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Nearly two millennia after his death, Ovid is as popular as ever.'v Denounced in the Romantic period for his supposed lack of true feeling and empty rhetoric, and subsequently relegated to anthologies read by schoolboys, the Roman poet has in the last fifty years made a splendid comeback and is today perhaps the most widely read Latin author altogether.1 Clearly, classical scholarship is enjoying a new aetas Ovidiana,2 but the current interest in things Ovidian is not restricted to the halls of academe. Thus, for example, a New York traumatized by the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 found solace in Mary Zimmerman's dreamlike stage adaptation of the Metamorphoses, a production that just months later went on to become a Broadway hit,3 and over the last few decades, writers from various countries have been producing fiction that features the Roman author as a character.4 As the success of these latter works shows, it is not just Ovid's poetry that holds a fascination for today's readers, who are often equally intrigued by the personality of the urban sophisticate who rose to celebrity through his daring erotic verse - only to find himself suddenly exiled to a barbaric place under circumstances shrouded in mystery.
Starting in his own lifetime, attitudes to Ovid the poet have always been colored by attitudes to Ovid the person (see Stroh (1969) 1-2), a somewhat paradoxical situation given that most of our biographical information about the historical figure Ovid is actually extracted from his poetry (compare Holzberg (1997a.) 31-54 and (1997b) and White (2002) 1). The <Ovid> we think we know is really the <I> that speaks to us from the poet's erotic elegies, his Metamorphoses and Fasti, and his exile poems, and the character and identity of this speaker have been the subject of considerable debate. In what follows, I shall trace the history and terms of this debate, as well as suggest an approach not hitherto considered to some of the theoretical issues that recent interpretations of the Ovidian <I> raise. My discussion will focus primarily on Ovid's amatory works and will be centered around two crucial questions and possible answers to them: Who speaks in Ovid's poems? and Who has the say in them? While this second question...