Reviewed by: Law and Love in Ovid: Courting Justice in the Age of Augustus by Ioannis Ziogas Teresa Ramsby Law and Love in Ovid: Courting Justice in the Age of Augustus. By Ioannis Ziogas. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xiii + 420. Hardback, $115.00. ISBN: 9780198845140. The presence of legal and forensic rhetoric in Ovid’s many works has long been a subject of interest among scholars. In his recent monograph, Ioannis Ziogas dials up the significance of these aspects of Ovid’s poetic style by claiming that they are not merely reflective of Ovid’s legal training, as described in his autobiographical poems. Ziogas also rejects the notion that Ovid is simply being playful with legal terms within the sportive and culturally parodic context of elegiac love poetry. Rather, Ziogas asserts that Ovid is purposefully and provocatively building towers of poetic and legal structures on two important foundations, the first being the concept of sovereign exceptionalism that culminates in Augustus who, for the first time in Roman political history, stood alone, outside the law, [End Page 484] while making the laws (as princeps). The second foundation is the forensic language of prior poets (Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius) who had already explored the idea of the amator as living outside the Roman system and who thus created terminologies to define that existence, with words and phrases that we are well familiar with, such as servitium amoris, militia amoris, otiosus and exclusus. Ovid’s legal structures of language and those of Latin love elegy in general, Ziogas explains, anticipate “the juridico-political milieu of the Principate” (55), so that “the sacrosanctity of the poet and that of the prince exist in parallel, if not in tension” (57). Ovid far surpassed his predecessors in his application of these precarious poetics, and, as we know, the tension he created did not resolve peacefully for him. In the introductory first chapter, Ziogas provides the theoretical basis of this interpretation, relying heavily on the work of Giorgio Agamben, whose notions of the homo sacer and the sovereign exception have been influential in philosophy, sociology, political science and ancient world studies. Ziogas discusses the creation of Augustus’s tribunician and sacrosanct status, as developed by Verrius Flaccus (and cited in Pompeius Festus centuries later), as bearing great similarity to Agamben’s homo sacer who lives a “bare life” outside the juridical order – a place of vulnerability for most, but a supremely protected and powerful place for Augustus. Ziogas summons many elegiac examples to make a compelling case for the idea of the elegiac amator as a man outside the law – governed not by the compelling cultural forces that shape the Roman man, but by the laws and legal environments he creates within his poems. The remaining seven chapters are divided into three sections and the work concludes with an epilogue. Part I: The Trials of Love (Chapters 2–4), develops the Ovidian amator as homo sacer, established primarily through recusatio, where forensic arguments are deployed through these acts of rejection, placing the poet in a position of enacting and empowering whichever pleasure principle he chooses to pursue. This ability is compared to the power of the princeps who is not constrained by any external force to pursue (or dismantle) the legal code of Rome. Ziogas then examines the courtroom dramas that unfold in the Amores (particularly 2.7, 2.19 and 3.4), whereby Ovid makes “free love the absolute basis of legality” and “defines a private zone that lies outside the juridical order” (141). In Chapter 4, Ziogas demonstrates how the paired epistles written by Acontius and Cydippe (Heroides 20 and 21) complicate “the issue of intention in the enactment of contracts and in falling in love,” (198), a poetic innovation that points to “the rise of epistolography in imperial adjudication” (199). [End Page 485] In Part II: Lex Amatoria (Chapters 5–6), Ziogas charts the “continuity of didactic and elegiac traditions from Hesiod to Ovid” (203) in his exploration of Ovid’s defense of his work in the Ars amatoria and its overt opposition to Augustus’s marital laws. He draws fruitful comparisons between Ovid’s didactic works and those...
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Dec 29, 2023
Antoni Bobrowski 
Open Access
