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).