In her epistle to Ulysses (Her. 1), Ovid’s Penelope has recourse to arguments that, in my view, resemble conceptually and lexically some lines from Clytemnestra’s famous Trugrede in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. The article brings to light and discusses these so far unexplored similarities between the elegiac letter and the tragic rhesis in keeping with recent trends in the Ovidian poetics of the Heroides: as is well known, Ovid’s heroines act not only as writers, but first and foremost as readers, being able, as they are, to draw on a variety of literary sources in order to build their own elegiac voice and their identity as abandoned women
