In the Tibullan corpus, Sulpicia’s poems are preceded by the poetically unimpressive Panegyric to Messalla (3.7) and the five so-called ‘Amicus’ poems (3.8–12); often called the ‘Garland of Sulpicia’, the ‘Amicus’ poems are sometimes attributed to Tibullus himself and written about, as well as in, the person of Sulpicia. The Sulpicia poems that follow are written as brief love notes in the voice of Sulpicia to a young man named Cerinthus (3.13–18). The opening poem, which calls pointed attention to the act of writing itself, consists of ten lines detailing the joyous emotional state of a young woman who has found a man worthy of her love and does not wish to hide it or entrust it to the ‘sealed tablets’ (3.13.7). The next two poems in the collection pertain to Sulpicia’s birthday: in the first she expresses disappointment at being taken away from the city and from Cerinthus, while in the second she rejoices in the cancellation of the trip.32 In the following poem Sulpicia is angry at Cerinthus’ indiscretions with a prostitute and expresses pride in her own aristocratic parentage; in the next, Sulpicia is ill and seeks to recover with the help of her beloved. In the final poem she apologizes for leaving Cerinthus the night before in an attempt to hide her passion. These six poems are then followed by two short love poems of debated authorship (3.19–20).
There are two schools of thought that differ dramatically on the authorship of the forty lines attributed to Sulpicia. One view – the so-called ‘naive’ or amateurish reading of the poems – was initiated by Otto Gruppe in 1838, a polymath of the German Romantic era.33 Key to this reading is the idea that Sulpicia’s authorship could be demonstrated through various stylistic qualities, in short, that a ‘feminine Latinity’ or ‘ladies’ Latin’ could be detected throughout the poems. Such a hypothesis, one based on the notion that sexual difference can be readily identified in patterns of writing, is highly speculative – not least because we have very few instances of female writing in Latin to compare with these poems.34 Moreover, such a theory often emanates from a distinctly pejorative view of the work; thus, many scholars following Gruppe have emphasized the allegedly artless and unrefined nature of Sulpicia’s poetry, crediting female authorship to the verses precisely because they were felt to be inferior in quality.35
More recently, scholars have started to recast the meaning of female authorship in relation to Sulpicia’s poetry, departing from the previous notion of ‘female Latinity’ by analysing the themes and poetic imagery explored in it rather than its stylistic features. Kristina Milnor, for example, argues that Sulpicia’s poems are not merely written in a woman’s voice, ‘but as a woman poet […] quite distinct from her male counterparts’.36 In one passage, Sulpicia pointedly uses ‘an image of disrobing to describe the act of writing her love poetry’, equating the revelation of the nude female body with the disclosure of her love story.37 The use of the female body is not altogether new for elegiac discourse; as we shall see in Chapter 4, both Ovid and Propertius use their beloved’s appearance and clothing as a stand-in for their poetic programme. In Sulpicia’s poem, however, the meaning of the female body becomes closely linked to female self-expression, to female poetic agency rather than female objectification.38 In similar ways, Sulpicia’s poetry discusses female desire and female sexuality quite explicitly, a forthrightness that has caused some consternation among critics.39
Against these interpretations, a different school of thought proposes that the poems were written not by a young woman named Sulpicia, but rather a male poet ‘consciously imitating the style and emotions one might expect from a teenage girl’.40 The prospective identity of the author on this side of the argument is open to debate.41 One possibility is Tibullus himself, who, being close to Messalla, would have known Sulpicia. Tibullus might thus have adopted Sulpicia’s style and voice in order to celebrate her pending marriage to a man whom he calls Cerinthus.42 In this view, the poems attributed to Sulpicia can be read as Tibullus’ poetic gift to a young girl, ‘a playful epithalamic tribute’.43
Despite continuing debates, most scholars today conclude that Sulpicia herself wrote poems 13–18 and some scholars contend that she also wrote 8–12 (or perhaps a portion of these poems in the so-called ‘Garland’).44 But we want to turn in the final part of this chapter to other examples of the female ego in Latin love poetry, voices explicitly adopted as a kind of narrative cross-dressing.
Writing as a Woman?
As the various sides taken in debates over Sulpicia’s poetry indicate, the intersections of gender and writing are complex; even as we are anxious to identify more fully the extent of women’s writing throughout history – Virginia Woolf’s unforgettable adage ‘anonymous was a woman’ challenging the limits of some of our conventional assumptions – the prospect of the female author raises important questions for any critic. For one, how can we actually identify women’s writing when we encounter it? What, if anything, makes it different or ‘stand out’ from male writing? Seeking to disentangle such questions from the actual physical makeup of an author – that is to say, from the notion that women and men inherently write a certain way because of their biological sex – some feminist critics have argued that women’s writing should be classified by a range of social rather than biological factors, such as whether the writing reflects a position of structural or systemic powerlessness or presents itself as ‘marginal to the symbolic order’.45 Taken to its logical conclusion, such arguments presume that male authors can themselves conceivably write ‘as women’.
Given that, as we discussed in Chapter 1, the love poets often seem to identify as ‘feminine’, what then is gained by their writing ‘as women’ and, even more, their adoption of a specifically female narrating voice? With even greater complexity, Ovid adopts not just the voices of various women, but of various women in the act of writing and, ultimately, Sappho herself. Why? We begin first with an important antecedent to Ovid’s Heroides, Catullus’ self-conscious play with Sappho’s voice in poem 51.
Experiencing Sappho’s Desire?
While little is known about Sappho’s life, her work, which today survives only in fragments, employs not only a distinctive ‘I’ voice, but also a rich range of imagery in its attempts to articulate what seem to be her most intimate desires, desires primarily directed at various female counterparts.46 She was without question the most famous female poet throughout antiquity; while continuing interest in Sappho may have been partially due to the rarity of female poets in the classical world, later audiences clearly considered her poetry some of the finest of the Greek era. Her poetry influenced many later authors, but in poem 51 Catullus goes one step further by explicitly reworking one of Sappho’s most famous poems: poem 31.
Scholars have long been intrigued with Catullus’ ‘strong dash of the feminine’,47 and have raised many questions about the precise choices he makes in this poem, including how we should read the obvious imposition of his own male ego onto Sappho’s unique expressions of female desire. Sappho herself seems to have written predominantly in the genre of epithalamia, or ‘wedding songs’, a genre Catullus also attempts in his own work (poems 61, 62 and 64.323–381). Some scholars accordingly classify Sappho’s original poem as a nuptial hymn intended to serve a more communal and less individual purpose, meaning that while Catullus’ poem embodies ‘a complex meditation on the ambiguities and contradictions of subjective experience’, Sappho’s poem ‘seeks to reintegrate that experience within the bounds of communally accepted forms’.48 Similarly, the differences between the two poems can be said to derive in part from the differences between ‘a lyric designed for oral performance and a lyric of the book’.49
In her poem, Sappho presents a notable fracturing of perspective; the audience is hearing a poem in which Sappho’s ego is watching a man talking with an unnamed woman. Key to Sappho’s scenario is the role of speech, reflecting its connections to oral performance: the man hears both the other woman’s conversation and her laughter, while, in the second part of the poem, Sappho describes the destruction of her own capa
city for speech (her tongue ‘breaks’). Sappho then lists a further series of physical responses provoked by her envy (a fire burns under her skin; her eyes go out of focus; she sweats and shudders), culminating in her sense that she is on the verge of dying. Throughout, Sappho’s ‘symptoms’ are uniquely – and many feel stunningly – conveyed by her unconventional language choice and the density of sensation she communicates.50
Catullus’ subsequent poem consists of four stanzas, three of which correspond closely to Sappho’s poem, although his choices yield certain changes in its overall impact. For one, Catullus explicitly names Lesbia as his object of desire in line 7, a name that not only documents the poem’s place in Catullus’ larger corpus but also alludes back to Sappho herself.51 So, too, while the ‘other man’ remains in many ways peripheral to Sappho’s poem, Catullus focuses his attention on him by placing ille (‘that man’) at the start of his first two lines.52 This emphasis placed on the other male party suggests that Catullus’ relation to other men remains a pivotal frame for the scene, and indeed the public world of male obligation drives Catullus’ final stanza, which has no parallel in Sappho’s work. We shall examine the meanings of the gendered body in love poetry in the next chapter; however, it is significant here that Catullus also describes his physical reactions in ways subtly different from Sappho. While Sappho performs a kind of ‘dismemberment of her own body’, achieving a ‘disintegration’ of self, Catullus’ account suggests ‘at most, only partial disintegration’, as from the outset he insists on perceiving his body as a totality and only then records the reactions of its individual parts.53
It is with the fourth stanza of the poem that Catullus seems to depart most radically from Sappho, as he adds his own coda to the experience through a moralizing address to himself. As T.P. Wiseman points out, this use of self-address (a tactic we have seen elsewhere in weighing the many sides of the Catullan ego) forces the reader to ‘distinguish the persona, Catullus the lover, from Catullus the poet’.54 Moreover, Catullus’ placement of otium (‘leisure’) at the beginning of two consecutive lines in the last stanza – giving it the emphasis he gave ille earlier – reminds us of the weight of that idea throughout Latin love poetry, especially as a counterbalance to conventional Roman pursuits like negotium. In effect, throughout the final stanza, Catullus is able to turn ‘abruptly away from his interior world of poetic images and back toward male public culture.’55
In his Heroides, Ovid pursues a much more in-depth experimentation with female writing, composing a series of letters written in the voices of famous mythological women. While the Heroides offers Ovid an opportunity to probe the narrative voice as it relates to gender more broadly, it ultimately allows him not merely to speak like Sappho but effectively to speak for her.
Ovid’s Heroides
Letters between lovers recur as a trope throughout Roman elegy. Propertius suggests the exchange of letters between his ego and Cynthia in numerous places (e.g. 3.16 and 3.23), and, as he instructs different audiences about the appropriate modes of conduct in love, Ovid also asserts the importance of written communication. In the Ars, in fact, Ovid discusses at length the practice of writing love letters (1.459–468 and 3.469–498); at one point he even warns men and women about the different kinds of errors they might fall victim to in such letters (3.482–483).56 Although Ovid claims in the Ars that the literary letters of the Heroides introduced an entirely new literary form (3.346),57 Propertius actually includes a lengthy poem in Book 4, written as a letter from a woman named Arethusa to her husband Lycotas, who is off campaigning in the east (4.3).58
Ovid’s Heroides consists of twenty-one letters, although the final six actually function as three sets of pairs – Paris and Helen, Leander and Hero, and Acontius and Cydippe – with the male hero in each pair providing his own letter.59 Scholarly evaluation of the Heroides has fluctuated over the centuries, with critics often citing a paramount tension in the work: while the epistolary form suggests a certain spontaneity and emotional intimacy (especially given that in most of the letters the abandoned female writers profess to be experiencing extreme anguish), the letters are themselves highly literary, even ‘artificial’ in tone.60 Moreover, if we judge the letters according to their presumed function – each writer aims to get her errant lover to return – the reader knows only too well from the myths evoked that they are doomed to failure and that they will ultimately be unsuccessful as forms of seduction or persuasion. Much of the richness of the Heroides therefore lies in Ovid’s assumption that the reader is aware of the relevant myths that define each woman.
As a distinct genre of writing, letters have numerous conventions, as does the associated tradition of literary letters.61 Duncan Kennedy has proposed that one way of evaluating the Heroides is thus to assess its actual use of the epistolary format – does Ovid make full use of the letter as a literary form in the Heroides or does the format seem merely a superficial device?62 Kennedy himself points to two key factors that help to evaluate the effectiveness of literary letters: their relation to time and to their own dramatic context. In the former case, it means assessing something like the alleged moment of the production of the letter; in the latter, how the writing of the letter both emerges from the plot and how it contributes to it in turn.63 If, as readers, we are distracted by wondering how a letter will ever be ‘delivered’ to its addressee, given the heroine’s distance from him, or even how it was produced in the first place – how did Ariadne actually find writing material on her deserted island? – then the format might in the end undermine its own impact.64 On the other hand, Kennedy points to the considerable pleasure added to reading Penelope’s letter (Heroides 1) when we realize that Ovid is relying specifically on Homer’s version of her myth in his Odyssey, for Ovid makes Penelope compose a letter to the long-absent Ulysses (Odysseus in Greek) just prior to her reunion with him, at a time when he has already returned home in disguise; even more, Penelope’s letter states that it will be given over to this very ‘stranger’ for delivery to her husband (1.59–62).65
Penelope’s letter clearly acquires much of its meaning from the reader’s ability to ‘insert’ it into the frame of Homer’s earlier epic poem; many scholars have therefore argued that the primary achievement of the Heroides is precisely this engagement with other ancient literary texts, a kind of literary conversation that is often called ‘intertextuality’. ‘Intertextuality’ or literary allusion characteristically functions ‘backwards’: authors write in response to earlier authors. Yet Alessandro Barchiesi points out that in the Heroides, Ovid is also able to employ allusions to future time, allowing a much broader terrain for the reader’s imagination, not to mention opening greater opportunities for irony.66 In the case of Penelope, then, Ovid may look back to Homer’s version of her tale, but he also encourages his readers to balance Penelope’s words against what we know her future entails after the completion of her letter.
Adding to the richness of his project, when Ovid uses his heroines to ‘talk’ to earlier literature, he seems to probe the limits of literary genre itself, including what might happen when certain material crosses into a new genre. Is Medea – a figure most widely known from the Greek playwright Euripides’ version of her myth – still ‘Medea’ when her plight is ‘translated’ from Greek tragedy into elegiac couplet? Or, as Barchiesi succinctly phrases it, what happens when Medea ‘attempt[s] to write [her] own story in terms of a new and different code’?67 Similarly, when Sappho asks at the opening of Heroides 15 whether the reader ‘recognizes’ her writing, she jokingly admits that the lyric mode is more suited to her – coy acknowledgement of the different metre Sappho used in her original poetry (1–6). As we shall see below, Sappho proves to love very differently in elegiac couplet.
With the exception of the men in the paired letters, the internal writers of the Heroides are all pointedly female, meaning each woman serves as her own story’s ego. By taking the pen, it is not merely that female writers enable Ovid to respond to a previ
ous literary tradition, but that their feminine perspective threatens to shift its very axis.68 Barchiesi poignantly elaborates:
The heroines’ struggle for control over their own destinies in the face of adverse or even impossible conditions is dramatic for the very reason that these destinies have already been recorded and written down: the women are in fact writing against the grain of the classical authorities.69
The act of writing, therefore, helps assert and establish female agency, but can we go further still in witnessing the unique subjectivity of each woman through the actual account she gives?
Because of Ovid’s heavy reliance on earlier literary texts, scholars have often puzzled over the apparent discrepancies between the letters in the Heroides and Ovid’s source material. Kennedy, for example, lists a series of claims made by Ovid’s Penelope that run counter to Homer’s poem. But rather than approaching such deviation as a source problem – did Ovid get his Homer wrong? was he perhaps relying on a different version of the myth? – Kennedy encourages us to see such gaps as central to Ovid’s method of characterization. In other words, it is only in ‘deviation from an established source’ that the reader can ‘recognise and penetrate the subjectivity of the “writer’s” viewpoint’.70 In effect, Ovid’s heroines emerge from the changes they make to the previous ‘record’.71
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