ABSTRACT
The first poem of Sulpicia's short collection is programmatic. It announces her theme and makes clear the distance she takes from the male elegists. The daughter of a noted jurist who died early and left his daughter in the charge of her mother's brother, Messalla Corvinus, Sulpicia was not only a woman of aristocratic background and upbringing, she was also privy to the most recent artistic and literary trends. As a young woman in the twenties Bce, she would have heard both Tibullus's poetry recited at her uncle's salons and that of the young Ovid. In such an environment, it is inconceivable that she would not have known the poetry of Catullus and Propertius or that when she sat down to write her own verse she would have done so in a naïve or artless manner. Rather as Santirocco, Lowe, and Tschiedel have shown, by far the most economical assumption is to presume that when Sulpicia deviates from the elegiac norm, she does so consciously and deliberately [14, 45–46]. Thus, where it was once fashionable dismiss her poetry as “feminine” – meaning untutored, unsophisticated, and ungrammatical – it is now possible to view it as a woman's poetry – meaning written from a fundamentally different position from that of Tibullus, Propertius, or Ovid.
