Sulpicia

 

     Sulpicia’s poems may be read in the original with English translation and notes on the Perseus site at https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0071.  Other translations are available at https://people.uncw.edu/deagona/lit/Sulpicia.pdf (by Lee Pearcy) and https://www.classicscorner.org/translation (by seventeen-year-old Sarah Freeman).

 

 

     When discussing Sulpicia, consideration of her gender is inescapable due to the simple fact that very little survives of women’s writing from the ancient Roman world.  A good many texts which we know once existed have vanished: Cornelia’s letters, Agrippina’s memoirs, Hortensia’s speeches, poems by Catullus’ Clodia, even a later Sulpicia whom Martial praised, all these are lost [1].  It is therefore no wonder that the mere fact of a competent female Latin poet has attracted considerable interest, particularly in recent decades. 

     Her obscurity was long compounded by the fact that her elegies were folded into the Corpus Tibullianum, which includes texts by poets other than Tibullus [2].  The six poems now considered to be Sulpicia’s follow a group of five on the same love relationship called the “Garland of Sulpicia” or the Cerinthus-Sulpicia cycle, the authorship of which is uncertain.  One might write a meaningful study of the interference of non-aesthetic elements into literary evaluation by charting critics’ reactions to the Sulpicia poems once their female authorship had been accepted.  Some critics found the poems weak, with sexist critics using terms with gender associations such as naïve and emotional, while feminist readers found the poems asserting their own feminism.  Those who, consciously or not, think little of female writers are slow to recognize Sulpicia’s debts to earlier elegiac conventions while more sympathetic readers consider her allusions and literary debts substantial and sophisticated.  The present intention is largely descriptive, acknowledging the issue of gender in a context of Roman patriarchy but then proceeding without value assumptions either positive or negative from a woman as writer.

    Most love poetry – one need only think of the blues – deals with difficulties or disappointment in romance.  The first of the poems attributed to Sulpicia (Tibullus 3.13) instead expresses fulfilment.  In the opening phrase “love has finally come” (Tandem venit amor) the relationship seems accomplished and mutually satisfying.  The poet has, it seems, like Sappho, invoked the goddess of love, but here her success seems explicit.  The obstacle is only others, those who might not approve of the couple, the sort of meddlers called “serveriorum” and “malus” in Catullus 5 and “curioso” in Catullus 7, like unsympathetic parents in New Comedy and Romeo and Juliet or the “jealous ones” of Occitanian verse. 

     The tension of individual desire in a context of social conventions is present throughout this verse from the first line’s mention of pudor to her later concern at busybodies reading her love notes and the final declaration that she is glad to sin (pecasse), having found a satisfyingly mutual relationship signified by the closing phrase suggesting both lovers are worthy (“cum digno digna fuisse ferar”).  Poetry and the goddess have contributed to the temporary triumph at least of a personal love which brings an island of joy in a less than ideal world.

     The threats to a love relationship become specific in the second lyric 3.14 (or Sulpicia 2) in which the lover’s uncle insists she spend her birthday on his country estate when she would prefer to be with her beloved in Rome.  While the birthday poem (or γενεθλιακόν) was a recognized genre [3], it is here, rather than a celebration, a lament about the interfering uncle [4]. 

   In this case the poet’s intrusive relative is a prominent Roman, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, a general and author (whose works are lost) and a significant patron of the arts like Maecenas.  He was particularly close with Tibullus and the poet known as Lygdamus, though he knew Horace and Ovid as well.  A powerful man, his authority over Sulpicia is unquestioned.  Yet she resists the excursion, preferring Cerinthus’ company and saying that the country estate Is cold (frigidus) and too rural (agro), unfit for a girl (puella).  The more conventional Latin praise of the rural life evident in, for instance, Martial 10.47 or Horace’s  Epode 2, is altogether lacking;  Sulpicia’s preference is for the city.

     The third poem, a pendant to the second,  indicates that Sulpicia’s wishes prevailed and she is able to observe her birthday with her lover.  The tone is especially intimate as the elegy is cast in the form of a letter to Cerinthus.

     The fourth reveals a different obstacle to love: Cerinthus is spending time with a courtesan.  The ambiguities about propriety in the first poem return here to describe a frivolous infidelity on the part of her beloved.  She pretends it is her family’s concern about reputation rather than her own jealousy that makes her angry.  She suggests that she deserves better as the daughter (filia Servi) of Servius Sulpicius Rufus the distinguished jurist, a student of Cicero when young and consul in maturity.  Invective similar to that used in iambic poems appears here in phrases like “obscure bed” (ignoto toro)  and “whore” (scortum), yet Sulpicia maintains her pose of superior composure, resisting being put into an absurd (inepta) situation.  Her anger nonetheless betrays her passion.

     In the fifth poem Sulpicia is ailing and wonders whether recovery would be worth it, since Cerinthus is behaving in a thoughtless manner.  Thoughts of suicide enter her mind as lovesickness complicates a physical illness.  She appeals to her lover as a petitioner, just as countless courtly love poems address the woman in a similar manner.

     The final poem associated with Sulpicia finds her again complaining of inattention, but blaming herself, suggesting the ruminations occasioned by the anxiety of love.  She regrets having pressed Cerinthus, fearing that she has alienated his affection further in taking a standoffish approach, what the troubadours were to call daunger.

     Considered together, Sulpicia’s poems present the reader with a picture of a love relationship consistent with elegiac conventions which anticipates the love poetry of the High Middle Ages.  While one of her poems seems to celebrate love’s fulfilment, frustration -- with her uncle, her lover, and herself -- is the more common theme.  Far from writing about lust, Sulpicia is primarily concerned with a mutually affectionate relationship, and repeatedly expresses anxiety about her lover’s emotional commitment, only to question her own gambits in trying to retain his devotion.  Some would regard this delicacy, along with the social limitations suggested by her uncle’s authority over her and her lover’s option of a purchased sexual partner, as indicative of her femininity, but such judgements have no effect on evaluation nor do they constitute a protest against ancient Roman patriarchal values. 

     If the judgement of Kirby Flower Smith in calling her an “amateur” whose primary gift is “simplicity” and who “writes from a full heart” is prejudiced, Ezra Pound’s claim that to translate her forty lines would be worth ten years of one’s life is at least hyperbolic [5].  As a woman writer of love elegies, she is neither a naïve imitator of male models nor is she a standard bearer for women’s rights.  The six poems attributed to Sulpicia constitute a satisfying pocket drama, complicated by the tensions between insistent passionate love on the one hand and limitations in one’s society and in one’s partner or oneself on the other. 

 

 

 

 

1.  They are known only because they are mentioned in other people’s writing: see Cicero Brutus 58.211,  Tacitus (Annals 4.53.3) and Pliny (Naturalis historia 7.46) for Agrippina, Valerius Maximus (8.3.3) and Quintilian (De institutione oratorio 1.1.4-8) for Hortensia.  A scholiast quotes two iambic lines of the later Sulpicia (sometimes called the satirist) in a manuscript known only from a citation in a fifteenth century edition of Juvenal.  Martial praises her in 10.35.

 

2.  They had long been known as Tibullus 3.13-3.18, but are today  sometimes identified as Sulpicia 1-6. 

 

3.  Among Latin examples of the genre are Tibullus 1.7, and 2.2, Propertius 3.10, Ovid, Prop. III 10, Ov. Tr. III 13, V 5, Pers. 2, Mart. VII 21, 22, 23, IX 52, 53, and X 24.

 

4.  An uncle is similarly an obstacle to love in Horace Odes 3.12.

 

5.  For Smith, see The Elegies of Albius Tibullus (1913). Pound’s comment is in “Horace,” in The Criterion 9 (1929-1930), reprinted in Arion 9 (1970). 

Those Curious Collective Nouns

 

     The examples here are largely, but not entirely, included in Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks.  Like Lipton, I do not use the Middle English since entertainment rather than philology or literary criticism is my goal. 

 

     We commonly use collective nouns: a bunch of keys, a row of houses, a group of lakes.  The majority of such terms are readily transferable in reference; one might equally speak of a bunch of flowers, a row of beans, or a group of actors.  Some are narrower in usage, including many which have to do with animals: a herd of cattle, a pack of wolves, a pride of lions.   There are herds of various beasts, but all are plant-eating mammals.  Pack may be used of other animals, but is strongly associated with wolves, and pride is used exclusively of lions.  Certain of the collective nouns are similarly specific to a certain species, but in addition seem unusually artful, sometimes a bit precious.  The best-known of this class is probably “a murder of crows,” which seems quaint enough to be suspicious.

     Many of these collective nouns refer to animals, and they strike the reader as self-consciously clever because many were indeed invented as a special fanciful vocabulary in the late Middle Ages.  Familiarity with these neologisms was then an index of how au courant a courtly pretender might prove to be.  Though all words have a sort of poetry, especially for readers who know their etymologies, these terms, mostly to do with hunting, were from the first showpieces, meant to impress and amuse.

     James Lipton’s book An Exaltation of Larks (1968) listed many of this special variety of collective nouns, bringing widespread publicity to a somewhat obscure linguistic phenomenon and demonstrating that the imaginative appeal of these neologisms had survived the centuries.  Though I saw the book everywhere back then, I never read it, taking it for a novelty gift, presenting these overly cutesy terms with quaintly old-fashioned illustrations.  I thereby missed until today reading Lipton’s well-informed introduction which provides a satisfying explanatory background.

     Often applying a new meaning to an existing word (“a prickle of porcupines” or “a skulk of foxes”), these morsels of wit were recorded in “courtesy books,” manuals laying down the rules for genteel behavior and sometimes in specific lists of “terms of venery,” a word rarely used today and easily confuised with its exact homograph which in fact has an altogether different meaning and origin.  One “venery” is derived from Latin venari, “to hunt,” the source as well of the English term venison, which once referred to the flesh of any large animal.  (The other venery, with roots in Venus, the goddess of love is the one Benjamin Franklin had in mind when he advised his [illegitimate] son, “rarely use venery but for health or offspring.”)

     Since the reliefs of royal hunts in Assyria and Egypt, nobles whose business was war had whiled away months of peace by practicing their equestrian and archery skills in hunting.  (Compare the brandishing of firearms by today's neo-fascists.)  Killing beasts is a mark of power as is killing people, but in time the bloody pastime of hunting had acquired an aesthetic dimension.  One was to behave with savoir faire even in butchery.  In Gottfried’s Tristan when King Mark first encounters the hero, he is impressed by two of Tristan’s accomplishments.  He notes that Tristan uses “words polished and well-chosen,” and is besides such a skilled and innovative practitioner in cutting up a deer that the king immediately offers to make him master of the hunt.  Both skills prove him “courtois.”

     Manuals began to appear to teach aristocrats and those who wished to be aristocratic the prized qualities of cultivation, elegance, and sophistication.  Best-known of such volumes was Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528) which defined the ideals of behavior that marked a true nobleman, including skill at loving women, playing music, making witty conversation, dressing well, and a host of other “aesthetic” accomplishments.  Castiglione was far from the first to compose such a self-help guide.  The earliest in England is the Book of the Civilized Man by Daniel of Beccles, also known as the Liber Urbani, which appeared circa 1200.  The “terms of venery,” of which a few, including a special vocabulary for animal droppings, had been printed earlier, for instance in William Twiti’s L'Art de vénerie (1328), gained popularity with The Book of St Albans (ca. 1452).  This volume, which contained essays on hawking and heraldry as well as hunting, included seventy collective nouns.  This book anticipated Emily Post in that it was written by a woman, Dame Juliana Berners.  Later writers copied and expanded her list and in 1595 Gervase Markham republished the St. Albans book with his own comments as The Gentleman's Academie, in 1595, bringing its content a new audience.

     The terms of venery and associated collective nouns illustrate several significant aspects of what might be called linguistic sociology.  They exemplify the employment of words not in common usage to establish a subculture, in this case the feudal ruling class, the nobility.  Just as inner city youth use a distinctive jargon, scholars ornament their monographs with currently fashionable academic jargon, and military people signal their vocation with a special argot, courtiers made lexical choices that testified to their identity as cultivated members of the ruling class.

     Apart from this social function, the terms are witty after the manner of other artful uses of language, such as riddles, jokes, and poetry.  Some suggest similes.  A pod of seals is so named due to the resemblance between a group of animals, especially when slumbering on the beach, and a pod of peas.  A group of whales is a gam, the word used as well for a social encounter of two ships in the open sea.  A “siege of herons” is so named because of the animals’ patient observation of shallow waters watching for prey.

     Many sorts of metonymy are represented.  A “slate of candidates” is current yet today, though few are aware that it was first used because of politicians’ names being displayed on slates in front of town halls. 

     Some are so familiar that they make little impression.  We know a “swarm of bees” “host of angels.”  Mysteries may yet linger about even well-known expressions.  “Bevy” is first recorded in the fifteenth century describing either quails or women, apparently derived from French bevée, perhaps from the birds frequenting ponds and the ladies drinking parties.  A "school of fish” may be a corruption of “shoal” (=shallows) or may have independently arisen from school meaning classroom.   

     Sometimes the word has shifted in sound or become obsolete so that its origin is not evident, as in “a clowder of cats” said to derive from the word cluster.  “A singular of boars” oddly contradicts itself, as the French sanglier is derived from Latin singularis porcus, a lone hog, used for a solitary individual wild boar.  A “kindle of kittens” sounds very cute with its source in the Middle English kindlen, to give birth and “covey of partridges” from the Latin cubare, to lie down, describing nesting habits. 

     The sound of doves strikes many as sounding sad.  This is the source not only of the name “mourning dove” but of the collective “a dule of doves” from the French deuil (lamenting).  Similarly, a “murmuration of starlings” refers to the sound made by the swarming of the birds.  Hair-splitting definitions were sometimes propounded.  While a “committee of vultures” is at rest, a “kettle” of them is in flight, and a “wake” of them is feeding. 

     Among the amusing social terms, describing people rather than animals, are the unimaginative doctrine of doctors and school of clerks and the somewhat more amusing “sentence of judges” and “draught of bottlers.”  Others are more pointedly satirical: a “superfluity of nuns," an “impatience of wives,” and a “disworship of Scots,” not to mention the strong but clumsy “abominable sight of monks.”  One might speak also of “a riffraff of knaves,” “a squat of daubers” (those who repair hedgerows and fences), a “diligence of messengers” (from which the coach called a diligence derives its name), and a “skulk of thieves” (a collective they share with foxes).  Perhaps the funniest, though it is somewhat obscure is an “incredibility of cuckolds.”

     Lipton quotes an exchange from Sir Nigel, a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle set in the fourteenth century that imagines the social context in which these terms of venery were significant.  A certain experienced knight, Sir John, quizzes Nigel on his knowledge of this special vocabulary, telling him that “no man of gentle birth” would fail to know these terms, but that “none can say that they know [them] all.”

      Finally, the modern enjoyment in resurrecting these words indicates a taste for the curious and antiquarian similar to that of over-educated Victorian clergymen, people who do rubbings of old gravestones, even the proprietor who calls his store Ye Olde Something Shoppe. The popularity of Lipton’s book in the ‘sixties suggests that era’s sympathy for unfettered imagination.  And what other motive might there be for you, dear reader, to have spent a few moments with this brief disquisition?  The wits of over half a millennium ago are, it seems, entertaining still. 

Sins Against Love in Horace Odes 3.11

 

 

 

 

A new translation of Horace Odes 3.11:

 

 

 

O Mercury, from whom Amphion learned his skill

to build Thebes’ walls with stones by music moved,

from lyre of tortoise shell let songs sound forth

through strumming well-tuned strings.

 

Once silent and unwanted but now dear

to holy shrines and rich men’s groaning boards –

sing forth your song till Lyde’s stubborn ear

will turn this way and hear

 

who like a mare of three years old will play

and frisk on open plains and take no part

in mating, up to now she boldly thinks

herself too young for love.

 

You lead the tiger and the woods themselves.

swift rivers halt their flow for you,

Cerberus, monstrous Underworld guard,

will yield to your sweet song.

 

Tityos and Ixion brightened then.

The urns of the Danaean girls

stood dry, their watery load had had drained away,

their holders held by verse.

 

May Lyde contemplate the virgins’ crime,

their guilt there marked by all their urns,

whose water drained as fast as it went in.

This was their punishment

 

and thus the guilty after death still pay.

Those sinners (how could they have been more vile?)

who with sharp iron blades did take

the lives of their own mates.

 

Just one of many honored marriage vows,

proved false to her own father’s treachery

and won acclaim, a faithful bride renowned

for ages yet to come.

 

“Get up!” she told her youthful mate,

“Get up or else you’ll sleep a lengthy sleep

you don’t see coming.  Flee my sire

and sisters who mean ill,

 

and who like lions seizing calves – alas! –

one at a time while I, more mild in heart,

will neither wound you nor will I aim

to hold you in durance.

 

My father may confine me with cruel chains

for mercifully having spared my mate

or he may banish me and make my home

remote Numidia.

 

Run off as far as feet and winds can carry you

while night and Venus aid your flight.  Run off

while still you can and see my sorry fate’s

recorded on my tomb."

 

 

 

     Reading certain Horatian odes resembles contemplating a box by Joseph Cornell.  One sees in his Ode 3.11, for example, a meticulously constructed elegant little arrangement of objects or images attractive in itself but elusive in meaning with the context enhancing the connotative tendency of each element.  Part of what lends Horace’s references their rich suggestiveness is the fact that, apart from the mentions of Lyde, apparently a friend of the poet, the ode takes place entirely in the mythic realm.

    The poem is curiously doubled and self-reflexive.  The author seems to have intentionally introduced obscurities and contradictions.  To begin with, the poem has two themes, each accorded roughly equal space.  The first is self-reflective, the enchanting power of song, illustrated by Amphion’s music with which he razed the walls of Thebes, by the social prestige of poetry in religion and symposia, and by mythic references to the power of Orpheus’ playing to charm not only nature but even Cerberus and the sufferers in the underworld.  In a form of sympathetic magic, by claiming supernatural power for poetry the writer thereby predicts the success of this particular verse. 

     The claim of art’s persuasiveness provides a bridge to the second theme, the proper management of erotic energy.  The poet condemns mythic figures that offended against love –Ixion, and Tityos and, most prominently, the Danaean women who killed their spouses, all toward the end of convincing Lyde of the value of marriage and a conventional family life.  Horace provides a little horror show to reinforce poetry’s teaching by indicating the penalties for spurning the natural destiny of maturation in married love.  Stanza five, which would be a digitally animated sequence in a film, presents a luridly threatening Cerberus, a shocker itself, but also a reinforcement of the poet’s admonitions later.  The reader then is introduced to the theme of proper love relations with glimpses of the punishment in Hades of two others who had offended against marriage, Ixion by attempting adultery with the worst of all possible choices, the wife of the king of the gods, and Tityos for having attempted to rape Leto at the behest of that same goddess. 

     This theme is supported as well by the story of the Danaïdes and of Hypermnestra’s saving her husband Lynceus.  There could scarcely be a less dutiful wife than one who murders her mate, and the reference seem overdone for the speaker’s message to the young Lyde.  The poem, though a sort of love advice, is more concerned with propriety than with eros, but even in this simple normative recommendation of marriage, it is hardly straightforward.  To begin with, the name of Lyde, the woman to whom the ode is addressed, has confused some readers.  The name is used for a ἑταίρα by several poets.  It is the name of Antimachos’ mistress and the title of his elegiac poem upon her death.  Athenaeus 13.597 mentions another courtesan of the same name and Horace himself mentions a ἑταίρα of the name in 2.11.  (Another reference in 1.23 is less certainly a courtesan, but there Lyde’s characterization in part resembles that in 3.11.)  Considering that the lesson the poet implores her to hear is to prepare for a respectable marriage and the role of a dutiful wife, this could hardly be a message for a courtesan.  The use of Hypermnestra as his exemplum is problematic in any event, though she was a spouse to Lynceus and with him founded the Danaid line that led to Perseus.  Having been coerced unwillingly  into marriage, she is inappropriate as a model bride, however loyal a wife she proved to be.    

     Horace’s Lyde is said to behave like a young filly playing in a field, active and healthy, while resisting the subjugation to a husband that would come with marriage.  This characterization makes inevitable the picture of her as a teen-aged girl, wholly inexperienced in love and dubious about relationships, perhaps the daughter of a friend.  She sounds very like Daphne in Ovid who (in Golding’s translation) hated “as a haynous crime the bonde of bridely bed,” but instead enjoyed sporting about the wild mountains: “unwedded Phebe doth she haunt and follow as hir guide,” but, of course, her lack of interest in men is there caused by Cupid’s intervention.  Daphne has been struck by his anaphrodisiac iron arrow, while Apollo’s desire has been enflamed by a golden one.

    For all the structural play, irony, and semantic disjunctions, the thematics of the ode persist.  Horace’s boasts about the power of poetry resemble the claims of poets from the revelations of shamans in archaic times to Wallace Stevens “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” but here they are hobbled as it were by the incongruities of the poetic argument.  Lyde is a misleading name and Hypermnestra an ill-fitting example of ideal marriage.  Such slippage renders the poet’s claims faintly ironic, while the hellish horrors seem exaggerated and out of place.  Naive and shy, Lyde is even less likely than the average wife to commit murder as the Danaïdes had done  

     Still at base the ode does represent a social consensus endorsing monogamous marriage as the fundamental building block of society.  Without such stabilizing institutions, violence and force would prevail, suggested by the multiple murders of Aegyptus’ sons  and the apparition of Cerberus.  Attitudes in support of marriage include the notions of respectability and propriety added to the age-old advice govern by an elder generation to the younger one just coming of age, “It is time to grow up now and act like an adult.”  The frightening pictures of the hellish dog and the torments of the condemned are nothing but the superego of a patriarchal system enforcing order through terror.

     These meanings are present in the ode, but they jostle one another uneasily.  Self-questioning, they feature cracks and flaws.  Yet the structure of the whole, the arrangement of symbolic objects from the world of myth, placed precisely to react against one another, is well-balanced so that all the elements of the problem of married love are included: not just the young woman’s reluctance to form a household, but also coercion from parents (Danaus and Aegyptus) and uncontrolled lust (in the figures of Ixion and Tityos).  The entire system of the universe, it is suggested, supports the marriage institution, assuring a sorry fate for those who defy their proper role and destiny.  Horace’s essentially poetic gifts are fully displayed as he renders what amounts to an admonition to behave in a dynamic field of competing demands of the ego: Amphion’s drive for power, Lyde’s desire to cling to childhood, the destructive lust of Ixion and Tityos, the coercive parental demands, the murderous potential of the reluctant wives, and the fidelity of Hypermnestra.  All these passions are on full display, while the reader hears nothing whatever of the joys of either nuptial or illicit love-making.  Who but Horace could build such a dynamic semantic field while simply recommending the most ordinary behavior?