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Law and Love in Ovid

Courting Justice in the Age of Augustus
Ioannis Ziogas
1
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For Daphne
incipe, parua puella, patrem cognoscere risu

Preface
This book’s cover shows a wedding ring in the shape of a Möbius band.
Such rings have become fashionable, though I am sure their popu-
larity has nothing to do with the contents of this book. Nevertheless,
the image illustrates one the main theoretical approaches of this
monograph. Giorgio Agamben (1998: 37–8) mentions the Möbius strip
in his attempt to represent schematically the essence of sovereignty.
For Agamben, sovereign power is the very impossibility of distin-
guishing what lies inside and outside the law; rule and exception,
nature and law, violence and justice pass through one another as in
a Möbius strip. My argument is that the relationship between law
and love in Latin love elegy creates a similar zone of indistinction
between what lies inside (law) and outside (love) the juridical order.
This is how Amor emerges as the sovereign legislator of elegiac love.
At first sight, the relationship between law and love may look
antithetical. Love falls outside or transcends legal boundaries—it is
above or beyond the law. The law, by contrast, needs to suppress
affection in order to operate objectively. We may represent love
(extramarital and extralegal) and law (family and property law)
with two distinct circles. When emotions (love or anger) enter the
legal sphere, they signal a suspension of proper procedure, an
exception to the rules. But instead of undermining the law, many
exceptions are fundamental to the legal system (think of clementia1
or amnesty). The exception and the rule are mutually constitutive.
Thus, in the next stage, the two circles of law and love are inside
each other—they form two concentric circles that overlap in part.
In the third stage, the exception (love) and the rule (law) merge in
one circle. Marriage is a good example of how law and love may or
1 Clementia is the sovereign’s power to pardon someone who deserves to be convicted. In

Seneca’s De clementia, it appears predominantly in contexts of imperial adjudication, but is
an extrajudicial action. It is the power to suspend the law in the name of justice.
viii Preface
should coincide in absolute indistinction. And the Möbius band is

what illustrates the union of lex (‘law’) and amor (‘love’).
This book argues that Ovid is obsessed with the interactions
between law and love—the ways in which these concepts can be
perceived as mutually exclusive but also mutually constitutive, as
distinct and inseparable. My aim is to study what Ovid has to say
about this dynamic dialectic. This does not mean that I necessarily
endorse his ideas (and thus I hope that I will not be relegated to the
margins of scholarship). Although I am passionate about Ovid,
I intend to neither approve nor disapprove of his amatory jurispru-
dence. Between the roles of Ovid’s defence lawyer and prosecutor,
I choose neither.
Admittedly, this may be hard to achieve, given that the trial set-
ting, where Ovid defends his life and poetry, is one of his main pre-
occupations. In Ovid’s case, a iudex is simultaneously a judge and a
literary critic. Aesthetics and legality, like law and love, blend
together at the moment of their separation. Ovid loves a good
courtroom drama. But despite his burning desire to be part of legal
procedures, he has been convicted, censored, or acquitted without
trial from his to our times. There is something in his poetry that
turns readers into judges, and, in my view, this is not coincidental,
but lies at the heart of his oeuvre; his love poetry is essentially jurid-
ical, inviting readers to pass judgment on its principles. Is Ovid a
sexist or a feminist? Does he support or undermine Augustus’ laws?
Is he guilty or not guilty? Do his laws of love liberate or enslave?
I do not have a straightforward answer to these questions other
than that one can argue either side. The main point is that in Love’s
sovereign rule, the identities of master and slave, moralist and adul-
terer, lawgiver and outlaw become indistinguishable. Once we put
Amor in the dock, we realize that he is a very elusive god—he is
both a lovely child and a venomous creature; he can reconcile or
divide; he likes to live outside the law, but is fully versed in it. Amor in
the Ovidian sense covers a great range of emotions and behaviours,
a fact that made my research both challenging and fascinating. Love
may aim to establish a harmonious society in which justice is so
prevalent that crimes are non-existent and thus legal procedures are
suspended indefinitely. The laws of love are the dream of a utopian
Preface ix
civilization. In its positive connotations, Ovid’s amor is not unrelated

to the Christian meaning of love as the fulfilment of the law—I do
not shy away from the tradition of a ‘Christian Ovid’ (Ouidius
Christianus). In particular, I draw a connection between Ovid’s laws
of love and the Judaeo-Christian tradition of the relationship
between law and love (especially as it is expressed in Paul’s letter to
the Romans).
But this is not the whole story of amor in Ovid. Elegiac love is
synonymous with crimen (‘accusation’ or ‘crime’). Amor can be
tyrannical. His sovereignty thrives in a state of exception, which
blends violence and justice, coercion and persuasion, nature (φύσις)
and custom (νόμος). This coincidence of opposites casts a dark
shadow on Amor’s regime. The very exceptionalism of the rule of
Love takes us to the origins of totalitarianism. In particular, the
ways in which Amor construes his sovereign jurisdiction uncannily
reflect the ways in which the emperor Augustus established his
autocratic rule, namely by simultaneously setting himself inside
and outside the juridical order. The prince is primus inter pares
(“first among equals”), both included in a legislative body as an
equal member and standing outside it as the undisputable first in
the hierarchy.
My thesis is that Ovid deploys legal discourse throughout his works
in conscious reflection on Augustus’ ongoing—and thoroughgoing—
revision of the Roman legal landscape. To that end, I select representa-
tive case studies from the whole of Ovid’s oeuvre, from the Amores,
Heroides, Ars amatoria, and Remedia amoris to the Metamorphoses,
the Fasti, and the exile poetry. The passages I discuss are wide-
ranging, but far from exhaustive. Ovid’s poetry is so deeply steeped
in the language and rituals of law that it is hard to find a substantial
passage that does not engage with legal theory or practice. I hope
that my work will inspire further study on Ovid and the law, but
also make a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary field of
law and literature. This book is not the fulfilment of Ovid’s laws of
love—it is just the beginning.
Acknowledgements
Parts of significantly revised versions of three of my previous

publications are included in this book. The first part of ‘Stripping
the Roman Ladies: Ovid’s Rites and Readers’, Classical Quarterly 64
(2014), 735–44 has been reworked for Chapter 6; ideas and argu-
ments from ‘Love Elegy and Legal Language in Ovid’, in P. Mitsis,
and I. Ziogas, (eds.) Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry,
De Gruyter, Berlin and Boston, MA, (2016) 213–40 are developed
in Chapters 2, 4, and 6; Chapter 8 has substantial points of contact
with ‘Orpheus and the Law: The Story of Myrrha in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses’, Law in Context 34 (2016), 24–41. These publica-
tions are not simply reproduced—they have been thoroughly
revised and integrated into the structure and overall approach of
the monograph. Significant parts of these articles are not included
in this book, and thus the publication of this monograph does not
replace them. I would like to thank the editors of Classical Quarterly,
Law in Context, and De Gruyter’s series Trends in Classics for per-
mission to reprint revised parts of my previous work.
I often consulted the Loeb translations of Greek and Latin texts.
Several translations in the book are modified versions of Loeb
translations. For the titles of Greek and Latin texts, I follow the
abbreviations used in the Oxford Classical Dictionary.
The idea of this book was conceived when I was working in the
Australian National University. I am grateful to Renata Grossi for
inviting me to contribute to Law in Context’s special volume on
‘Law and Love’. Desmond Manderson was incredibly supportive at
the very beginning of my project. He has inspired a great part of my
work, and I owe him more than he probably realizes.
I thank Durham University for granting me a term of research
leave to work on this book (Epiphany 2018). I am very grateful to
Durham’s Department of Classics and Ancient History— their sup-
port and encouragement kept me going. I feel very lucky to be part
xii Acknowledgements
of such a collegial group of scholars. I am particularly grateful to

Jennifer Ingleheart, Zara Chadha, Peter Heslin, Roy Gibson, Erica
Bexley, Amy Russell, Phillip Horky, Stuart McKie, and Ted Kaizer.
I would also like to thank James McKeown for sending me a draft
of his unpublished commentary on Amores 3.
My students at Durham have been a source of inspiration for this
project. I am grateful to all the students who took my module on
Roman Law and Latin Literature and my MA seminar on Law and
Literature in Ancient Greece and Rome. That was research-led
teaching at its best.
I presented various parts and versions of this book at the
Universities of St. Andrews, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Belgrade,
Newcastle, Boston, the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and the
Florida State University. I am grateful to colleagues who invited me
to present my work and to audiences for their responses. I am par-
ticularly grateful to Nikoletta Manioti, Aaron Pelttari, Goran
Vidović, Athanassios Vergados, Leah Kronenberg, Hannah Čulík-
Baird, Patricia Johnson, Gianpiero Rosati, and Celia Campbell.
Many thanks to Oxford University Press and the series editors of
Classics in Theory for being extremely supportive from the begin-
ning till the end. I am particularly grateful to my OUP editors,
Georgina Leighton and Karen Raith, and their excellent team. Many
thanks are also due to the anonymous readers of the press for their
perceptive, detailed, and challenging reports.
I would also like to thank my friend George Gryllos, who took
the picture of the book cover.
If the book’s iudices discover any faults or misdemeanours in my
work, I take full responsibility—ego feci!
Contents
1. Introduction: Eros and Nomos1
I. THE TRIALS OF LOVE

2. Love as a State of Exception 27
3. The Courtroom in the Bedroom 69
4. The Letter of the Law 142
II. LEX AMATORIA

5. Poets and Lawmakers 203
6. Sexperts and Legal Experts 245
III. THE LAW OF THE FATHER

7. Authors of Law and Life 303
8. Love and Incest 346
Epilogue384
Bibliography 389
Index of Passages Discussed 409
General Index 415
1
Introduction
Eros and Nomos
We may start by saying that law is the negation of passion. As

Aristotle put it, ‘the law is a mind without desire’ (Politics 3.11.4
ἄνευ ὀρέξεως νοῦς ὁ νόμος ἐστίν). The legal system relies on dispas
sionate objectivity in an attempt to put an end to the vicious circle
of revenge. Personal desires and vendettas need to be controlled by
the disinterested hand of the law. Subjective emotions undermine
law’s rationality. Vengeance does not end crime but perpetuates it in
a way that renders the distinction between crime and punishment
indistinguishable. Reason is the source of the law and passion a
regression to the primitive rules of the lex talionis (‘law of retaliation’).
The representatives of the legal system need to be unrelated to their
subjects. It is imperative for the effective administration of justice
that the judge have no relationship with the defendant outside the
strictly prescribed rituals of the courtroom.
Yet we can also argue that desire is the ultimate source of the law.
The legal system does not replace passions with reason, but creates
an elaborate apparatus that conceals the very source of justice,
which is none other than the will of the legislator. Law needs a pre
cedent in order to establish its objectivity. Every law acquires author
ity from past laws, a technical procedure designed to check the
transgressive forces of personal urges. But once we strip law of all layers
of referentiality, we are left with the arbitrary choices of the legislator
or the will of a god. No rational explanation can justify the primary
source of law, unless it includes the subjectivity of the legislating
authority. If we push this argument further, we can even say that
law is the division of passions into legitimate and illegitimate.
Law and Love in Ovid: Courting Justice in the Age of Augustus. Ioannis Ziogas, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Ioannis Ziogas.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198845140.003.0001
2 Law and Love in Ovid
Similarly, love poetry is often a normative discourse that legitimizes

or outlaws desire. That the language of pleasure dominates love
poetry may seem unremarkable. More surprising is that pleasure is
explicitly related to the lawmaking procedures of the Romans. The
legislative formula senatui placuit (‘it pleased the senate’) reveals an
often well-hidden secret: that the ultimate source of law is the desire
of the legislator. Under Augustus, this sovereign authority is trans
ferred to the prince. Ulpian famously rules that ‘whatever pleased
the prince has the force of law’ (Institutes 1.4.6; Digest 1.4.1 quod
principi placuit legis habet uigorem). In the numerous constructions
of placet (‘it is pleasing’) in Ovid, we should detect the poet’s claim
to the authority of the sovereign legislator. Ovid exemplifies the
confluence of lawmaking and lovemaking, an essential aspect of his
poetry that has been overlooked in scholarship.
Latin love elegy reaches its climax at the same time as Augustus
introduces his moral legislation. This is not a coincidence. The pro
duction of laws that revolve around the regulation of sexuality and
the publication of love poetry that has the force of law are the two
sides of the same coin. Augustus’ reforms were unprecedented in
the history of Roman law. His legislation criminalized adultery,
encouraged marriage, rewarded childbirth, and penalized celibacy.1
What was hitherto the business of the family and the pater familias
now became the business of the state and the pater patriae. For the
first time, a standing criminal court was created to punish adultery
and criminal fornication by trial. The laws were primarily aimed
at the upper classes, whose members, in the eyes of Augustus, had
deviated from the good old ways of Republican morality. To this end,
there were several legislative attempts: the Lex Iulia de maritandis
ordinibus (18 bce), the Lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis (16 bce),
and the Lex Papia Poppaea (9 ce). This time span is indicative of
Augustus’ persistence and struggle to enforce a particularly unpopular
legislative agenda. Despite the immediate reaction from several
groups (including the knights, Ovid’s social class), the laws remained
valid for centuries. Yet they did not seem to be successful, if we trust
1 On Augustus’ moral legislation, see Csillag (1976); Raditsa (1980); Treggiari (1991);
Edwards (1993: 34–62); McGinn (1998: 140–215).
Introduction 3
Tacitus (Annales 3.25) and Dio (56.1–10).2 A particularly thorny

issue was that Augustus himself suffered under his laws. The prince
punished his daughter and granddaughter for committing adultery.
His family life was too problematic to function as an authoritative
example for his marriage legislation. Augustus (then Octavian)
divorced Scribonia soon after she gave birth to his daughter Julia to
marry a hastily divorced and heavily pregnant Livia. Rumours about
Augustus committing adultery with Livia before their marriage
would inevitably proliferate.
Ovid (43 bce–17 ce) writes his love poetry during this period.
Even though we are not sure about the date of the second edition of
his Amores, it is beyond reasonable doubt that the love poet is aware
of the Augustan legislation. The moral reforms loom large through
out Ovid’s oeuvre, not only in his love elegies (the Amores, the
Heroides, the Ars amatoria, and the Remedia amoris), but also in the
Metamorphoses, the Fasti, and the exile poetry (the Tristia and
Epistulae ex Ponto). The Ars amatoria is a turning point, since it is
likely that it provided a reason for Ovid’s exile in 8 ce. On account
of ‘a song and a mistake’ (Tristia 2.207 carmen et error), the poet was
relegated to Tomis by a decree of Augustus. The measure is extraor
dinary; the emperor was personally offended by Ovid. In his exile
poetry (e.g. Tr. 5.12.67–8; Ibis 5–6), Ovid says that he was destroyed
by his own art (meaning his poetic art but also his ‘Art of Love’)—
his books are compared to children who turned against their father
(see Chapter 7). There is an uncanny similarity here between
Ovid, the author of love poetry, and Augustus, the author of moral
legislation—the prince suffered under his own laws when his own
child broke them.
The similarities between Ovid and Augustus are a key aspect of
this book. In my view, Ovid is essentially anti-Augustan not in his
opposition to the prince, but in his attempt to be equal to Augustus
(the other meaning of the Greek ἀντί). This is important for inter
preting legal discourse in Ovid. The love poet does not simply ‘com
ment on’ the laws of Augustus, but casts himself in the role of the
sovereign legislator. And even if Ovid’s poetry simply reacts to
2 For the minority view that Augustus’ laws could be judged successful, see Reid (2016).
Augustan legislation, this is not a superficial reaction. To interpret

the law was a legislative act in the age of Augustus. The interpret
ations of influential jurists were instrumental for the production of
law. As we shall see in this book (Chapter 6), Ovid casts himself as a
jurist—the teacher of law and the teacher of love speak the same
language. Far from reducing literature to a harmless parody of real
law, we need to take seriously the ways in which Ovid’s love poetry
is involved in the production of normative discourse.
While scholars relegated Ovid to the realm of mockery and fri
volity, my book aims to restore him to his rightful position in the
field of law and literature. Contrary to Kenney’s (1969: 263) view
that Ovid’s transference of legalisms into elegy is surprising and
amusing, I argue that the language of law in Ovid is not incidental,
but fundamental. If older critics may be excused, antiquitatis causa,
for dismissing legal language in Ovid as superficial and incongruous
(see, e.g. Daube 1966; Kenney 1969; 1970), the persistence of simi
lar views in more recent scholarship shows that more often than not
there is still no escape from the interpretative dead end of trivializing
Ovid. In an otherwise fine and compelling article, Kathleen Coleman
(1990: 572) suggests that Ovid imitates the pedantic locutions of
jurists in order to trivialize the preoccupations of the bickering
Olympians. For Coleman, legal jargon in Ovid contributes an
atmosphere of incongruous pomposity to the divine comedy of the
Metamorphoses. She notes that ‘[it] has been well observed that
Ovid frequently employs legal terminology in contexts where it is
either starkly incongruous or else pregnant with double entendre’.
Coleman here subscribes to Kenney’s reading. Similarly, Alessandro
Schiesaro (2007: 82), in his perceptive chapter on rhetoric and law
in Lucretius, endorses Kenney’s view that legal terminology in Ovid
points to little more than his training in eloquence. For Neil Coffee
(2013: 85), the lover’s juridical discourse in Amores 1.10 is evidence
that Ovid was more concerned with the rhetorical play of his poetry
than with the representation of a real amatory situation (as if we
could strip away from a ‘real amatory situation,’ whatever that
means, all layers of rhetoric). ‘Few lovers’, he adds, ‘would have been
clever enough to know something about the law and dull enough
to imagine that they could persuade their girlfriends with legal
Introduction 5
analogies.’ Without further ado, the lover’s discourse is deemed

alien to anything that has to do with the law. To introduce legal
diction into love poetry is to highlight an absurd combination.
This book argues against the widespread view that the language
of law in Ovid is another glib affectation of our poet. In my view,
the image of a superficial Ovid is the creation of superficial scholar
ship. I do not mean to argue that Ovid’s poetry is not playful (far
from that). Something can be fundamental and important—even,
in sense, serious—but still amusing. Ovid’s playfulness should not
prevent us from exploring the deep-rooted connections between
law and love. Below the glimmering surface of Ovid’s wit there is an
ocean of amatory jurisprudence.3 Even if the language of law in
Ovid is another joke, this should not be the end but the starting
point of our interpretations. We do not really get the joke, unless we
figure out what is at stake in it. And what is at stake is much more
than mockery of the Augustan legislation. What is at stake is a fear
less exploration of the origins of law.
My thesis is that the language and rituals of law in Ovid point to
love as the source of the law’s emergence. This may sound like the
sort of trendy legal theory that has little to do with Ovid. In fact, it
comes from Ovid’s poetry. In Fasti 4, for instance, the book and
month of Venus, Ovid includes an encomium of the goddess of
love. Venus is praised as the lawgiver of the universe (Fasti 4.93
iuraque dat caelo, terrae, natalibus undis, ‘and she gives laws to the
sky, the earth, and her native sea’). The goddess of love is thus
the primary legislator. For Ovid, Venus is the origin of human
civilization:
prima feros habitus homini detraxit: ab illa

uenerunt cultus mundaque cura sui.
primus amans carmen uigilatum nocte negata
dicitur ad clausas concinuisse fores,
eloquiumque fuit duram exorare puellam,
proque sua causa quisque disertus erat.
3 Contra Miller (2004: 162): ‘What lies beneath the surface of Ovidian wit is precisely
nothing.’
mille per hanc artes motae; studioque placendi,

quae latuere prius, multa reperta ferunt.
Ovid, Fasti 4.107–14
That force first stripped man of his savage garb; from her he
learned decent attire and personal cleanliness. A lover was the
first, they say, to serenade by night the mistress who denied him
entrance, while he sang at her barred door, and eloquence lay in
winning over a harsh girl, and each man was a barrister pleading
his cause. This goddess has been the mother of a thousand arts;
the wish to please has given birth to many skills that were
unknown before.
In the context of the laws of Venus, the passage quoted above

evokes the setting of a trial: the primary meaning of causa is ‘a legal
case’ (OLD s.v. A1) and disertus means ‘barrister/forensic orator,’ as
in Ovid, Ars amatoria 1.85 (see Hollis 1977: 49–50 and cf. Ars
1.459–64). Readers familiar with Latin love elegy will recognize that
Venus here features as the inventor of this genre. The lover’s serenade
(109–10), the so-called paraclausithyron (‘lament by the door’), is a
trademark of the elegiac lover. The role of Venus also clearly evokes
the praeceptor amoris (‘the teacher of love’) of the Ars amatoria.
Instructions about cultus (‘fashion style’) and munditia (‘cleanliness’)
feature in the Ars amatoria. Winning over a girl is similar to wining
over a judge (cf. Ars 1.459–64). The pursuit of pleasure, the aim of
the Ars amatoria, is the origin of a thousand artes. These ‘arts’ are
inspired by Venus and derive from the art of love. The art of rhetoric,
ars oratoria, is cast as an imitation of the art of love, ars amatoria.
This is important for understanding how Ovid conceives of the rela
tionship between the lover’s and the lawyer’s discourse. Contrary to
modern critics who see incongruity between the language of law and
love, Ovid points to Venus as their common origin. For Ovid, foren
sic rhetoric derives from the poetics of Latin love elegy. In Ovid’s
history of human civilization, the art of courtship not only precedes
courtroom rhetoric, but actually provides the model for winning a
legal case. Fasti 4.111–12 is not a case of introducing the setting of a
trial into the rituals of elegiac courtship, but exactly the opposite.
The elegiac lover is the archetypal lawyer (disertus). From that
Introduction 7
perspective, the current practice of pointing out Ovid’s borrowings

from law is problematic. Ovid says that legal diction is a reflection of
the lover’s discourse, not the other way around.
Far from being an Ovidian peculiarity, the overlap between
amatory and forensic discourse is as old as Homer and Hesiod.4
The end of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, to refer to a clearly serious case, is
a good example for the confluence of legal and amatory persuasion.
Nicholas Rynearson (2013) argues convincingly that Athena draws
on the discourse of amatory persuasion in order to win over the
Erinyes to give up their wrath. Through the erotic element of her
seductive speech, the virgin goddess woos the Erinyes, casting them
as the beloved objects. Her rhetoric of seduction has a transforma
tive power over the Erinyes, just as amor is the driving force of
metamorphoses. Critics have been puzzled by the fact that no less
than one-third of the play takes place after the decision has been
rendered. But Aeschylus seems to understand that the legal system
does not depend on whether the winners accept the verdict, but on
whether the losers do.5 To sustain the law, seductive persuasion is
more fundamental than law enforcement.
My work contributes to a current interdisciplinary trend in law
and the humanities that examines the interactions between law and
love.6 Peter Goodrich (1996; 1997; 2002; 2006) has been a pioneer
in this field and one of the main inspirations for my project. Justice,
Goodrich (2006: 7) notes, has always been tied to the jurisdiction of
love. The law of Venus was the originary and thus higher law,
because it allowed for settlement, and it furthered the community
in mending itself. To proceed by love was to remain friends and to
forestall law in its coercive and punitive forms (see Goodrich 2006: 8).
We shall see that Ovid draws a similar distinction between the
justice of love and the corruption of litigation, between love that
resolves conflict and legalism that breeds dissent (see Chapter 5).
4 See Chapter 5. On amatory persuasion in antiquity, see Gross (1985).

5 Cf. Ovid, Tr. 2.95–6 (discussed in Chapter 5), in which the poet refers to his appoint
ment as a judge and tells Augustus that even the losing side acknowledged his good faith.
6 See Bankowski (2001), who argues that law and love are entangled and even dependent
on each other. See also Detmold (1996); Petersen (1998); Goodrich (1996); (2006);
Manderson (2003); Meyer and Umphrey (2010); Nussbaum (2013); Grossi and Neoh (2016);
Neoh (2019). On law and love in Shakespeare, see Kahn (2000); in Cervantes, see González
Echevarría (2005).
While Goodrich mentions Ovid in passing, the Roman poet is at

the centre of my research. The medieval tradition that Goodrich
studies is not anomalous in time, unrelated to prior or succeeding
legal discourses. In fact, a great part of it derives from the Ovidian
jurisprudence of love.7
My work both builds on Goodrich and interrogates his approach.
The key is that Goodrich treats the medieval courts of love as iso
lated from the mainstream legal system and running by wholly
independent norms. By contrast, my aim is to show that Ovid’s
courts of love were not simply ‘other’ than Roman law but funda
mentally connected to them in discourse, in principles, and in con
cepts of jurisdiction. The engagement between love and law
is intimate rather than isolate, and this makes a contrast with
Goodrich’s approach.
Interdisciplinary work on law and the humanities has reopened
questions of jurisdiction and the plurality of laws—nterior and
exterior, emotional and rational, imagined and real. All these issues
lie at the heart of Ovid’s poetry; yet Ovid is conspicuously absent
from recent work on law and literature. By contrast, scholarship on
Ovid rarely engages with current developments in legal theory. The
common denial to take law in Ovid seriously is partly to blame for
this. There are, however, some exceptions which hopefully suggest a
paradigm shift. In his book on Latin love elegy, Paul Allen Miller
(2004: 160–83) includes a chapter on ‘Law and the Other in the
Amores’. He argues that Ovid’s Amores revolve around the double
axis of law and transgression. His fascinating argument is relevant
to my thesis that Ovidian elegy creates a zone of indistinction
between following and breaking the law (see Chapter 3). Miller
argues that Ovid violates the law in such a way as to require its pres
ervation. For Miller, the poet ultimately reproduces the structures
of the dominant regime. Without law there is no transgression, and
vice versa. In my view, Ovid indeed avers that transgression is the
fulfilment of the law. But the fulfilment of the law can be either its
7 Andreas Capellanus’ Rules of Courtly Love (twelfth century), Boccaccio’s Decameron

(fourteenth century), Martial d’Auvergne’s Judgments of Love (fifteenth century), and
Stephanus Forcadel’s Cupido Jurisperitus (sixteenth century) are deeply influenced by Ovid’s
amatory jurisprudence.
Introduction 9
preservation or its end. While imperial legislation crumbles in

Ovid’s sovereign jurisdiction of love, the art of love cannot escape
from the web of Augustan legislation.
Micaela Janan (2001: 146–63) has a short, but perceptive analysis
of the interdependence of law and desire in Propertius 4.11.8 Janan
applies Lacan’s concept of the Law as ungrounded in any unshak
able foundation to her compelling reading of Livy’s Verginia and
Propertius’ Cornelia. She notes that ultimately juridical reasoning
comes to rest in the logical opacity of desire: something is made
into law, because ‘it is the will of [the gods, Nature, emperor, people,
senate]’. To the question ‘what does justify this’, no answer can be
given (Janan 2001: 149). Janan’s chapter is relevant to my approach:
desire is the ultimate source of law and love. That is why the lover
and the legislator are the two sides of the same coin.
Kathryn Balsley’s article on Ovid’s Tiresias (Balsley 2010), which
partly derives from her unpublished dissertation (Balsley 2011),
discusses Ovid’s presentation of the seer as an expert in law. Ovid
brings together prophetic, poetic, and juristic discourse in an era
that signals the emergence of the science of law (see Chapter 6).
Balsley (2011: 44–100) studies the trial scene in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
in a way that complements my work on the trial scene in the
Amores, the Heroides, and the Ars amatoria. The trial setting also
features prominently in Gebhardt (2009), the only recent book-
length study of law in Augustan poetry. This monograph has been
extremely useful, as it systematically identifies legal diction in Ovid
and other Augustan poets. Yet, despite its usefulness, its scope is
limited. Even though Gebhardt (2009: 3–4) mentions in his intro
duction the field of law and literature, his analysis is mostly
restricted to identifying legal terms in Augustan poetry. It is strik
ing that the laws of Augustus do not concern his study.
My book does not follow the common practice of identifying
legal terminology in Augustan poetry and then moving on without
interpreting its cultural significance. Dissecting legalisms in Ovid
8 I find her discussion of the law of the father in Metamorphoses 3 (Janan 2009: 53–86) less
relevant to my approach. Her Lacanian concept of Law is too abstract in comparison to my
historically grounded analysis.
for the purpose of collecting and evaluating historical data about

Roman law is similarly not the goal of my research. Ovid’s poetry is
not merely a reflection or distortion of Roman law but is involved
in its production. If the majority of works on Roman law are to
blame for studying law as a culturally isolated field, the literary
critic who sees legal diction in poetry as appropriated in a closed
literary universe falls into a similar trap. In my view, poetry does
not borrow from law just to serve poetic ends. Law in literature is
more than just another literary device. The language of law in Ovid
declares the normative force of his art.
The classicist whose work is most relevant to my project is
Michèle Lowrie.9 Her work not only engages with the interdiscip
linary field of law and literature, but also combines close readings
with historically sensitive analyses. Key aspects of her work (author
ity, performativity, and exemplarity) feature prominently in my
monograph. As far as legal theory is concerned, the work of Giorgio
Agamben (1998; 2005a) is key for my argument that both Ovid and
Augustus, the love poet and the prince, define the boundaries of the
law by excluding themselves from formal legal procedures. For
Agamben, sovereignty consists in pronouncing what lies inside and
what outside the juridical order. Agamben’s work is not only rele
vant to Augustan Rome; it actually derives from his research on
Roman law and the crucial shift from the Republic to the Principate.
The titles of two of his most influential books (Homo Sacer and
State of Exception) are concepts of Roman law. According to
Pompeius Festus (De uerborum significatione 318), the homo sacer
is a man whom anyone can kill without committing a crime. This is
an important concept, because it describes a man who is not legally
punished, but whom the law banned from the juridical order and
thus reduced to what Agamben calls ‘bare life’, a life that does not
concern the law. When Latin love poets exclude themselves from
the juridical order or are banned from it by a domina (a mistress) or
a dominus (Augustus), they bear more than fleeting similarities to
the homo sacer (see Chapter 2).
9 See mainly Lowrie (2009: 327–82); (2016).

Introduction 11
But they also bear more than fleeting similarities to the sovereign
legislator. The homo sacer is a legal creation of tribunician law
(see Festus, De uerborum significatione 318). This is important
because the sacrosanctity of the tribunes has an uncanny similarity
to the bare life of the homo sacer. Augustus solidified his sovereignty
by assuming the tribunes’ powers and sacrosanctity (see Chapter 2).
The prince becomes the sovereign ruler by creating for himself a
state of exception. He simultaneously stands outside the juridical
order and belongs to it by legally defining it. My argument is that
Latin love poets play a similar game of sovereignty. The elegiac lover
exemplifies the correspondence of sovereign power and bare life
that lies at the heart of Agamben’s theory. The lover can effortlessly
shift roles between an outcast from law and a sovereign legislator,
because the homo sacer and the sovereign share a place outside the
law. The elegiac poets exclude the sacrosanct lover from the jurid
ical order and thus create a sovereign exception that presupposes
the juridical reference in the form of its suspension. In fact, Latin
love elegy claimed this state of exception before Augustus. From
that perspective, the elegiac constructions of sovereignty are not
just a parodic reflection of Augustan politics. Quite the contrary—
the prince seems to have copied from Latin love elegy, not the other
way around.
Not unlike sovereignty as defined by Agamben, love is included
in cultural conventions by excluding itself from them. Love, like
law, is a cultural construct that claims that its origins lie outside cul
tural norms. Cultural constructs are most powerful when they pose
as reflections of the natural order. Michel Foucault’s incomplete
History of Sexuality (Foucault 1979; 1986; 1988) plays an important
role in my research. His work has been both followed and criticized
by classicists.10 Some of the criticism is relevant to this book.
Foucault skips Augustan Rome, a period that is key for the emer
gence of sexuality as an independent discourse (cf. Habinek 1997).
Contrary to Foucault’s phallocentric approach, Ovid’s poetry and
10 See Hallet and Skinner (1997); Larmour, Miller, and Platter (1998); Nussbaum and
Sihvola (2002); Ormand (2008); (2014); Blondell and Ormand (2015); Boehringer and
Lorenzini (2016). On Foucault and Roman antiquity, see the collection of articles in Foucault
Studies 22 (2017).
Augustan legislation exemplify how the creation of law is inextricably

related to controlling female sexuality. Despite these differences,
Foucault is important because he rightly argues that the construc
tion of sexuality is inconceivable outside a legal framework. Ovid’s
love poetry is a discursive artefact or more precisely a juridico-
discursive artefact.11
At this point, it is important to explain the meaning of ‘love’. In
Ovid, amor refers both to a natural desire and to the discourse of
sexuality. The meaning of amor in Ovid is debated in recent schol
arship on the Ars amatoria. The issue is whether Ovid teaches love
as a universal experience that applies to all peoples of all times or as
a cultural construct restricted to specific social classes in Augustan
Rome. In an influential edited volume on the Ars amatoria, Molly
Myerowitz Levine (2006) makes the former case, while Katharina
Volk (2006) the latter. This discussion is in turn related to the
duplicity of amor, a word that usually means desire, but in the Ars
amatoria seems to describe social norms of courting. As Volk
(2006: 241–2) puts it:
While the Latin word amor typically connotes a strong feeling of desire
and affection, Ovid for most of the Ars Amatoria uses it instead to refer
to the social practice of establishing and participating in sexual rela-
tionships. The Ars Amatoria is thus really something like the art of dat-
ing, the art of the love affair, and not the art of love. This, of course, is
the reason why it is teachable in the first place: amor is for Ovid not a
feeling but a mode of behaviour, and thus can be mastered by following
the simple steps laid out in his didactic poem.12
The rather odd view that the Ars amatoria is not the art of love is at
least as old as Hermann Fränkel (1945: 61–2), who notes that every
one understands the playfulness of Ovid’s pseudoscientific project
of teaching love, since everyone knows that consummate love
amounts to something more than a bag of tricks. Similarly,
Myerowitz Levine (2006: 259) states: ‘As all readers know, Ovid’s
11 On the lover’s discourse in Ovid, see Kennedy (1993: 64–82) and Chapter 4.
12 See also Volk (2002: 168–73).
Introduction 13
subject is not love.’ Note how Fränkel and Myerowitz Levine ascribe
their own views to everyone. There is something ironically Ovidian
in casting a peculiar idea as universal consensus. Even though
Myerowitz Levine and Volk support two different claims, they both
build on the same premises: (a) that we need to distinguish between
natural desire and sex education and (b) that the Ars amatoria is
not about love. But I think we can do better than arguing that the
Ars amatoria does not mean ‘the art of love’. The strength of Volk’s
analysis lies in her focus on the ways in which Ovid continuously
plays with the double meaning of amor as powerful emotion and
social practice (Volk 2002: 168–73). In my view, Ovid does not sim
ply play with the two different meanings of amor, but claims that
his Ars amatoria has the power to make them inseparable. Love is
simultaneously a natural emotion and a poetic construction.
Critics often note that it is absurd to teach love, because this is
something everyone knows without taking lessons (see Myerowitz
Levine 2006: 261–2). In the opening couplet (Ars amatoria 1.1–2),
Ovid identifies his target audience as any Roman who does not
know the art of loving, but the joke is that nobody needs instructions
on this topic. Volk (2002: 169–70) notes that the opening couplet
‘already implies that in the opinion of most people, ars amandi is an
oxymoron, love cannot be taught, and everyone already knows
what it is to feel love and needs no teacher’. Similarly, Victoria
Rimell (2006: 71) states that the Ars is actually ‘a joke on the rhetoric
of knowledge which claims to teach the unteachable’. Either nobody
needs instructions on something they already know or nobody can
teach something that cannot be taught.
In his exile poetry, Ovid seems to suggest this irony of teaching at
Tristia 1.1.112 (hi quia, quod nemo nescit, amare docent, ‘because
these books teach how to love, something that everybody knows’).
These books here are the three books of the Ars amatoria. The line,
which Myerowitz Levine (2006: 261) quotes as evidence that Ovid’s
Ars taught loving (amare), a subject of which nobody is ignorant
(quod nemo nescit), is more ambiguous, because it can be read as a
reference to the popularity of the Ars amatoria. Everybody knows
that the Ars teaches love, a reading that fits better in the context:
Ovid’s books try to hide themselves in a dark place (Tr. 1.1.111), but
to no avail, since their contents are widely read and studied.13 Thus,
two different readings of the line are possible: that the Ars teaches
love, even though there is not anyone who does not know how
to love (Kennedy 2000: 173–4; Volk 2002: 169–70; Myerowitz
Levine 2006: 261–2) or that the Ars amatoria cannot remain a secret
since everybody knows that it instructs Romans in the art of love
making. If there is not anyone who needs instruction in love, it is
not because amor is a natural instinct that defies scientific training
but because Ovid’s didactic work taught the art to everyone. The
line’s ambiguity is important. Ovid’s games of amatory seduction
have become universally known, and their sweeping popularity is
in turn identified with amor as an instinct that all humans possess
naturally without any need for instruction. Thanks to the dissemin
ation of the Ars, amor as a cultural construction becomes indistin
guishable from amor as a natural phenomenon.14
The controversy about the universal or Roman character of the
Ars is of limited value given that in imperial Rome what is Roman
and what is universal merge together. For Ovid and his contempor
aries, Rome is urbs (‘city’) and orbis (‘globe’) (see Fasti 2.683–4;
cf. Ars 1.55–6). Rome is not just a part of the inhabited world, but
the city that is identified with the universe, and by this identification
it transforms even cosmogony from a natural event into a cultural
construct. Amor is the mirror of imperial Roma, the sovereign and
universal power that casts culture as nature. In other words, the
issue of amor’s double identity as nature (φύσις) and custom (νόμος)
brings up not only the contrast between natural law and cultural
norms but also their interdependence.
The two faces of Ovid’s amor (‘nature’ and ‘custom’) hark back to
the controversy between the Sophists and Plato about the source
13 Cf. Wheeler’s Loeb translation (revised by Goold and based on a slightly different text)
of Tristia 1.1.111–12 tres procul obscura latitantes parte uidebis,— / sic quoque, quod nemo
nescit, amare docent. ‘But three at some distance will strive to hide themselves in a dark place,
as you will notice—even so, as everybody knows, they teach how to love.’
14 Cf. Kennedy (1993: 67): ‘If love can be viewed, and reflected upon, as a discursive arte
fact, it is also a discourse which we inhabit, a discourse which “works” its “effects” in so far as
it is internalized and reproduced as a “spontaneous” or “natural” expression of behaviour.’ See
also his important discussion on the capacity for ‘nature’ to be conventionalized or ‘conven
tion’ to be naturalized (Kennedy 1993: 77–82).
Introduction 15
and nature of law. In Laws 690a–c, Plato aims at undermining the

validity of the Sophists’ opposition of φύσις and νόμος (cf. Agamben
1998: 34–5). For Plato, the intelligent men should govern and the
ignorant should follow the knowledgeable. This, Plato adds, does
not happen against nature but in accordance with nature, that is, in
accordance with the natural rule of law (Laws 690c). Thus, Plato
does not counter the Sophists’ argument about the primacy of
nature over law by supporting law’s supremacy over nature but by
constructing law’s sovereignty as natural. The crucial point is that
for both Plato and the Sophists, law’s sovereignty consists in the
indistinction between φύσις and νόμος. The state of nature is nei
ther anterior nor external to law. It is the norm’s self-presupposition
as natural law (cf. Agamben 1998: 35–6). This is crucial in Ovid.
Amor as a cultural construct is not just the aftermath or side effect
of amor as natural desire. Quite the contrary—the social norms of
lovemaking establish themselves as natural conduct.
Towards the end of her chapter on the universal nature of Ovid’s
Ars amatoria, Myerowitz Levine (2006: 274–5) acknowledges the
interdependence of nature and culture, citing Ridley (2003) on
nature via nurture. Building on research in evolutionary science
that suggests the universality of selecting a mate across different
human societies (e.g. Buss 1994), Myerowitz Levine concludes that
not only sex but also sexualities can become case studies from a
universalist perspective. While I agree that nature and nurture
depend on each other, I disagree that cultural constructions ultim
ately reveal the homogeneity of human sexuality. My argument is
the opposite of Myerowitz Levine’s thesis. While she argues that
cultural particularities often reveal the universality of human
nature, my thesis is that the point of Ovid’s Ars amatoria is that
cultural constructions of sexuality are universalized by being pre
sented as natural. But if the particular poses as universal, it does not
ensue that there is universality in the particular. I am sceptical, for
instance, that it is an evolutionary rule that applies to all human
societies of all times that women bait with sex while men bait with
investment.15 This seems to me like a socially constructed
15 Myerowitz Levine (2006: 255) quotes and approves of Buss (1994).

generalization in the guise of scientific truth, but nonetheless an

interesting one. By relying on some research from social and bio
logical sciences, Myerowitz Levine is convinced that Ovid’s cultural
games of love follow the universal commands of natural evolution.
It appears that Ovid has succeeded in making his readers believe
that the rules of his love games are the laws of nature. The test of
truth is the level of deception.
Ovid deconstructs the binary opposition of φύσις (‘nature’) and
νόμος (‘custom/law’), showing that one cannot be perceived without
the other. While nature is both the measure and object of law, the
relationship is often reversed and the law becomes the measure of
nature. As Paul Kahn (2000: 29) puts it, nature and law are categor
ies that appear only to each other. We judge nature by law and law
by nature.16 This is particularly relevant to constructions of sexuality.
Since antiquity sexual intercourse has been divided into natural and
unnatural, but the unnaturalness of certain types of sex is nothing
more than the projection of cultural norms onto the natural order.17
As a force of nature that shapes human customs that in turn refash
ion the face of nature, Ovid’s amor exemplifies the mechanisms
that produce the legal system. Love and law play the same game of
normative constructions and natural deceptions.
Alessandro Schiesaro (2007) argues convincingly that it was part
of juristic discourse to construct a legal model for the universe.
Interestingly, the first attested example of this practice is the didac
tic poet Lucretius, whose work De rerum natura is one of the most
important intertexts for Ovid’s Ars amatoria. As Schiesaro (2007: 81)
puts it:
Lucretius’ poem must stand as the first and foremost example of the
extension of juridical concepts to the explanation and interpretation of
the entire physical reality . . . Lucretius implicitly but effectively shows
that legal thought can aspire to explain and regulate more than human
16 My reading of the Ars amatoria is here similar to that of Kahn (2000: 21–9), who
examines the interdependence of nature and law in his study of law and love in Shakespeare’s
King Lear.
17 On the cultural significance of the Romans’ rhetoric of nature in sexual relations, see
Williams (1999: 231–44).
Introduction 17
transactions, but can project its force onto the universe and provide a
form of understanding for the whole cosmos.
It is not nature that dictated the law, but the other way around.
Scholarship on law in Ovid ranges from pointing out legal ter
minology in his poetry (Kenney 1969) to applying Lacan’s concept
of Law to the narrative of the Metamorphoses (Janan 2009: 53–86).
Kenney’s definition of law is very different from Janan’s. In order to
explain what I mean by ‘law’ in this book, I start by discussing the
methods of critics who identify legal language in Ovid. A common
practice is to separate technical legal terms from the language of
poetry. In her discussion of the word sententia (‘sentence’ or ‘judg
ment’) in Metamorphoses 3.322, Coleman (1990: 573), for instance,
distinguishes between the ‘metaphorical’ or ‘colloquial’ use of the
word and its ‘technical’ sense in law. Similarly, Balsley (2010) follows
Coleman’s lead in distinguishing between ‘popular’ and ‘precise’ use
of legal terminology in Ovid.
Coleman and Balsley are right to point out the technical meaning
of sententia (‘verdict’) and doctus (the uox propria of a ‘learned
jurisconsult’) as key to interpreting the story of Tiresias in
Metamorphoses 3. Throughout this book, I often employ a similar
method in identifying diction and imagery that refer to technical
legal concepts and procedures. Ovid’s style is at times meant to
reproduce the language of jurists, contracts, witness statements, etc.
We need to be sensitive to the legal color of Ovid’s poetry in order
to understand how it engages with legal discourse. But I also differ
from scholars who study legalisms in Ovid. As I have already men
tioned, I do not see legal terminology in Ovid as an extraneous or
incongruous addition to poetic discourse. What is more, the line
between the ‘colloquial’ and the ‘technical’ or the ‘metaphorical’
and the ‘literal’ in Ovid, as Duncan Kennedy (1993: 46–63) showed
in a brilliant chapter, is much more blurred than it may seem at first
sight. In Ovid, love is often described in terms also applicable to law
(‘a lover’s blush is evidence of his guilt’). The tenor here is from law
to love. But as Kennedy (1993: 53) notes, such tenors are open to
reversal. Law can also be described in terms of love (‘we need to
embrace justice’, ‘a passionate advocate of human rights’). In Auden’s
poem (‘Law, like Love’), law is compared to love, not the other way
around. In other cases, we are in grey areas in which it is difficult
and at times impossible to determine the ‘proper’ sphere of refer
ence of a word. Does the word ‘consent’ belong to the area of law or
love? Are ‘partners’ joined by law, love, or both?
There is law in love and love in law, just as there is war in love and
love in war. In this book, we shall see that the law in Ovid’s love
poetry occupies a similar position to that of war. Legal discourse in
Latin love elegy parallels the motif of militia amoris (‘military ser
vice of love’).18 Martial and forensic pursuits are seemingly
excluded, but fundamentally define the discourse of Latin love
elegy. Similarly, amor is a key motivator on the battlefield and in the
forum. Students of Latin poetry would easily identify the motif of
militia amoris in Gallus’ tag omnia uincit amor: et nos cedamus
amori (Vergil, Eclogue 10.69 ‘love conquers everything: let us too
surrender ourselves to love’). As the elegiac poet Gallus ultimately
accepts his fate, the lover becomes a prisoner of war in the camp of
Amor. But there is more to it. The verbs uincere and cedere belong
not only to military, but also to legal discourse. In Latin love elegy,
uincere is used in the meaning of ‘winning a legal case’ (see Amores
2.5.7; 3.14.47–8 with Chapter 3) and cedere means ‘to become the
property or pass into the possession of someone’ (OLD s.v. 15).
With cedere, Gallus evokes the elegiac motif of seruitium amoris
(‘servitude of love’), a concept of property law.19 When all his trials
fail to win over Amor (Eclogues 10.64–8), Gallus rests his case with
a sententia, a pithy maxim and a judicial pronouncement that estab
lishes Amor’s sovereign jurisdiction. Interestingly, Gallus’ line is
alluded to in the laws of Henry I of England (c.1108), which pro
claim that ‘agreement supersedes law, and love court judgment’
(pactum legem enim uincit et amor iudicium; see Downer 1972:
164). Gallus’ aphorism sets a precedent not only in the literary
universe of Latin love elegy,20 but also in the real world of
18 For the motif of militia amoris in Latin love elegy, see Gale (1997); Drinkwater (2013).
19 For the elegiac motif of seruitium amoris, see Lyne (2007: 85–100).
20 See Ovid, Am. 1.2.9–10; 3.11.34; cf. Ars 1.21–2; 2.197; Rem. am. 144 cedit amor rebus:
res age, tutus eris, ‘love yields to business: do business; you will be safe’, where res means not
only ‘business’ in general, but also ‘a lawsuit’ in particular (see Rem. am. 151).
Introduction 19
legislation. Latin elegy is a trope of property law and, conversely,

legal treatises reflect the poetics of Latin love poetry.
Kennedy (1993: 54) notes that the distinction between the
‘proper’ or ‘literal’ and the ‘secondary’ or ‘metaphorical’ uses of a
word provides, by virtue of being largely unquestioned, a frame
work within which a hierarchy of values and assumptions can be
articulated. Coleman (1990: 253), for instance, argues that sententia
is primarily a technical term that belongs to the sphere of law.
For Coleman, the colloquial or metaphorical meaning of senten-
tia, albeit commonly used, should be secondary. This suggests a
technical term that loses its precise meaning, when it is com
monly used. But this is far from clear. In the Oxford Latin
Dictionary, for instance, the legal sense of sententia (‘a juryman’s
vote; the collective vote of a jury’) is listed fourth. The primary
meaning of the word is ‘a way of thinking, opinion, sentiment’. It
is likely that the ‘technical’ or ‘precise’ meaning of the word
derives from its ‘popular’ use, not the other way around. My
point is that the shift between the colloquial and technical use of
language reveals not only the ways in which legal language pene
trates everyday speech but also the potential of popular words to
enrich legal terminology.
Even the word lex has a technical and non-technical meaning.
Lex can refer to ‘the laws of the state’ or to a ‘rule,’ (e.g. Varro, De
lingua Latina 7.18 lege poetica ‘the law of poetry’) that is, not tech
nically a ‘law’. Likewise, iure can mean ‘according to law’ or simply
‘with good reason’ (see Chapter 3 on Ovid, Am. 1.4.63–6). Just as
amor can refer both to extrajuridical desire and to the juridical dis
course of sexuality, lex means both ‘law’ and ‘rule’. The ways in
which these key terms shift in and out of the juridical order will be
at the heart of this study. The aim of my research is not to create a
firewall between the ‘precise’ and ‘popular’ uses of the language of
law. By contrast, my aim is to explore the ways in which the laws of
the state become part of people’s everyday life, but also the ways in
which literary norms and social customs influence the laws of the
state. This is important for understanding Ovid, because his love
poetry highlights the interdependence of Roman law and poetic
justice.
When scholars point out the primarily technical meaning of a

word to stress its incongruity in Ovid’s love poetry, they assume the
primacy of the language of law over the language of love poetry.
Thus, Ovid cheekily borrows or steals from law. But, in fact, Ovid
points in the opposite direction, namely to forensic rhetoric as
emerging in the aftermath of the lover’s discourse. Of course, we do
not have to take Ovid at face value. His version may be the ultimate
attempt at appropriation. But if we want to interpret his poetry on
his terms, we need to take into account that he casts Venus as the
originary legislator. We need to do justice to Ovid’s claim that his
love poetry reproduces the primary act of legislation and is thus not
just a mere reflection or distortion of the realities of Roman law, but
their very source.
That love poetry may be the source of law is not yet mainstream
jurisprudence, but should not be controversial either. As Desmond
Manderson (2003: 9) notes, the school of legal pluralism has done a
lot to emphasize that law is learnt and practised in specific cultural
contexts, in diverse and disparate fashions, and on an everyday
basis. The interpretive battles over the meaning and functions of
law take place not only in the courts of law’s empire, but also as
daily events in the streets, in the bedroom, and in love poetry. Law,
like love, conquers everything. When Ovid assumes the roles of an
expert jurist, an eloquent advocate, a judge, a censor, or a sovereign
legislator, he points to his art as a discourse through which we
develop, test, and implement assumptions about the meaning, func
tion, and interpretation of law. Legal issues are hotly debated in
Latin love poetry and its courts of love, just as the Lex Iulia was
fiercely debated in the treatises of jurists and in the courts of the
Roman Empire. If we want to understand Roman law, we cannot
afford to restrict our inquiries to the forum and dismiss Ovid’s
courts as insignificant.
The main body of the book is divided into three parts and con
cludes with an Epilogue. Part I (‘The Trials of Love,’ Chapters 2–4)
explores legal expression, imagery, and authority in Ovid’s earliest
literary works (the Amores and Heroides), but also highlights the
juridical nature of Ovidian elegy from the Amores to the exile
poetry. Chapter 2 (‘Love as a State of Exception’) discusses passages
Introduction 21
in which Ovid rejects a career in law for the sake of love poetry.
Scholars take these as proof of his indifference to legal procedures.
Yet the poet’s disavowal of law for the sake of love is couched in
courtroom rhetoric and is thus both a denial and an appropriation
of legal discourse. The elegiac recusatio is a version of the recusatio
imperii, Augustus’ strategy for establishing his sovereignty by set
ting himself outside or above formal procedures. Similarly, Ovid
aims to control the juridical order by deciding what lies outside it.
The chapter studies a number of key passages from Catullus,
Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid to show that the love poets antici
pate Augustus’ claims to sacrosanctity and sovereignty. It further
examines love elegy’s affinities with the Saturnalian spirit of
Roman comedy in order to argue that the elegiac suspension of
legal action affords space for the emergence of an alternative juris
prudence of love.
Chapter 3 (‘The Courtroom in the Bedroom’) compares the dis
tinction between what lies inside and outside the rule of law with
the blurring of public and private space in the age of Augustus. Love
elegy blends private with public life, but also bars Roman law from
the privacy of the bedroom. The secrecy of lovemaking is emblem
atic of the autonomy of love poetry, an independent area governed
by the sovereign laws of love. At the same time, love’s jurisdiction
spreads from the privacy of the bedroom to occupy the spaces of
public life. The bedroom in Latin love elegy is part of the discursive
independence of sexuality, an autonomy that is the basis of sover
eignty. Focusing on representative case studies from the Amores
(1.4, 2.5, 2.7–8, 2.19, 3.4, 3.14), the chapter examines the shift to the
privacy of the elegiac bedroom against the background of Augustus’
policy of making all aspects of his private life public.
Chapter 4 (‘The Letter of the Law’) moves away from the Amores
to explore the last of the double Heroides (20–1), the correspond
ence between Acontius and Cydippe. While the extensive legal lexi
con of these letters has been much discussed, its significance has
been downplayed. By contrast, building on Goodrich (1997), I
argue that Ovid highlights the fundamental confluence of the love
letter with legal correspondence. The discussion ranges widely
through comparative material from contemporary Latin elegy
(Propertius in particular) to its intertextual matrix (Callimachus’

Aetia) in order to spell out the dependence of both poetry and law
on precedent. Core aspects of Heroides 20–1, such as the materiality
of the text, iterability, performativity, and intertextuality are not
only closely related to the predominance of legal diction in these
letters, but also show that the invention of love is inextricably
related to the invention of law. I further bring in the extrajudicial
rituals and materials of magic, in the form of the curse tablet, to
investigate the triangulated relations between magic spells (car-
mina), love poetry (carmina), and legal statements. The scripted
authority of the law cannot always be segregated from the jurisdic
tions of magic and poetry. In its historical context, the crucial role
of epistolography in the production and communication of laws in
the Roman Empire is important for understanding the legal force of
Ovid’s love letters.
Part II (‘Lex amatoria,’ Chapters 5–6) revolves around the Ars
amatoria in order to demonstrate the importance of both literary
tradition and historical context for Ovid’s self-presentation as a
paragon of justice. Chapter 5 (‘Poets and Lawmakers’) starts by
reassessing the common view that Ovid’s Ars amatoria is a frivolous
parody of serious didactic poetry. I argue that Ovid’s didactic elegy
should be studied in the tradition of the genre’s founding father,
Hesiod. The close relationship between law and didacticism is
encoded already in Hesiod’s Works and Days and continues there
after in Greek elegy (Theognis and Solon). Ovid is part of this
tradition. The courtroom setting, to which Ovid has repeated
recourse in the Ars amatoria, reproduces the trial setting of the
Works and Days. Not unlike Hesiod, Ovid aims at an out-of-court
settlement in contrast with the litigiousness of corrupt lords. Hesiod
and Solon cast themselves as champions of justice in a world dom
inated by unjust rulers. Subtly but clearly, this is how Ovid envis
ages the relationship between his poetry and the laws of Augustus.
Chapter 6 (‘Sexperts and Legal Experts’) examines the expertise
of the praeceptor amoris (‘teacher of love’) in the context of the
rise of the Roman jurists in the early Principate. The autonomy of
jurisprudence in the schools of law goes hand in hand with the
independence of sexuality in Ovid’s school of love. The bulk of the
Introduction 23
chapter explores the juridico-discursive nature of Ovid’s Ars amato-

ria and includes a discussion of Ovid’s account of Tiresias
(Metamorphoses 3) that highlights the confluence of amatory and
juridical expertise. Arguing against the view that the science of law
was culturally isolated, I trace the deep interconnections between
the didactic discourses of jurists and love poets. Since both Ovid’s
innovative laws of love and Augustus’ legal reforms make female
sexuality the centre of attention, the chapter focuses on the ways in
which both Ovid and Augustus aim to fashion women in the image
of their desires.
Part III (‘The Law of the Father,’ Chapters 7–8) focuses on the
connection between producing laws and fathering children.
Chapter 7 (‘Authors of Law and Life’) examines the biopolitical
force of Augustan legislation vis-à-vis Ovid’s love poetry. Ovid, the
‘father of poems’, pits himself against the prince, the ‘father of the
fatherland’. Poet and emperor are involved in the production of
normative discourse (legal or literary) that aims at generating bio
logical or conceptual offspring. Their roles are both parallel and
antithetical. Augustus’ laws aim to increase the population, while
the elegiac legislator sees pregnancy as undermining attractiveness.
Yet both poet and prince cast themselves as auctores, a word that
can refer to a proposer of law, an author of poems, and a father. As
auctores, Ovid and Augustus aspire to create a zone of indistinction
between the biological and the political, between law and life. The
capacity of Ovid’s art to become life parallels and contrasts with the
power of Augustus’ laws to become flesh.
Chapter 8 (‘Love and Incest’) takes up these themes in an explor
ation of Orpheus’ celebration of pederasty and denunciation of
female passion, especially in the form of incest. The chapter starts
by discussing Orpheus as a figure who combines the roles of the
archetypal poet and lawgiver (Horace, Ars Poetica 391–401; Ovid,
Metamorphoses 10–11). While in Horace the legendary bard insti
tutes marriage laws, in Ovid he is the founding father of pederasty.
Orpheus’ version of the myth of Myrrha (a daughter who fell in love
with her father) revaluates the prohibition on incest as the origin of
the law of the father. Myrrha’s love is an attempt to appropriate
patria potestas by challenging the father’s power to say no to incest.
What is more, the myths of Orpheus and Myrrha resonate with

Augustan Rome: Orpheus bears more than fleeting similarities to
the teacher of the Ars amatoria; Cinyras and Myrrha recall Augustus
and Julia, a resemblance that opens the gap between the intention
of the law of the pater patriae and its undesirable effects.
In the Epilogue, I outline my study’s links to Ovid’s reception in
the Middle Ages in order to recapitulate the main theoretical
approaches of my work. Ovid’s jurisprudence of love had a major
impact on Forcadel’s Cupido Jurisperitus and Boccaccio’s Decameron.
The current trend to simultaneously study and marginalize legal dis
course in Ovid is a modern construction that this book aims to
demolish. My comments on the juridico-discursive reception of
Ovid are brief, but will hopefully open new avenues not only in
Ovidian studies and the reception of our poet’s work, but also in the
field of law and literature.
PART I
THE TRIALS OF LOVE
2
Love as a State of Exception
Introduction
In a book whose main argument is that Ovid’s love poetry lays

down the law, it is important to discuss the passages in which Ovid
and other love poets explicitly declare that they do not care about
legal procedures. The recusatio of laws and courtrooms at Amores
1.15 or Tristia 4.10.17–22, 37–40 are salient examples that will be
examined in this chapter. These passages feature in studies on legal
language in Ovid. Kenney (1969: 263) concludes his article on legal-
isms in Ovid by quoting and briefly discussing Tristia 4.10.37–40.
For Kenney, Ovid’s disavowal of forensic business is proof of the
poet’s indifference to the rituals of the law. Despite Ovid’s distaste
for the forum, his early and short experience with it, Kenney adds,
‘left a mark on him that cannot be wholly deplored’. After twenty-
two pages of masterful identification of legalisms in Ovid, Kenney’s
conclusion is rather anticlimactic. Ovid’s obsession with legal dic-
tion is perceived as ‘brushes with the law’; the law ‘may claim some
small part’ in the formation of Ovid’s versatile poetry, reads the last
sentence. After all, Ovid himself says he rejected a career in the
forum for the pleasures of the Muses.
Publishing twenty-four years after Kenney (1969), John Davis
(1993) follows a similar methodology and draws similar conclusions.
Focusing on Amores 1.4, Davis (1993) perceptively identifies Ovid’s
future imperatives as the language of legal injunctions. He then
quotes Amores 1.15.1–6, in which Ovid dismisses an education in
law and a career in the forum, to conclude that it is clear that our
poet had no taste for Roman law; he simply used legalese to mock it
(Davis 1993: 68–9). Mockery, the ultimate interpretative resort of
Law and Love in Ovid: Courting Justice in the Age of Augustus. Ioannis Ziogas, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Ioannis Ziogas.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198845140.003.0002
so many studies on Ovid, brings us to a conclusion. Ovid laughed at

the law, so he did not care about it.
These articles briefly discuss Ovid’s recusationes of the world and
language of law in their concluding remarks. By contrast, my work
takes them as the point of departure in an attempt to assess the full
force of legal discourse in Ovid’s love poetry. My argument sharply
contrasts with Kenney’s and Davis’ conclusions. To begin with, the
rejection of a career in law is presented in the context of a trial, a
court of love or a judgment of love poetry. The courtroom setting of
the elegiac recusatio suggests that love poetry is not separated from
legal action but fully integrated into the rituals and rhetoric of the
forum. It is an illusion that love renders lovers indifferent to law.
Quite the contrary, the elegiac recusatio reveals the juridical nature
of the lover’s discourse.
What is more, the recusatio defines a sovereign exception that is a
prerequisite for the creation of the juridical order. Kirk Freudenburg
(2014) draws an intriguing connection between the recusationes of
Augustan poets and Augustus’ recusatio imperii, the emperor’s
strategy for establishing his sovereignty by setting himself outside
or above formal procedures. Building on Freudenburg and further
drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben (1998; 2005a), I argue
that Ovid’s recusationes are enmeshed in imperial politics. Not
unlike the prince, the poet proclaims a sovereign exception; he
controls the production of law by deciding what lies outside it. Ovid
does not close the door of the law. He opens it by standing outside
the juridical order.
Recusatio: Elegy’s Sovereign Exception
Latin love elegy is a literary genre that defines itself by denial. The
so-called recusatio, the disavowal of epic war for the sake of love,
shapes the profile and agenda of elegiac discourse. Yet this denial is
simultaneously an appropriation.1 Roman elegy may apparently
1 Hinds (1998: 52–5) discusses Latin poets’ simultaneous appropriation and denial in the
rather different context of the so-called primus motif.
Love as a State of Exception 29
refuse to engage with the world of wars and men, but actually enlists
martial epic in the service of love poetry. Elegy’s strategy is more
aggressive than it looks at first sight; the genre conquers by feigning
a retreat and transforms epic narratives into elegiac metaphors.2
From that perspective, elegy is more imperialistic than epic since it
expands by dividing and conquering the martial and amatory
aspects of epic poems. The denial of an active military and political
life is a powerful political statement. By refusing actively to take
part in Roman imperialism, the Roman elegists make a radical
poetic and political choice. Elegy’s action is its pretence of inaction.
A similar combination of denial and appropriation applies to
elegy’s stance towards Roman law. Latin elegiac poets ostensibly
reject a career in law for the pleasures of love poetry, but in fact
employ the full force of legal discourse for amatory purposes. If
every lover is a soldier and Cupid has his own barracks, as Ovid
famously avers (Amores 1.9.1), every lover is also a lawyer and
Cupid has and holds his own court. The shift from the interplay
between love and war to the disavowal of law for the sake of love
suggests itself, since any Roman man aspiring to a successful career
would choose to serve the state either in the army or in the forum.
If elegiac love contrasts with military action, it also contrasts with
legal action. In the Remedia amoris, Ovid teaches that the end of
leisure (otium) will be the end of love. Avoid leisure and you will be
cured of your longing for pleasure:
Sunt fora, sunt leges, sunt, quos tuearis, amici:

uade per urbanae splendida castra togae.
uel tu sanguinei iuuenalia munera Martis
suscipe: deliciae iam tibi terga dabunt.
Remedia amoris 151–4
There are the courts, there are the laws, there are friends for you
to defend: march through the camps that gleam with the urban
toga. Or undertake the youthful task of bloostained Mars: you will
soon be routing pleasures.
2 E.g. the motif of militia amoris. On this elegiac motif and its ironies, see Gale (1997);
Drinkwater (2013).
The courtroom is presented in military terms (castra), anticipating

the transition to martial pursuits that can be an antidote to amatory
passion. This combination of military and legal discourse features
at the beginning of the Remedia. The work starts with Cupid accus-
ing Ovid of declaring war against him. Ovid retorts with a speech
with which he begs Cupid not to condemn his bard of this crime,
reminding the god how dutifully he served in his camp (Rem. am.
1–4). In other words, the Remedia starts with a trial scene. Ovid
wins the case and Cupid lets him proceed with his project. His apo-
logia for the Remedia convinces Cupid more than Tristia 2, with its
defence of the Ars amatoria, ever moved Augustus to recall the poet
from exile. Amor yields to legal action (Rem. am. 144) and is moved
by forensic rhetoric (Rem. am. 39–40).
The parallel between military and civil service is part of oratory’s
self-definition: forensic pleading is often compared to martial activity—
a young orator’s apprenticeship is a tirocinium (‘a soldier’s first
service’). Cicero (Off. 1.71) states that military and civil offices
(imperia et magistratus) are the only praiseworthy pursuits, and
excuses only two categories of men who choose a different path:
men of extraordinary genius who are devoted to learning and men
of ill health. It is as if Cicero anticipated the persona of the elegiac
lover, the outstandingly learned and frail poet who abstains from
public service burdened with the onus of love and love poetry.
Cicero has no sympathy for all other men who scorn a career in
the army. For him, glory is earned on the battlefield or in the
forum, while for the elegiac poets the eternal glory of poetic after-
life is pitted against the ephemeral pursuits of civil and military
administration.
Propertius, for one, classes forensic oratory alongside epic poetry
as a discourse he should reject. At 4.1b.133–46, Apollo dictates the
production of elegy and forbids the thundering rhetoric of the law
courts:
tum tibi pauca suo de carmine dictat Apollo

et uetat insano uerba tonare foro.
‘at tu finge elegos, fallax opus (haec tua castra).
Propertius 4.1b.133–5
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Title: Sous l'Étoile du Matin
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOUS

L'ÉTOILE DU MATIN ***
ADOLPHE RETTÉ
SOUS
L’ÉTOILE DU MATIN
Stella Matutina
Ora pro nobis.
PARIS
LIBRAIRIE LÉON VANIER, ÉDITEUR
A. MESSEIN Succr
19, Q U A I S A I N T- M I C H E L , 19
1910
DU MÊME AUTEUR
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Du Diable à Dieu, histoire d’une conversion, préface

de François Coppée, 30e édit. 3 fr. 50
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AU RÉVÉRENDISSIME PÈRE ABBÉ
DE
SAINT MARTIN DE LIGUGÉ
DOM LÉOPOLD GAUGUIN

EN EXIL
Hommage filial.
A. R.
PRÉAMBULE
C’était un gros village dont la rue principale montait vers un

plateau aride où végétaient quelques sapins maigres et où s’élevait
une croix.
Certaines maisons offraient des façades en torchis jaunâtre, des
vitres ternes et fendillées, des toits roux et cabossés comme de
vieux chapeaux. Dans leurs cours, force détritus et des tas de fumier
que des poules picoraient en jacassant. D’autres, c’étaient des villas
blanches, coiffées de tuiles d’un ton aussi vif que celui des pétales
de coquelicots. Des jardins les entouraient, avec des pelouses où
pas un brin d’herbe ne se serait permis de dépasser son voisin, avec
des massifs de rosiers et de géraniums, avec des allées de sable
que grattait un râteau quotidien et méticuleux.
Il faisait jour depuis une heure environ. Le soleil de septembre
avait peine à glisser quelques rayons à travers les nuages chargés
de pluie qui encombraient le ciel. Les fumées, au lieu de
tirebouchonner gaîment et de s’envoler vers le zénith, roulaient,
lentes et lourdes, au ras des toitures. Les alouettes, silencieuses,
restaient blotties dans les sillons. Un vent mou soufflait par bouffées
inégales qui ployaient à peine les cimes inquiètes des peupliers.
Des paysans, sur le seuil de leurs masures, inspectaient l’air gris,
la main en auvent au-dessus des yeux, flairaient l’odeur fade de la
terre, puis rentraient en hochant la tête et en grognant : — Nous
aurons de l’eau.
Des femmes mal réveillées, la tignasse en broussaille, les
savates traînantes, vaquaient machinalement aux soins du ménage,
de la basse-cour et de la porcherie. Elles s’arrêtaient parfois, en des
postures objurgatrices, pour menacer de châtiments prompts des
enfants qui se préparaient à l’école en se jetant des épluchures et en
échangeant des coups de cartables.
Les villas, tous volets clos, dormaient encore. A scruter leur
mutisme pesant, on devinait qu’elles recélaient des bourgeois
grassouillets, retirés à la campagne, après fortune faite, et dont la
première pensée, au réveil, se formulerait ainsi : — Que mangerons-
nous aujourd’hui ?
Ensuite les hommes tueraient la journée avec le plus de lenteur
qu’ils pourraient. Cependant que leurs épouses persécuteraient des
servantes sournoisement révoltées, ils caresseraient les pensées
massives qui s’ébrouent dans les cervelles rentières comme des
hippopotames dans un marécage. Ils rumineraient le chocolat
onctueux et les brioches tièdes englouties au saut du lit. Ils
combineraient des plats rares pour le dîner et le souper. Ils
fumeraient de vagues pipes. Ils se remémoreraient les plus
fructueux de leurs inventaires. Puis, l’Angelus du soir sonné, ils
feraient de nouveau gémir les sommiers sous leur embonpoint
flasque. La panse distendue par un vaste amas de victuailles, les
paupières battantes, ils murmureraient en guise d’action de grâces :
— Comme nous avons bien mangé aujourd’hui !…
Puis ils tomberaient dans le gouffre au sommeil et rêveraient
d’andouilles juteuses et de venaisons pourries à point. Et le démon à
gros ventre, au nez en vitelotte, qui préside aux digestions
bourgeoises écarterait d’eux, pour le lendemain, toute idée qui ne
serait pas propre à s’enclore dans une marmite, tout songe qui ne
parlerait pas d’entremets et de charcuterie. Enfin, il lubrifierait leur
âme d’une graisse raclée dans les arrière-cuisine de l’enfer…
Les rentiers ronflaient. Les paysans maugréaient à cause de la
pluie imminente. Le dernier coup de la messe tintait dans le clocher
de la petite église ruineuse et moussue qui occupait un coin d’une
place en triangle plantée d’ormeaux chétifs. Mais personne ne
semblait entendre cet appel. Seul, un boucher, au tablier sanglant,
se pencha sur son étal et guigna, d’un œil moqueur, le curé qui,
après avoir sonné lui-même, s’attardait sous le porche. Il attendait,
comme s’il ne savait pas, depuis bien des années, qu’aucun de ses
paroissiens ne se soucierait de s’unir au Saint-Sacrifice.
Il finit par rentrer, en soupirant, dans l’église. Quand sa soutane
élimée eut disparu, l’homme des viandes, qui se glorifiait du titre de
libre-penseur, ricana et lança un long jet de salive sur le pavé en
disant :
— Enfoncé le ratichon !
Son premier garçon, qui empilait de la « réjouissance » dans un
coin de la boutique, se hâta d’approuver et corrobora l’allégresse de
« l’ami des lumières » par cette phrase :
— Des mangeurs de Bon Dieu, n’en faut plus.
Cet aphorisme, c’est tout ce qu’il avait retenu des enseignements
du moraliste obligatoire et laïque qui avait formé son enfance.
Le ciel se faisait plus triste et plus sombre au-dessus de la
campagne. Le vent se taisait. Le soleil, caché par un opaque écran
de nuages, renonçait à baigner de son or fluide les peupliers
immobiles. Un calme sinistre régnait sur les choses. C’est à peine si,
dans un vague lointain, un coq enroué parvint à chanter trois fois. Ce
village avait l’air d’une cité des morts.
A ce moment je vis poindre, au bas de la rue en pente, un
homme qui traversait le pont jeté sur une mince rivière, à courant
faible, dont les eaux mates coulaient entre des berges pleines
d’orties et de caillasses.
L’homme marchait lentement, non, semblait-il, par lassitude, mais
parce qu’une méditation profonde l’absorbait tout entier. Il portait une
sorte de longue robe brune, assez pareille à celle des capucins ; une
courroie lui serrait les reins ; une corde en bandoulière soutenait une
besace à son flanc gauche. Il avait la tête nue. Comme il la tenait
inclinée et qu’une profusion de cheveux fauves retombait sur sa
figure encadrée d’une barbe de même nuance, je ne pus distinguer
ses traits ni saisir son regard.
Il fit quelques pas sur les rocailles pointues qui bosselaient la
chaussée. Je remarquai alors que ses pieds étaient nus et laissaient
derrière lui des traces de sang.
Qui cela pouvait-il être ? Pas un trimardeur, à coup sûr, car on
distinguait dans sa démarche je ne sais quelle majesté qui imposait
le respect. Peut-être un moine mendiant ?… Ce qu’il y a de certain
c’est qu’à le considérer, on se sentait peu à peu envahi d’un
sentiment où il entrait de la crainte et une grande douceur.
Dès qu’il fut près de moi, une intention soudaine, où la volonté
n’avait nulle part, m’obligea de le suivre à quelque distance. Une
force irrésistible, qui émanait de lui, m’englobait, me tirait sur ses
pas. J’avais l’intuition que je ne pourrais plus me détacher de lui. Je
sentais, sans me rendre compte comment ni pourquoi, que, s’il le
voulait, j’irais après lui jusqu’au bout du monde. J’avais envie de
pleurer, de tomber à genoux, de prendre sa main et de me la poser
sur la tête. Mon cœur brûlait si fort dans ma poitrine qu’il me faisait
mal presque à crier. Et, en même temps, mon âme s’emplissait
d’une paix immense qui s’étalait en moi comme une nappe de
lumière.
L’homme ne paraissait pas s’apercevoir que je le suivais. Arrivé
devant la première maison, il heurta la porte d’un coup discret. Puis
il ramena sa besace devant lui, y plongea la main et attendit.
Une maritorne, d’aspect revêche, vint ouvrir. Elle examina le
solliciteur d’un air soupçonneux puis fit aussitôt le geste de refermer
en criant d’une voix glapissante :
— Encore un galvaudeux !… Nous n’avons rien pour vous.
Mais l’homme avait retiré sa main de la besace. Je me penchai et
je vis qu’il tenait une hostie. Il l’offrit à la femme étonnée et dit :
— Je te donne ma chair et mon sang ; donne-moi ton cœur en
échange.
Cette voix ! Elle évoquait le chant des hautes cimes forestières,
en avril, lorsque la sève montante fait frémir d’amour les jeunes
pousses, lorsque la plainte des rossignols se mêle à l’oraison
chuchotée des feuilles nouvelles. Il s’y ajoutait une vertu suave et
impérieuse à la fois que nulle intonation sortie d’une bouche
humaine ne saurait imiter.
La femme, déroutée, recula d’abord devant l’hostie. Se reprenant
bientôt, elle gronda :
— C’est un toqué !
Quelle expression de haine sauvage lui parcourut alors toute la
face ! Une lueur couleur de soufre lui jaillit des prunelles et sa
mâchoire s’avança comme pour mordre. J’eus l’avertissement en
moi qu’un diable s’agitait dans les caves regorgeantes de péchés de
son âme et, machinalement, je fis le signe de la croix.
— Voilà pour toi et ton hostie, brailla enfin la mégère.
Elle cracha à la figure de l’étrange solliciteur, puis referma la
porte avec une telle violence que les vitres de la façade grelottèrent
dans leurs châssis.
L’homme soupira profondément. Puis sans s’essuyer ni
prononcer une parole, il gagna la maison voisine…
Il n’est pas une seule demeure du village où il ne frappa. Partout,
absolument partout, l’accueil fut le même. Tantôt, c’était un tâcheron
qui venait ouvrir et qui, dès la phrase mystérieuse entendue, éclatait
en injures atroces ; tantôt quelque malpropre furie, dont le rire
insultant grinçait comme les gonds d’une porte de la Géhenne ;
tantôt un enfant dont le visage se tordait tout de suite en grimaces
démoniaques. Tous, comme liés par un pacte, crachèrent sur l’hostie
et sur l’homme dont la face fut complètement souillée. Le boucher lui
lança un os pointu qui lui fit une blessure au front. A la grille d’une
des villas, une servante, qui sortait une boîte à ordures, la vida sur
lui.
J’aurais voulu m’élancer, réprimer tant d’outrages. Mais un ordre
tacite, émané de l’homme, me retenait. Je demeurai passif, dans
l’épouvante à cause de cette flamme de soufre que je discernais
dans le regard de tous ces malheureux.
Arrivé sur la place de l’église, l’homme se tourna vers le portail.
Immobile, les mains tendues, il prononça les mots trois fois saints :
Hoc est enim corpus meum. Et il éleva lentement l’hostie, comme
fait le prêtre au moment décisif de la consécration.
Alors, il se passa une chose inouïe. La muraille disparut pour
moi : je découvris l’intérieur de l’église. Je vis le desservant
s’agenouiller, après avoir répété la même phrase que je venais
d’entendre. A cette seconde précise, l’hostie s’échappa des mains
de l’homme qui la tenait toujours élevée. Elle se transforma en un
disque fulgurant d’où s’irradiaient des clartés d’une blancheur
éblouissante ; elle s’envola dans la nef en traçant un sillon d’éclair et
vint se poser sur l’autel, devant le calice. Aussitôt j’entendis s’enfler
les sons d’un orgue séraphique et, dans les hauteurs, des voix
d’anges psalmodièrent : Alleluia.
Ce verbe de joie fut articulé plaintivement car, ce jour-là, tout était
triste, même les anges.
Mais moi, l’amour bondit dans mon cœur comme un poulain
qu’on lâche à travers un pré. Ce que je n’avais fait que pressentir,
depuis que j’accompagnais l’Homme, devint une certitude
foudroyante. Je reconnus mon bon Maître. Les yeux débordants de
larmes heureuses, je me prosternai devant Lui, je baisai ses pieds
sanglants, puis je m’écriai :
— Seigneur, Seigneur, recueille-moi, prends avec toi le pauvre
caillou brisé des routes de l’Esprit qui ne demande qu’à mourir pour
ta gloire.
Il me regarda. Comment trouver des syllabes pour rendre la
splendeur de la Sainte Face ? Comment décrire l’infinie, la
mélancolique bonté qui s’y révélait ?
Tout y échouerait car que sont les coassements de notre nature
pécheresse pour exprimer ce qu’elle éprouve, quand la Vérité
absolue daigne se manifester à elle ?
Le bon Maître garda ses yeux, d’un bleu nocturne, fixés pendant
quelque temps sur moi, sans rien dire. Ils pénétraient jusqu’aux
replis les plus cachés de mon être. Je perçus que rien de mes
sentiments ni de mes idées ne lui échappait et j’eus honte de ne
pouvoir lui offrir qu’un terrain si ingrat, si encombré d’une broussaille
de péchés pour qu’il y répandît la semence de sa charité.
Mais Il vit ma bonne volonté car, me montrant d’abord le plateau
qui dominait le village, et que surmontait la croix toute nue, il
prononça ces paroles :
— Si quelqu’un veut venir après moi, qu’il se renonce lui-même,
qu’il porte sa croix et qu’il me suive.
— Je le veux, avec votre Grâce, m’écriai-je.
Et alors, une invisible croix s’appliqua, lourd fardeau, sur mes
épaules. Je sus qu’elle était faite de mon noir passé et des douleurs
de tous ceux que j’avais égarés, outragés ou méconnus. Je sus
aussi que j’allais beaucoup souffrir et je me réjouis d’endurer ces
maux pour l’amour de Notre-Seigneur.
Il reprit sa marche lente vers le haut du pays. Docile comme un
bon chien qui trottine humblement derrière le maître qui le nourrit,
j’allais après lui et je posais mes pieds partout où les siens avaient
posé.
Un rassemblement s’était formé. Aucun des gens du village ne
s’était aperçu du miracle de l’hostie, une taie pitoyable bouchant les
prunelles de leur âme. Ce qui les réunissait ainsi c’était une curiosité
malveillante. Ce mendiant, qui offrait du pain et qui demandait les
cœurs en retour, les stupéfiait à coup sûr ; mais surtout le monceau
de péchés qui croupissait en eux leur envoyait au cerveau des
vapeurs meurtrières. Ils auraient voulu bafouer davantage Notre-
Seigneur, le frapper, le torturer. Ils s’excitaient entre eux par des
plaisanteries fangeuses. Des femmes aux graisses ballottantes
raillaient sa maigreur. Des enfants, approuvés par leurs pères,
ramassaient du crottin pour le lui jeter. Un propriétaire, — levé plus
tôt que les autres, — le considérait de cet air de répugnance
méprisante qui désigne les riches sans Dieu quand le Pauvre les
effleure. Il se plaignait hautement qu’on laissât circuler ce vagabond
et parlait d’en écrire à la préfecture. Le garde-champêtre, stimulé par
cette évocation des puissances, mâchait, dans sa moustache en
chiendent, des menaces de procès-verbal. Le boucher hurlait son
envie de lâcher son bouledogue aux trousses de l’intrus.
Ah ! Seigneur, vous les aviez reconnus : c’étaient les fils de ceux
qui, sur les routes de Galilée, vous refusaient une pierre pour
reposer votre tête. Une fois de plus, flambait ce feu de haine que le
Prince de ce monde allume chez ses esclaves.
Voyant que nous nous éloignions quelqu’un cria :
— Bon voyage, guenilleux, et surtout ne reviens plus nous
embêter avec ton sale pain à curés.
Tous approuvèrent parmi des rires de dérision. — Notre-Seigneur
se retourna. Une pitié divine illumina sa face couverte de crachats
gluants. En silence, la main haute, il traça, sur la foule horrible, le
signe de la croix.
A ce geste, tous chancelèrent, comme si une volée de mitraille
les avait atteints. Les figures pâlirent, devinrent verdâtres, les dents
claquèrent, les doigts se tordirent comme pour griffer. Puis —
comment cela se fit-il ? — des têtes de morts aux orbites remplis de
flammes sombres s’entassèrent devant moi. Aussitôt après, il n’y eut
plus qu’un visqueux brouillard, couleur de boue, qui, dévalant la
pente, alla se perdre dans la rivière…
Mon bon Maître me fit signe de le suivre et nous reprîmes
l’escalade.
Un sentier, à peine marqué parmi les bruyères flétries et les
genêts secs qui revêtaient la colline d’une toison minable, conduisait
au sommet. Le ciel s’obscurcissait de plus en plus. Des ténèbres
s’appesantissaient sur la terre, pareilles au drap d’un catafalque.
Toute la nature se tenait immobile, comme dans la stupeur.
Nous atteignîmes le plateau. Quelques rochers aux formes
monstrueuses, rappelant celles des bêtes antédiluviennes, le
parsemaient. Une mousse jaunâtre, semblable à une lèpre, y avait
mis ses plaques. Au centre, la croix se dressait, solitaire, formée de
deux troncs de pins mal équarris, hérissés d’échardes et de nœuds
et que fixaient des chevilles grossières.
Notre-Seigneur s’arrêta contre l’instrument de son supplice. Il
posa la besace à terre ; elle s’ouvrit, et un flot d’hosties dédaignées
s’en échappa qui brillaient, dans le sable, comme des étoiles. Puis il
enleva sa robe et je vis son corps adorable, ceint du cripagne, tout
zébré des blessures de la flagellation.
Soudain, sans que je pusse comprendre comment cela s’était
produit, Jésus fut en croix, les bras étendus, la couronne d’épines au
front. Des marteaux invisibles retentirent à coups précipités ; des
clous s’enfoncèrent dans les pieds et dans les mains ; une plaie
ouvrit ses lèvres au côté droit. Le sang jaillit, raya le corps de
ruisseaux rouges et forma une mare lugubre qui s’élargissait sur le
sol pierreux.
Ensuite, je vis une femme qui se tenait assise, la figure dans les
paumes, tout près de la croix. Elle était vêtue de bleu sombre, un
voile blanc descendait sur ses épaules. Je l’entendais sangloter si
violemment qu’on eût dit que sa poitrine allait se rompre. Je sus que
c’était la Sainte-Vierge et je sus aussi qu’elle pleurait sur le monde
de blasphèmes et d’iniquités qui se tenait, béant, autour de la
colline. Enfin — mystère de douleur et de charité — je découvris que
ses mains, ses pieds, son cœur étaient percés comme ceux de son
Fils et mêlaient son sang au sang rédempteur qui pleuvait de la
croix.
A ce spectacle, des tenailles me broyèrent l’âme. Je tombai la
face à terre et je versai de lourdes larmes, car je compris qu’une fois
de plus, mes péchés et ceux de tous les hommes causaient le
supplice de Notre-Seigneur et celui de Sa Mère.
Quand je me relevai pour puiser un surcroît de souffrance dans
la vue des plaies de Jésus, j’assistai à quelque chose de si terrible
que je tremble en le décrivant.
Sous le ciel, semblable à une coupole d’ébène, il régnait
maintenant une sorte de clarté livide qui donnait aux objets une
apparence cadavéreuse. Je découvris ensuite que les quatre
horizons avaient reculé jusqu’à l’infini. Des multitudes s’étageaient,
au bas de la colline, rigides, la face tournée vers Notre-Seigneur
douloureux. Je sus qu’il y avait là toute l’humanité. La plupart le
regardait d’un air de dédain. D’autres offraient une mine de défi
triomphant et d’orgueil. D’autres ne présentaient qu’une expression
d’indifférence stupide.
J’entrai dans ces âmes et je vis que chacune était habitée par un
démon qui travaillait avec zèle à l’infecter. Elles me furent montrées
comme des enclos fiévreux, peuplés de bêtes immondes et de
plantes vénéneuses. Il s’y traînait des limaces et des crapauds, des
larves excrémentielles et des vers d’égout. Les mouches métalliques
qui naissent de la corruption y voltigeaient sur des jusquiames et des
aconits, dans une atmosphère de miasmes dégageant une puanteur
suffoquante.
Des catholiques clairsemaient cette foule. Quelques-uns, qui
avaient reçu l’hostie, par amour, portaient, entre les sourcils, une
petite croix de lumière. Mais beaucoup de baptisés ne montraient
pas ce signe et dormaient, accroupis, comme dormirent les disciples
au Jardin des Olives. Par contre, certains se démenaient, babillaient
de fêtes et de fanfreluches, cherchaient tous les moyens d’oublier le
Dieu qui, en ce moment même, souffrait d’épouvantables douleurs
pour qu’ils l’aimassent. Parce que ceux-là ne voulaient pas recevoir
l’hostie, ils portaient, comme les ennemis de Jésus, la marque du
Diable imprimée sur leurs lèvres.
Je me sentis alors pénétré de honte et de repentir. Je me
rappelai toutes les occasions où, après avoir demandé, d’un
murmure machinal, mon pain quotidien, je m’étais abstenu de
m’agenouiller devant la Table unique, pour en recevoir l’aumône.
Cela par paresse, par négligence, par tiédeur de foi. Un tel regret de
mon défaut d’amour me corroda le cœur qu’il me sembla que, dès
ce moment, je subissais les justes peines du Purgatoire…
Or, Notre-Seigneur saignait, saignait de plus en plus fort, et le
cœur de la Sainte-Vierge laissait s’échapper des torrents vermeils.
Tout ce sang se répandit sur l’univers. — Bientôt il n’y eut plus qu’un
océan rouge dont les vagues déferlaient, submergeaient ceux qui
n’avaient pas voulu du pain de vie, se changeaient en tuniques
glorieuses sur le corps de ceux qui l’avaient reçu, chaque aurore,
comme la nourriture essentielle de leur âme.
Une dernière fois, les yeux mélancoliques de Notre-Seigneur se
fixèrent sur moi et j’entendis chanter dans mon cœur les paroles qu’il
m’adressa :
— Mon petit enfant, il faut m’aimer. Que de fois tu te plaignis

de ne pas m’aimer suffisamment ! Pour obtenir ce grand amour
dont tu as soif, pour ne plus frapper sur les clous qui me
crucifient, pour ne plus enfoncer de couteaux dans le cœur de
ma Mère, garde-toi sans souillures, digne de recevoir, tous les
jours, ma chair et mon sang. Alors, nourri de ce pain quotidien,
tu mériteras de rappeler à tes frères oublieux ou endurcis qu’il
faut que Je vive en eux pour qu’ils vivent en Moi…
Tout disparut comme si un rideau tombait d’un seul coup. Je me

réveillai en sursaut et mes regards se portèrent vers la fenêtre
ouverte sur la nuit d’été. Un très faible petit jour grandissait à l’orient.
Le vent frais de l’aube faisait bruire doucement le feuillage des
bouleaux plantés devant la maison. L’étoile du matin scintillait,
comme un pur diamant, dans le ciel pâle. Tout plein du rêve que je
venais de faire, j’élevai mes mains vers ce limpide symbole de Celle
qui eut toujours pour moi des sourires indulgents et je m’écriai :
Stella matutina, ora pro nobis !…
II
Oui, c’était un rêve — mais quel rêve ! Et comme je le reconnus

tout de suite pour être de ceux que Notre-Seigneur nous envoie,
quelquefois, dans le but de nous instruire, de nous mettre en garde
contre un péril ou de nous faire progresser vers son Absolu !
Le sommeil constitue l’une des fonctions les plus mystérieuses
de notre existence où tout est mystère. Déjà, dans la veille, pourvu
que nous nous maintenions en état de grâce, nous percevons très
vite que le monde qui nous entoure n’est pas la vraie réalité. Nos
sens infirmes nous y trompent sans cesse. Errant dans les coulisses
du théâtre de Dieu, nous ne voyons que l’envers du décor planté par
ce sublime machiniste. Dans l’autre existence seulement, il nous
sera donné d’en voir l’endroit. Tout au plus, pendant les rares
minutes où Jésus daigne éclairer notre âme, par l’oraison, nous
découvrons que tous les aspects de la nature sont les symboles
d’une réalité supérieure et que ces images, déformées pour nous
depuis la Chute, ne peuvent nous fournir qu’une représentation
affaiblie de la face surnaturelle de l’Univers.
Néanmoins, dans le sommeil, il arrive que cette notion se
précise. Quand notre corps se repose, laissant enfin notre âme un
peu tranquille, nos sentiments et nos idées prennent, parfois, une
intensité tout à fait étrange et se concrètent en tableaux d’une
signification redoutable ou consolante.
Il est vrai que, souvent, cette vie nocturne de l’âme s’active pour
des causes purement physiques. Surgissent alors des
représentations baroques et fugitives. L’imagination, que ne contrôle
plus la volonté, s’enfièvre et engendre des figures incohérentes qui
se succèdent et s’effacent comme les bouffées de tabac qu’essuffle
un fumeur de cigarettes. Dans ce cas, il est à croire que le cerveau

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Law and Love in Ovid

incipe, parua puella, patrem cognoscere risu

1 Clementia is the sovereign’s power to pardon someone who deserves to be convicted. In

should coincide in absolute indistinction. And the Möbius band is

civilization. In its positive connotations, Ovid’s amor is not unrelated

Parts of significantly revised versions of three of my previous

of such a collegial group of scholars. I am particularly grateful to

1. Introduction: Eros and Nomos1

I. THE TRIALS OF LOVE

II. LEX AMATORIA

III. THE LAW OF THE FATHER

We may start by saying that law is the negation of passion. As

2 Law and Love in Ovid

Similarly, love poetry is often a normative discourse that le­git­im­izes

Tacitus (Annales 3.25) and Dio (56.1–10).2 A particularly thorny

4 Law and Love in Ovid

Augustan legislation, this is not a superficial reaction. To interpret

analogies.’ Without further ado, the lover’s discourse is deemed

prima feros habitus homini detraxit: ab illa

6 Law and Love in Ovid

mille per hanc artes motae; studioque placendi,

In the context of the laws of Venus, the passage quoted above

perspective, the current practice of pointing out Ovid’s borrowings

4 See Chapter 5. On amatory persuasion in antiquity, see Gross (1985).

8 Law and Love in Ovid

While Goodrich mentions Ovid in passing, the Roman poet is at

7 Andreas Capellanus’ Rules of Courtly Love (twelfth century), Boccaccio’s Decameron

preservation or its end. While imperial legislation crumbles in

10 Law and Love in Ovid

for the purpose of collecting and evaluating historical data about

9 See mainly Lowrie (2009: 327–82); (2016).

12 Law and Love in Ovid

Augustan legislation exemplify how the creation of law is in­ex­tric­ably

14 Law and Love in Ovid

and nature of law. In Laws 690a–c, Plato aims at undermining the

15 Myerowitz Levine (2006: 255) quotes and approves of Buss (1994).

16 Law and Love in Ovid

gen­er­al­iza­tion in the guise of scientific truth, but nonetheless an

18 Law and Love in Ovid

legislation. Latin elegy is a trope of property law and, conversely,

20 Law and Love in Ovid

When scholars point out the primarily technical meaning of a

22 Law and Love in Ovid

(Propertius in particular) to its intertextual matrix (Callimachus’

chapter explores the juridico-discursive nature of Ovid’s Ars amato-

24 Law and Love in Ovid

What is more, the myths of Orpheus and Myrrha resonate with

In a book whose main argument is that Ovid’s love poetry lays

28 Law and Love in Ovid

1. Introduction: Eros and Nomos1

Similarly, love poetry is often a normative discourse that legitimizes

Augustan legislation exemplify how the creation of law is inextricably

generalization in the guise of scientific truth, but nonetheless an