Oxford University Press 2026, paperback £17.99. Pp. 198. ISBN 978-0-19-760697-1
Sulpicia is doing very well for a woman who may never even have existed: K.’s new book is the second book about her from Oxford University Press this year alone and interest in her is booming alongside the rising interest in hitherto neglected female composers and artists. Other writers in the ‘Women in Antiquity’ series have had plenty of material to go on: the evidence for the author of these poems, however, is scanty in the extreme and K. is left no choice but to spend a lot of time discussing the men of the period as the main sources of evidence for her social and historical milieu.
She starts with a short chapter on how these poems came to public knowledge, buried in the manuscript of the 3rd book of Tibullus’ Elegies: she then sketches the family history and its foibles from early Republican Rome to the age of Cicero. Sulpicia’s male family-members enjoyed great success and influence and K. is good on the hard-nosed politics of the period: it is a pity that in concentrating on this she missed out the famous letter which Servius Sulpicius wrote to Cicero (Ad Fam. 4.5) to console him for the death of his daughter Tullia. This is one of the great letters from antiquity, and Servius’ astonishing exploration of grief, philosophy and paternal emotion could well have added welcome nuance to this section of the book. Chapter three similarly traces Sulpicia’s maternal ancestry—and provides useful family stemmata for both paternal and maternal lines. The upshot of all this is that our poet was lucky in her family line on both sides, so that when Augustus came to power her family had chosen sides wisely and were well placed to benefit from the new regime.
Chapter four conjectures what Sulpicia’s upbringing must have been like. K. runs through the typical girlhood of a typical elite girl in the period, with lively details of toys, dolls, engagement and marriage. It is at this point (p.59) that we also begin to engage with the texts and K. explains how Sulpicia addresses her lover with a Greek name just as her male counterparts did with their own pseudonymous mistresses—although K. assumes that Cerinthus is a pseudonymn for Cornutus—whom she went on to marry—unlike the free spirits who inspire male elegists without benefit of clergy. Marriage was ‘the ineluctable destiny of the upper class Roman girlchild’ (p.61) and K. subscribes to Treggiari’s reading of these poems as ‘the preliminaries to a marriage’ (p.62).
The second major section of the book turns to the poems themselves and K. first examines their sources (‘Pretexts’). Her uncle Messalla wrote a great deal as well as being a patron of other writers—and Horace (Sat. 1.10.86) mentions a certain Servius among what Gowers nicely calls his ‘claque of back-scratchers’, although the identification of this Servius with Sulpicia’s father is not certain. Greek women poets were comparatively plentiful and celebrated: Sappho obviously, but also poets such as Corinna and Erinna whose work is now largely lost but was read in antiquity. When we get to the late Roman republic we read Sallust (Cat. 25) recording that Sempronia’s talents extended to the writing of verses and we also hear of the letter-writing of the virtuous Cornelia. Above all there was a Cornificia who wrote ‘famous epigrams’ and died in 41BC.
Chapter six turns to a detailed reading of Sulpicia’s poetry, and K. helpfully provides a full text and facing translation of the relevant poems in an Appendix. K. rightly examines above all the programmatic and problematic poem 3.13 which she reads as asserting ‘the double valence of sexual and poetic license’ as the poet bares her sins to the world in a blaze of poetic intertextual defiance of the claims of pudor, but she also gives full and elegant attention to the other poems with their quirky takes on elegiac norms and on generic stereotypes such as the birthday-poem. These poems are endlessly fascinating, and their degree of lexical and stylistic sophistication is well brought out by K. in some wonderful pages of incisive analysis. She discusses the derivation of Cerinthus’ name (pp.98-100) and Sulpicia’s use of mythology (Venus and Adonis most obviously), metaphor (such as her gynocentric take on servitium amoris) and intertextual allusions. She might have made much more of the links with Horace—who wrote some of the most affecting love-poetry of the era and who published his Odes just when K. tells us Sulpicia was producing her own poetry. Lucretius also could have received more attention at many levels: Cerinthus in 3.13 falls into Sulpicia’s lap like Mars into that of Venus at Lucretius 1.33-4 for one thing, and Sulpicia’s use of the word gaudia for sexual delight looks back to Lucr. 4.1106. Lucretius’ condemnation of elegiac passion—combined with a naturalistic account of the sex-drive—is also of massive significance in the creation of the sexual world-view behind these poems.
The first half of this book is largely devoted to the task of joining the historical dots to postulate Sulpicia’s place in history. This lady would not have attracted attention, however, if she had not been a poet, and in the second half of the book K. has the chance to gauge her poetic identity. Poetry put into the mouth of women (but written by men) is not so unusual—think of Ariadne’s lament in Catullus (64.132-201: see also the girls’ chorus in poem 62), Ovid’s Heroides (discussed pp. 126-30), Horace’s Odes (3.9 for instance). Propertius’ fourth book of Elegies contains a wonderfully Sulpician passage (4.7.15-20) in which Cynthia reminds the poet of their very public fornication. The scripta puella thus often becomes a puella scribens, but these are admittedly women being written by men: Sulpicia—K. argues—was a woman writing in propria persona. The ultimate question for the reader is whether this matters: Sulpicia’s poems could have been written by a male poet focalising female passion and hinting at this with his 3rd-person poems (3.8, 3.10, 3.12) which act as ‘commentary’ on the 1st-person poems. If so, and if the whole thing was an exercise in creative imagination, would that undermine the poetry? This issue is taken up further in the final ‘Postscript’ in which K. opens up the debate further to suggest that scholars who argue that Sulpicia was a male poet in literary drag are part of ‘a persistent tendency among scholars… to downplay the evidence for, and dismiss the value of, female artistic creation’ (p.136). These poems discuss and express female desire and longing: and they articulate that longing within the patriarchal context in which all Roman poetry of the period was composed. Does the gender-status of the poet matter so long as the issues are aired in such compelling terms? It is of course a historical fact that some women (such as Cornificia) were renowned for composing poetry, and we all want to catch a glimpse of the (wo)man wielding the stylus: but these texts do not need the underpinning of speculative historical investigation to show their worth as literature.
Chapter 7 (‘Rescripts’) speculates on how these texts were read after publication. Roman poets certainly read each other’s work and Sulpicia shows abundant knowledge of the literary scene past and present, but references to her own work in poetry of her own and later times is scant except for Ovid and a possible reference in Martial. All Latin and Greek is translated into English, but the reader is assumed to be familiar with the language of Latin grammar and syntax: see for example p.95 where Sulpicia’s language and prosody is analysed in terms unfamiliar (one assumes) to the Latinless. The final chapter is a useful postscript in which K. summarises (pp.132-3) what the book has argued and then sighs that her summary amounts to ‘a dishearteningly thin account not only of a historical Roman woman’s life but also of her literary career’. K. is too modest: her book makes the reader think hard about the status of women and above all about the many ways in which elegiac poetry can offer them a voice which demands to be heard.
John Godwin