Law and Love in Ovid: Courting Justice in the Age of Augustus by Ioannis Ziogas (review)

Trajan. A further catalogue of dubious interpretations of Parthian wars from Verus to Macrinus cannot be pursued here. Most incredible is extending Caracalla’s 216 activities into Babylonia (170). In sum, Schlude rightly attributes (193-194) a role of Roman-Parthian wars 114-217 to the Arsacids’ demise, but he has no problem with the historicity of either Parthian claims to be Achaemenid Persian heirs (a hotly contested topic) or even Sallust’s epistula Mithridatis. The numbers of Parthian kings are often wrong (frequently Artabanus III for II and likewise for Vologaeses II-V). The microscopic maps (xv-xvi) add little; Fig. 3 lacks a caption; and the blurry Fig. 25 serves for show rather than illustration. Yet these flaws may lie with the publisher. Proofing errors are relatively few, but at least one is glaring: ΘΙΛΕΛΛΗΝΟΣ (3). I cannot recommend this book for undergraduate consumption, but it could be used for discussions in graduate seminars. One can only marvel at why editors of the OCD thought this work’s arguments worthy of canonization in a standard reference work.