Time and genre intersect in a number of ways in the Heroides : the epistolarity of the poems insists that each is written at a specific point in time or “to the moment,” as Duncan Kennedy argues in the Heroides, this is often a point in time prior to the defining moment of that heroine’s mythology.

As a collection of letters that take on the point of view of spurned mythological heroines writing to their former lovers, the poems purport to express the sadness, fear, and anger felt by the heroines from their own perspective-though, of course, the Heroides is the work of male poet Ovid. Ovid’s Heroides are fundamentally paradoxical. Everyone should now be more avid for Ovid.Reading Ovid’s Heroides 15 as Reconstruction The words she speaks are by Natalie Haynes, who has for some months been posting breezily radiant Instagram videos based on the Heroides, titled Ovid Not Covid.

It would be hard to rival Olivia Williams’s beautifully calibrated contempt as she curses Medea, with whom Jason has scarpered (“your mother won’t like her”). In Nathalie Armin’s bold performance, Samantha Ellis’s script makes turning into an almond tree look like empowerment. Sabrina Mahfouz’s eloquent fury shows a fervent Rebekah Murrell as Helen of Troy’s daughter, Hermione, dobbing in her husband as a rapist. Taut but natural as Canace (daughter of the god of the winds, by the way), she has a smile that looks increasingly strapped-on as she explains to a scandal-hungry interviewer that she actually loved the brother with whom she went to bed. Eleanor Tomlinson proves capable of far more than Poldark palpitations in Isley Lynn’s strong script. Bryony Lavery does not simply redescribe Ariadne (Patsy Ferran, febrile in silk pyjamas): she makes the thread with which she guided Theseus from the labyrinth into an absorbing metaphor – a web of veins, the beginning of string theory.

Heroides by Ovid