Sulpicia Americana: A Reading of Sulpicia in the Commentary by K. F. Smith (1913)1

How to read the women of Roman elegy has been the subject of much debate during the last 30 years. ² In particular, what happens when a feminine voice enters this "distinctively male genre"? Would she perhaps answer like Dorothy Parker's Lesbia who refuses to be "but a tune" on the poet's "pipe" and confesses that she "always hated birds"?

It's just the same--quarrel or a kiss
Is but a tune to play on his pipe.
He's always hymning that or wailing this;
Myself, I much prefer the business type.

That thing he wrote, the time the sparrow died--
(Oh, most unpleasant--gloomy, tedious words!)
I called it sweet, and made believe I cried;
The stupid fool! I've always hated birds . . . ³

How to deal with the intrusion of a female voice into Roman love poetry lies at the core of the reception of Sulpicia's poems. The Sulpician corpus consists of six short love poems of, in total, forty lines addressed to or about a male beloved. The combination of a female lover and a male beloved has a potentially disturbing effect on the structure of Roman elegy. One answer to this potential disturbance, however, is to exclude the Sulpician poems from the elegiac corpus, as the American scholar Kirby Flower Smith does in his commentary, The Elegies of Albius Tibullus: The Corpus Tibullianum Edited with Introduction and Notes on Books I, II and IV, 2-14, published in 1913. He reads the poems by Sulpicia not as poetry but as the record of a genuine love story from antiquity, and creates a "Sulpicia Americana" to meet contemporary American philological, psychological, and moral requirements.

The poems 3.13-18 (4.7-12) that you find at "the back" of Tibullus, in the so-called Appendix Tibulliana, are written from the first person perspective of Sulpicia Servii filia and are nowadays normally attributed to an Augustan Sulpicia. ⁴ That has not always been the case, and is still the subject of heated discussion. ⁵ Most recently, Niklas Holzberg (1999) has argued that the entire Appendix is a product of the Tiberian or post-Tiberian period. Besides being the subject of debates on authorship throughout the history of their reception, the Sulpician poems have also produced highly varying interpretations and judgements and still seem to challenge the modern reader and critic. Seemingly idiosyncratic attitudes to and conceptions of the elegiac genre, ⁶ together with the expression of a female voice and female sexuality, make the Sulpician poems very interesting as a case study for an investigation of classical scholarship. As early as Jerome, a commentator's task has been described as an interpretative act. ⁷ A basic premiss of this study is therefore that the knowledge communicated in commentaries is never disinterested, but instead it is implicated in the different structures of power, as has been very well demonstrated in relation to classical pedagogy in general. ⁸ Since they are so full of controversial issues, the scholarly reception of Sulpicia's poems puts philology's hermeneutic nature vividly on display. In other words, their reception demonstrates how interpretative commentaries can be, and how they are coloured by the cultural horizons of different interpretative communities and by their intellectual contexts. ⁹ Such colourings, captured in scholarly works, in turn influence how we think about Sulpicia.

This article seeks to explore a specific moment in the history of the reception of Sulpicia: the commentary by K. F. Smith. This scholarly commentary will be read as text: that is, as material for interpretation and analysis. Like Stanley Fish (1980), who, in his "Interpreting the Variorum," explores the theoretical assumptions behind a commentator's commentaries, I shall investigate the interpretative strategies and rhetoric employed in Smith's treatment of the Sulpician corpus and focus mainly on two aspects of them: how he treats a female elegiac voice...