Sulpicia I

The earlier Sulpicia is the only known woman from Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....

 whose poetry

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

 survives to this day. She is said to have lived in the reign of Augustus

Augustus

Augustus ;23 September 63 BC – 19 August AD 14) is considered the first emperor of the Roman Empire, which he ruled alone from 27 BC until his death in 14 AD.The dates of his rule are contemporary dates; Augustus lived under two calendars, the Roman Republican until 45 BC, and the Julian...

 and have been probably the daughter of Servius Sulpicius Rufus and a niece of Messalla Corvinus

Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus

Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus was a Roman general, author and patron of literature and art.-Family:He was the son of politician Marcus Valerius Messalla Niger Although, some dispute his parentage and claim another descendant of Marcus Valerius Corvus to be his father.Messalla Corvinus is...

, an important patron of literature. Her verses were preserved with those of Tibullus

Tibullus

Albius Tibullus was a Latin poet and writer of elegies.Little is known about his life. His first and second books of poetry are extant; many other texts attributed to Tibullus are of questionable origins. There are only a few references to him in later writers and a short Life of doubtful authority...

 in the third book of elegies, the appendix tibulliana, and were for a long time attributed to him. They consist of six elegiac poems addressed to a lover called Cerinthus. Cerinthus was most likely a pseudonym

Pseudonym

A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

, in the style of the day (e. g. Catullus

Catullus

Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Latin poet of the Republican period. His surviving works are still read widely, and continue to influence poetry and other forms of art.-Biography:...

' Lesbia, Ovid

Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...

's Corinna). Cerinthus has sometimes been thought to refer to the Cornutus addressed by Tibullus in two of his Elegies, probably an aristocratic Caecilius Cornutus. Recent criticism has tended away from attempting to identify Cerinthus with an historical figure in favour of noting the literary implications of the pseudonym.
For a long time many academics regarded Sulpicia as an amateur author, notable for nothing but her gender. This view was challenged by Santirocco in an article published in 1979, and subsequently the literary merit of this collection of poems has been more fully explored.
Some critics have challenged the view that the poems attributed to Sulpicia were authored by a woman; Hubbard suggests the content of the poems is too risqué to have been penned by an aristocratic woman in Rome, while Habinek and Holzberg both suggest that the poems are too sophisticated to have been written by a woman. In an overview of Sulpician criticism, Alison Keith described the logic of Hubbard's article as "tortuous" and also highlights problems in Holzberg and Habinek's attempts to efface female authorship. In contrast, Hallett argues for increasing the numbers of poems attributed to Sulpicia to include poems 13 - 18 from the Corpus Tibullianum, which had previously been attributed to the "amicus Sulpiciae" (boyfriend of Sulpicia).

Sulpicia II

The later Sulpicia lived during the reign of Domitian

Domitian

Domitian was Roman Emperor from 81 to 96. Domitian was the third and last emperor of the Flavian dynasty.Domitian's youth and early career were largely spent in the shadow of his brother Titus, who gained military renown during the First Jewish-Roman War...

 and was apparently married to a man named Calenus. She is praised by Martial

Martial

Marcus Valerius Martialis , was a Latin poet from Hispania best known for his twelve books of Epigrams, published in Rome between AD 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian, Nerva and Trajan...

 (x. 35, 38), who compares her to Sappho

Sappho

Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...

, as a model of wifely devotion and as the writer of poems that teach "girls to please one husband and husbands to please one wife.". Two lines of iambic trimeters attributed to Sulpicia survive in the scholia to Juvenal

Juvenal

The Satires are a collection of satirical poems by the Latin author Juvenal written in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries AD.Juvenal is credited with sixteen known poems divided among five books; all are in the Roman genre of satire, which, at its most basic in the time of the author, comprised a...

:

{si me} cadurc{i} restitutis fasciis

nud{a}m Caleno concubantem proferat

Me -

the linen, the slinging restored -

naked, making love with Calenus.

Exposed.

--John Quinn

The fragment seems to confirm the characterization in Martial: sexually explicit poetry about marital love.

An extant poem of 70 hexameters also bears her name. It is in the form of a dialogue between Sulpicia and the muse

Muse

The Muses in Greek mythology, poetry, and literature, are the goddesses who inspire the creation of literature and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge, related orally for centuries in the ancient culture, that was contained in poetic lyrics and myths...

 Calliope

Calliope

In Greek mythology, Calliope was the muse of epic poetry, daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, and is now best known as Homer's muse, the inspiration for the Odyssey and the Iliad....

, and is a protest against the banishment of the philosophers by the edict of Domitian (AD 94

94

Year 94 was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Calpurnius and Magus...

), which, she complains, is an annulment of Roman

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

 history. At the same time Sulpicia expresses the hope that no harm will befall Calenus. The muse reassures her, and prophesies the downfall of the tyrant.

It is now generally agreed that the poem (the manuscript of which was discovered in the monastery of Bobbio

Bobbio Abbey

Bobbio Abbey is a monastery founded by Irish Saint Columbanus in 614, around which later grew up the town of Bobbio, in the province of Piacenza, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. It is dedicated to Saint Columbanus...

in 1493, but has long been lost) is not by Sulpicia, but is of much later date, probably the 5th century; according to some it is a 15th century production, and not identical with the Bobbio poem.

External links

Poems of Sulpicia I:

• Diotima Text
• Perseus Project Text
• English translation only
  • Poems of Sulpicia I translated, with an Introduction, Notes, and Glossary by Jon Corelis

Poetry attributed to Sulpicia II:

• Diotima Text