Classical World

The elegies of Sulpicia have long been held to constitute an enigma in Roman literary history and the author herself an anomalous figure: the feminists' Sulpicia, a female author in a masculine literary culture;² the philologists' Sulpicia, a young lady in a literary establishment dominated by mature men of letters;³ the historians' Sulpicia, an apolitical author in the highly politicized aftermath of the civil wars.⁴ The only feature that she seems to share with her older and more famous Augustan contemporaries—the elegists Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, as well as Vergil, Horace, Maecenas, Livy, and Asinius Pollio—is her elite social status, as the daughter of the orator Servius Sulpicius Rufus (son of Cicero's friend, the jurist of the same name)⁵ and the niece of the senior statesman, orator, and literary patron M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus. Then again, perhaps even in this respect she may be supposed to constitute an anomalous figure, at any rate in the eyes of an earlier generation of literary critics who rated the Augustan poets as far superior to her in poetry as they were beneath her on the social scale. A more recent critical trend, however, has drawn attention to conventional features of Sulpicia's verse in order to assimilate her to elegiac poet-lovers and/or beloveds. It is this line of inquiry I wish to interrogate here, by reviewing what I shall characterize as two diametrically opposed types of "assimilationist" readings of her poetry that have emerged in late twentieth-century scholarship on Sulpicia.

Matthew Santirocco, in his 1979 article "Sulpicia Reconsidered," inaugurated a new saeculum in Sulpician studies by eschewing biographical speculation for careful examination of the "technique and traditional features" of Sulpicia's poetry.⁶ Documenting in detail her [End Page 3] debt to the literary traditions of erotic elegy and elegiac epigram, he concludes that she drew "her themes, certain technical features, and several conventions from elegy, her form and much of her style . . . [from] another related tradition, elegiac epigram."⁷ In particular, Santirocco identified an important debt to Catullus' poetry in Sulpicia's small corpus. For N. J. Lowe, too, writing a decade later, Sulpicia's poetry is primarily Catullan in expression and form,⁸ though he also suggests that "we might see the Sulpician elegidia as attempting on the epigram scale what Tibullus explored more diffusely in his longer elegies."⁹ In exploring the generic affiliations of her poetry, both critics emphasized the formal artistry of the work and sought to contextualize the poet and her literary production in the same literary milieu that fostered the elegiac poetry of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid.

Feminist critics have pursued the implications of these readings tenaciously. Judith Hallett's well-known paper on "Women as Same and Other in Classical Roman Elite"¹⁰ develops and complicates these findings to argue that Sulpicia represents herself not only as "Same" in her adoption of the elegiac conventions employed by her contemporaries in their poetic self-representations (e.g., as the victim of a blocking figure who conventionally separates poet-lover from beloved), but also, paradoxically, as "Other" in her self-differentiation from her fellow elegists (e.g., in her similarity to their mistresses). Thus, Hallett's Sulpicia works within the conventions of elegiac poetry but radically revalues them through her inversion of the genre's gender roles. Similarly Maria Wyke and Barbara L. Flaschenriem have explored the ways in which Sulpicia's "literary persona combines features which serve, in the texts of her fellow elegists, to distinguish or individuate the male and female protagonists, or which receive special emphasis in the case of one sex."¹¹ Moreover, Emily A. Hemelrijk implicitly extends Hallett's conclusions about Sulpicia in her 1999 study of educated women from Cornelia to Julia Domna.¹² Accepting the scholarly consensus that places Sulpicia's poetry in the tradition of "Roman 'subjective' love poetry," she explores the complications and contradictions...