Classical World

Until fairly recently, Sulpicia was treated more as a novelty than as a poet.¹ Scholars who regarded her as a female amateur writing verse in imitation of the male poets in her uncle's circle treated her poems as mere expressions of a woman's emotions, rather than as serious literature.

It is therefore not surprising that the study of literary allusion, and indeed of other sophisticated devices in her verse, has been lacking. In fact, it has generally been suggested that this poet makes no literary or mythic allusions in her short poems. Hermann Traenkle, in his commentary on the Appendix Tibulliana, claims that Sulpicia shows little sign of the influence or awareness of other poets;² C. Davies dismisses the elegies as "personal and non-universalised" and "in no way academic."³ And most recently J. R. Bradley has described Sulpicia's elegies as "lacking any display of erudition."⁴ The dismissal of Sulpicia as an author goes even further than this, and N. J. Lowe speaks of it feelingly:

The case could easily be made that Sulpicia, more perhaps even than Sappho, has found her poems condemned by accident of gender to a century and a half of condescension, disregard and wilful misconstruction to accommodate the inelastic sexual politics of elderly male philologists.⁵

Lowe goes on to say that O. Gruppe's image of Sulpicia as an essentially artless, amateur poet is still widely invoked to apologize for stylistic oddities in the poems.⁶

A notable exception to this common dismissal of Sulpicia has been the opinion of D. Roessel, who believes that Sulpicia's choice of Cerinthus as the pseudonym of her beloved is a conscious allusion to the connection of bees and honey with poetry in earlier Greek poets, such as Erinna and Anacreon.⁷ J. F. Gaertner goes too far in this 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.⁸ A more moderate appreciation is that of G. Luck, who at least believes [End Page 11] 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.⁹

What I would like to do in this paper is to offer a corrective to this prevailing view of Sulpicia by identifying and exploring the importance of a specific, multilayered allusion in her work. Sulpicia's only introduction of a god into her poetry is the appearance of Venus in the first of the poems as they are arranged in the Tibullan corpus, [Tib.] 3.13: exorata meis illum Cytherea Camenis / attulit in nostrum deposuitque sinum. / Exsolvit promissa Venus ("begged by my Muses, the Cytherean has brought him and placed him in my lap. Venus has fulfilled her promises," 3-5).¹⁰ The double use of Venus, under two different names (Venus and Cytherea), indicates that Sulpicia has constructed a multilayered literary allusion, which serves to place her love affair in the context of the literary culture that other Roman poets are credited with understanding.

First, we can see in Sulpicia's statements that Cytherea, begged by her muses, deposited Cerinthus in her lap (exorata meis . . . Cytherea Camenis, [Tib.] 3.13.3) and fulfilled her promises to the poet (exsolvit promissa Venus, [Tib.] 3.13.5) the same kind of faith in this goddess that characterized Sappho's relationship with Aphrodite. For when Sappho prays to Aphrodite for help in fragment 1 (, "Splendid-throned, immortal Aphrodite, clever child of Zeus, I pray to you," fr. 1.1-2), she expects positive results and help in her current love affair because she had always experienced them before ( / / , "you, blessed goddess, smiling with your immortal face, asked me from what I was suffering," fr. 1.13-15).

Ovid suggested Sappho as an appropriate predecessor and model for a woman who writes poetry: ergo si remanent ignes tibi pectoris idem, / sola tuum vates Lesbia vincet opus ("Then, if any passion remain in your heart, the...