Abstract
Ovid's Heroides 13 is a fictional letter from Laodamia to her husband Protesilaus who left to fight at Troy. One of the notable features of the work is Laodamia narrating how she saw Protesilaus in her dream (107-114) and how she cherishes a statue of him (151-158) all the while assuming that he remains in Aulis (3). The purpose of this paper is to examine Laodamia's state of mind when she refers to the dream and the statue. In this letter she seems to be conscious of the fate awaiting Protesilaus (i.e. his death), but she does not give up the hope of seeing him come back home alive (cf. 1-2). We may therefore assume that such hope is reflected in the descriptions of the dream and the statue. In Heroides 13, Laodamia tends to avoid bad omens (49, 85-90, 135), and anticipates that the oracle which prophesies death of a Greek soldier concerns Protesilaus (93-100), and avoids describing his death although she suspects it (65, 69-70, 79-80, 164, 166). In her dream, Protesilaus' figure (imago 109) looks pale and seems to lament his fate (querela 110), then she drives the dream away and offers sacrifices on the altar (111-114) because the dream makes her think of his death and she regards it as a bad omen. Right after that she imagines that she will meet with the returned Protesilaus (115-122). We can understand that she intends to deny what she has seen and heard in the dream by imagining an ideal homecoming scene. We can also observe remarkable verbal echoes in her imagination. Here she intends to replace the ominous scenes with the ideal ones by such verbal echoes. When she describes the statue of Protesilaus, she feels in appearance (imago 155) it is more than a mere statue and she complains to it (queror 158). Here imago at 109 and at 155, querela at 110 and queror at 158 become verbal echoes. Like 115-122, she intends to replace the bad dream with her cherishing the statue of Protesilaus. In this description, the remarkable expression is hanc teneo sinu 157. Considering 77-78 and 147-148, we can say that she treats the statue as her returned husband. In conclusion, Laodamia hopes so earnestly that Protesilaus will come back home alive that she refuses to see the deathlike figure of him in the dream and instead she devotes herself to his statue which makes her believe he is still alive.
