Catullan Voices in Heroides 15: How Sappho Became a Man

This paper examines some echoes of Catullus' poetry in Heroides 15, chiefly but not exclusively from Catullus' poems in the elegiac meter. It argues that these “Catullan voices” strengthen the contention of Pamela Gordon (1997) that Ovid presents his readers with a “mannish Sappho”, a “Roman construction with few roots in the early Greek tradition.”