Constantia's Classical Model |
Her paradigm was the Latin love poet of the Augustan Age, Ovid,
born 90 miles east of Rome and the Apennines in Sulmona Italy, on 20 March
43 BCE. He offers one of the few autobiographies we possess of an ancient
poet or anything else (Tristia 4.10). After a brilliant career at
Rome, as man about town, lover (if we can believe him, a big if) and poet,
his pleasures were ended when he offended the emperor Augustus (he mentions
a carmen et error, but the precise identity of both remain a mystery).
Ovid was sent into internal exile (relegatio) to Tomi on the
Romanian (a country named for Rome and still speaking a Romance, i.e.,
Latin derived, language) shore of the Black Sea. He had written, inter
alia, a series of letters supposedly by lovelorn women of myth,
for example, Penelope, Ariadne, and Helen, daughter of Zeus, domiciled
in Sparta, then Troy. He called the epistolary poems Heroides, that
is, Women Heroes, or Letters of Women Heroes.
CONSTANTIA'S LETTER TO BALDERICUS
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION VISIT:
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| Constantia's Beloved | Influences
| Language & Conclusions
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Last Revision: 11/13/98
© 1998 The
Five Colleges of Ohio Consortium
Please send comments to Laurie Churchill at ljchurch@cc.owu.edu.
http://www.owu.edu/~o5medww/cncwomen/model.html