In this commentary, focused on elegiac texts of the third book of Tibullus (also called the Appendix Tibulliana or Corpus Tibullianum), Laurel Fulkerson engages with two primary issues. The first is to see how these poems ‘do and do not fit into the rest of Latin love elegy’ as practised by its major poets; the second is to ‘explore the book as a book’, even though these poems are written by a number of hands (vii). Her main working assumption is that these poets are competent and good poets, and that they have produced witty and sophisticated poetry. I think that this is very a good point. The introduction (59 pages) is divided into eight sections: 1. ‘Contexts: Elegy and Amatory Poetry’, 2. ‘Contexts: The “Augustan Age”, Patrons, and Poetic communities’, 3. ‘Theoretical Approaches to Elegy’, 4. ‘What's in a name? Name, Pseudonym, and Persona’, 5. ‘Chronology and Authorship: the Composition and Arrangement of [Tib.] 3’, 6. ‘Women Writing (Latin)’, 7. ‘Style, Metre, and Syntax’, 8. ‘Manuscript Tradition and Text’. The text printed is Lenz–Galinsky's 1971 Brill text, except for a few differences indicated (59).
F. seeks to reflect the ongoing debates on Roman elegy while examining how they are relevant for the Appendix Tibulliana. I will give a few examples of her analyses and discussions. After providing a good summary of elegiac genre as practised by the main poets, she concludes that the Appendix Tibulliana contains most of the standard elegiac building blocks, but also neglects some and adds others. Many elegies focus on occasional poetry, for example for a specific date such as a birthday. This may suggest that they were composed by a poetic coterie, which fits in with the existence of a poetic circle under the patronage of Messalla. Sulpicia could have been part of this literary community, as F. illustrates further in her commentary, referring to later examples of family-based poetic communities, such as the circle around Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina (52–3). F. offers a brief but very useful discussion of the names of the major characters in the Appendix Tibulliana (Lygdamus, Neaera, Sulpicia, Cerinthus and Messalla).
Among the different theoretical approaches that have been central to scholarship on amatory elegy, F. examines the three that have most often been seen as appropriate to the Appendix Tibulliana. The first approach, ‘the romantic, or biographical mode of criticism’, treats elegy as the sincere, more or less autobiographical record of real events. The second approach, ‘symbolic or formalist’, considers that poetry offers a discourse about discourse. Even if these two approaches seem to be mutually incompatible, in fact, as noted by F., they can be fruitfully combined. The third theoretical approach is the feminist and gender theory that is able precisely to ally itself with the other two. Why does F. present these three approaches? Not only because the elegiac genre focuses on gender relations, but also because one of the poets in the Appendix Tibulliana ‘could’ be a woman, Sulpicia. F. adopts the traditional repartition in which only elegies 13–18 are ascribed to Sulpicia. She never discusses this repartition, although it is based on a problematic gender conception, dated from the nineteenth century, about the kind of ‘short’ and ‘awkward’ texts a woman is able to write. However, F. honestly indicates that some scholars also ascribe the first-person elegies 9 and 11 to Sulpicia. Later in her commentary, she comes back to the question of ‘whether “Sulpicia” was in fact a woman’ (46), in other words, whether poems 13–18 were or were not written by a woman. F.'s discussion here — for example, on female education in Rome, or on the existence (or not) of a recognisably female way of writing — is both detailed and nuanced.
At the end, F. gives her own opinion: ‘much is gained, and little lost, in treating the poetry of Sulpicia as an authentically recovered female voice from Antiquity’. I agree with this conclusion, which could be extended to elegies 9 and 11. F. recalls that other elegists had experimented in various ways with female voices. In my opinion this does not imply that a woman could not write elegiac poems in the first person. In fact, many scholars implicitly consider that the length of elegies 9 and 11 testify against their being written by a woman. Conversely, H. Parker (CW 100.1 (2006), 17–29) has brilliantly demonstrated the non-validity of several arguments and readings applied to Sulpicia by showing that they could perfectly well also be applied to a male poet, Catullus, in order to deny him the authorship of his long poems.
F.'s book further offers a close reading and a substantial commentary on each poem, taking one couplet at a time (228 pages of commentary in total). After an introductory paragraph aiming at helping the reader understand the couplet, F. provides information on vocabulary, motifs, cultural uses and syntax. She lists verbal and thematic similarities with earlier, contemporary or later texts. She often indicates different interpretations of critics on specific points or refers to useful studies providing interesting background or discussions. The book ends up with an impressive list of works cited, an Index Locorum and a general Index.
Concerned with providing the broadest possible range of information and interpretation, F. has written a very well documented and smart book that fills a gap in recent modern criticism. Everyone interested in elegy and Latin literature will benefit from reading and possessing it.
