In spite of Pliny's enthusiasm for his poet friends, there is no reason to suppose that the reign of Trajan saw the production of any poetry, save that of Juvenal, which even approached the first rank. With the accession of Hadrian we enter on a fresh era, characterized by the rise of a new prose style and the almost entire disappearance of poetry. Rome had produced her last great poet. The Pervigilium Veneris and a few slight but beautiful fragments of Tiberianus are all that illumine the darkness till we come upon the interesting but uninspired elegiacs of Rutilius Namatianus, the curiously uneven and slipshod poetry of Ausonius, and the graceful, but cold and lifeless perfection of the heroic hexameters of Claudian.
II
SULPICIA
Poetesses were not rare at Rome during the first century of our era; the scribendi cacoethes extended to the fair sex sufficiently, at any rate, to evoke caustic comment both from Martial[458] and Juvenal.[459] By a curious coincidence, the only poetesses of whose work we have any record are both named Sulpicia. The elder Sulpicia belongs to an earlier age; she formed one of the Augustan literary circle of which her uncle Messala was the patron, and left a small collection of elegiac poems addressed to her lover, and preserved in the same volume as the posthumous poems of Tibullus, to whose authorship they were for long attributed.[460]
The younger Sulpicia was a contemporary of the poet Martial, and, like her predecessor, wrote erotic verse. Frank and outspoken as was the earlier poetess, in this respect at least her namesake far surpassed her. For the younger Sulpicia's plain-speaking, if we may judge from the comments of ancient writers[461] and the one brief fragment of her love-poems that has survived,[462] was of a very different character and must at least have bordered on the obscene. But her work attracted attention; her fame is associated with her love for Calenus, a love that was long[463] and passionate. She continued to be read even in the days of Ausonius and Sidonius Apollinaris. Martial compares her with Sappho, and her songs of love seem to have rung true, even though their frankness may have been of a kind generally associated with passions of a looser character.[464] If, as a literal interpretation of Martial[465] would lead us to infer, Calenus was her husband, the poems of Sulpicia confront us with a spectacle unique in ancient literature—a wife writing love-poems to her husband. Her language came from the heart, not from book-learning; she was a poetess such as Martial delighted to honour.
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.