Remember this…A child of six, small and young, his name was Lilis. To whom I raise this stone, as it should not have had to be, I the father Bassianus with my wife Januaria, she of the too many shed tears, mourning together our child’s painless birth. I salute you, O Passerby, and wish good health to all the others.
-Greek funerary inscription, Tomis, 4th C CE
Be not severe, Lover, as you pass by. Say, Easy may the bones of Ovid lie.
-Ovid’s imagined epitaph, Tristia 3.3.76, inscribed on his statue in Constanţa
We passed these outside the Greco-Roman Museum on our way to dinner in the marina’s restaurant row after a long day. We had been to Dr. Lilis’ hometown Mangalia with the 16th C. Ottoman mosque and minaret, Romania’s oldest. I had been reading the Black Sea Letters and Tristia, the Argonautica’s Book IV and Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. They all had Tomis as a place to get away from or to pass by in winter when the sea froze. I liked it there. It was early in the summer but the season was already in full swing. We were headed next to the Danube Delta, from the Greek as are many things in Constanţa.