Book Title: Death and The Poet
Series: The Publius Ovidius Mysteries
Author: Fiona Forsyth
Publication Date: 20th March 2025
Publisher: Sharpe Books
Pages: 361
Genre: Historical mystery
Any Triggers: murder, references to slavery, domestic abuse, alcohol, cancer
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Book Title and Author Name:
Death and The Poet
by Fiona Forsyth
Blurb:
14 AD.
When Dokimos the vegetable seller is found bludgeoned to death in the Black Sea town of Tomis, it’s the most exciting thing to have happened in the region for years. Now reluctantly settled into life in exile, the disgraced Roman poet Ovid helps his friend Avitius to investigate the crime, with the evidence pointing straight at a cuckolded neighbour.
But Ovid is also on edge, waiting for the most momentous death of all. Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, is nearing his end, and the future of the whole Roman world is uncertain.
Even as far away as Tomis, this political shadow creates tension as the pompous Roman legate Flaccus thinks more of his career than solving a local murder.
Avitius and Ovid become convinced that an injustice has been done in the case of the murdered vegetable seller. But Flaccus continues to turn a deaf ear.
When Ovid’s wife, Fabia, arrives unexpectedly, carrying a cryptic message from the Empress Livia, the poet becomes distracted – and another crime is committed.
Ovid hopes for a return to Rome – only to discover that he is under threat from an enemy much closer to home.
When Angels Fly blog post
Finding Tomis
Have you ever been to the ancient towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum or Ostia? They are a wonderful experience, and terrific sources for life in the ancient Roman world. Not only have they been excavated and documented, but you can also walk down their streets, wander in their gardens, imagine the bustling streets…
When I decided to write a series of books about the poet Ovid in exile, there were lots of good reasons to do so, mainly centred on the crisis in which he found himself in 8 CE. But – why oh why didn’t the Emperor Augustus exile the poet Ovid to Pompeii? I would have had a street map to work from! I would know where all the major buildings were! There would be so much information about life and the people who lived there! I could cunningly introduce the graffiti which covers Pompeii and how cool would that be?
But instead, the Emperor exiled Rome’s most famous living poet to the small town of Tomis – or “Where?” as I first called it. Like many towns in the Roman Empire of two thousand years ago, Tomis has disappeared. There is no street plan and information is limited by time and environment. Tomis was situated on the coast of the Black Sea and that coastline has changed dramatically since Ovid’s time: much of the town is under the sea now and what remains on land is buried far beneath the modern Romanian city of Constanța. This is an account of how I built my own Tomis – though probably not Ovid’s Tomis…
I began with the website of the Museum of History and Archaeology in Constanța (Muzeul de Istorie Națională și Arheologi). The Museum has put a lot of valuable information online – and in English! I am so grateful that they put out this information freely. One of the first things I learned about Tomis was that there had a settlement there for far longer than I had realised. In the 8th-6th centuries BCE, the Greeks began planting colonies all over the Mediterranean. The western Black Sea coast attracted many such settlements and Tomis must have been a coveted location because it had a good sheltered harbour. The Greek town seems to have been founded in the 6th century BCE, and 600 years later it was looking forward to an exciting development – it was in the middle of a region that the Romans planned to take over and make into a province, Moesia. Tomis was hoping to be the provincial capital, and I am sure that many people in the town hoped that Romanisation would bring prosperity, both for individuals and the town as a whole.
I set out to reconstruct Tomis. I visualised a town with long roots, but set in a region with an interesting mix of peoples. Locals could be Greek, but they could be Thracian, Dacian, Getan or Sarmatian, or a mixture. Added to this was the fact that Tomis was a port: the people of the town would be familiar with languages, races and religions from all over the Mediterranean, and archaeological evidence suggests that Egypt’s Isis was worshipped alongside the Great Mother of Asia Minor and the Thracian Horseman. The primary language would be Greek, as was the case all over the eastern Mediterranean, and with the advent of Rome many canny merchants would be practising their smattering of Latin while the local upper classes would no doubt be teaching their sons, maybe even their daughters, to communicate with Romans.
I thought that for this mix of people, awaiting a major change in their political system, there must have been many different opinions on the Romans taking over. Most were probably resigned to it, because the Greek cities of the Black Sea had been on cordial terms with Rome for a long time, and had no interest in resisting. Some would positively look forward to the new opportunities, some would be thankful that Rome would have responsibility for the troublesome border, some resentful of the new regime. Many of the upper classes would be hoping to acquire Roman citizenship over the coming years, and were of course the most likely to benefit financially from the change. Ordinary people? I expect they had a bit of a grumble and then got on with it, because after all, what choice have ordinary people ever had?
I loved the prospect of depicting this intriguing political situation, so all I had left to do was imagine what my Tomis actually looked like. The Greek towns and cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were my model, so I researched places like Ephesus. I thought of the buildings I wanted Tomis to have and went through the material on the Museum website for evidence. I figured that if there was a beautiful staue of a goddess discovered by archaeologists, I could reasonably put a temple to that goddess in the town. I found a reconstruction of Tomis on YouTube – a couple of hundred years after the era I wanted but useful nonetheless for size. I carefully studied the limited physical evidence recovered, aware of the limitations. There is a beautiful mosaic near the Museum for example – but it is fourth century, drat! However, this doesn’t mean that nobody in Tomis had a mosaic floor put down before the fourth century, I reasoned. I had the idea that among certain wealthy Tomitans, as they became part of the Roman Empire, there might have been a sudden craze for Roman decorating.
Finally, I looked at what Ovid tells us about Tomis in the poems he sent back to Rome and he is annoying imprecise. It is almost as though he did not care that I needed to know where the Town Council offices were! He is also dramatic, especially in his descriptions of the weather – did the wine really freeze so that to get a drink our poor poet had to lick an icy block? Well, modern Constanța can have some chilly winters – the port of Constanța did freeze up in 2012 just as Ovid describes. But I wondered if this happened every year and for months at a time, as Ovid implies. Some more research discovered that at Ovid’s time the region was going through what meteorologists call the ‘Roman warm spell’ with temperatures estimated to be similar to modern times. So far the action of Poetic Justice and Death and the Poet has taken place in spring and summer, but book 3 in the trilogy is set in autumn and winter so I shall have to make a decision as to how cold I should go.
Of course what you will have realised by now is that all the above is just a long-winded apology, for my Tomis is probably nothing like the town in which Ovid spent his last years. But this is what an historical novelist does, surely? I have found out what I could and then plugged the gaps with what seems to me to be reasonable and likely. I do think I’m going to draw the line at licking frozen wine though!
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Author Bio:
Fiona studied Classics at Oxford before teaching it for 25 years. A family move to Qatar gave her the opportunity to write about ancient Rome, and she is now back in the UK, working on her seventh novel.
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When Angels Fly 