Authors of Law and Life

This chapter 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’ (pater patriae). Poet and emperor are involved in the production of normative discourse (legal or literary) that aims at generating biological 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.

Epilogue

The Epilogue discusses Ovid’s reception in the Middle Ages, in order to recapitulate the main theoretical approaches of the book. Ovid’s jurisprudence of love had a major impact on Forcadel’s Cupido Jurisperitus and Boccaccio’s Decameron. Within the long tradition of Ovidian receptions, the current trend to simultaneously study and marginalize legal discourse in Ovid is anomalous. The brief discussion of the juridico-discursive reception of Ovid will hopefully open new avenues not only in Ovidian studies, but also in the field of law and literature.

Introduction

This chapter sets up the methodological and theoretical parameters. Agamben’s homo sacer and ‘State of Exception’ are keys for interpreting Latin love elegy’s links to the juridical order. This theoretical background is closely linked to the age of Augustus. The chapter offers definitions of the key concepts of amor, a word related both to extrajuridical desire and to the juridical discourse of sexuality (cf. Foucault), and lex, which can mean both ‘law’ and ‘rule’. The technical and non-technical uses of lex bleed into one another in ways that Ovid will exploit in his poetry to document the interdependence of legal authority and poetic justice. The chapter gives an overview of current scholarship on law in Ovid and further explains its contribution to the interdisciplinary field of law and literature.

The Letter of the Law

This chapter studies the correspondence between Acontius and Cydippe (Heroides 20–1). The main argument is 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 show that the invention of love is inextricably related to the invention of law. The chapter further investigates the triangulated relations between magic spells (carmina), love poetry (carmina), and legal statements. 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.

Love and Incest

This 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 institutes 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) re-evaluates 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.

Love as a State of Exception

In Latin love elegy, the 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 setting himself outside or above formal procedures. Not unlike the prince, Ovid proclaims a sovereign exception; he controls the production of law 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 anticipate 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 jurisprudence of love.

Sexperts and Legal Experts

This chapter situates 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 chapter explores the juridico-discursive nature of Ovid’s Ars amatoria and includes a discussion of Ovid’s account of Tiresias (Metamorphoses 3) that highlights the confluence of amatory and juridical expertise. It explores 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.

Poets and Lawmakers

This chapter argues that Ovid’s didactic elegy (Ars amatoria) should be studied in the tradition of the genre’s founding father, Hesiod. The relationship between law and didacticism is encoded already in Hesiod’s Works and Days and continues thereafter in Greek elegy (Theognis and Solon). Ovid is part of this tradition. The courtroom setting, to which Ovid has repeated recourse, 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 dominated by unjust rulers. Subtly but clearly, this is how Ovid envisages the relationship between his poetry and the laws of Augustus. The Roman poet aligns himself with the old and authoritative voices of legendary bards and lawgivers in competition with powerful leaders who attempt to control the juridical order.

The Courtroom in the Bedroom

This chapter compares the distinction 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 emblematic 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 love elegy is part of the discursive independence of sexuality, an autonomy that is the basis of sovereignty. 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.