Tomis, 8 – 17 or 18 AD · Constanta today
In 8 AD, Augustus relegated Ovid to Tomis, on the Black Sea shore. He never came back: from 8 until his death, in 17 or 18, he wrote 9 books of verse about cold, longing, and a fault summed up only as a poem and an error. Today his 1887 statue stands over Ovidiu Square in Constanta.
Born 43 BC, Sulmona · Relegated in 8 AD, aged 50 · Died at Tomis in 17 or 18, aged 59 or 60
Book 1 of the Tristia includes poems of departure and travel: storms in the Adriatic, boarding at Cenchreae, the narrows, Samothrace, then the Pontic coast down to Tomis. The chart below shows 8 reconstructed editorial stages after Tristia 1.10–1.11, not 8 stopping places named as such in the poem.
Ovid was still on the road and writing in December; the journey is usually placed in the winter of 8/9, with arrival at Tomis in 9. As the crow flies, Rome and today's Constanta, on the site of Tomis, stand 1,330 km apart; by sea and on foot, his road ran far longer.
The night of departure, Tristia 1.3. Augustus orders him out of Italy.
Editorial waypoint: storms and verses written on the waves, Ovid says he was writing in December, Tristia 1.2, 1.4, 1.11.
Here he says he boards Minerva's ship, Tristia 1.10.
Editorial waypoint: the narrows, past Troy, Tristia 1.10.
Here he says he leaves the ship and walks through Thrace, Tristia 1.10.
The ship, without Ovid, gone on foot, is prayed to pass Byzantium, at the mouth of Pontus, Tristia 1.10.
Editorial waypoint grouping the towns on the ship's wished route: Apollonia, Anchialus, Mesembria, Odesos, Dionysopolis, Callatis, Tristia 1.10.
Arrival, in 9. He dies here in 17 or 18, never recalled.
Each poem shows its date, the Latin text, and the Romanian and English renderings: A. S. Kline's English (2003), Marius Comper's Romanian.
Tristia 1.3.1–2
on the road to exile, winter 8/9
Tristia 1.3 opens the book with the last night in Rome.
Latin
Cum subit illius tristissima noctis imago,
quae mihi supremum tempus in urbe fuit,
English, A. S. Kline
When the saddest memory comes to mind,
of that night, my last hour in the city,
Romanian, Marius Comper's translation
Când îmi răsare în minte imaginea acelei nopți atât de triste,
ceasul meu din urmă în cetate,
Tristia 2.207–208
Tomis, probably 9–10
Tristia 2, a plea of 578 lines addressed to Augustus. Here he sums up his motives as a poem and an error, without disclosing the error.
Latin
Perdiderint cum me duo crimina, carmen et error,
alterius facti culpa silenda mihi:
English, A. S. Kline
Though two charges, carmen et error, a poem and an error,
ruined me, I must be silent about the second fault:
Romanian, Marius Comper's translation
Două învinuiri m-au pierdut, poemul și greșeala,
vina celei de-a doua fapte trebuie s-o trec sub tăcere:
Tristia 3.10.37–38
Tomis, probably 9–10
Tristia 3.10. Ovid claims he saw the frozen Pontus and walked on the ice.
Latin
Vidimus ingentem glacie consistere pontum,
lubricaque inmotas testa premebat aquas.
English, A. S. Kline
I’ve seen the vast waters frozen with ice,
a slippery shell gripping the unmoving deep.
Romanian, Marius Comper's translation
Am văzut Pontul uriaș închegat de gheață,
cum o coajă lunecoasă apăsa apele nemișcate.
Tristia 3.3.73–76
Tomis, probably 9–10
Tristia 3.3. He dictates his own tombstone inscription.
Latin
hic ego qui iaceo tenerorum lusor amorum
ingenio perii Naso poeta meo;
at tibi qui transis ne sit grave quisquis amasti
dicere Nasonis molliter ossa cubent.
English, A. S. Kline
I LIE HERE, WHO TOYED WITH TENDER LOVE,
OVID THE POET BETRAYED BY MY GENIUS:
BE NOT SEVERE, LOVER, AS YOU PASS BY,
SAY ‘EASY MAY THE BONES OF OVID LIE’
Romanian, Marius Comper's translation
Aici zac eu, cel ce m-am jucat cu gingașele iubiri,
Naso, poetul, pierdut de propriul meu talent;
iar ție, trecătorule, oricine ești care ai iubit,
să nu-ți fie greu să spui: lin să se odihnească oasele lui Naso.
Tristia 4.10.3–4
Tomis, probably 11–12
Tristia 4.10, the autobiography. Sulmona, 90 miles from Rome, about 133 km apart.
Latin
Sulmo mihi patria est, gelidis uberrimus undis,
milia qui novies distat ab Vrbe decem.
English, A. S. Kline
Sulmo’s my native place, rich in icy streams,
and ninety miles distant from the City.
Romanian, Marius Comper's translation
Sulmona îmi e patria, bogată în unde reci,
la nouăzeci de mile depărtare de Roma.
Ex Ponto 4.13.19–20
Tomis, after the death of Augustus; Ovid calls it the sixth winter
Ex Ponto 4.13. Ovid claims verse written in the local tongue, a lost work, an uncorroborated event.
Latin
A! pudet et Getico scripsi sermone libellum
structaque sunt nostris barbara uerba modis:
English, A. S. Kline
Ah! Shameful: I’ve even written a work in Getic,
where savage words are set to Italian metres.
Romanian, Marius Comper's translation
Ah, rușine: am scris până și o cărticică în grai getic,
iar vorbele barbare le-am clădit în măsura versului nostru:
Tomis was, in Ovid's etiological account in Tristia 3.9, a Milesian colony among the Getae. On the traditional dating, Tomis was a Milesian colony founded around the 6th century BC; today's Constanta stands on the site of Tomis.
Ovid arrived in a small Greek city at the tip of the peninsula. The archaeologist A. Aricescu put the Greek city at about 17 hectares, but its extent in Ovid's day is unresolved; its wall is attested, but its course is unknown. In the 2nd century AD the inhabited area had reached about 30 hectares. The mosaic edifice, the baths and the wall that can be seen today are Roman and late Roman; in Cathedral Park the visible houses and streets date from the 1st to the 4th century, and beneath them the digs reached the first Greek levels. The ancient pavement of the mosaic edifice is estimated at about 2,000 m² of mosaic, of which about 400 m² survive in situ. The edifice was raised at the end of the 3rd or the start of the 4th century.
The letters from Pontus name real people. Ex Ponto 4.7 is addressed to Vestalis, sent, Ovid writes, to the shores of the Euxine to dispense justice. In 2014 Maria Bărbulescu and Livia Buzoianu published a decree of Histria (Istros), now in the museum at Constanța, honouring the Roman prefect Quintus Iulius Vestalis. Tiberius and his legate Lucius Pomponius Flaccus had sent him “for the preservation and safety of the Greek cities of the Left Pontus”, after Histria, too close to the barbarians, had asked leave to abandon the city and move. Georgy Kantor dates Vestalis's appointment to AD 15; the first editors and C. P. Jones date the decree to AD 18 or 19. Ovid mentions Flaccus too, in Ex Ponto 4.9.
Ovid claims he learned the local tongue and reports that his Getic listeners nodded and murmured approval at his verses in their speech, Ex Ponto 4.13.19–38, a lost work, an uncorroborated event. In Tristia 3.10, Ovid claims he saw the frozen Pontus.
Under the old peninsula of Constanța lie several cities, one above another. Under Cathedral Park the digs of 1971–1974 uncovered layers from late Roman houses down to the first Greek traces, of the late 6th century BC. Ovid arrived in a small Greek city confined to the tip of the peninsula. The later Roman city grew over it and beyond it.
The old peninsula, the 1910 Casino at its tip and Ovid Square on the ridge. At the foot of the cliff, the port's platforms.
The Ottoman town Romania took over in 1878. Still standing: the lighthouse of 1860 and the Hunchiar mosque, built in 1867–1869 on the orders of Sultan Abdülaziz, with a 24-metre minaret. The Carol I mosque of 1913 stands on the site of the Mahmudiye mosque of 1822. In 1863 a firman of Abdülaziz grants the Greek community land for a church; the Metamorphosis church goes up in the 1860s, without spires. In 1860 a British company opens the Cernavodă–Constanța railway.
From 536 Tomis is the seat of the metropolitan of Scythia Minor. The city wall, about 3 metres thick, crosses the isthmus for 700–800 metres, from Modern beach to Ferdinand boulevard; 100–150 metres of it can be seen today in the Archaeological Park. The main gate, in the north-east, was uncovered in the digs of 1987–1998: a slab-paved road 10.5 metres wide between two towers, over 31 metres across in all. By 2012 archaeologists had identified seven Christian basilicas. One, of the 5th–6th centuries, stands near the shore; another, with a crypt under the altar, at the corner of Revoluției and 9 Mai streets. The largest known by 2012, found in 1989 at the corner of Ecaterina Varga, Negru Vodă and Mircea cel Bătrân streets, measured 54.7 by 24.3 metres.
The brown line is the wall's course as Natalia Toma reconstructs it from Vincke's plan of 1840 and the digs: it starts at the corner of Mircea cel Bătrân and Dragoș Vodă streets, passes the North Gate and the Archaeological Park, runs parallel to Ferdinand boulevard as far as I. G. Duca street, then turns due south to Gate 3 of the port. Smaller digs refine it: in 2013 Octavian Mitroi found foundations on Ferdinand boulevard showing that, by the Archaeological Park, the wall made a zigzag of sharp turns, as on Vincke's plan. And the stretch parallel to Ferdinand, towards Gate 3, belongs according to Laurențiu Cliante to the second phase, often linked to enlarging the city to take in the western basilicas; its dating to the 5th–6th centuries is a hypothesis.
In May 2026, near the Palace hotel, two streets dating to around AD 600 were uncovered, crossing at right angles; one had been seen 20 years earlier, in the dig for the Archbishopric's garage. The find is consistent with the right-angled grid archaeologists had assumed.
The mosaic edifice goes up, its hall about 100 by 20 metres; its lowest terrace opened onto the quays of the ancient port. With the modern port's platforms gone, the shore here is an approximation that follows the foot of the cliff. Beneath the largest basilica, the 1989 digs hit the walls of a Roman arena, 55–60 metres long and 30–35 wide, with small outer rooms used during the animal fights. At the corner of Traian street and the former Marinarilor boulevard, the 2004 digs at the old station site found pits of the later 3rd century, very probably from the settlement outside the walls of the early Roman city; early in the 4th century the ground was levelled and built over. From this city come the 24 sculptures buried in a pit and found on 1 April 1962, under the 1860 railway embankment near the old station; the exact spot has not been published.
The baths by the harbour are somewhat older: their marble façade dates from the second half of the 2nd century or the start of the 3rd. On the north shore of the harbour as it then was, below the naval school, at a spot known only roughly, stood the staircase building: a platform reached by seven steps, with a marble façade of the same age as the baths; an inscription of 162–164 probably belongs to it. Orest Tafrali published the site plan, drawn in 1914, in 1930. The building is gone, and what it was for is unknown. Under Cathedral Park, houses and streets of the 1st–4th centuries can be seen.
Ovid's city is the least known layer. Houses of the 6th–5th centuries BC, found under Cathedral Park and, in 2024, under the Hotel Intim, show early settlement at the tip of the peninsula. At 23 Arhiepiscopiei Street the 2001 excavation identified four successive levels, from the 4th century BC to the 1st century AD. The last, dated between the 2nd century BC and the 1st century AD, spans Ovid's years. The archaeologist A. Aricescu put the Greek city at about 17 hectares, but its extent in Ovid's day is unresolved; in the 2nd century AD the inhabited area reaches about 30 hectares. The streets in Cathedral Park run NW–SE and NE–SW; according to MINAC the grid seems Hellenistic and lasted until the 6th century. The wall of the time is attested by an inscription and by Ovid's verse, but its course is only conjectured. The poet's house has not been found. The red line marks the extent of the archaeological site, not a wall.
The yellow lines are today's streets that, in Natalia Toma's hypothetical reconstruction, follow the ancient grid in the south of the peninsula: Ovidiu, Titulescu, Arhiepiscopiei, Maior Șonțu and perhaps Revoluției run south from Ovid Square, roughly parallel, and Cantacuzino, Georgescu and Reiner cross them almost at right angles. The Ottoman town inherited them, the ancient paving still visible in the 19th century. Excavations document fragments of it: in Cathedral Park one street has paving of the 1st–2nd centuries AD, and at 23 Arhiepiscopiei Street a street 5.25 metres wide, relaid in the 4th century, lies over older, probably Hellenistic paving (Irina Năstasi, 2014).
“Nothing outside is safe; the mound itself is defended by small walls and the nature of the place,” Ovid writes in Tristia 5.10. Petre Covacef, taking up an idea of A. Aricescu in 1998, places the wall of Ovid's time on the south side of Ovid Square, at the narrowest part of the peninsula, where a ravine cut across the plateau from east to west into the first decade of the 20th century. The purple line sketches that hypothesis from cliff to cliff. Covacef also puts the crest of the mound at the start of Arhiepiscopiei Street, where digs in the 1960s met a strong wall running across the street. Irina Năstasi places the limit of the right-angled street grid on the town side of the square. The blue line is the Ottoman fortification from before 1830, along Vasile Alecsandri street; close by ran the new wall of the 1st–2nd centuries which, according to Livia Buzoianu and Maria Bărbulescu, enclosed twice the area of the Hellenistic city. At the North Gate and the Butchers' Tower, on the line of the later wall, graves of the 2nd century BC have been found; archaeologists use the spread of this cemetery to guess where the wall ran.
Terrain: the Copernicus GLO-30 model with buildings smoothed out; the seabed is modelled. Positions: OpenStreetMap outlines of the visible remains (the mosaic edifice, the baths, the basilica by the harbour, the tower, the wall in the Archaeological Park, the Cathedral Park quarter) and of the Metamorphosis church; at the Hotel Intim, the Palace hotel and the North Gate the marker is today's building or ruin, not the exact point of the dig. Dates: MINAC, the Constanța Culture Directorate and the source list below.
The 3D scene needs WebGL; the text above says everything it shows.
In 1914 Orest Tafrali took his pupils to Constanța and found still standing, partly wrecked, the ruins he had seen in 1902 with Grigore Tocilescu, “on the north shore of the port of Constanța, below the naval school”. The townspeople took them for a Greek temple. Tafrali photographed them and asked the engineer Alexandru Theodorof to draw a plan: three parallel rooms, one larger, opening to the sea, set against the slope of the hill, and beneath them a vaulted tunnel heading into town.
Tafrali published it all in 1930 as “The ruins of a building of the Roman imperial age at Constanța, now vanished”. On a marble fragment found by the ruins he had read the word “Apaturia”, the festival of the Ionian brotherhoods. If the fragment belonged to the building, Tafrali thought, this was where citizens entered their children in the registers. Natalia Toma re-examined the plan in 2010: a row of rooms with a platform reached by seven steps, on the western side of the ancient harbour; the temple theory does not hold. What it was for is unknown, and the building is gone.
In 1887, almost 1,900 years after the poet's death in 17 or 18, Constanta raised his statue in Ovidiu Square. Its author is the Italian Ettore Ferrari; in 1925, a replica was placed in his native Sulmona, 38 years later.
Ovid had asked in verse not to be forgotten. The poet's plea to be remembered takes monumental form at Constanta in 1887.
The edict of Augustus does not survive, and no source precisely identifies the error. Ovid mentions it often and never names it. Here is where knowledge parts from guesswork.
That is how Ovid sums up his motives, in Tristia 2.207–208, adding that the guilt must pass over in silence. Scholars usually identify the poem with the Art of Love; the error stays unknown. The name of the fault appears nowhere in the 96 exile poems, in the Kline division.
The edict of Augustus was harsh, but mild in naming the penalty: Tristia 2.135–137. Ovid kept his citizenship and his property, but was compelled to remain far from Rome.
Augustus died in 14, Ovid in 17 or 18, still at Tomis. The years of hope under Tiberius brought no pardon.
Scholars usually identify the poem with the Art of Love, published years before 8, so many think Augustus used it only as a pretext. Ovid himself defends the book at length in Tristia 2.
Links with scandals in the imperial house have been proposed, including the exile of Julia the Younger in 8, but there is no consensus and no direct evidence connects Ovid with them.
The hypothesis, proposed by J. J. Hartman in 1923 and revived by G. D. Fitton Brown in 1985, stays marginal. The letters themselves weaken it: Vestalis, to whom Ovid writes from Pontus, is attested independently in the Histrian decree, on a mission on the same coast, and the legate Flaccus appears in both. The decree does not mention Ovid, so it does not prove the poet lived at Tomis; it does confirm that the letter's addressee existed and held a real post there.
Test what stayed with you: each answer shows its evidence, verse cited.
1
Ovid lost his Roman citizenship by sentence.
False. The edict calls him relegated, not exiled (Tristia 2.135–137): he kept his citizenship and his property, but was compelled to remain far from Rome.
2
Ovid names his fault in verse.
False. He says only this: a poem and a fault (Tristia 2.207–208), and the guilt must pass over in silence.
3
The exile produced 9 books: 5 of Tristia and 4 of Letters from Pontus.
True. 5 books holding 50 elegies and 4 books holding 46 letters, 96 poems in all in the Kline division.
4
Ovid says he wrote a poem in the Getic tongue.
True. Ex Ponto 4.13.19–20: a booklet in Getic speech, in the winter Ovid calls his sixth at Tomis.
5
Augustus pardoned him before dying.
False. Augustus died in 14, Ovid in 17 or 18, still at Tomis, after 9 or 10 years of exile.
6
The Constanta statue dates from 1887.
True. Ettore Ferrari, Ovidiu Square; the Sulmona replica was placed in 1925, 38 years later.
No answers yet
The Latin verses come from the Latin Library text, an uncritical text; the verse numbers were counted from the book, not copied. The English is A. S. Kline's translation, quoted with attribution; the Romanian is Marius Comper's translation.
The poem count, 50 plus 46, follows the Kline tables of contents; Hall's critical edition divides six units differently, so any total depends on segmentation. The exile years follow Jerome's Chronicle, which gives 17, with 18 as the alternative; the ages allow for no year zero.
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