In Book 3 of his Ars amatoria, Ovid rounds off a survey of authors put forward as suitable reading for the would-be female lover with a characteristic claim that his works will bring him immortality. Perhaps, he surmises, his name will be ranked with those of Sappho, Propertius or Virgil; perhaps 'somebody will say: “read the cultured poems of our maestro, in which he draws up the battle-lines of the sexes”' - the Ars amatoria itself -' “or the Amores, or recite a Letter in an assumed voice; this type of work, unknown to others, he pioneered”' (uel tibi composita cantetur EPISTVLA uoce; | ignotum hoc aliis ille nouauit opus, 3.345-6). The nature of Ovid’s claim for this last work - universally agreed to be what we have grown accustomed to call the Heroides - continues to generate considerable scholarly debate. It is unlikely that the poet who was to go on to write the Metamorphoses would seek to claim that the emergence of any form – still less the invention of a literary one – takes place ex nihilo. The epistle of Penelope to Ulysses, which stands first in the collection of fifteen as we currently have it and may have been put in first place by Ovid himself as a programmatic gesture, is itself a transformation of Homer’s Odyssey, and the lament voiced by a heroine abandoned by her lover had had a long history in various generic manifestations in Greek and Latin literature, notably Euripidean tragedy and Alexandrianizing epic. Nor