'A Simple Girl’?: Medea in Ovid Heroides 12

For Homer’s Circe the story of Argo’s voyage was already well known.2 Although we cannot be sure that the Odyssey’s first audience was aware of Medea’s role in Jason’s story, we do know that by the time that Ovid came to write Heroides, she had already appeared in numerous Greek and Latin texts, in epic and lyric poetry and on the tragic stage.3 Given her complex textual and dramatic history, it seems hardly likely that any Ovidian Medea could actually be ‘a simple girl’. And yet precisely this charge of ‘simplicity’ has been levelled against Heroides 12 and its fictive author.4 I propose to argue that the Medea of Heroides 12 is complex, not simple, and that her complexity derives from the fact that Ovid has positioned his elegiac heroine between past and future,5 guilt and innocence, epic and tragedy.