a terrible reading of heroides 14

Tl;dr: some stranger is being wrong on the internet and I am not being at all brave about it.

Ovid’s Heroides 14 is a letter that Hypermnestra wrote to Lynceus. Hypermnestra describes herself as a virgin and a sister to Lynceus. Heroides 14.55, 123. Hypermnestra asserts that she is wholly innocent of the murder of Lynceus’s brothers. She claims that she deserved to be honored for not killing her husband after she nearly did so three times. She implores Lynceus to come and rescue her, at considerable risk to himself. In short, Hypermnestra’s letter is completely self-centered. Moreover, as Vaiopoulos (2014) shows, Hypermnestra seems to have implicitly expressed sexual interests.

This is the worst reading of Heroides 14 that I have ever had the misfortune of laying eyes upon. Genuinely what has happened here?

Yeah, she considered killing her husband on her father's orders but importantly she didn't and she's now going to be executed for it (which, you know, maybe suggests that she wasn't crazy for feeling pressured to do it in the first place). Also, she isn't begging Lynceus to come back for her; she barely mentions it (Her. 14.123–25; this is two and a half lines in a poem of 132) and she undercuts that mention by being like "if you don't wanna, that's cool, just write nice things on my grave" (Her. 14.125–130). She spends more time on her weird Io tangent (Her. 14.85–108) than on her frankly reasonable request for a jailbreak.

Oh, and by the way, what does Hypermnestra showing possible sexual interest have to do with self-centeredness? Is her sparing her husband's life at the risk of her own somehow not morally righteous if she thinks he's hot?

And another thing: Hypermnestra calling herself virgo at Her. 14.55 is (a) not that weird to begin with? and (b) easily explained by the fact that in the myth as told by Apollodorus, the reason she doesn’t kill him is that he “respects her virginity” (i.e. doesn’t rape her, Bibl. 2.1.5). It’s a callback to that. Quit being weird about it.

Also for the record soror in context means “cousin“, which is attested in both poetry (including Ovid specifically) and post-Augustan prose.

I don't know what this guy was thinking but I think he needs to try again.