{"title":"Spectacle in the Eleven Elegies of Sulpicia: To Marcus Colyer, M.D., and Joseph Pasternak, M.D.","authors":"J. Hallett","doi":"10.1353/HEL.2018.0009","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"My paper closely examines the text of Tibullus Book 3, poems 8–13, the eleven elegies about, and to my mind by, the Augustan poet Sulpicia, through the lens of “the visual.”1 It concludes by reflecting on what I would regard as an Ovidian echo of one particularly memorable visual detail in these elegies. Like Tibullus—whose death in 19 BCE Ovid laments, and whose poetry he evokes both reverentially and playfully in Amores 3.9—Ovid testifies that he benefited from the literary patronage of Sulpicia’s maternal uncle, the influential general and statesman Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus.2 For that reason alone, Ovid was likely to have been acquainted with Sulpicia and her writing. And although Ovid never mentions Sulpicia by name as he does Tibullus in his poetry, he often appears to evoke her poetry as well, although never in a reverential or playful way.3 I will argue that in her eleven elegies Sulpicia depicts herself as a dynamic, self-actualizing visual spectacle. Then, more briefly, I will maintain that Sulpicia’s mode of self-representation contrasts with the tendency of Ovid and the other male elegists to portray their female inamoratae as immobile, passive art objects. In this context, I will contend that in the first book of the Ars amatoria Ovid evokes the opening two lines of the first Sulpicia elegy, 3.8, so as to recall, much as he does in both the Amores and Metamorphoses, Sulpicia’s elegies. I will claim as well that he does so to critique Sulpicia’s verses, unfavorably commenting upon the dynamic, self-actualizing, physically appealing, expensively adorned, and erotically successful female persona central to the visual spectacle these verses create. An attention-arresting elegiac couplet begins the first of the eleven Sulpicia elegies: Sulpicia est tibi culta tuis, Mars magne, kalendis / spectatum e caelo, si sapis, ipse veni (Great god Mars, Sulpicia is arrayed for you on your Kalends. If you have any discernment, come down from heaven to look at her yourself).4 Summoning the god Mars on the first day of ‘his’ own month, the poem commences with the poet’s own name in the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 S39 R40","PeriodicalId":43032,"journal":{"name":"HELIOS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2019-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/HEL.2018.0009","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"HELIOS","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/HEL.2018.0009","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"CLASSICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
My paper closely examines the text of Tibullus Book 3, poems 8–13, the eleven elegies about, and to my mind by, the Augustan poet Sulpicia, through the lens of “the visual.”1 It concludes by reflecting on what I would regard as an Ovidian echo of one particularly memorable visual detail in these elegies. Like Tibullus—whose death in 19 BCE Ovid laments, and whose poetry he evokes both reverentially and playfully in Amores 3.9—Ovid testifies that he benefited from the literary patronage of Sulpicia’s maternal uncle, the influential general and statesman Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus.2 For that reason alone, Ovid was likely to have been acquainted with Sulpicia and her writing. And although Ovid never mentions Sulpicia by name as he does Tibullus in his poetry, he often appears to evoke her poetry as well, although never in a reverential or playful way.3 I will argue that in her eleven elegies Sulpicia depicts herself as a dynamic, self-actualizing visual spectacle. Then, more briefly, I will maintain that Sulpicia’s mode of self-representation contrasts with the tendency of Ovid and the other male elegists to portray their female inamoratae as immobile, passive art objects. In this context, I will contend that in the first book of the Ars amatoria Ovid evokes the opening two lines of the first Sulpicia elegy, 3.8, so as to recall, much as he does in both the Amores and Metamorphoses, Sulpicia’s elegies. I will claim as well that he does so to critique Sulpicia’s verses, unfavorably commenting upon the dynamic, self-actualizing, physically appealing, expensively adorned, and erotically successful female persona central to the visual spectacle these verses create. An attention-arresting elegiac couplet begins the first of the eleven Sulpicia elegies: Sulpicia est tibi culta tuis, Mars magne, kalendis / spectatum e caelo, si sapis, ipse veni (Great god Mars, Sulpicia is arrayed for you on your Kalends. If you have any discernment, come down from heaven to look at her yourself).4 Summoning the god Mars on the first day of ‘his’ own month, the poem commences with the poet’s own name in the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 S39 R40