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:
Our Heroine | Introduction | Constantia's Beloved | Influences | Language & Conclusions