From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

As myth and legend hover over the Danube from its source to its delta, so do they also linger along the western shore of the historic Euxine. Even before we have left the earth-colored flood which pours into it, we descry in the distance the little island of Fido-Nisi—Serpent Island—so called from the great number of snakes which are said to infest its sea-lashed cliffs and about which, from time immemorial, Russian and Turkish sailors have told the most fantastic stories.

In antiquity it was known as Leuce—

“Leuce, the white, where the souls of heroes rest.”

According to Homer, the ashes of Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, were placed in a golden urn and deposited in a tumulus on the promontory of Sigeum in the Troad. This elevated headland, visible far out on the Ægean, served as a landmark for passing mariners. Later poets, however, inform us that the body of Achilles was snatched from the burning pyre by Thetis, his goddess-mother, and transferred to the Island of Leuce where, with his bosom friend, Patroclus and other heroes,[28] it was speedily worshipped by the Greeks who here erected a temple in the hero’s honor. For this reason Leuce was long known as the Island of Achilles.

The Greek historian Arrian in his Periplus of the Euxine Sea, written in the form of a report to the Emperor Hadrian, says:

Some call this the Island of Achilles, others call it the chariot of Achilles, and others Leuce, from its color. Thetis is said to have given up this island to her son Achilles, by whom it was inhabited. There are now existing a temple and a wooden statue of Achilles of ancient workmanship. It is destitute of inhabitants and pastured only by a few goats which those who touch here are said to offer to the memory of Achilles. Many offerings are suspended in this temple, as cups, rings and more valuable gems. All these are offerings to Achilles. Inscriptions are also suspended written in the Greek and Latin languages. Some are in praise of Patroclus, whom those who are disposed to honor Achilles treat with equal respect. Many birds inhabit this island, as sea gulls, divers, and coots innumerable. These birds frequent the temple of Achilles. Every day in the morning they take their flight and, having moistened their wings, fly back again to the temple and sprinkle it with the moisture, which having performed they brush and clean the pavement with their wings.... It is said that Achilles has appeared in time of sleep both to those who have approached the coast of this island and also to such as have been sailing a short distance from it and instructed them where the island was most safely accessible and where the ships might best lie at anchor. They also say further that Achilles has appeared to them not in time of sleep, or a dream, but in a visible form on the mast, or at the extremity of the yards, in the same manner as the Dioscuri 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: