indebted to it. This volume explores the complex relationship between the Ovidian and the Catullan model and focuses on literary memory, allusive forms, generic boundaries and transgression. Resorting to more recent interpretative approaches and an updated bibliography, the introduction aims at disclosing the parallel construction of text and character, placing emphasis on the sophisticated dialogic contact with the source-texts (e.g. from elegy, epic, comedy) and its literary effects on the epistle. The text also deals with some metaliterary and authorial instances to which readers of the Heroides are quite familiar. The commentary surveys aspects of Ovidian language and style and discusses major textual problems shedding light on literary sources and strategies of dramatic irony.epistle to its literary models.
