Roman Moesia
A remote Greek colony on the Black Sea coast of what is now Romania, forever marked as the bleak place of exile where the Roman poet Ovid spent his last embittered years writing letters home.
12 most-discussed ideas
Tomis (Constanța) through the eras
Tomis began as a modest Greek trading colony on the western shore of the Black Sea (the Pontus Euxinus), founded by settlers from Miletus and sharing the rugged Dobruja coast with sister-colonies like Istros and Callatis. Through the Hellenistic centuries it stayed a small, Greek-speaking port at the very edge of the civilized world, ringed by the Getae and other Thracian peoples and far from the great centers of learning to the south.
Tomis owes its lasting fame to a single exile. In 8 CE the emperor Augustus banished the celebrated poet Ovid here, to the raw frontier of the empire, for an offense Ovid named only as 'a poem and a mistake' (carmen et error). On this cold, half-barbarian coast—where, he complained, few understood Latin and Getic raiders pressed against the walls—Ovid composed the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto, mournful verses pleading for a recall that never came; he died at Tomis around 17 CE. The town itself was then a frontier settlement near the edge of the newly organized province of Moesia, its modest Greek civic life overshadowed forever by its most reluctant resident.
Teachers who lived here
Works composed here
Ideas shaped here
Concepts most frequently discussed in the works composed at Tomis (Constanța). Click any to trace the idea across time and place.