Ovid against the Elements

This chapter examines Ovid’s use of the literary and philosophical traditions of natural science, ethnography, and paradoxography in his exile poetry (Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto) to depict his exilic locale, Tomis, as a place of elemental confusion and chaos, where nature’s laws and the elements are confounded and inverted. In this way Ovid illustrates the cosmic scale of his exilic sufferings. The four Empedoclean elements that have been shown to frame and underlie the metamorphic physics of the Metamorphoses reappear in Ovid’s descriptions of Tomis. In this unbalanced environment these elements are largely reduced to three—air, water, earth—which frequently behave in unnatural or disordered ways. Ovid’s frequent use of adynata underlines further the cosmic disarray of the natural world of his exilic world and its regression to disorder and Chaos. At the same time, Ovid’s employment of these traditional explanatory discourses suggests his continued mastery of these modes of knowledge, even as he finds himself in an environment where the impossible (thaumata, adynata) becomes “real” and a world that seems beyond the reach of human understanding.