In this study, I have analyzed the poems from the Corpus Sulpicianum (3.8–3.18) as the creation of a single author, Sulpicia. My argument in favour of the uniformity of the cycle is based on the consistency of the authorial persona, poetic concerns, and author-specific blending of some elegiac tropes. Through a metaliterary analysis of the poems, an authorial identity emerges based on the trope of the docta puella. Unlike the doctae puellae of other Roman elegists who are constructed predominantly as recipients of male-authored poetry, Sulpicia through her doctrina enhances her persona as a creatrix of poetry. In the opening poems 3.8 and 3.13, for example, Sulpicia constructs her body as part of her literary program, while also developing her persona of elegiac lover. I also show how Sulpicia’s literary concerns arise in her preoccupation with literary fama, for which Sulpicia introduces an image that reflects a creative and maternal dimension, and which diverges from the predominant elegiac tradition. In most of the poems of the remaining cycle (3.9, 3.10, 3.11, and 3.12), not only does Sulpicia represent her persona consistently as a docta poeta, but she also includes amor mutuus and servitium aequum as part of her other poetic materia. From this perspective, I argue, Sulpicia again differs drastically from the rest of elegiac tradition, by considering the reciprocity of feelings to be the base of her valuable poetic discourse. The absence of mutuality, in fact, is also reflected in the exhaustion of both her body and her literary corpus in 3.16 and 3.17. / Graduate / 2023-01-12

The woman has always been an invisible individual behind the act of ’Great men’ in the Roman society. The woman’s gender role has forever been specified where the woman is a submissive, quiet and an unintelligent individual who wants to do everything for her man. Even though this gender role is created by authors that are men and is about how they consider a woman should behave, what about the women’s view on this matter? By means of getting an answer to this question, we can get a fuller perspective and an understanding about the Roman woman and as a woman writer in a patriarchal society. The purpose with this essay will therefore be to give a fuller perspective about the Roman society and its woman writers. In order to fulfill this purpose, I have asked the following questions: How did men react when women published their literary work and is it possible to investigate how the women thought about themselves through analyzing their work. And how was it possible for a woman to publish her texts in a society where women had no rights and a small chance to publish her work for the public? In order to have been able for doing this examination I have delimit myself and investigate three women, Cornelia, Hortensia and Sulpicia. Cornelia wrote letters, Hortensia wrote and delivered a speech and Sulpicia wrote poems. I have used the ancient sources Appian, Nepos, Tibullus to get the quotes of the women’s texts. I have also used other ancient sources like Aelian, Cicero, Ovid, Plutarch, Pliny, Quintilian and Valerius Maximus for other valuable information about the three women and their literature. They contribute with comments about the women and about women’s possibilities to get an education. I have a gender role and feminist view through the entire essay as the main focus is the three roman women writers. I have done this by analyzing the women’s texts and investigated what men thought about them and high educated women generally. And how the society encounters this texts. Through all this we have got a better understanding about how the attitude was towards the Roman woman and how she looked upon herself – and with that a fuller perspective on the Roman woman in general instead of the androcentric view we had before. There are a lot of variables that contribute to whether the woman can publish her work which is status, wealth, her loyalty to Rome and contacts with important people. Through all these men were relative positive about the three women’s texts and the women themselves were relative positive to themselves.

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This thesis explores the representation of gender, desire, and identity in elegiac discourse. It does so through the lens of post‐structural and psychoanalytic theory, referring to the works of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Jessica Benjamin, and Laura Mulvey in their analyses of power, gender performativity, and subjectivity. Within this thesis, these concepts are applied primarily to the works of Tibullus, Propertius, and Sulpicia, ultimately demonstrating that the three love elegists seek, in their poetry, to construct subversive discourses which destabilise the categories by which gender and identity were determined in Augustan Rome. This discussion is supplemented by the investigation of Ovid’s use of elegiac discourse in Book 10 of his Metamorphoses, and the way in which it both comments upon Augustan love elegy and demonstrates a number of parallels with its thematic content. This thesis focuses especially on the representation of power relations within elegiac discourse, the various levels on which such relations operate and, finally, the possibilities for the contestation of and resistance to power, in addition to the motivations that might lie behind the poet‐lover’s frequent attraction and submission to it.