Editor’s note: We are happy to bring you this amazing guest post. SA is always open for posts about ancient literature and the modern world. Feel free to reach out over email if you have an idea

While visual arts have been synonymous with classics for centuries, substantial research has connected the field of classics to performing arts, specifically theater, dance, and music. In his paper, The Novelty of Ovid’s Heroides, author Maurice P. Cunningham asserts that the originality of the Heroides lies in how they were written as “lyric-dramatic monologues to be presented on the stage with music and dancing.” I wish to take this argument one step further, for I believe that the Heroides are intrinsically connected to music, specifically the genre of lyrical jazz, through a shared emotional power that transcends language or form.

Jazz, a uniquely American folk art form, traces its lineage to the spirituals sung by enslaved Africans in the American South. Jazz arose organically from the experience of oppressed people, who had very little formal education, let alone access to classical literature. It seems ludicrous to compare the two art forms, but lyrical jazz resonates emotionally with Roman elegy. Whether it is Sulpicia or Etta James, artists reach into the abyss of the human experience to pull out captivating tales of loss and longing, considering how love and heartbreak are fundamental parts of the human condition. Both Ovid’s Heroides and lyrical jazz represent the vulnerability and heartache of the central female characters by portraying personal truth as reality, illustrating raw emotional reactions to abandonment, and appealing to shared common tropes. 

The heroines of lyrical jazz narratives and of the Heroides both accept their own biased personal realities as the objective truth. In Ovid ‘Heroides’ V: Reality and Illusion, Edward M. Bradley notes how “the only formal expression of objective reality we encounter within each poem is defined exclusively by the turbulent flow of emotions running through the mind of the heroine” (159). We see this pattern clearly in Epistula V, a letter from Oenone to Paris, in which she acknowledges how he cruelly abandoned her in favor of Helen of Sparta, yet describes a scene featuring them together. She paints a picture of Paris and herself lying under a tree: 

Epistula 5.15-18

Often you might gather between [where] we lay [under] the ceiling’s tree, And having been mixed when the grass presented the swelling to the leaves; Often above straw bedding and deep hay lying down the small wicker hut was kept off the frost”

Saepe greges inter requievimus arbore tecti
mixtaque cum foliis praebuit herba torum.
Saepe super stramen fenoque iacentibus alto
defensa est humili cana pruina casa

“Greges; you might gather,” a present subjunctive of characteristic, indicates that Oenone has built a fantasy world for herself in which Paris is still hers; she ascribes idealized behaviors to Paris that do not reconcile with his current actions. She describes a world that is peaceful, removed from the turbulent realities of her circumstances amidst the Trojan War, since she cannot cope with the loss of her idyllic life with Paris.

In accordance with Bradley’s observation, Ovid chooses to focus on Oenone’s emotional narrative, forgoing the objective sequence of events that his audience would be familiar with. Jazz lyricists have this exact focus. Jazz indeed is a “turbulent flow of emotions” represented in music, whose audience solely receives a subjective portrait of a story based on a highly emotional account rather than a clear factual report. In Nina Simone’s song “If I Should Lose You,” she presents numerous hypothetical scenes, describing what would happen if she lost her beloved. She cries that “If I should lose you, the stars would fall from the skies, if I should lose you, the leaves would wither and die.”

The lyrics do not provide the listener any information about Simone’s actual circumstances, but the listener does receive a rich portrait of Simone’s emotional landscape. In fact, the audience does not know that Simone’s beloved is actually gone until the song’s penultimate couplet: “I gave you my love, but I was living a dream.” Here, through the switch from conditional subjunctives earlier in the song to this indicative past tense, Simone recognizes that she deceived herself. The lyrics are too heavily invested in describing her heartache to give any tangible narrative details to the listeners until the end. Both Epistula 5  and this lyrical jazz piece are more interested in portraying emotional scenes with florid imagery than offering a clear sequence of events. 

Another common theme between lyrical jazz and the Heroides is how women process abandonment in romantic relationships. Earlier in Phyllis’s letter, she relives the day her beloved abandoned her and wishes in hindsight that the night Demophoon left was her last night living. She cries, “Heu! Patior telis vulnera facta meis; Oh! I suffer wounds having been made by my own weapons!” (Epistula 2.48). Phyllis blames herself for Demophoon’s actions, and processes her own abandonment by punishing herself and assuming all responsibility. She further laments that “speravi melius, quia me meruisse putavi; I hoped for the best, because I thought that I deserved it,” (Epistula 2.61).

The sheer emotion in her speech clearly demonstrates the strength of her heartbreak and her overwhelming shame, especially when remembering her former naivete, her previous belief that merit would bring about ideal circumstances in love. The perfect tense of “speravi; I hoped,” “putavi; I thought,” and “meruisse; I deserved” alludes to a personal growth, as she reflects on a previous childish persona. Use of the perfect tense denotes completed past action, indicating that she is no longer the naive person who would trust traditional notions of love and relationships.

This type of character growth is also represented in Etta James’s “Fool That I Am,” where she regrets her past actions, calling herself a “fool that I am for falling in love with you and a fool I am for thinking you loved me too.” James laments her former naivete and her foolhardy belief that her beloved actually loved her back. The repetition of “fool that I am” and the past tense of “you loved me” both suggest feelings of shame surrounding her past innocence. Both heroines respond to abandonment by criticizing themselves; they are both ashamed of how they naively believed that their lovers would stay. 

 

Beyond shared content, Ovid uses several direct tropes that carry over into jazz canon. In his paper Discourse Tendency: A Study in Extended Tropes, Don L. F. Nilsen observes that “tropes function at the levels of semantics (meaning) and pragmatics (interrelationships between language and culture),” noting that “some tropes… become so developed and so extended that they actually become the discourse.” Not only do both elegy and lyrical jazz discuss the same emotions, they also portray the same reactions to those emotions and eventually become synonymous with those emotions. We see such in Dido’s letter to Aeneas, where the traditional trope of sleeplessness invokes Dido’s infatuation with the young hero: “Aeneas oculis vigilantis semper inhaeret, Aenean animo noxque quiesque refert; Aeneas clings always to my sleepless eyes, both the night and serenity bring Aeneas back to my mind,” (Epistula 7.25-26). She depicts herself as literally unable to sleep since Aeneas is constantly at the forefront of her mind.

This image of the insomniac lover was a common trope in Roman elegy and remains a common representation of lovesickness in lyrical jazz. In Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” many vocalists, including the likes of Ella Fitzegerald and Barbra Streisand, mourned how they “couldn’t sleep and wouldn’t sleep when love came and told me I shouldn’t sleep.” Similarly, in the song “Prisoner of Love,” Etta James sings about how “I’m not free, He’s in my dreams awake or sleeping.” Both representations of sleeplessness emphasize a lack of power; they cannot sleep because they are overwhelmed by the pressure of love. The representation of the sleepless nighttime lover contributes to the emotional landscapes of these women, and merges with the underlying messaging to such a deep degree that lyrical jazz reflects representations from antiquity.

While Roman elegy and lyrical jazz belong to two separate millenia, the similarities between the two art forms are overwhelming with regard to the heroines’ alternate perceptions of reality which lead to unfiltered emotional reactions to abandonment. Each heroine’s consuming emotions of love, fear, doubt, sadness, and anxiety are expressed in similar tropes. The narrators live in an emotionally skewed reality, fueled by tropes common to love, to heartache, and to abandonment. 

Maya Martinez is a high school senior at Friends Seminary studying Latin and Spanish. She is particularly interested in the connections between antiquity and the modern world and aims to make the field of classics both accessible and exciting to the general public. She is fascinated by the way in which translation impacts the overall narrative and how history alters a work’s legacy, particularly: what is remembered, what is forgotten, and what is changed. In the fall semester, she will attend Brown University where she plans to continue her engagement with Classical Literature. This is her first publication. 

Works Cited

“Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.” Performance by Ella Fitzgerald. Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Song Book, Verve Label Group, 1956. Spotify. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.

Bradley, Edward M. “Ovid ‘Heroides’ V: Reality and Illusion.” The Classical Journal, vol. 64, no. 4, Jan. 1969, pp. 158-62. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3295901. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.

Cunningham, Maurice P. “The Novelty of Ovid’s Heroides.” Classical Philology, vol. 44, no. 2, Apr. 1949, pp. 100-06. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/267476. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.

D’Angelo, Frank J. “Prolegomena to a Rhetoric of Tropes.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 6, no. 1, fall 1987, pp. 32-40. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/465948. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.

Farrell, Joseph. “Reading and Writing the Heroides.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 98, 1998, pp. 307-38. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/311346. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.

“Fool That I Am.” Performance by Etta James. The Second Time Around, Argo Records, 1961. Spotify. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.

Fulkerson, Laurel. “Writing Yourself to Death: Strategies of (Mis)reading in Heroides 2.” Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici, no. 48, 2002, pp. 145-65. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40236218. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.

“If I Should Lose You.” Performance by Nina Simone. Wild Is The Wind, UMG Recordings, 1966. Spotify. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.

Nilsen, Don L. F. “Discourse Tendency: A Study in Extended Tropes.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 3, summer 1989, pp. 263-72. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3885294. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.

“Prisoner of Love.” Performance by Etta James. The Chess Box, UMG Recordings, 2000. Spotify. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.