Recovering Sulpicia: A Critical Phenomenology of Poetry and Power in Ancient Rome

Guest Speaker: Dr. Erin M. Hanses

Assistant Teaching Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Penn State University

 

 

This talk considers the much-debated identity of Sulpicia, one of very few women from the ancient Roman world whose writings appear to have survived. Sulpicia is a persona featured in eleven poems from an appendix to the works of the elegist Tibullus, and may have written some or all of the poems featuring her name. Recent work on an epitaph of the lectrix Sulpicia Petale has productively problematized the question of whether a woman named Sulpicia wrote any or all of these poems. In this talk, I offer a means of reconstituting the Lebenswelt or "lifeworld" of Sulpicia via critical phenomenology. Elements of the Sulpicia poems offer a concretized sense of life at Rome: a birthday, a festival, an illness, clothing and hairstyles, letters on tablets, and the power differentials among men and women, the freeborn, and the enslaved. While we can analyze these elements to nuance our understanding of a feminine, Roman lifeworld (whether imagined by men, lived by women, or somewhere in between), we can also use them to frame considerations of an intersectional and manifold Sulpician identity, one alluded to by the freedwomen lectrices Sulpicia Petale represents.  

 

Dr. Erin M. Hanses is a scholar of classical languages and literature whose research focuses broadly on sex, gender, and identity in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Her published work to date has treated engagement with Epicurean philosophy among the Latin love elegists, in particular Sulpicia; gendered personifications of Nature in Vergil and Lucretius; and representations of female pleasure from ancient Greek medical texts to modern scientific studies. Her current book project, Recovering Sulpicia: Women, Poetry, and Power in Ancient Rome uses critical phenomenology as a framework and methodology for investigating the enigmatic figure of Sulpicia as it considers both the manifold possibilities for her identity as poet and her connectivity as literary persona with the other women of Roman elegy.