omnes Sulpiciam legant puellae, uni quae cupiunt viro placere; omnes Sulpiciam legant mariti, uni qui cupiunt placere nuptae. non haec Colchidos adserit furorem, diri prandia nec refert Thyestae; Scyllam, Byblida nec fuisse credit: sed castos docet et probos amores, lusus delicias facetiasque. cuius carmina qui bene aestimarit, nullam dixerit esse nequiorem, nullam dixerit esse sanctiorem[466].
Read your Sulpicia, maidens all, Whose husband shall your sole love be; Read your Sulpicia, husbands all, Whose wife shall reign, and none but she. No theme for her Medea's fire, Nor orgy of Thyestes dire; Scylla and Byblis she'd deny, Of love she sang and purity, Of dalliance and frolic gay; Who should have well appraised her lay Had said none were more chaste than she, Yet fuller none of amorous glee. A. E. STREET.
Although the thought of what _procacitas_[467] may have meant in a lady of Domitian's reign raises something of a shudder, and although it is to be feared that Martial, when he goes on to say (loc. cit.)
tales Egeriae iocos fuisse udo crediderim Numae sub antro,
Such sport I ween Egeria gave To Numa in his spring-drenched cave. A. E. STREET.
had that in his mind which would have scandalized the pious lawgiver of Rome, we may yet regret the loss of poems which, if Martial's language is not merely the language of flattery, may have breathed a fresher and freer spirit than is often to be found in the poets of the age. Catullus and Sappho would seem to have been Sulpicia's models, but her poems have left so little trace behind them that it is impossible to speak with certainty. As to their metre we are equally ill-informed. The fragment of two lines quoted above is in iambic _senarii_. If we may believe the evidence[468] of a satirical hexameter poem attributed to Sulpicia, she also wrote in hendecasyllables and scazons. The genuineness of this poem is, however, open to serious doubt. It consists of seventy hexameters denouncing the expulsion of the philosophers by Domitian, and is known by the title of _Sulpiciae satira_.[469] That it purports to be by the poetess beloved of Calenus is clear from an allusion to their passion.[470] Serious doubts have, however, been cast upon its genuineness. It is urged that the work is ill-composed, insipid, and tasteless, and that it contains not a few marked peculiarities in diction and metre, together with more than one historical inaccuracy. The inference suggested is that the poem is not by Sulpicia, but at least two centuries later in date. It may readily be admitted that the poem is almost entirely devoid of any real merit, that its diction is obscure and slovenly, its metre lame and unimpressive. But the critics of the poem are guilty of great exaggeration.[471] Many of its worst defects are undoubtedly due to the exceedingly corrupt state of the text; further, it is hard to see what interest a satire directed against Domitian would possess centuries after his death, nor is it easy to imagine what motive could have led the supposed forger to attribute his work to Sulpicia. The balance of probability inclines, though very slightly, in favour of the view that the work is genuine. This is unfortunate; for the perusal of this curious satire on the hypothesis of its genuineness appreciably lessens our regret for the loss of Sulpicia's love poetry and arouses serious suspicion as to the veracity of Martial. It must, however, in justice be remembered that it does not follow that Sulpicia was necessarily a failure as a lyric writer because she had not the peculiar gift necessary for satire. The absence of the training of the rhetorical schools from a woman's education might well account for such a failure. At the worst, Sulpicia stands as an interesting example of the type of womanhood at which Juvenal levelled some of his wildest and most ill-balanced invective.