Fabia, l'ultima delle eroine Ovidiane?

Resumen

The aim of this report is to show that in his literary production at exile Ovid did not forget, neither put aside youth elegiac models. In particular, they relive in the female character of Fabia, Ovid's wife: indeed she is alike to heroines who write erotic epistles to their lovers in Heroides. By analyzing Tristia 1.3, it appears that, when Ovid is going to leave for exile, Fabia embraces his husband, cryes for his leaving, implores him to bring her with him and when he goes away, she faints and -upon regaining senses- she wants to die: we meet all these Fabia's attitudes and behaviours in many deserted women of Heroides. Moreover, when Fabia asks Ovid to bring her with him, she says that she would be his sarcina parva (l. 84): this expression recalls the one of Briseides in Her. 3, but especially the archetypic one is: essem militiae sarcina fida tuae of Arethusa, a female propertian character of Prop. 4.3, who asks her husband Lycotas, a soldier, to take her as a sarcina parva (cf. v. 46). Therefore, we can say that in exile epistolaries, Fabia, transfigurate from the dimension of reality and time, becomes an everlasting paradigmatic character in elegiac literature: she represents the last of ovidian heroines, with her eyes turned to propertian Arethusa of elegy 4.3.