'A simple girl'? Medea in Ovid Heroides 12

Abstract

<jats:p>For Homer's Circe the story of <jats:italic>Argo's</jats:italic> voyage was already well known. Although we cannot be sure that the <jats:italic>Odyssey's</jats:italic> first audience was aware of Medea's role in Jason's story, we do know that by the time that Ovid came to write <jats:italic>Heroides</jats:italic>, she had already appeared in numerous Greek and Latin texts, in epic and lyric poetry and on the tragic stage. Given her complex textual and dramatic history, it seems hardly likely that any Ovidian Medea could actually be ‘a simple girl'. And yet precisely this charge of ‘simplicity’ has been levelled against <jats:italic>Heroides</jats:italic> 12 and its Active author. I propose to argue that the Medea of <jats:italic>Heroides</jats:italic> 12 is complex, not simple, and that her complexity derives from the fact that Ovid has positioned his elegiac heroine between past and future, guilt and innocence, epic and tragedy.</jats:p><jats:p>Like all of Ovid's heroines, Medea writes at a critical juncture in her mythic life. But Medea's myth differs significantly from those of her fellow authors, for it requires her to play five distinct roles in four separate locations. Thus while Penelope, for example, plays only the part of Ulysses' loyal wife on Ithaca immediately before and during her husband's return, Medea plays the ‘simple girl’ in Colchis, the murderous wife in Iolcus, the abandoned mother in Corinth, the poisonous stepmother in Athens and the potential filicide back in Colchis. She is a heroine with a well-known and extensive history and so it is not surprising that the first line of <jats:italic>Heroides</jats:italic> 12 invokes the concept of memory: <jats:italic>memini</jats:italic> (‘I remember’).</jats:p>