Ancient Witches X: The Witches of Ovid's Heroides


The Metamorphoses was far from Ovid’s only literary creation. True to form, the poet explored many innovative ways of dealing with topics both classical and contemporary. One of his most interesting compositions, the Heroides, predates Metamorphoses and gives an unprecedented voice to female characters. The Heroides are a series of fictional letters written by the women of classical literature to their mythical (and often misguided) lovers.* For the purposes of our discussion, it is interesting that Ovid includes Dido (Letter VII) and Medea (Letter XII).

Letter VII is an impassioned plea from Dido to the departing Aeneas not to leave her. While any hint of a malefic death ritual is absent from the letter, Dido does threaten to commit suicide and, in an interesting twist, asserts that she is pregnant with Aeneas’ child. Killing a child to spite a leaving lover is traditionally Medea’s claim to fame. In Medea’s letter, while she is more than willing to taunt Jason with all her witchy credentials, she is conspicuously silent about any child slaughter. Medea does, however, end with an ominous threat: she feels divine inspiration to do some further, unnamed, dastardly deed, beyond murdering Jason’s new bride. The reader, of course, knows that this will be the murder of her children by Jason.

What unites these two characters, the widow and the witch, is a furious desire to harm children in order to achieve revenge. While Dido’s letter makes no specific reference to dark rituals, the reader knows that the Queen’s suicide will seal the death curse she casts upon Aeneas and all his descendants and, according to the letter, take Aeneas’ unborn child into the underworld with her. As occult theologian Charles Williams reminds us in his study of European witch folklore, the desire to harm children and use them in magic rituals is a key trope of this lore.** Thus, Ovid preserves the unity of the two characters with their prior literary presentations, without having to repeat what his audience already knows.

By omitting Dido’s ritual and Medea’s child-murder, Ovid creates a sense of suspense in his Heroides, playing what the audience knows against what the characters don’t know. More than that, by refusing to dwell on the two women’s dark deeds, Ovid presses his audience to focus on the events and emotional upheaval that led to their maleficium. Dido is not a witch, but a deceived and abandoned woman who, as a Queen, understands full well that an insult to herself by a prince of Troy is a diplomatic insult to Carthage. Medea may be a witch, but she is one who has striven to use her powers solely for Jason’s benefit; and though she gave up everything to be with him, he has rewarded her by abandoning her for a “trophy wife.” *** As a result, the “witches” of the Heroides are complex and sympathetic, far removed from the stock characters of Ovid’s later Metamorphoses. We can only speculate what occasioned the change, but it is the novelty of female characters giving expression to their innermost thoughts and desires that make the Heroides stand out in classical literature.

*I am indebted to a friend in classics, who introduced me to the Heroides as the only work by Ovid she didn’t hate, as well as the book’s deployment in a fascinating debate between Mary Beard and Boris Johnson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k448JqQyj8
**Charles Williams, Witchcraft. Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2005. pp. 60-62, 167, 171.


Nota Bene: This post first appeared on Eidos at Patheos. All rights are reserved by the author.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ancient Witches II: Helen of Troy

In our last post, we examined the close link between medicine and magic evinced by Homer’s healers in the Iliad . This week, we turn to another Homeric adept in the art of pharmaka , one step closer to the ideal European “witch” Judge Hathorne had in mind at Salem: Helen of Troy. By 1692, Helen of Troy’s name had already entered the pop-canon of European witch-lore with Christopher Marlowe’s play Faust .* Marlowe specifically plays on the idea of Helen’s irresistible sexuality as a temptation of the Devil. While Homer knew nothing of the Devil, he does portray Helen’s beauty as supernaturally baleful. The Trojans are so enraptured by her that they refuse to release her, against the advice of the elders, even though it spells doom for their city. These elders see Helen clearly:   Small blame that Trojans and well-greaved Achaeans should for such a woman long suffer woes; she is dreadfully like immortal goddesses to look on. But even so, though she is like them, let her g...
Read more

The Shield of Aeneas Part II

In the previous post on the Shield of Aeneas, we saw how Virgil moves from the generic scenes of Achilles’ and Herakles’ shields to specific moments in the Roman past in order to express his hope that Caesar Augustus will lead the world into an era of universal peace. Today’s post focuses on the circumstances surrounding the gift of Aeneas’ shield and what they reveal about Virgil’s attitude toward his Greek sources. At first glance, the Aeneid appears strongly anti-Greek. The defeated Trojans, not the Greeks, are the heroes of the epic. Odysseus in particular comes off as a weasel, and we are told that Aeneas’ opponent, Turnus, is a new Achilles. Given how closely the structure of the Aeneid follows that of the Odyssey and then the Iliad , it can give the impression that Virgil is trying to undo Homer by some process of literary alchemy. We should take careful note, then, that at the moment when Aeneas receives his shield and prepares to bear Rome’s future on his shoulders, h...
Read more

Ancient Witches XI: The Witches of Acts

The Julio-Claudian dynasty reigned in the Hellenistic style as “Sons of God” and “Saviors,” bringing order to the chaos of the Mediterranean world. As a part of that order, the Julio-Claudians suppressed destabilizing forces such as magic and divination. During the reign of Tiberius, and particularly under his successors, Gaius Caligula and Claudius, a sect within Second Temple Judaism began challenging the official line. Leaders of The Way, such as Simon/Peter and Saul/Paul, defiantly claimed that the true “Son of God” and “Savior” was an obscure backwater preacher by the name of Jesus of Nazareth, who had been executed for political agitation. As one proof of their claim, Peter and Paul didn’t outlaw witchcraft; they declared war on it. Accounts of powerful confrontations between Peter and Paul and ancient practitioners of magic abound in the earliest organized account of The Way, Acts . It is significant that Acts does not show Peter and Paul forbidding magic so much as annih...
Read more