This lecture is supported by the Discipline of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney, the Sydney Latin Summer School, and the Classical Association of New South Wales.

Servius' Daughter Sulpicia: Life, Love and Literature in Ancient Rome.

Professor Alison Keith | University of Toronto

5:30pm doors for 6:00pm start.

This talk aims to shed light on the historical and literary contexts of Sulpicia, “Servius’ daughter,” known to us only from a cycle of poems, celebrating her amatory trysts and tribulations with a man named Cerinthus, included in the third book of Tibullus’ poetry. Unlike other famous aristocratic women from classical antiquity, Sulpicia is not mentioned anywhere else in ancient literature or material documents, and so our knowledge of her historical existence and literary activity derives solely from the poems in which she speaks and is named. This constitutes a distinct challenge for constructing her biography, and one not shared either by the famous Greek poet Sappho or by such notorious historical women as the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra or the Roman Empress Livia, both of whom were the targets of copious, often critical, commentary in the male-authored literature of classical antiquity but who have left no first-person accounts of their lives and loves. If other scholars of women in antiquity have asked how it is possible to write biographies of women whose life-histories are known to us only in refraction, filtered through ancient preconceptions of gender and sexuality (and in Sappho’s case, through tattered fragments of first-person verse), this talk explores the possibility of direct contact with a historical Roman woman.

Alison Keith is Director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and University Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto, where she also holds cross-appointments at the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Women and Gender Studies Institute. She has written extensively about the intersection of gender and genre in Latin literature and Roman society, and has authored or edited books on Ovid and his reception, Vergil and Latin epic, Propertius and Roman literary cultures, Roman dress, motherhood, and women and war in the ancient Mediterranean. A past editor of the classical journal Phoenix and past President of both the Classical Association of Canada and the Ontario Classical Association, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and current President of the Society for Classical Studies. Current projects include a biography of Sulpicia, the earliest female Latin poet whose work survives, and a monograph on Latin literature and Roman Epicureanism

Image: Fresco from the cubiculum B of the Villa Farnesina. 1st century BC—1st century AD. (Rome, Roman National Museum, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme)