The Mythical Method in Ovid’s Exile Writings Based on His Tristia (3.10): The Cultural Myth of the Land of Eternal, Loveless Winter

ABSTRACT

Until recently, scholars have often assumed that in his exile writings, Ovid abandoned myth and the mythical method of composing poetry; yet it was only his way of creating cultural myth that underwent a metamorphosis. This article argues that in Elegy 10 of Book III of the Tristia, Ovid is not documenting the literal conditions of his exile in Tomis (Dobrudja), but rather constructing the myth of a land of eternal winter bereft of love. This myth is the product of his literary imagination, nourished by the topos of frozen, fearsome Scythia as it appears in Greco-Roman literature (Herodotus, Xenophon, and Virgil). Ovid had already revealed his antipathy toward this region in the Metamorphoses, long before he was relegated there. The cultural myth of a land of unending frost—an externalization of his wounded, emotionally frozen inner world, plunged into an abyss devoid of love—emerges in the Tristia as a carefully wrought, multidimensional, and symbolically rich creation of universal scope. It is a myth that renders exile as a realm of solitude, alienation, and fear (locus horridus). Within this myth, Ovid shapes a catastrophic vision of the world fatally paralyzed by frost: the cosmic death of all nature, stripped of life and love.