Phaedra And Hippolytus: detail of a carved sarcophagus (late second century A.D.). The youthful Hippolytus (centre) is
shunning the advances of his stepmother, conveyed by the old nurse beside him. At the left sits the love-struck Phaedra
herself, with two Erotes (Cupids) in attendance; at the right a groom or companion holds Hippolytus' horse. The fourth of
Ovid's Heroides is an imaginary love-letter in which Phaedra declares her passion.
In between the Amoves and the Ars come the Heroides, Ovid's first experiment with mythical narrative. This is safer fare,
nevertheless congenial to read. Ovid's basic idea was to invent letters (in elegiacs) from mythical heroines to their lovers:
Ariadne to Theseus, Phaedra to Hippolytus, Dido to Aeneas, Penelope to Odysseus, and so on. The examples cited show the
wide range of situations that he dealt with, providing himself with wide scope for his rhetorical ingenuity and facile emotive
ability. Nor is the irreverent spirit suppressed. Ovid takes pains to translate Virgil's Dido into a much more easily sympathetic
figure, and one indeed who spots that Aeneas is vulnerable in the matter of his first wife's death.
At approximately this time Ovid composed his now lost tragedy Medea. His first extant attempt to compose on a larger and
more ambitious scale is the Fasti. This work can reasonably be dated to the years A.D. 1-4; it is also reasonable to see in it an
effort to balance the recently republished erotic works with something less risque. The Fasti, also in elegiacs, aimed to go
through the Roman calendar offering 'causes' for events and nomenclature in the Roman year. Thus Ovid, who had light-
heartedly adopted a Callimachean stance in the Amores, felt as Propertius had done before him that it might be prudent to