Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

the scythians as others saw them
2.12 The exile of the Roman poet Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea coast is recorded in his well-known
laments complaining about the indignity of living among barbarians. His plight is depicted in Eugene
Delacroix’s Ovid among the Scythians, painted in 1859.
empire. Even in Central Asia, where he could have confronted the Sakā, he wisely
chose instead to turn south to the richer pickings of India.
In the centuries following Philip’s success against the Scythians in the Danube
estuary the nomads of the steppe continued the natural rhythm of their lives, with
pressures from the east generating a constant flow of nomads thrusting further and
further to the west. In such uncertain times the Greek cities of the north Pontic region
declined, some into desolate ruins.
South of the Danube the cities along the western shore of the Black Sea still maintained
a precarious existence. Some sense of the life in one of them, Tomis, founded
in the sixth century bc, is captured in the lament, Tristia, written by the Roman poet
Ovid. Ovid was 50 years old when, in ad 8, he was exiled to Tomis by the emperor
Augustus, who could no longer tolerate the poet’s louche behaviour and risqué
verses. Tomis (modern Constantą) was close to the Danube mouth in an area then
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