With this monograph and a volume, Roman Law and Latin Literature (2022), co-edited with Erica Bexley, Ionannis Ziogas has finally established law and literature as a field within Roman studies. Since E. J. Kenney's seminal article on Ovid and the law (Yale Classical Studies 21 (1969), 241–63), Latinists have returned sporadically to law's entanglement with literature, always with a call for greater engagement. Meanwhile, law and literature has burgeoned as a discipline in English and other modern literary studies, especially of Shakespeare. Given Roman law's importance to legal history, it is surprising it has taken so long for the approach to reach Latin literature. Given the divide between doctrinal approaches to Roman law and social history, between social history and literary analysis, it is heartening this has happened at all.

Various approaches define the field: literature thinks about law; law operates in ways amenable to literary criticism (e.g. narratology, discourse analysis); both are norm-defining discourses that share and contest cultural practices. Z. belongs firmly in the post-structuralist camp, which takes what literature says about law as a strong cultural intervention. Inspired by Giorgio Agamben's Homo sacer (1995) and State of Exception (2003), Z. explicates paradoxes, zones of indistinction, the inside-outside positions of sovereign and lover in relation to law, and the möbius-strip dependencies structuring Ovid's representation of two ostensibly independent cultural domains. This book is about Ovid, with the presumption that this wily poet's treatment of law and love reveals truths about real power.

Z. climbs at least three mountains. One is to convince sceptics that Ovid's pervasive use of legal terminology is not, as for Kenney, amusingly decorative fluff, but instead a sustained analysis and critique of power, specifically Augustus’ power. Given the political turn of Ovidian studies in recent years, Z.'s adroit demonstration of how systematically love parallels, intertwines, overturns and undermines law as a discourse of power in Ovid will convince.

A steeper challenge is to persuade legal scholars and social historians that a poet can say anything worthwhile about law beyond making it mere subject matter or metaphor, that this book analyses more than one Latin poet's obsessions. Those who, like Richard Posner in Law and Literature (2002), keep law and literature firmly in different social domains, will grant that the one may discuss the other, but scoff at literature's having formative influence beyond its own jurisdiction. Z. builds on scholarship about the emergence in the Augustan period of legal experts — well-versed in poetry, sharing the same education as literary authors — to make a compelling case that literary and legal discourses were ‘in constant dialogue’ (254). Professionalisation among jurists was contemporaneous with the Ars amatoria's spoof of expertise in the praeceptor amoris. Ovid's skewering of Augustus’ centralised authority parallels that of jurists, like Labeo, who cherished the ‘polyphony of the Republic's legislative procedures’ (263). Using a move familiar from cultural criticism, Z. argues that Ovid does not just reflect on independent social developments but contributes to their conceptualisation.

Third, Z.'s commitment to deconstructive modes of argumentation will irritate some. It is also the strength of the book. Broad, counterintuitive claims initially shock. However, these rest securely on detailed close reading. To those who resist the idea that love generates law, citations lend solid philological support: Venus gives law (iura) to sky, earth, and her native seas at Ovid, Fasti 4.93 (5); in Diotima's speech, ‘justice is the child of a man in love’ (Plato, Symposium 208–9) (307). Dispositive decision-making comes in pleasure's own vocabulary: ‘senatui / principi placuit’ (2); ‘mihi places’ (280). If we insist these are different types of law, Z. shows how slippage between ‘precise’ and ‘popular’ meanings of lex and ius and the likelihood that ordinary meanings precede the technical flip law's commonly assumed priority (19–20). Love emerges as law's topsy-turvy twin.

Ovid's inversions target nothing less than sovereign power by establishing love as a pocket of immunity from public interference, an alternative sphere possessing a higher sovereignty with its own rules. This means that love is less law's opposite than its liberatory rival. The invention of privacy means the marriage legislation generates perverse results: with adultery's criminalisation, ‘unless proven guilty in a public trial, all adulteresses were innocent’ (85). Unexpected is less that law and love are opposed, but that they end up in a similar place: despite antithetical priorities, love elegy and the Augustan marriage legislation both disembed sexuality from the family (73); sumptuary legislation and the poor lover's taste both counter feminine extravagance (293); adulterer and moralist alike confine women's sexuality within normative discourses (including advice on sexual positions) to serve the desires of men (300).

I am unconvinced every zone of indistinction establishes a sovereign exception. Z. slides quickly sometimes from the one to the other. Nevertheless, the book's insights far outweigh my quibbles. Among numerous eye-openers is that Augustus’ biopower as pater patriae shifted patria potestas from the father's right to kill his children to his own ‘power to give life’ (305), a significant legal innovation. This aperçu reveals the ideological link between the marriage legislation and clemency. But for Ovid among others, Augustus’ touted increase in the birth rate becomes the sterile generation of only more law, in contrast to the fertile generation of love, pleasure and poetry. The Ars amatoria's real threat is less its advice on lovemaking than the alternative society and juridical order it establishes against the normalised coercion of merely legal authority. Ovid's relegation outside Roman dominion is therefore poetic justice.