Heroides

The Heroides are twenty-one verse letters in elegiac couplets. In the first fifteen, women of myth write to the men who left or wronged them: Penelope to Odysseus, Phyllis to Demophon, Briseis to Achilles, Phaedra to Hippolytus, Dido to Aeneas, Ariadne to Theseus, Medea to Jason and others, with the poet Sappho writing to Phaon. Letters 16 to 21 are pairs, a man's letter and the woman's answer: Paris and Helen, Leander and Hero, Acontius and Cydippe. The authorship of some letters (notably 15 and the paired letters) has been questioned. One section per letter; the long letter of Paris is in two parts.