Sulpicia, According to Giovanni Pontano

John T. Quinn (Hope College)

Of the poems found in the last book of the Tibullan collection, the ones that concern Sulpicia attract much contemporary attention. Some see in the “Sulpicia Cycle” of 3.13-18 the only extant literature written by a woman of Latin’s Golden Age. Others variously would include as well parts or all of “Sulpicia’s Garland,” poems 3.8-12. For others still, the disjunction between poet and persona entails that none of the poems in the Tibullan corpus need be the work of a woman named Sulpicia. Rather, Tibullus himself or another man (or men) has created a world out of a Sulpicia of the imagination. As Skoie demonstrates in a book-length study of commentaries on the poems (2002), versions of this last view recall the assumptions of the Renaissance editors who brought the Tibullan collection again to light after it had languished, known as excerpts in only a few medieval florilegia.

Subsumed within a broader understanding of Tibullus, Sulpicia, along with the other figures to be found in the third book, did not make a very large impact until quite recent times. This makes all the more precious the first place in which a postclassical poet engages Sulpicia: the Baiae of Giovanni Pontano (1429-1503). Pontano cultivated a keen scholarly interest in the newly-recovered Tibullus, if, as is likely, Codex G is indeed his own. The Latin poetry which Pontano wrote also makes clear his devotion to Tibullus, both by imitation and by named references to him. What is especially unusual is Pontano’s use of the third book. For example, a Neaera, sharing the pseudonym of the love of Lydgamdus ([Tibullus] 3.1-6), recurs in Baiae. Although a Sulpicia is featured by name in only one of the Baiae, this paper will examine it and related poems to discover how Pontano re-imagined the Sulpicia he knew as Tibullan.