Sulpicia's Nuanced Approach to Erotic Language
I plan to analyze the poetry of Sulpicia and also the poems of Tibullus about Sulpicia. Both Tibullus and Sulpicia were Roman poets in the early first century CE. They were contemporaries of one another and they both engaged primarily in the genre of Roman elegy and epigram. Sulpicia, however, is the only female Roman elegist of which we have any record, which makes her an anomaly in the literary canon. Her few poems were preserved as part of Tibullus’ corpus and were long looked on as poetry written by Tibullus in the persona of a woman. Even when it was attributed to Sulpicia scholars have often seen it as inferior and “feminine.” In the last few decades, as part of a wider application of modern gender theory to all Roman elegy, several scholars have finally started to give Sulpicia her due, but the scholarship devoted to her still lags behind the centuries of work which has been devoted to the other elegists. I hope to add to that growing scholarship by doing a comparative analysis of the poems attributed to Sulpicia herself and the poems written by Tibullus about Sulpicia, in terms of both subject matter and syntactical structure.
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