This reconstructed story does not aim any longer at celebrating the glorious deeds of a hero, but at portraying him as a weak and effeminate character, producing, ultimately, a reversal of roles between female and male attitudes, as well as an inversion of performative acts within the marital relationship. Such an emphatic antithesis is the result of Deianira’s selective use of the previous mythological tradition referred to Hercules and leads to the construction of a (new) distorted version of the story. These tasks, which include also Hercules’ cross-dressing, not only represent an ironical amplification of the elegiac topos of the servitium amoris, but are also in opposition with Hercules’ traditional ‘heroic’ labours (84-100). After having provided a short overview of the contents of the letter, I will examine some specific lines, namely 74-118, where Hercules is told to have become effeminate and even performed female tasks (74-81 101-118).

Following this route, in my paper I shall focus on Heroides 9: this is arranged as a letter written to Hercules by Deianira, who claims that he has fallen in love with Iole – after having had love affairs with many other women during his travels – and, thus, forgotten of his wife. According to these approaches, the letters may be interpreted as examples of écriture féminine, which gives expression to female voices, in spite of the male poet behind them. In particular, since the beginning of the 2000s they have been profitably examined through categories pertaining to modern literary criticism, as, for instance, intertextuality and intratextuality, as well as through psychological or gender-based approaches. Having been neglected for a long time by Ovidian scholars, who have stigmatized them as repetitive in patterns and deficient in originality, the Heroides have undergone a revaluation only in the last decades.

Ovid’s Heroides are staged as love letters written by female characters from mythology to their partners.

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