Heroides
Penelope, Dido, Medea, Ariadne and other women of myth write letters to the men who left them, each catching her story at the moment just before its known outcome. They argue, plead and accuse in elegiac couplets, retelling famous episodes from the side the epics leave silent, and a later set adds paired letters with replies. An invented genre, the verse letter of the abandoned woman, which supplied Chaucer, the Renaissance complaint, and every later rewriting of epic from the margins.
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Lineage
- responds to ↑ The Odyssey
- responds to ↑ The Aeneid
- alludes to ↑ Medea
- ↓ The Legend of Good Women
Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 68% · 10 shared
- 62% · 10 shared
- 58% · 11 shared
- 55% · 9 shared
- 52% · 10 shared
- 52% · 10 shared