Intertexts

Abstract The chapter explores Sulpicia’s literary achievement by reference to her intertexts with the Latin elegists Catullus, Gallus, Propertius, and Tibullus, and the classical Greek female poetic tradition from Sappho to Anyte. Sulpicia puts into play the characters (the beloved, the rival, the blocking figure of her uncle), themes (the amatory hunt, birthdays, erotic trysts, and illness), and poetics (fame and urbanity at any cost) familiar from the elegiac collections of her male contemporaries. There are few models in male-authored Latin amatory poetry for women’s statement of erotic passion or poetic principle, however, and so the chapter also traces the inspiration of Sulpicia’s gynocentric themes and gynocritical poetics back through the Greek tradition of female-authored verse. Sulpicia’s critical intervention into the discourse of Latin elegy and classical epigram consistently troubles the gendered codes of these popular genres and disrupts social hierarchies (of male over female, freeborn over enslaved, and Roman over foreigner) long normalized in republican Rome.