Edita de magno flumine nympha fui: La voce di Enone tra figura mitica ed elegia soggettiva (Ov. epist. 5)

The Heroides exemplify Ovid’s ability to re-adapt the mythological tradition to subjective elegy, as well as giving his female heroines the opportunity to tell their side of the story. The code-switching from the epic or tragic genres to elegiac epistles clearly emerges when we compare the Ovidian letters to their text sources, namely the Odyssey and the Homeric cycle for Penelope (Her. 1), the Iliad for Briseis (Her. 3), and Euripides’ Hippolytus for Phaedra (Her. 4), to name but a few. However, the extent of Ovid’s reworking cannot be easily grasped when the sources are fragmentary or not extant. This is the case with Heroides 5, whose fictional author is Oenone (Paris’ first love). Although Oenone’s myth must have been well-known by Ovid’s educated readers, the pre-Ovidian sources for her narrative are extremely fragmentary. This Quellenforschung shows how Ovid recasts and transforms the version of Oenone that could be found in the sources into an innovative, ironic, and self-empowered (Ovidian) Oenone. By exploring Ovid’s engagement with, and challenge to, his sources, this article stresses the originality of Ovid’s poetic art in the Heroides.