The letters are really dramatic monologues, in which the lessons of Ovid’s rhetorical education, particularly the exercises called ethopoiea (“character drawing”), are brilliantly exploited. The first 15 of those letters are purportedly from legendary ladies such as Penelope, Dido, and Ariadne to absent husbands or lovers. In the Heroides ( Heroines) Ovid developed an idea already used by Sextus Propertius into something like a new literary genre. Their keynote is not passion but the witty and rhetorical exploitation of erotic commonplace they chronicle not a real relationship between Ovid and Corinna (who is a literary construct rather than a real woman) but all the vicissitudes of a typical affair with a woman of the demimonde. They form a series of short poems depicting the various phases of a love affair with a woman called Corinna. His first poems, the Amores ( The Loves), were published at intervals, beginning about 20 bce, in five books. Ovid’s extant poems are all written in elegiac couplets except for the Metamorphoses.

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Heroides by Ovid