Ovid at the Edge of the Roman World.
In 8 CE, the Roman poet Ovid was exiled by Emperor Augustus to Tomis, a port on the western Black Sea in what is now Romania. Far from Rome and its literary circles, he found himself living among peoples he described as Scythians. His writings from exile offer an interesting comparison with the mythical Scythia he had portrayed before leaving Rome.
In the Metamorphoses, Ovid presents Scythia as a distant and dangerous place. The Scythian king Lyncus attempts to murder the Athenian hero Triptolemus, who has come to introduce agriculture, and is transformed into a lynx as punishment. Elsewhere, Ovid describes a land inhabited by Cold, Fear, Trembling, and Hunger. He also associates the region with dangerous magic: the poisonous plant aconite supposedly grew from the saliva of Cerberus, the three-headed guardian of the underworld, after Hercules dragged him into the world above.
After his exile, Ovid's descriptions became less mythical but often more hostile. In the Tristia (Sorrows) and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from Pontus), he describes nomadic horsemen attacking farms, carrying away captives, burning houses, and shooting poisoned arrows. He repeatedly emphasizes the dangers of his surroundings and sometimes compares the local peoples to wolves and birds of prey.
Yet Ovid was not a disinterested observer. Much of his exile poetry was written to seek permission to return to Rome, or at least to be relocated somewhere more hospitable. Describing Tomis as a terrifying place surrounded by violent peoples helped make his own circumstances appear especially miserable. His accounts may therefore reflect not only what he experienced, but also what he wanted his readers, including Augustus and his circle, to believe.
Ovid's portrayal of the Scythians illustrates a problem historians encounter when using literary sources. Even firsthand experience does not guarantee an impartial account. The poet who had once imagined Scythia through mythology now claimed to describe it from experience, but his descriptions continued to draw on familiar stereotypes, shaped by his personal circumstances and his hopes of escaping exile.