VULTUS COMPONERE FAMAE TAEDET: Sulpicia’s self-definition

Jessica A. Westerhold (University of Toronto)

Among the male Augustan elegists, we have extant six short poems by a female author, Sulpicia. Recent scholarship has shown that her poems incorporate many of the themes common to the genre in this period. In an important article, Maria Wyke (1995.114) notes, however, that “For a female ego, much of what the other elegiac narrators say on the subject of warfare, politics, patronage, the rejection of public life, and the preference for elegy over epic, is unavailable for enunciation.” As a woman, the public duties required of men, against which the male ego defines himself, do not constitute the ‘normal’ duties of a Roman woman. Sulpicia is therefore unable to participate in the elegiac discourse of the recusatio in the same manner as her male counterparts. Through a close analysis of the themes and language of her small corpus, I will explore how Sulpicia responds by defining herself against what is traditionally feminine—pudor and fama—thereby forging a uniquely feminine recusatio.

Wyke lists several commonalities between Sulpicia and her male counterparts (cf. Flaschenreim, 1999 and Milnor, 2002). Among these shared features, her narrator is subjective and focused on her experiences of the affair. Sulpicia, however, defines herself as a puella (3.17.1), making her both subject (ego) and object (puella) in the elegiac tradition. Sulpicia’s dual status not only inverts social norms for Roman women, but distorts common elegiac motifs. This is most notable in 3.14, where the impending absence of the puella is the source of pain and anxiety for the narrating ego (sine Cerintho tristis agendus erit, 3.14.2; cf. Prop. 2.33a). Here, the puella is also the ego, and her absence is forced upon her by her uncle and guardian, Messalla.

Alison Keith (1997) has identified Vergil’s Dido as a literary paradigm for Sulpicia’s female lover. According to Keith, Sulpicia would have had an opportunity to hear parts of the epic read before its publication in 17 BCE. Most significant to this discussion are Keith’s comments on the role of pudor and fama in Book IV of the Aeneid. Her love for Aeneas drives Dido to break her oath to pudor and jeopardize her fama (p. 298). In Vergil’s Augustan epic context, such actions mark her as transgressive. Dido’s intersectional role as ‘other’, both as Carthaginian and ‘political’ woman, further define her as deviant. The female ego in Sulpicia embraces this deviant role, considering it more shameful (pudori…magis, 3.14.1-2) to conceal (texisse) her love than to reveal it (nudasse).

In the birthday poem (3.14), the motif of militia/epic, is replaced by Sulpicia with the expectations and demands traditionally made on Roman women. If military duty and a political life are defined as normative for the (elite) Roman male, then a concern for pudor, fama, and obligations to the family are defined as normative for the (elite) Roman woman. Neglect of these virtues was destructive, as we see in the epic heroine, Dido. But if we follow Wyke (1995.115), who argues that male-authored elegy plays with gendered roles, an aspect which makes elegy “readily available for appropriation and transformation by a woman writer,” we may see that Sulpicia, taking a cue from her male predecessors, is defining herself as narrating ego against the codes and conventions of upper-class Roman feminine behavior. If she is assuming the role of female lover in the form of Dido, her subversion of the epic Augustan message is both textually sophisticated and generically appropriate to elegy.