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of Russia were inhabited in ancient times, and of their
natural conditions. Poor Ovid! The knowledge we
now have was bought by the misfortune which befell
him, — a misfortune so great and complete that it is
incomprehensible how any one has ever been able to
speak of his lamentations in a careless tone. No author
in the Roman literature had a more original or bolder
talent, and no one met with a more cruel fate. It was
so long before the days of the Russian empire, an actual
exile for life to Siberia. The illegal judgment strikes
him, the finest, most sensuous, most petted poetic nature
of Rome, tears him, even then growing old, out of the
pleasures of home life, away from a wife whom he loves
with the most heartfelt tenderness, after having been
twice unhappily married, away from the circle of his
friends and admirers, away from the city of the world
which is all in all to him, from his fatherland (nay, from
civilization), and drags him over the sea and the salt
waves to the end of the known world. He is landed
solitary and alone in a place where the air itself is
painful to him; where he can endure neither the drinking
water nor the food, cannot protect himself sufficiently
against the climate, cannot find a physician when he is
ill, nor a single man with whom he can exchange ideas
when he is well; where few understand Greek and none
Latin; where he must live in perpetual fear of attacks
from hostile tribes, who swarm about the town and often
enough break in, in constant anxiety lest there should
be attacks from the inhabitants of the town, who were
little less than barbarian; finally, where he cannot once
move outside of the poor strongholds of the town, or own
even the least bit of a garden, of which he so bitterly
feels the want, because there are no gardens in the town,
and personal safety is wholly wanting outside, so that the
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