“The Ottomans don’t seem to have had any trouble rampaging up and down the coast, so why not you?” My original plan had been to apply for summer funding to visit Troy, located these days near Çanakkale in Turkey. Two chapters of my dissertation on site-specific memory in Latin literature “took place” there, and I was very much looking forward to addressing the “silent ash” of Troy’s dead, as Catullus had once done — or, more likely, ignorantly tripping over important rocks, like Lucan’s Caesar. But once my advisor had observed that I would be just a hop, a skip, and a rampage away from Tomis, the site of Ovid’s exile in 8 CE, it did seem like a good idea to spend at least a couple days there, seeing what there was to see. Why not me, indeed.

According to Ovid, Augustus relegated him to Tomis, a town at the very outermost edge of the Roman Empire, for carmen et error, “a poem and a mistake” (Tristia 2.207). Under such circumstances, a different man might have taken the hint and ceased writing poetry altogether. But due to what appears to have been variously an indomitable poetic spirit, tenacity, loneliness, desperation, and boredom, Ovid produced three additional poetic works while in exile. Two of these, the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto, offer an autobiographical account of the exile and Ovid’s experience of Tomis.

One might well wonder whether an indomitable poetic spirit, tenacity, loneliness, desperation, and boredom would make for especially great verse, and it’s true that Ovid’s griping and complaining over everything Tomitian is one of the most prominent features of the exile poetry. As Philip Hardie has observed, “All too often…the exile poetry [has been] written off as the pathetic and tedious whining of a poet starved of the metropolitan oxygen that fuelled his wit” (152). While our appreciation of the wit in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto has been rehabilitated in recent years, the persistent whininess is difficult to ignore. The complaints tend to center around the features of Tomis that are most foreign to the transplanted Roman: weather, words, and wars.

In the first category, Ovid’s vivid descriptions of the Tomitian winters are rightly famous: “The snow lies untouched, and Boreas hardens it up and makes it eternal, so that neither the sun nor rain can soften it up….Often [men’s] hair clinks with hanging ice when it moves, and their beards shine white with the frost covering them….” And, my personal favorite: “At that time, not even can the curved dolphins launch themselves into the air; when they try, the harsh winter holds them back,” (Tristia 3.10.13–14, 21–22, 43–44). Such descriptions seem almost specially designed to appall a reader ensconced in Rome’s Mediterranean clime.

Words, or, more specifically, language, further contribute to the alienation that the poet experiences. In a scene that evokes the pathos of the playground, Ovid describes his linguistic difficulties (Tristia 5.10.35–8):

They carry on their conversations in their shared language: I have to indicate things through gestures. Here, I am the barbarian, I the one who is understood by no one, and the stupid Getae laugh at my Latin words.

It may seem obvious that this linguistic isolation would be especially hard for a man who was both famous and infamous for his way with words. Indeed, in another poem, Ovid suggests that he was so desperate for praise that he actually attempted a poem in Getic. But the quotation above exposes Ovid’s alienation not only from the Tomitians, but also from Rome. In a moment of relativism, Ovid redefines “barbarian” as “Other,” a move that paradoxically distances himself both from the Getae, who mock his language as not their own, and from other Romans, who would never identify as “barbarians.”

Finally, there was war. The threat of foreign violence Ovid details would be equally unfamiliar to the reader in Rome, surrounded by a buffer of pax Romana (Tristia 5.10.21–6):

Often, although the gates are closed, we pick up dangerous weapons that come within our walls in the middle of the streets. The man is rare, therefore, who dares to farm the countryside, and such an unfortunate man plows with one hand and holds his weapons in the other. From under his helmet, the shepherd plays songs on his reeds joined with pitch, and the terrified sheep fear war instead of the wolf.

It is as if the shepherds of the Eclogues and the farmers of the Georgics suddenly find themselves in the lines of the Aeneid. For the poet who famously lost a foot of his dactylic hexameter in the very first poem he ever published, it seems decidedly late to be discovering his martial Muse.

None of this would seem to recommend Tomis as a dream destination for a classicist with summer funding. But I was a scholar! Conducting research! And I was pretty well-versed in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, so I thought I knew exactly what to expect.

Today, ancient Tomis is buried under the modern port city of Constanţa, Romania. Several excavations have been conducted within the city itself; they have unearthed, among other things, a large Roman mosaic from the 4th century CE — likely part of a complex that connected the port to the city market. An archaeological museum sits right next to the mosaic, displaying finds from the Paleolithic period to modern times. Large chunks of ancient masonry are spread seemingly haphazardly throughout an archaeological park, which bears an unfortunate resemblance to parts of the old city; according to my Lonely Planet guide, the once gorgeous late 19th/early 20th century architecture was poised for restoration when the 2009 economic crisis put a sudden halt to the plans. And so royal vacation homes lie abandoned and crumbling alongside Byzantine columns.

On the one hand, Ovid himself seems quite distant from all of these ruins. The most impressive archaeological finds date either from long before Ovid’s birth, when Tomis was a Greek colony, or long after his death, in the Trajanic and Byzantine periods. On the other hand, Ovid is everywhere. In the middle of the Piaţa Ovidiu (which might otherwise have been mistaken for a parking lot), Ettore Ferrari’s 1887 statue of the poet glares down at visitors to the archaeological museum. Beneath the feet of the lithified poet, one finds Ovid’s self-authored epitaph (which, paradoxically, he had hoped would be written above his grave back in Rome). The whole effect rather reminded me of Ovid’s own tale of Niobe, and for a moment I wondered whether this might be the Tomitians’ ultimate revenge upon the poet who had absolutely nothing nice to say about their weather, their food, or their culture.

But upon further investigation, I concluded that the homage is sincere, at least insofar as it is an economic boon: a tourist could stay at the Ovid Hotel, pay to take the Ovid Ferry out to Ovid Island, where she could buy lunch at the Ovid Island Restaurant and order… a Caesar salad. But you get the idea. Although I harbored a suspicion that I was the only visitor in Constanţa who had come specifically to see the site of Ovid’s exile, vendors clearly were hoping the poet’s name could be used to their (newly) capitalist advantage.

Although the physical remains of Ovid’s time in Tomis were non-existent, I soon realized that I was having a much more authentic experience of Ovidian alienation than I had bargained for. This was partly due to my identity as a classicist and my preoccupation with all things ancient (in this case, at the expense of a few things modern), and partly due to my identity as an American, who had traveled from the center of Western capitalism to the farthest edge of the modern EU. Ovid’s three categories of lamentation were also at the heart of my own confusion: weather, words, and war.

To be fair, I had no expectation of finding any frozen dolphins in Constanţa; even if it had been January instead of July, Ovid’s descriptions of the Tomitian climate were clearly exaggerated, the barren wasteland perhaps a metaphor for his psychological state in exile. All the same, there was something deeply disorienting about Constanţa’s modern identity as a very popular, inexpensive, beach resort for vacationing Romanians and Italians. Far from having to banish them here, on a weekend in late July, the Romans come willingly and eagerly to sun themselves on the warm sand or play in waves now truly “Euxine” (Tristia 5.10.13).

Words were also problematic. Reading knowledge of Romanian isn’t exactly a standard requirement for a Classics Ph.D., and while it’s certainly true that the language has a lot in common with Italian (and Latin!), using “cinque” to indicate that I wanted five stamps at the post office earned me a very cold stare from the woman behind the counter. I suppose I should be grateful that people did not “laugh at my English words,” but the most common response was simply to ignore my question. This was a problem since, not being able to read most things, I had a lot of questions.

This linguistic problem was unfortunately rather tied up in the final area of alienation: war. Constanţa does have a long history as a naval base, and, in a rare instance of modern correspondence to Ovid’s poetry, some impressive warships were visible off the coast. The legacy of war felt most keenly, though, has nothing to do with shepherd’s helmets and reed pipes and everything to do with the former Soviet Union. For all of its enthusiasm for its membership in the European Union, from a cultural perspective, Romania has maintained much of its former identity as a member of the Eastern Bloc. And as an American with no previous experience of eastern Europe, this unanticipated cultural divide was deeply alienating. Particularly difficult was the gruff unwillingness to help. “When is the next train to Constanţa?” I asked the ticket agent in Bucharest several times before the person behind me in line informed me that it left in two hours. “Do you know how I can get to Adamclisi from here?” I asked the woman behind the front desk at the hotel; after ignoring me for about 30 seconds, the response finally came: “You can’t.” “Is this where I get off for Mamaia?” I asked the bus driver. Silence. Five stops later: “Get off here!” “Rampaging” around was proving quite a bit more difficult than expected.

For better or worse, we’ve grown increasingly accustomed to the sight of American cultural imperialism. Just as an imperial Roman entering a town in the provinces might have expected to find the forum easily, so an American visiting any major city in the world expects to find the McDonalds. We’ve traded the extensive Roman imperial bureaucracy for seemingly endless variations on “American Idol,” but the effect is similar: for an American traveling through wide swaths of the world, things feel a little more familiar than they used to. That is, until you reach that border area, where the local past exerts more influence than the imperial present, and you wake up one morning to find yourself transformed from cultural imperialist to alienated Other. Both Ovid and I woke up in Tomis/Constanţa. And just as Ovid felt alienated both from his Tomitian neighbors and from his fellow Romans, so I now experienced the double discomfort of sticking out in the Romanian crowd and of recognizing the limits of my multicultural ideals.

After my first day in Constanţa, I had already finished seeing everything I had come to see, and I was very tempted to hide in my hotel room and watch coverage of the 2012 Olympics in the hope of reconnecting with the rest of the (Western) world. But no! I was where Ovid had been exiled! There must be more to see! My guidebooks mentioned that Ovid Island in nearby Mamaia was “where the poet’s tomb is located.” The chance that such a tomb could be authentic was exactly zero, but since my work was on place and memory, it would be just as interesting for me to see what kind of memorial later — even modern! — people had chosen to construct on the site.

I bought a ticket for the Ovid Ferry. The captain showed up about an hour later and, after several comic failures to free ourselves from the dock, we were out on the open water. Closing my eyes, I summoned up the words of Tristia 1.4: “With what great winds the waters rise / and the sand rages, torn up from the deepest sea!….The sailor, admitting his icy fear in his pallor,…does not steer the boat with skill.” Ten sunny and calm minutes later, we docked on Ovid Island.

Ovid Island is tiny; one can easily walk its circumference in fifteen minutes. It is also beautiful. Vacation cottages with private docks surround the periphery, while the interior is lushly maintained with all manner of flora and domesticated fauna. In my suggestive, imaginative state, I felt rather like the character Cotta in Christoph Ransmayr’s Ovidian novel The Last World, seeing the Metamorphoses everywhere: willows and vines, bending to hear an invisible Orpheus; a Jupiter-like swan, eyeing me from his enclosure; even a peacock with Argus’ many eyes. There was nothing, however, that even vaguely resembled a tomb.

“Excuse me,” I said to the bartender at the outdoor restaurant at the center of the island, “do you know where I can find Ovid’s tomb?”

“What?” the bartender smiled at me.

“Ovid, the poet, his tomb is supposed to be here?”

“Oh, he is not here,” came the bartender’s biblical response, “Try the museum.” I glanced back in the direction of the ferry: no sign of the captain or the first mate. How fitting: I was stuck on Ovid Island. I smiled back at the bartender and ordered a drink.

One feature of the exile poetry that has garnered significantly less attention from critics is the poet’s vivid imaginative transport of places and people in Rome to Tomis. In the midst of his complaints about war in Tomis and the trials of being both a soldier and an exile, Ovid suddenly shifts to a description of the way Rome steals over him at times (Pont. 1.8.33–38):

…from my home again I visit the places of the beautiful city, and my mind gazes upon all things with its own eyes. Now the fora, now the temples, now the theaters covered in marble come to me, now every porticus on levelled ground, now the grasses of the Campus, as it looks out on the beautiful gardens, the pools, the canals, and the water of the Aqua Virgo.

The verbs are present and indicative; the great landmarks of the Roman city have come to Tomis in the midst of war and sit right in front of the poet’s eyes. Not only are they truly and indicatively present, but Ovid is especially emphatic that the sites are present “now,” repeated five times in three lines. Ovid does not distinguish these seemingly imagined sites from the real ones, presumably still in Rome. In these moments, the icy-hard Black Sea somehow occupies the same space as the Aqua Virgo.

The vivid juxtaposition of familiar and unfamiliar is even more apparent when Ovid describes the people who imaginatively visit him. In a poem to his friend Macer, Ovid situates himself in this alien geography, “beneath the pole of the world.” But then he goes on (Pont. 2.10.47–50):

yet I gaze on you with my heart, the only way I am able, and I speak with you often beneath this icy pole. You are here, even though you don’t know it, and you are very often present, even when absent, and, called upon, you come from the very midst of the city to among the Getae.

Again, the unfamiliar reality sits side by side with the familiar fiction — but the simple, emphatic, indicative verbs suggest that this is no fiction at all. Macer is there. Ovid doubles down on the conceit in a poem to Cotta Maximus (Pont. 3.5.45–47):

Indeed, may I myself die, pierced by the Getic bow (and you see how near that punishment for lying is!) if I, though absent, do not see you at nearly every moment…

As the poet himself observes, the circumstances of the apodosis are a well-established reality: at least in the world of the exile poetry, Ovid’s life is constantly at risk among the warlike Getae. This, then, seems to pull the protasis out of the realm of the imaginary and into this same reality. Ovid does see Cotta — and not some vision of Cotta, but the man himself. The juxtaposition of the strange (the Getae) and the familiar (his friend Cotta) coincides with a confusion of the real (his absence from Rome) and the imaginary (Cotta’s presence before him).

In my final hours, standing in this uncomfortably foreign town, reading the familiar verses of an ancient poet, I allowed a similar imaginative double-vision to fall over my own eyes.

Looking at twentieth-century ruins piled next to third-century ones.
A wild Romanian dog curled up beneath a famous wild Roman wolf.
A statue of the poet, whose limbs might, at any moment, grow soft, “just as Hymettian wax grows soft again in the sun and is transformed into many forms by the touch of a thumb, and becomes useful by its very use,” (Metamorphoses 10.284–286).

Pygmalion-like, I eagerly watched and waited until — unlike Ovid — it was time for me to catch my train back home.

Jessica Seidman is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, OR. She is currently revising her monograph A Place to Remember: Site-Specific Memory in Latin Literature.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.