Z.'s impressive and important book has several aims: the headline is that, although scholars are aware of the prevalence of legalistic metaphors and scenarios in Ovidian elegy and of the extent to which his poetry engages with the Augustan socio-political reality, especially his moral reforms, the traditional view that legal discourse in Ovid is just window-dressing or a residue of the poet's own legal training, still needs debunking. Modern disciplinarity still blinds us to the intense interrelationships between fields of knowledge (art, literature, medicine, rhetoric and the law) in ancient Rome. Ovidian poetry is not just packed with legalisms, Z. shows: it explores the shared language and signifying structures of love and law, which begin with Homer and Hesiod; it is a ‘juridico-discursive artefact’ that accompanies the rise of Roman jurists in the early Principate and should be read alongside not just the lex Iulia but legal treatises and correspondence, declamation and curse tablets. The project is a new-historicist one: Ovidian poetry does not just ‘reflect’ an ‘exterior’ socio-political context, but is an impactful actor in that ‘context’. Ovid is not just a commentator on Augustan law, but a creative participant in its production: his poetry points to love as the condition of the possibility for law, which is itself created through performative fiction. The book takes the work of P.A. Miller on Ovid and M. Janan on Propertius as precedents, but also draws on J. Derrida's ‘Before the law’, G. Agamben on sovereignty and J. Butler (after M. Foucault) on the exclusionary/normativising mechanisms of power.

Like Agamben's homo sacer, Amor, Venus, the erotic poet and erotic elegy itself are ungovernable outlaws who make their own rules, which they enforce by persuasion, seduction and violence. Ovid famously declares that he rejected a career in law to become a poet, and his Remedia recommend a return to fora et leges. Yet they are also sovereign legislators, censorious masters of their own imperial domains who ‘compete’ with Augustus; like the emperor, their will/desire dictates which passions are legitimate, and they set themselves simultaneously inside and outside the juridical order. Amor, as both phusis and nomos, models the operation of sovereign power, which – as Agamben understands – is predicated on its own exceptions and on the violence it ostensibly excludes. Ovid emerges as both an innovative and a profoundly conservative, even totalitarian poet, both pro- and anti-Augustan, or rather counter-Augustan, para-Augustan. His poetry is both involved in producing normative discourse and cultivates a space in which to think outside that discourse, which operates by incorporating and defining itself in relation to that which lies outside itself. After Miller and T. Habinek, in particular, Z. argues powerfully that Ovid's violations of the law re-instantiate or require the re-instatiation of the law and therefore ultimately serve the dominant regime.

The book is divided into three parts (‘The Trials of Love’, ‘Lex Amatoria’ and ‘The Law of the Father’), followed by an epilogue. A substantial introduction expertly prepares the jury. Part 1 (3 chapters) focuses on the Amores, Heroides and exile poetry, exploring not just legal expression and imagery in these texts, but also the legal-political work they do in mapping the workings of sovereignty in the domain of love, and the intrusion of a legalistic gaze into ‘private life’, in parallel with, or anticipation of, the cultural shifts engineered by Augustan legislation. This section culminates in a chapter on Heroides 20–1, the case of Acontius vs Cydippe on the issues of contract law and consent. Part 2 (Chapters 5 and 6) turns to the Ars Amatoria, and Z. develops his earlier work on Ovid and Hesiod to offer an expansive recuperation of the Ars as fully embedded in a polyphonous tradition that has always included elegy and has since Hesiod and Solon investigated the close relationship between law and didacticism. As we know, the Ars negotiates the social and moral status of women in relation to the law against a backdrop of Augustan legislation: yet what R. Gibson calls the ironic ‘middle way’ in the poem is better expressed, Z. argues, as a deconstruction or ‘category confusion’. Part 3 examines the biopolitical force of Augustan legislation (long before the date Foucault sets for the birth of biopolitics), with its emphasis on patria potestas, the control of female sexuality and reproduction and the fathering of legitimate children, alongside the transgressive promiscuity of Ovidian poetry, which privileges sexual pleasure over reproduction, breaks the law on incest, and prefers the crimen-ality of Oedipal carmina to actual offspring. For Ovid, Augustan ideology can never be immune to texte: laws against adultery just turn people on; the poet's relegation to Tomis is another paraclausithyron. Chapter 8, ‘Love and Incest’, comes closest to seeing Ovidian poetry as mythologising, in a very direct way, (opposition to) the new legislation on sexual behaviour: in Met. 10 Orpheus is not a lawmaker but the inventor of pederasty, and Myrrha is a queer-feminist rebel who upsets the Law of the Father by challenging his power to say no to incest. (Ovid's Cinyras also reveals the Law's concealment of its legitimation of incest, when he ‘soothes’ Myrrha by calling her filia, in v. 467.) A suggestive epilogue cements these readings by observing the impact of Ovid's ‘jurisprudence of love’ on Forcadel's Cupido Jurisperitus and Boccaccio's Decameron.

At points in the book, Z. suggests that ‘the elegiac suspension of legal action affords space for the emergence of an alternative jurisprudence of love’ (p. 21). Yet, within his Foucaultian-Butlerian framework, he is contracted to think only in terms of static inclusion/exclusion, rather than in terms of the pleasurable or ethically problematic movement between them. By p. 244 we are reading, ‘As a sovereign legislator, the elegiac poet does not simply oppose tyrannical rulers, but becomes their alter ego’, and p. 312 creates a loose analogy between Augustus and Hitler (both draw a biopolitical link between exemplarity and paternity). Emphasis throughout is always on similarities rather than (also) on the significant differences between Ovid and Augustus, and between texts such as the Res Gestae and the Amores. Ovid attempts ‘to be equal to Augustus’; lover and legislator are ‘two sides of the same coin’; artistic innovation is emulation/rebellion that revolves around the problem of succession. We almost forget that the poet-emperor analogy is a ludic, fantastical one and that the per-se-ness of Ovidian orgasms does not just clash with or ‘ironically reflect’ the tyrant's pleasure, but spreads a virus in the system that makes a difference or can make a difference for readers. The disparity between poetry and political propaganda is not reducible to poetry's oppositional or ‘ironic’ moves. While convincing to a point (in the sense that it alerts us to the fictionality of political-legal discourse, and the political implicatedness of literary texts), the drive towards sameness and bi-directional mirroring risks shutting down our engagement with Ovidian poetry. The Derridean point that there is no law without transgression and vice versa (i.e. there is no law invulnerable to différance or to the spatio-temporal relation that is life) is misread as a collapse or merging in the present: transgression is the fulfilment of the law (p. 138). We somehow slide from the idea that law and literature share conditions of possibility to the notion that Ovidian poetry can only be read as representing the ‘ruling ideology’ (p. 124) and must be restored to its ‘rightful position in the history of legal humanism’ (cover blurb). The book convinces that Ovid's love poetry is ‘essentially juridical, inviting readers to pass judgement on its principles’. Yet the distinctiveness and singularity of Ovid's texts, before the law, get lost here, as does the difficult process of attempting to respond to the ethical demands made on us qua judges. What is it to ‘do justice’ to these texts? As Derek Attridge comments, apropos of these analogies, in The Singularity of Literature, the reader-judge must first ‘assess a particular case by bringing to bear on it all the relevant legal history and documentation, and thus dissipate its uniqueness by relating it to the general field of law’; yet to act justly, s/he must then ‘move beyond’ the lifeless ‘codes of legal practice’ and answer to the singularity and context-specificity of the case – not singular in the sense of being an impervious identity, but in the sense of not being reducible to the codes, conventions and precedents through which it becomes intelligible (pp. 178–80). Z. does the former, brilliantly, but not the latter.