The Significance of the Name Cerinthus in the Poems of Sulpicia

Roessel, David

doi:10.2307/283989

Cited by 39 publications

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“…The poetry of Sulpicia, who is the only possible female elegist whose poetry is extant, stands as the quintessential testament to this fluidity. Throughout her short corpus she casts herself as the active lover and the passive beloved: although she takes on nearly all the traits of the typical passive beloved, she herself is the active agent who writes to her lover Cerinthus, whose name, derived from the term for wax or honey, evokes a malleable, passive persona (Roessel 1990). Yet such fluid movement from a passive to an active role of the poetic persona perhaps comes to its zenith in the poetry of Ovid.…”

Section: Inverting Sexualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Erotic Lyric

and¹,

Natoli²

2013

A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities

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Section: Inverting Sexualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Erotic Lyric

and¹,

Natoli²

2013

A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities

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“…Similarly, following the elegiac trope of identifying love and poetry, writingtablets (tabellis, 3.13.7) signify both erotic messages to a beloved and book-publication; the beloved's name, Cerinthus (3.14.2; 3.17.1), the honey-sweetness of both a lover and a poem. 20 Thus the lover/poet of the Sulpician corpus, like the other narrating egos of elegy, manifests a discursive mastery over the object of both her erotics and her poetics.…”

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Taking the Woman's Part: Engendering Roman Love Elegy

Wyke

1994

Ramus

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When a woman writes herself into the genre of Roman love elegy she appears to break the recognised conventions for its production, according to which woman is the passive object of erotic desire not its active subject, the written not the writer. In discussing the elegiac poetry composed by Sulpicia, one means by which critics have expressed her extraordinary achievement has been to engender Roman love elegy. For Nick Lowe, Sulpicia's unique intervention was to compose poetry on the subject of her own erotic experience in ‘an obstinately male genre’. For Amy Richlin, Sulpicia breached a double barrier, both the ‘male job’ of writing and the ‘male genre’ of elegy. With reference to Sulpicia, I also labelled Augustan elegy as ‘male-oriented verse’ that constructs a ‘male narrative perspective’. While it is evidently the case that, with the notable exception of Sulpicia, the biological sex of all the authors of Roman elegy is male, I would now argue that the genre of elegy itself is not unequivocally ‘masculine’ and that to engender elegy unproblematically as ‘male’ fails to do justice to the genre's crucial play with Roman categories of gender.

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Authorial Identity in Latin Love Elegy: Literary Fictions and Erotic Failings

Hallett

2012

A Companion to Roman Love Elegy

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The Significance of the Name Cerinthus in the Poems of Sulpicia

Cited by 39 publications

References 0 publications

Erotic Lyric

Erotic Lyric

Taking the Woman's Part: Engendering Roman Love Elegy

Authorial Identity in Latin Love Elegy: Literary Fictions and Erotic Failings

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