![]() According to Ovid, none of its citizens spoke Latin, which as an educated Roman he found trying. At the time, Tomis was a remote town on the edge of the civilised world it was loosely under the authority of the Kingdom of Thrace (a satellite state of Rome), and was superficially Hellenized. Ovid’s exile is related by the poet himself, and also in brief references to the event by Pliny the Elder and Statius. The reasons for his banishment are uncertain. Ovid, the Latin poet of the Roman Empire, was banished in 8 AD from Rome to Tomis (now Constanţa, Romania) by decree of the emperor Augustus. Ovid’s poems in exile have been seen as of fundamental importance for the study of Roman aristocracy under Augustus and Tiberius. Eugène Delacroix, Ovid among the Scythians, 1862, Oil on wood, Metropolitan Museum of Art / Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wikimedia Commons ![]()
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