This is the first book-length study to reconstruct the experiences of the abandoned heroines of the Heroides, which have been largely ignored by past criticism. Dr Spentzou isolates the voices of landmark female figures of the classical myth, releasing them from Ovid's male text. Bringing together a broad range of ancient and modern critical thought, this is a book about gender, genre, writing, and reading women and men, in antiquity and today.

A variety of critical approaches from an international cast of contributors offer an original appreciation of creativity in classical literature. Whereas previous scholarship has portrayed the Muses as religious and benign creatures, the secularized muse figures explored here in a diverse corpus of Greek and Latin poetry are involved in a series of vibrant battles for inspiration.

Recent decades have seen a marked shift in approaches to cultural analysis, with the critical role of location and spatial experience in the formation of the human subject gaining increasing prominence. This volume applies the insights and concerns of the 'spatial turn' to this specifically Roman engagement with space, and explores its representation and manipulation in Latin literature. The terrain covered by the contributions is broad, both temporally (from Catullus to St Augustine) and in terms of genre, with lyric, epic, elegy, satire, epistolography, and historiography all finding their place in discussions that focus mainly on movement and the mobile subject in the experience and making of space. Offering a detailed exploration of Roman engagement with space, the ideological stakes of this engagement, and its intersections with empire, urbanism, identity, ethics, exile, and history, the volume contains a wealth of insights for readers across and beyond the discipline of classical studies: those looking equally for new approaches to ancient texts and authors or to explore the relationship between the materiality of antiquity and its literary aspects will find these discussions illuminating.