In December of the year 8 AD, a Roman citizen named Publius Ovidius Naso left Rome on a long journey. After enduring ferocious storms in the Adriatic and rough sailing in the Ionian Sea and the Gulf of Corinth, he crossed the Aegean to Samothrace. Then, after transiting the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, he landed on the eastern coast of Thrace, somewhere in today’s Bulgaria.