'Ad coniugem suum'. Da Properzio a Ovidio

With his youthful works, Ovid interprets the spirit that feels the new era through the experimentation of different poetic typologies like the Heroides, which reveal a compositional dynamics of Alexandrian ancestry. The Heroides inaugurate a type of literary experimentalism, which will become constant throughout the Ovidian poetic career and at the same time they take inspiration from the Propertian elegy, as revealed by the fidelity to the love theme and the tendency to give voice to the female figures emerging in particular in Propertian IV book. Already in Propertius the elegiac voice entrusted to the woman proclaims her adherence to the traditional ethical system, while the partner systematically violates these values, proving himself unrespon- sive. The path that leads from Propertius to the Ovidian epistologra- phy certifies that the elegy of Arethusa occupies a liminal space, in which elegiac traits and original aspects of the couple of lovers coex- ist; the reconciliation of the characters will constitute the figure of the Ovidian epistolography.