ABSTRACT
The poet Sulpicia, however, is the exception with her forty lines of elegy. On these grounds alone Sulpicia's poetry is in a special position and should arouse no small degree of interest. And yet it was 180 years ago that the poetry was "discovered." Before then classicists thought these were early poems by Tibullus, or they were written by another Sulpicia writing under Domitian. Hallett, focused on text and intertextuality, and argued that all the poems, both the "Garland" and the Sulpicia poems, were by Sulpicia. Hallett rejects the division into Sulpicia poems and those of another poet. She cites social circumstances, literary context, intertextuality with the Aeneid, the diverse style of the Catullan corpus, and the many similar themes. One critic has astutely pointed out that the name of Sulpicia's lover, "Cerinthus," sounds like the male version of a conflation of "Corinna" and "Cynthia".
