Episodi marginali in Ovidio: il caso di Her. 6, epistula Hypsipyle Iasoni.

Hypsipyle’s Letter to Jason is presented as an Ovidian reworking of the short and marginal passage from the Book I of the Argonautics by Apollonius Rhodius (vv. 609-913), a reworking where Hypsipyle takes the leading role that the Greek poet had denied her. However, the heroine was by no means such a marginal and secondary mythological figure: there is evidence of two Ae- schylean tragedies dealing with her character, Hypsipyle and Lemniai, and of a Euripidean tragedy, unfortunately fragmentary, entitled Hypsipyle. The aim of this paper is to show, through an inter- textual analysis of the texts of Apollonius Rhodius, Ovid and Euripides, that the composition of Her. 6 is an interesting operation of literary reunification that has as its fulcrum the construction of a new and literarily defined character.