Erasing Cerinthus: Sulpicia and Her Audience

Maria Wyke, Allison Sharrock, and others have recently reminded us that in Latin elegy, loving and writing are often figured as the same activity, as are being loved and being read.¹ The elegists' masculine voices constitute their mistresses and their books simultaneously. In the self-centered world of elegy, problems of love and gender blend into and feed on problems of authorship and genre.² The beloved puella docta becomes an ideal reader. When Propertius imagines his literary fate and posthumous audience, he pictures a very private recitation to an audience of one: me iuvet in gremio doctae legisse puellae, / auribus et puris scripta probasse mea ("Let me enjoy reciting my poems in the lap of a scholarly girl and having her approve them with the pure taste of her ears," Prop. 2.13.11–12).³ The puella becomes the primary audience through which the elegist creates his erotic and literary persona. Other readers include an assortment of individual addressees, human and divine, but the elegist can also imagine an audience wider than the private world of assignation, friendship, and prayer. Propertius imagines a throng of writers following his triumphal example (Prop. 3.1.11–12) and an envious crowd of readers whose detractions will be erased by his posthumous fame (21–22). Ovid imagines an extensive readership of troubled lovers: atque a sollicito multus amante legar (Am.1.15.38). Loving entails writing, and writing entails not only being read, but also being published. The masculine elegist's emotions are not a private phenomenon.

This masculine elegiac ego constructs his hard-hearted, enticing mistress as he writes his poems and shares her and them with a public readership. The puella docta, however, remains his primary audience, and what might be called the wider erotic public, the community of lovers and readers, becomes his secondary audience. What happens to these two audiences when the first person of Latin erotic poetry becomes feminine? The poems of and around Sulpicia, even though most are better called epigrams than elegies, allow us to try to answer. Just as Cynthia is the key to understanding Propertius, our answer will begin with Cerinthus. It will be a different answer than the one given for the masculine elegist who writes Cynthia into his poetry and by doing so, creates his elegiac persona. Sulpicia writes Cerinthus out of her poetry and as she deconstructs him, creates her distinctive revision of the elegiac ego.

In poem 7, Tandem venit amor, Sulpicia works against masculine elegy's convention that the poet's lover is both primary subject and primary reader; instead, she claims amor and fama as her subject.⁴ The character we have been calling "Cerinthus," in fact, does not appear by name in this poem, but only as a demonstrative: illum.⁵ Venus has brought him in response to her poetry (exorata meis illum Cytherea Camenis / attulit, 7.3). Unlike the male elegist's beloved, however, Cerinthus is not the first possible reader of Sulpicia's poetry. She does not, she declares, want to entrust anything to sealed tablets so that no one will read it before her lover. Sulpicia thus denies Cerinthus his place as primary and privileged reader (ne legat id nemo quam meus ante, 7.8).⁶

In a characteristic, hypotactic litotes,⁷ Sulpicia here suggests an inversion of masculine elegy's usual relationship between the beloved as ideal reader and the public audience who are witness to the elegist's experience. If Sulpicia's primary readers are her public audience, then to read Sulpicia's poetry is to take part in experiences that, in the normal world of masculine elegy, should be enjoyed first by the poet's beloved primary reader and only then overheard by a secondary, public audience. If loving and writing are figured as the same activity, as are being loved and being read, then this experience must be understood as in some sense erotic.

Sulpicia's primary audience, then, consists of a public defined by shared erotic experience. In the second couplet of Tandem venit amor, Sulpicia tells how she had sought her love from...