Sulpicia Digna

Pierre D. Habel
Brown University

Handed down to us in the Fourth Book of the Tibullan corpus are several short poems by Sulpicia, a poet contemporary with Tibullus and associated with him in the circle of Messala.[1] Above and beyond the sheer pleasure in reading which the poems offer, they possess two distinctive and important features for the student of Latin literature and its history. In the first place, they provide an indication of the use made of elegiac couplets by a poet who knew as contemporaries the better known and better preserved Augustan elegists, Tibullus and Propertius. Secondly, Sulpicia's poems are the first extant representatives of the writing of Roman women. I propose now to examine one of her poems, Poem 7 in the Fourth Book of the Tibullan corpus.[2] I will do so with an eye towards appreciating the poem both on its own merits and for its significance in respect to the two particular features of Sulpicia's poems mentioned above.

Like the other poems composed by Sulpicia that have survived to our time, IV.7 is in elegiac couplets and brief. It contains only five couplets and is, in fact, her longest.[3] In contrast, Tibullus' shortest elegy, II.2, is made up of eleven couplets while his longest, II.5, has sixty-two. Similarly, the elegies of Lygdamus, which comprise Book Three of the Tibullan corpus, are on average twenty-four couplets in length.

It is evident, then, that Sulpicia's poems as preserved are very much shorter. The corollary of the brevity of her poems is their departure from the full elegiac style. Her poems all tend towards the terseness of Catullus' epigrammatic poems and employ a style which relies for expression not on long, developed images and metaphors, but on the playing out of a single fine strand of theme and language. Poem IV.7 well exemplifies this style:[4]

Tandem venit amor, qualem texisse pudori
quam nudasse aliqui sit mihi fama magis.
exorata meis illum Cytherea Camenis
attulit in nostrum deposuitque sinum.
exoluit promissa Venus: me gaudia narret,
dicetur si quis non habuisse sua.
non ego signatis quicquam mandare tabellis,
me legat ut nemo quam meus ante, velim,
sed peccasse iuvat, vultus componere famae
taedet: cum digno digna fuisse ferar.

At last has come a love such that my reputation would
shame me more to hide than to disclose to any one.
Won over by my Muse's prayers, Cythera's queen
has brought and placed him in my embrace. What
Venus promised she has fulfilled. Let my joys be
told by all of whom it's said that they have missed
their own. Never would I choose to entrust my
messages to tablets under seal, that none might read
my thoughts before my lover. No, I love my fault,
and loathe to wear a mask for reputation. Let all hear
that we have met, each worthy of the other.[5]

The poem is clearly complete and self-contained within its five couplets. The first opens the poem as if Sulpicia were divinely inspired by the arrival of love. The adverb tandem and the perfect venit in the half of the hexameter before the strong caesura in the third foot produce this impression of spontaneity and immediateness. The second half of the line together wit the pentameter then picks up and qualifies the amor by means of the erotic language of covering and nakedness. Finally, the notion of Sulpicia's reputation, her fama, is reached at the end of the pentameter as it pulls together the sense of the subordinate clause. I translate the clause poorly, "which love is of a kind that by veiling it in modesty my reputation would grow more than by baring it to someone."

But as much as fama magis ties together the couplet,, it also creates an unresolved ambiguity: Her fama can b either her good reputation as a poet, or her bad reputation as a woman immodestly involved in love. By creating this ambiguity Sulpicia brings into focus in this poem one of the foremost preoccupations of Augustan elegy-the relationships between the poet's literary and erotic activities. The theme and subject matter of love elegy is here even if they are treated in the abbreviated style of epigram.

The poem's second couplet works to further intimate at the so-far vague connections between the erotic and the poetic. Venus was, we learn, beseeched and won over through the agency of Sulpicia's Muses: her poetry, in a gender reversal of the usual roles of the avid, poetic male and the bemused but hesitant female, has placed her lover comfortably in her bosom.

The third couplet proves to be the point of decision for Sulpicia in regard to her fama. Again, as in the first couplet, the hexameter falls into two parts (though here it is at the strong caesura in the fourth foot). The first half again constitutes a declaration, which predicates the statement that follows. "Venus," Sulpicia says, "has done what she promised me, now in return let her share my delights with whomever was none of his own." Sulpicia has her dues to pay, and they include the poetic expression of her new-found love to assuage the pain of the loveless.

Thus resolved she proposes in the fourth and fifth couplets to disregard her modesty and to proclaim publicly her gaudia. The fourth couplet is textually problematic, but the best sense is achieved from the readings Postgate prints. It is nonetheless boldly constructed and merits some explanation. The verb of the main clause is, of course, the negated velim at the end of line 8. It governs the infinitive in line 7, on which in the turn the accusative quicquam and dative signatis . . . tabellis depend. Within the participle signatis is the sense of guardedness that introduces the purpose clause. The accusative me, as the object of legat, is a perfectly fine poetic expression of meas litteras or the like. The expression here, however, of more significance. It encompasses Sulpicia's poetic identity and the chaste reputation, which she no longer cares to maintain. Her contempt for that reputation is neatly expressed in another erotic image of the sort familiar from the first couplet. In this instance, though, the image is not simply one of nakedness before intercourse; instead, the image is the post-intercourse necessity of the recomposition of the appearance. Sulpicia, tired of this deception (vultus componere famae taedet), will no longer try to hide her activities.

In accordance with the above, I paraphrase the last two couplets of the poem with the following: "I wouldn't want to write anything down and seal it up so that no one could read me before my lover broke the seal. No, I enjoyed my transgression and I don't like tidying myself up for form's sake: let me e spoken of as proper since I'm with a proper gentleman." This is her closing declaration. It is exultant; her transformation is accomplished. Undaunted by the prospect of a bad fama amongst some for her sexual behavior, Sulpicia knows she can reap from her tabellae the fama of a poet versed in the meter and subject matter of love-elegy, and yet imbued with a distinctive style arguably more elegant and genuine than her better-preserved counterparts.

[1] Cf. Poem IV.8 for a brief mention of Messala.
[2] It is the first poem in the corpus attributed to Sulpicia. In the edition of J. P. Postgate, Carmina Tibulli (Oxford, 1905), the poem is renumbered as the eighth poem of Book Three. I will continue to use the conventional numbering of the poems, though the text that I cite is Postgate's.
[3] It is perhaps possible that in some cases what we possess are actually fragments of larger poems. I will argue that this is not true of IV.7.
[4] In another equally important respect, however, namely meter, the poem seems very much to reflect the influence of Tibullus and the Augustan elegists. First, Sulpicia avoids elision; there is only one in the ten lines and although it occurs in the pentameter of the first couplet, it is of a short vowel and away from the diaeresis. She furthermore ends all but the first line with disyllabic words. Only in the combination of spondee-spondee in the first two metra in the third and fifth pentameters does she fail to maintain Augustan practice.
[5] The translation given is the author's adaptation of that of F. W. Cornish in the revised edition of the Loeb text, Catullus, Tibullus, and Pervigilius Veneris (Harvard, 1962).