Mirum e fides. Meraviglia vs. credibilità nelle opere ovidiane dell'esilio

It is well known by critics that in Ovid’s Metamorphoses a crucial aspect of the narrative is represented by the narrator’s tendency to mark the miraculous, astonishing, and thus incredible side of the stories he tells: the infinite number of tales narrated through the poem sets the reader in front of a series of miracula, whose unbelievable character is constantly emphasized. It is worth noticing that in his elegies from exile Ovid does not seem to lose his interest in the mirum: in the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto, the descriptions of Tomis and its surroundings (the remote Pontic locality where the poet was banished) concentrate upon those elements which cannot but sound incredible to the Roman audience. The exile’s purpose, in fact, is that of making his readers sensible to his bad condition, so that they can decide to bring him their help; this practical aim, which lies at the heart of Ovid’s exilic output as a whole, finds expression in a hyperbolical and ‘spectacular’ representation of the Pontic reality: in Tomis the exiled poet faces risks rare to find elsewhere and experiences phenomena that seem quite unnatural – and difficult to believe. Through such a representation the poet wants to show his friends and readers (not least, the emperor) that the place where he now lives is the ‘worst of all possible worlds’, a place where adynata become real and the standard laws of nature are not followed; but such an account of the Pontic reality can easily lack credibility, thus invalidating the poet’s persuasive efforts – something Ovid is well aware of. It is therefore interesting to see how the poet faces the problem of his own truthfulness (fides), an issue that is taken into consideration up to the last of Ovid’s collections.