What was life like for Ovid in Tomis on the Black Sea?

In 8 CE, the emperor Augustus banished the poet Ovid to Tomis, a remote port on the Black Sea near modern-day Constanța, Romania. For a man accustomed to the sophisticated, pleasure-seeking society of Rome, this exile was a profoundly cruel punishment.12

Life in Tomis, which sat on the extreme fringes of the Roman Empire, was difficult for Ovid. He spent his time there writing the Tristia (Sorrows) and the Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea), which served as a continuous stream of pathetic pleas to the emperor for pardon or a mitigation of his sentence. Despite his efforts to secure a return through his well-connected wife and friends, neither Augustus nor his successor, Tiberius, relented. Ovid remained in exile until his death, though his later writings suggest he eventually began to reconcile himself to his fate.1