A stylistic analysis of Ovid's elegiac poetry with a view towards determining the authorship of 'Heroides' 16-21

This thesis attempts to show that Heroides 16-21, attributed to Ovid, were not written by him. Until as late as the early part of this century, a large majority of scholars believed these poems to be spurious. The athetizers pointed to formal and stylistic discrepancies between the last six Heroides (the double letters) and the preceding fifteen verse epistles, as well as Ovid's other amatory elegy. The current view is that they were written by Ovid, but later in his career (approximately 7 or 8 A.D. rather than the second and first decade B.C.). This theory rests on the fact that several of the stylistic anomalies which had brought the authenticity of the double letters under suspicion can be found in the later elegiac works of Ovid.;The approach of this thesis is to subject the elegiac works of Ovid to a thorough stylistic analysis in order to determine whether there are features of style employed in the double letters that are incontrovertibly un-Ovidian. The areas of style examined are diction, metre and figures of speech. The inquiry into diction considers both rare words (e.g. hapax and dis legomena) and common words (e.g. particles), not only with respect to occurrence, but also usage. Other poets, as well as prose authors, are brought within the scope of the study as controls.;The metrical features examined include the location of word endings, elision, the preferred position of word types in the line, as well as the interplay of ictus and accent. The concept of the line type is expanded to include the location of word endings and word types. Propertius and Tibullus are included in the study for the sake of comparison. The metrical analysis is conducted by means of a computer program written by the author.;When examining lexical repetition, word configuration and the position of the metrical ictus are taken into consideration. Another figure common in Latin verse, alliteration, proves to be a useful discriminator of authorship.