The second series, letters 16 to 21, consists of three pairs of fictional letters, the first from the man to the woman, and the second from the woman to the man, in relationships in which Ovid considers the woman to have been a heroine. The situations vary considerably, from Penelope’s imminent reunion with her husband after twenty years apart, to several who knew that they could never be reunited and chose suicide. The first series, consisting of letters 1 to 15, are fictional letters written by a woman, one of Ovid’s heroines, to her partner during a time of separation. The genre has developed considerably since, although it remains limited in scope and popularity. The Heroides consist of two series of letters, and Ovid claimed that they established a new genre of epistolary (poetic) fiction. Bizarrely, it was after the critical attention that they received during the nineteenth century that they declined in popularity. Until the late nineteenth century, they were among his most popular works, at times better-known than his Metamorphoses. One of Ovid’s most controversial works, his Heroides (which means ‘heroines’) could have been written early in his career, or quite late, and some have claimed that few of its letters were even written by him.
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