Ovid’s Heroides 3 and the inventio of Criseyde in the Medieval Matter of Troy

In its focus on Briseis, Heroides 3 develops an amatory reading of the traffic in women depicted in the Iliad. Heroides 3 transmitted this Ovidian version of the Homeric Briseis to the Medieval West in the absence of the Homeric epics. The medieval story of Briseida as the lover of Troilus and Diomedes, derived from Dares’s De excidio Troiae historia, intersected with medieval versions of Heroides 3, both in Latin and vernacular, resulting in the re-naming of Briseida as Criseyde in order to distinguish between the Ovidian and medieval figures. If it is women who are being transacted, then it is men who give and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it … To enter into a gift exchange as a partner, one must have something to give. If women are for men to dispose of, they are in no position to give themselves away. (Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women”).