Distributed Authorship in the Sulpicia Corpus

This presentation explores the evidence for communal authorship advertised in the Sulpicia cycle, a poetic sequence transmitted in the Appendix Tibulliana as poems 3.8–18. The cycle focuses on the love of an elegiac puella named Sulpicia for her beloved Cerinthus in what appears to be no random sequence but a carefully ordered poetic “garland.” The name Sulpicia stands as the first word in the first poem of the cycle ([Tib.] 3.8.1) and implicitly confers the title of Sulpicia on the sequence as a whole, in a fashion reminiscent of Propertius’ use of his girlfriend’s name Cynthia as the title (inasmuch as the first word) of his first elegiac collection (Prop. 1.1.1). Near the end of the cycle, moreover, Servius’ daughter Sulpicia signs one of the first-person poems with her patrician name and filiation (Serui filia Sulpicia, [Tib.] 3.16.4), thereby apparently claiming the collection (or at least the first-person poems in it) as her own. The recurrence of her beloved Cerinthus’ name from 3.9.11 to 3.17.1, and across poems couched in both the first-person (3.9.11; 3.11.1, 5; 3.14.2; 3.17.1) and the third- (3.10.15), unifies the collection further and may be felt to confirm the first-person authorial voice as that of Sulpicia. But what are we to make of the third-person poet’s commentary on the couple’s relationship in 3.8, 10, and 12; or, indeed, of the alternation between third- and first-person poems at the beginning of the cycle? This paper addresses these questions in relation to the literary culture of ancient Rome and explores the varied contexts of textual production in antiquity that conditioned the distribution of tasks which are nowadays considered authorial, i.e., belonging to a single, unique author.