AboutEssays2022Dear Theseus… yours faithfully, Ariadne

Imagine… a letter written by Ariadne to Theseus, remonstrating with him for having abandoned her on the island of Naxos. Such a letter does exist: from the first century BC, composed on Ariadne’s behalf by the Roman poet Ovid.

It is the tenth of Ovid’s Heroides or ‘Heroic Women’: imagined letters from eighteen heroines of Greek and Roman myth, taking to task the men who have betrayed or otherwise let them down. Some of the pairings are well known: Dido to Aenes, Medea to Jason, Deianira to Hercules; others less so: Oenone to Paris (he abandoned her for Helen). Ovid’s project might seem problematic in its implausibility. Greek heroines (and one Carthaginian) write letters in Latin, each about 150 lines long, in finely-formed dactylic pentameters. Ariadne, marooned on the desert island of Naxos, is presumed to have access to pen, ink, papyrus, and a reliable postal service. Further fundamental suspensions of disbelief are required. In addition to being written by a man, the poem-letters would originally have been declaimed before an audience dominated by men, and by a male performer, very likely Ovid himself. Not much space here, it might be thought, for the women, like Ariadne, who are supposedly the focus of attention.All this may help explain why, until recently, the Heroides were not seen as Ovid at his best; not a patch on his erotic verse; notably, Amores (‘Love Poems’) or Ars Amatoria (‘The Art of Love’). The introduction to the edition I used as an undergraduate in the 1970s, edited by Grant Showermann, began with the discouraging words: ‘The Heroides are not a work of the highest order of genius. Their language [is] nearly always artificial, frequently rhetorical, and often diffuse…’ They were on the Cambridge syllabus, not as choice specimens of Latin literature, but as raw material for the stern discipline of textual criticism: scrutinising corrupt passages in the text as transmitted, trying to restore what Ovid ‘actually wrote’. Did Ariadne allude to Theseus’ oscula (‘lips’) or occulos (‘eyes’)? It was fortunate that the lecturer for the paper was the great E.J. (Ted) Kenney, who emphasised at every turn the qualities of the poems as literature. What follows tries to convey something of their subtlety.

What did Ariadne write to Theseus? Her letter is treated here as a supposed stream of consciousness, ordered for her by Ovid.

She begins with a paradox: even wild beasts (a recurring theme in their imagined presence on Naxos) are gentler than Theseus in his abusive treatment of her. Then comes confirmation that this is indeed a letter: she presumes Theseus to be reading her words, written after her betrayal by him and by sleep itself (the first of her many personifications of things intangible and inanimate). Sleep-as-deceit leads into the narrative of Ariadne’s experience. She recalls the realisation of her desertion with a vignette which will have resonated with the audience then, and readers ever since: being half awake in the early morning, stretching out an arm, and finding not a person but an empty space. Typically trivial in the circumstances of our own experience, but her response is one of terror, with beating of breasts and tearing of hair (another motif). She wanders erratically along the shore, calling out ‘Theseus’; the rocks (again, personified) echo her cries, as if to offer help. (ll. 1–24)

Lent strength by desperation, she scales a mountain, which enables her to see Theseus’ ship far out at sea, in full sail: the very winds are cruel. Although deeply shocked she shouts with all her strength to Theseus to turn back his ship, which, as she puts it, lacks a member of its crew. Her words are mixed with renewed beating of breasts; then a touch (for us) of realism: she fashions a flag by attaching her veil to a long branch: shades of the Railway Children. Failure of this practical measure is followed by a ‘literary’ allusion. She describes herself as randomly ranging like a Bacchant, with resonance for Ovid’s educated audience, probably familiar with Euripides’ Bacchae, of women dangerously out of control. Ring composition returns the narrative to the bed Ariadne shared with Theseus, then deserted by him. She directly denounces the bed, having harboured both of them, as ‘faithless’; subverting thereby Winston Churchill’s alleged detestation for learning Latin on the ground (still familiar to some) that it pointlessly necessitated having to learn how to address pieces of furniture (‘O table!’). (ll. 25–58)

Ariadne’s thoughts turn to the future: what is she to do? The place seems to be deserted. Even were it possible to leave, where could she go? The backstory she now introduces of slaying the Minotaur demonstrates her ethical dilemma. Since she betrayed her father, Minos, by providing the thread that guided Theseus through the labyrinth, she must needs be an exile. In the ancient world, duty to one’s parents came second only to piety toward the gods. However, another is also guilty of betrayal: she quotes verbatim Theseus’ emphatic oath never to desert her. In retrospect, she wishes that the perjured Theseus had killed her as he slew her brother: a reminder that the Minotaur was, after all, part of the family. (ll. 59–82)

The idea of being ‘better off dead’ leads Ariadne to imagine death on the island through wolves, lions, tigers, seals, or men. For one of high birth like her, death might seem preferable to surviving as a slave; again, the audience possibly dwelt on the royal captives in Euripides’ Trojan Women. Her thoughts return to the threat from wild animals; nor can she depend on help from men, whom, thanks to Theseus, she has learnt to distrust. She harks back to the unfortunate circumstances leading to Theseus’ presence in Crete, her providing the thread, and his victory over the Minotaur. This prompts the conceit that Theseus, having heart of iron and breast of flint, was bound to win the fight. She calls to account sleep, the winds, Theseus’ right hand (killing her brother and now her), and his worthless pledge: all of them ranged against a solitary girl. (ll. 83–118)

Ariadne invokes the frequent motif (best known for us from Sophocles’ Antigone) that no one will give her decent burial. By contrast, Theseus is imagined safe back in Athens, boasting of his great deeds; she urges him not to leave out her help and his abandonment. His parents cannot have been mortal; surely they were rocks and the deep sea. Ariadne imagines that Theseus might, in his mind’s eye, see her wretchedness: how she can hardly hold her pen, her hand trembles so; a reminder that this is a letter. Then a concluding ethical appeal: she makes no claim on Theseus for her service to him; but he should not visit evil on her. If Theseus returns too late, he can at least carry away her bones. (ll. 119–52)

A bare synopsis cannot convey Ovid’s complex interplay of metre with meaning, or how he manipulates word order (far more flexible in Latin) to generate emphasis, surprise and suspense. Nor can we recreate the dramatic impact of the original performance. An imagined approximation might be the combining of modern dramatic monologue (Alan Bennet’s Talking Heads, or The Vagina Monologues) with the declamatory power of Beethoven’s aria ‘Ah! perfido’ (‘Faithless one!’). Though not included in the Heroides, it might well have been. The stand-alone piece by Beethoven had its origins in a now forgotten play in which Deidamia, daughter of the king of Scyros, denounced Achilles for abandoning her to fight at Troy.

These and other, more accessible aspects of the poem, might loosely be labelled as ‘rhetoric’; defined even more loosely as ‘the art of persuasive speaking or writing’. Showermann, as quoted above, plainly conceived of rhetoric as something superfluous, negative, and possibly deceitful. But more recent approaches allow the legitimate possibilities of persuasion: winning people over to right belief.    

A case in point might be the repetition, ring-composition, and even wit of the motif of Ariadne beating breasts and tearing hair. This being the expected response by women to the death of another, she poignantly presents herself as sole mourner at her own funeral. In the final few lines, she disarmingly admits to hands wearied with beating and not having much hair left to tear. There is complexity of narrative technique with intermingling of stories told: Ariadne on her present experience; what happened in the past; what she fears for the future. The technique known to us as focalisation sees identical events through different eyes; chiefly those of Ariadne and Theseus, but also via the entities repeatedly personified.

Allusion to earlier literature, identified and embraced by Ovid’s informed audience, served to enhance appreciation. Suggested cross-bearings from Sophocles and Euripides stand as proxy for a mass of literary material, much of it lost. But for the Romans as for us, the obvious shared knowledge is of the wider myth of Ariadne and Theseus: knowing ‘what happens next’. (A generation of readers needs here to suppress recollection of Mary Renault’s rationalising if bloody version in The King Must Die.) No matter how wretched Ariadne feels, her bones will not have to await collection by Theseus. She is shortly to be rescued by and, with great pomp and circumstance, married to Dionysus. Moreover, we know the further fate of the faithless Theseus, meeting his just desserts (if not justice) at the hands of his wife Phaedra, sister to Ariadne, fatally infatuated with her stepson and Theseus’ son, Hippolytus. Details would be familiar from Euripides’ Hippolytus, reinforced by the fourth of the Heroides, the anguished letter of Phaedra to Hippolytus, both of whom end up dead.

It is now generally agreed that the Heroides stand in their own right as major poetry. But to return, by ring-composition of our own, to the opening question. How are we to respond to letters, supposedly written by women, that are actually by a man (and here being commented on by another male)? My teacher, Moses Finley, wrote sadly but resignedly in the 1960s of ‘The silent women of Rome’. Since then, marginal ways have been found of hearing their voices. But it remains overwhelmingly the case that Roman men wrote about women for other males. Can anything be retrieved from this apparent cul-de-sac? What seems striking are the many Greek myths highlighting women as shockingly treated by men. If myth may be read as reflecting communal subconscious, might this represent some kind of collective guilt? If so, why did Ovid, writing as a Roman, deliberately choose male mistreatment as his theme? One approach might see him as setting up an artistic challenge: repeatedly and convincingly adopting the persona (the Latin word means ‘mask’) of repudiated women. It is a virtuoso performance; more so than taking on in his erotic poetry the persona of relentless male lover.

In context, what seems arresting about Ovid’s Ariadne is her agency in the carrying through of Theseus’ task, three times mentioned in her letter. She made a massive sacrifice to save him; he has given in return harm rather than help. The relationship that emerges between them is, in anthropological terms, instrumental rather than affective, with no hint, at least retrospectively, of what we would call romantic love. Reciprocity or ‘helping friends and harming enemies’ was one of the guiding principles of Greek myth and a major part of the ethical underpinning of Greek society and culture. That throws into relief Ariadne’s concluding sentiment about not requiring what is due to her from Theseus; she simply wants to be protected from gratuitous harm. Ovid presents her as ignoring the prevailing orthodoxy to occupy at the last, and with dignity, the moral high ground.

P.S.

To read Ariadne’s letter and the other Heroides, there is the Penguin Classic verse translation in syllabic couplets by Harold Isbell (rev. edn 2004); alternatively, Harold Canon’s version in rhyming couplets (Unwin, 1972). The prose translation in the Loeb edition by Grant Showermann (1914) has a facing Latin text; the second edition (revised by G.P. Goold,1989) is more appreciative of Ovid’s poetic achievement. Renewed recognition of Ovid owes much to Cambridge classicists, inaugurated by L.P. Wilkinson’s Ovid Recalled (Cambridge, 1955). Guy Lee brilliantly translated and commented on the Amores (Murray, 1968). E.J. Kenney wrote the introduction to A.D. Melville’s Ovid, The Love Poems, Amores and Ars Amatoria (Oxford, World’s Classics, 2008). Moses Finley’s ‘The silent women of Rome’ appears in his Aspects of Antiquity (Penguin, 1972). The transformational study of the Heroides is by Howard Jacobson, Ovid’s Heroides (Princeton, 1974), followed by Florence Verducci, Ovid’s Toyshop of the Heart: Epitsulae Heroidum (Princeton, 1985). Rhetoric as potentially positive was decisively reasserted by Brian Vickers (Downing Honorary Fellow) in his In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1989).