ABSTRACT
Women writing poetry or prose have left very few traces in Roman literary history: only a small number of names have been transmitted, and very little of their work has reached us. The virtual absence of women from literary history was taken for granted in the past, so much so that even the poems that have come down to us under the name of Sulpicia were ascribed by some to a male pseudonymous author; others judged them amateurish.1 Both judgements imply that literature was regarded as a purely male field from which women were excluded. Recent feminist scholarship of the seventies and eighties has attempted to redress the balance and to restore the ‘lost voices’ of women to literary tradition. This went hand in hand with a, sometimes implicit, assumption that women had a distinct literary ‘voice’ and tradition which was marginalized or suppressed by a dominant male literary tradition. Though this approach went too far in looking for a ‘lost tradition’ of female writers and, as a consequence, has gone out of fashion in the nineties, it has the merit of questioning the lack of importance of female writers and of posing the problem of their virtual absence from literary history.2
