Discovery

Abstract Chapter 1 surveys the transmission of Sulpicia’s poetry from classical antiquity to the end of the twentieth century. The survival of her poetry depends on a single manuscript of the elegist Tibullus that was unearthed in medieval France and copied in renaissance Italy before vanishing for good. The chapter explores what we can know about this manuscript and then follows the fortunes of the Sulpicia cycle to the identification of the poems’ author as an Augustan-era Roman aristocrat, granddaughter of Cicero’s friend the jurist Ser. Sulpicius Rufus and niece of the emperor Augustus’ general M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus.