corpus, has increased greatly, especially when we consider that Sulpicia’s body of work comprises fewer than fifty lines.1 Most of
the work on Sulpicia has concentrated on her poems as personal expressions of Sulpicia’s feelings for Cerinthus, although recently
N. Holzberg has raised again the question of Sulpicia’s very existence. While Holzberg’s theory—that “the liber tertius of the Corpus
Tibullianum is supposed to make its readers believe that they are looking at Tibullus’ early work” (1999, 178) and that all the poems
of this book were written by one (male) author—is interesting and has its merits, it does not yet seem necessary that “the only Roman
poetess that the handbooks of ancient literature have been able to cite as the author of a complete extant text must be banished to the
realm of fiction” (1999, 188–189). For the purposes of the current study, I will continue to refer to Sulpicia as a distinct, probably female author, especially since the female persona is clearly intended by the author of the poems.
Generally, this persona has been accepted by scholars, and the poems have been treated as expressions of a girl’s emotions, rather
than as literature. So allusions to literary figures and tropes in the six short elegies of Sulpicia have been largely ignored in scholarly
discussion of the poems. Indeed, it has generally been suggested that this poet makes no literary or mythic allusions in her short
poems. H. Traenkle 1990, in his commentary on the Appendix Tibulliana, claims that Sulpicia shows little sign of the influence or awareness of other poets; M. S. Santirocco (1999, 237) calls her poems “unallusive, short, without mythological adornment,” while C. Davies (1973, 26) dismisses the elegies as “personal and nonuniversalised” and “in no way academic.” Most recently J. R. Bradley (1995, online) has described Sulpicia’s elegies as “lacking any display of erudition.” G. Luck (1982, 116) at least believes that “she must have read some of the authors prescribed by Ovid, and she handles language and metre well” but never ventures to identify any literary allusion in the poems. Even Sarah Pomeroy, a noted feminist Classicist, has declared that Sulpicia “is not a brilliant artist:
her poems are of interest only because the author is female.”
Fortunately for Sulpicia’s reputation, this treatment of her began to change in the 1990s, partly because of the influence of feminism on the study of ancient literature. She is treated very differently by D. Roessel 1990, for example, who believes that her choice of Cerinthus as the pseudonym of her beloved is a conscious allusion to the connections of bees and honey with poetry in earlier Greek poets such as Erinna and Anacreon. A. Keith 1997, also, gives Sulpicia some credit for literary skills and knowledge, and Keith’s is one of the most balanced and sensible interpretations of Sulpicia to date, giving the poet credit for both originality and literary sophistication. J. F. Gaertner 1999 goes too far in the opposite
direction, presenting numerous parallels and antecedents for every phrase in [Tib.] 3.13, and thus seeming to indicate that Sulpicia’s
work is simply a pastiche constructed from what she has read.
In general, though, Sulpicia is dismissed as unskilled in such literary arts as allusion, and the term “amateurish” that Gaertner uses of
her in his title sums up the received critical opinion of the poet. This appraisal of Sulpicia’s poetry, as unallusive, lacking in technical skill and literary artistry, and generally amateurish is the sort of appraisal that would commonly be given to the poetry of a young dilettante, writing solely for his or her own pleasure, with no thought of publication. With no intention of publication, the poet has no need to work at making the poetry in any way “literary”: the
emotion is enough, and skill and artistry are unnecessary. This seems to have been the accepted view of Sulpicia and her work for many years. It was assumed that her few short poems survived simply because she was the niece of Messalla, a prominent and important literary patron, and her efforts were for this reason included, with some other poems by members of Messalla’s coterie, at the end of
the collected works of Tibullus.
We have no reason to assume that Sulpicia did not write for some kind of broadcast or publication, however. Why would she, alone of all the Roman poets whose works have survived, have written solely for her own amusement?3 If, as we know, Sulpicia was part of, or at least attached to, the discriminating literary coterie of Messalla, and if she intended her work to be read by members of this circle and the wider public, why would she not avail herself of all the literary technique and sophistication possible? It can be argued that, in fact, she does.