have appeared. This distinction, however, must be made between the appearance of Achilles and that of the Dioscuri, that the latter appear evidently and clearly to persons who navigate the sea at large, and, when so seen, foretell a prosperous voyage, whereas the figure of Achilles is seen only by such as approach this island.[29] A short sail southwestwardly from the island of Achilles brings us in view, on our starboard, of the important seaport of Constanza. It is located at the eastern extremity of Trajan’s wall and had a special interest for me because its site is near that of Tomi to which the poet Ovid was banished by the Emperor Augustus. The privations which he had to endure on this distant boundary of the Roman Empire and the miseries of his life among the barbarians on the shore of the Euxine are graphically described by the poet in his _Tristia_ and _Letters from Pontus_. The climate of this inhospitable place was trying indeed to the disconsolate exile who had just come from the palace of the Cæsars and who had so long enjoyed all the delights of the Roman capital. For here, to his eyes, the fields were without verdure, the spring without flowers, and snow and ice were eternal. The long hair and beards which concealed the visage of the rude Sarmatians, among whom he was compelled to live, clicked with icicles. Wine froze and had to be cut with a sword. According to Ovid’s account the cold was more severe in his time than it was during the memorable arctic winter many centuries later when the temperature fell so low that the Euxine was frozen over for weeks and the ice on the Bosphorus was so thick that people were able to pass on foot from the Asiatic to the European shore. It was in this cheerless and frigid region, far from home and friends, that one of Rome’s greatest poets spent the last eight years of his life and here it was that he died. Before his death he had expressed a wish that his ashes, enclosed in a modest urn, should be taken to Rome in order that he might not be an exile after death, as he had been during so many years of his life, but his request was not granted.[30] A tradition exists that a tomb was erected to his memory in Tomi, but there is among scholars as much doubt respecting the existence, or location of such a tomb, as there always has been regarding the reason of the poet’s banishment by one who had showered on him so many and so great favors. According to a legend that Ovid recalls in one of his elegies, Tomi was a place of ill omen, for it was here that Medea murdered her brother and strewed the sea with his carved limbs. And it was from this atrocious fratricide, according to the poet, that the town of Tomi took its name: _Inde Thomis dictus locus hic, quia fertur in illo_ _Membra soror fratris consecuisse sui._[31]