"This study explores the ancient Roman historical and literary milieu of Servius' daughter Sulpicia, known to us from a cycle of Latin poems about her love affair with a man named Cerinthus. Unlike other women in the OUP series "Women in Antiquity," the poet/lover Sulpicia is not mentioned anywhere else in classical literature, 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 by the other women featured in this series, who 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 volumes in this series 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, this volume explores the possibility of direct contact with a historical Roman woman. Taking the discovery of Sulpicia's poetry as its point of departure, the biography explores her family background at the pinnacle of the Roman aristocracy and her literary achievement in the heyday of Latin love poetry. A brief conclusion surveys the difficulty many male critics have had in believing that an aristocratic Roman woman could write poetry about love and sex"-- Provided by publisher