From lockyert@mweb.co.za Sun Aug 13 04:46:12 2000 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id EAA107188 for ; Sun, 13 Aug 2000 04:46:11 -0700 Received: from cpt-proxy1.mweb.co.za (cpt-proxy1.mweb.co.za [196.2.48.247]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id EAA00664 for ; Sun, 13 Aug 2000 04:46:07 -0700 Received: from default ([196.31.122.176]) by cpt-proxy1.mweb.co.za (Sun Internet Mail Server sims.3.5.2000.03.23.18.03.p10) with SMTP id <0FZ8004QCBCMQG@cpt-proxy1.mweb.co.za> for classics@u.washington.edu; Sun, 13 Aug 2000 13:46:01 +0200 (GMT-2) Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 00:44:07 +0200 From: Terrence Lockyer Subject: Re: Bohn - Sulpicia (LONG) To: Classics List Reply-to: Terrence Lockyer Message-id: <000401c0051b$ee3e73a0$b07a1fc4@default> MIME-version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2014.211 Content-type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2014.211 References: X-Priority: 3 Thanks to James Butrica for his useful posts on the Sulpiciae and the SC. He wrote: : >Wasn't there a famous archaeological fake : >that was supposed to prove the existence : >of a particular verb form in early Latin? : : Would this be the Praeneste fibula, inscribed "manios : med fhe fhaked numasioi" and supposedly proving the : existence of a reduplicated perfect fefeci? That's the one. I vaguely remembered a fibula and reduplication in the Latin perfect, but have learned not to trust my memory. Now I hope I was right about its being a forgery! : Kroll's survey of scholarship in PW indicates that : others too have argued for a Domitianic date and : presumably accepted Sulpicia's authorship. The OCD2 (1970), with its description of the SC as 'questionably ascribed to [Sulpicia]', is evidently more nearly representative of the history of the problem than OCD3 (1996), which gives no indication that anyone has ever seriously defended its authenticity in either date or authorship. Would that we could all have an RE on our personal shelves. By the way, what is the general opinion on the coincidence of name between the two Sulpiciae? Obviously Sulpicius (and therefore presumably Sulpicia) was a fairly common name, but has anyone ever inquired as to why the two female Roman erotic poets share the same name? Do we know anything of Calenus? Apart from Martial and the Sulpician fragment, I can locate only two references to Caleni: Q. Fufius Calenus (son of another Quintus) was consul in 47 BCE, and Tacitus (Hist. 3.35) mentions a Julius Calenus, who was a supporter of Vitellius. : >Coffey (Roman Satire, p. 253, n. 188) mentions an : >edition and discussion by H. Fuchs in Discordia : >Concors, Festschrift fuer Edgar Bonjour (Basle : >and Stuttgart 1968) 32-47. Fuchs apparently argues : >for the Historia Augusta as a source for the Sulpiciae : >conquestio. If accepted, this argument would, : >of course, exclude Sulpician authorship. : : Another book not in our library! But the HA is, and it : mentions Domitian some 11 times by name; later this : morning I'll check the references and see whether they : provide anything that looks as if it was used in the : Conquestio -- but doesn't the HA seem an odd source : to use for Domitian, as opposed to Suetonius, for : example? There doesn't seem to be a copy of Discordia concors *anywhere* in this country. Whatever Fuchs says, though, *I* must apologize for a really abominable case of careless expression. What Coffey actually says is that 'Fuchs ... regards SHA as a likely influence'. 'Influence' can, of course, mean much more than 'source', and much less. Coffey says no more, so I have no idea as to what the substance or extent of this 'influence' is supposed to be, but that 'likely' looks suspicious. : The Conquestio strikes me as substantial only in : being 70 lines long; the tone is light, and in fact it : seems to be a one-off: It was the length I was referring to. I doubt that a light tone would prevent its mention by a writer of epigrams. His own purposes, however, certainly might. : Martial, as you seem to imply, was certainly under : no obligation to mention everything that Sulpicia ever : wrote, Of course. Nor need it be supposed that Martial knew every work of every contemporary: if, as is usually assumed, his mention of Sulpicia in 10.38 follows her recent death, it is perfectly possible that he was not aware of a particular poem by her, especially if it was written shortly before her death. I am indulging in speculation in this direction only because I wonder if any of those who have defended a Domitianic date have sought to explain supposed stylistic infelicities by arguing that the poem may have been left incompletely revised? This argument has certainly been used in scholarship on Valerius Flaccus to account for one or two apparent textual oddities. : Do the contexts in which Martial mentions Sulpicia : suggest that her sexy poetry is the very reason that : she's being mentioned? Definitely. Martial 10.35 introduces Sulpicia as a poet whose work would be instructive to either a woman or a man who wanted to satisfy a partner (in a monogamous relationship). The subjects he says Sulpicia did not deal with suggest that she did not write of extreme passion or illicit relationships: Medea (who was sufficiently infatuated with Iason to betray her father and [in some versions] murder her [sometimes infant] brother), Thyestes (who had an affair with his brother's wife), Scylla (presumably the one who was so besotted with Minos as to bring about the fall of her father's kingdom) and Byblis (who loved her own brother). Martial suggests that Sulpicia's work was erotic, but within the framework of a relationship acceptable to traditional morality (unlike Catullus, Ovid and others with their married lovers). Sulpicia is praised above Sappho in a passage containing the image of someone seeing them together (cf. Sappho fr. 31; Martial's specific reference is to Phaon, the supposed male lover of Sappho addressed in Ovid [?], Heroides 15). The epigram ends by mentioning Sulpicia's fidelity to her husband Calenus. Martial 10.38 addresses Calenus and refers to his fifteen years of marriage to Sulpicia. The usual interpretation is that she has recently died. The poem does not explicitly mention her poetry, but refers to the couple's mutually enthusiastic lovemaking and Calenus's apparent absorption in his wife. The two epigrams, incidentally, create a nice balance, the first ending with Sulpicia's devotion to Calenus, the second with Calenus' to Sulpicia. JLPB seems to have put it well when he wrote of Sulpicia as a poet famous for making married sex sexy. Perhaps it is the incongruity of such a poet's writing satire that has bothered some about the SC. : >A late poet might have chosen to compose a : >work in the style of 1st century CE satire, : >attacking figures from the past, as Juvenal : >had explicitly claimed to do, and doing so : >in the name of a figure from that past. : : But someone imitating 1st-century satire would surely : imitate a famous 1st-century satirist like Juvenal. I know : that Juvenal was apparently ignored for a long time, but : hadn't his fortunes been revived by the date of the Bobbio : collection? The nachleben of Juvenal aside, can we really make any assumptions as to whom a later poet might choose to impersonate? If one wished to pass one's poem off as a genuine survival from an earlier age, then it might be safer to choose a poet who was known, but not for satire. The exact extent of Sulpicia's ouevre may have been nearly as obscure to later antiquity as it is to us, and the generic difference need not be disturbing. Horace wrote both satire and lyric, and one surviving fragment of Turnus, another contemporary of Martial who was known as a satirist, is apparently pastoral (admittedly another hexameter genre). If, on the other hand, one wished merely to try one's hand at (but not to forge in the true sense) a mode of writing whose acme belonged to the distant past, one might choose almost any persona. Incidentally, Quintilian, in his survey of satire beginning, famously, in IO 10.1.93, mentions Lucilius, Horace and Persius (10.1.93-94), as well as Terentius Varro (as represnting a different and earlier form of satire, 10.1.95). Between the reference to Persius and the 'alterum illud' that introduces Varro, and so presumably still referring to hexameter satire, Quintilian writes: sunt clari hodieque et qui olim nominabuntur ('There are some [satirists] who are distinguished now and who will one day be named [sc. "in a reading list like this"]'). Who would these 'clari' be? If IO 10 belongs to the 90s CE, Juvenal must presumably be ruled out, for his five books are usually dated to the 2nd and 3rd decades of the next century. Quintilian *might* have known his work in draft, as it were, but need not have, and the usual dates would put as much as 17 years between Quintilian's tenth book (c. 95) and Juvenal's first (c. 112). The satirist Turnus (of whom there are fragments in Courtney's FLP) belonged to the period of Domitian, but one poet does not a vibrant tradition make. Who on earth was Quintilian on about? : The Conquestio gives no indication that Calenus had : suffered at the hands of the famed tormentor of flies; : if Sulpician, it would probably post-date his fall, when : such talk was safe. More than a year, and perhaps two, elapsed between Domitian's death in 96 and Martial's 10th Book (mentioning Sulpicia) in 98. But the Prokopian parallel I mentioned earlier might also be interesting: it must be presumed that Justinian and Theodora would hardly have been overcome with joy at such a work as the Anecdota, and yet it was written (and at the same period as Wars 1-7, in the opinion of at least some modern scholars). Terrence Lockyer Johannesburg, South Africa .