S.J.

Heyworth
Place and Meaning in Tibullus, Lygdamus,
Sulpicia

The iconic places of elegy

Love elegy is most characteristically set on the urban doorstep: the poet is at the
limen of his beloved, outside a locked door on a street in Rome. Even though this
situation is not dominant in many poems,1 references to the door and its physical
attributes quickly evolve as a shorthand to describe the commitment, separation
and pain endemic in elegiac love. So for example2 early in the paraclausithyron
at Tibullus 1.2.5–10:

nam posita est nostrae custodia saeua puellae,

clauditur et dura ianua firma sera.
ianua dissimilis dominae3, te uerberet imber,
te Iouis imperio fulmina missa petant.
ianua, iam pateas uni mihi, uicta querelis,
neu furtim uerso cardine aperta sones.4

and more fleetingly and evocatively at 1.1.56, at the conclusion of a four-line pri-
amel that sets Tibullus against his patron Messalla:

te bellare decet terra, Messalla, marique,

ut domus hostiles praeferat exuuias;
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1 Tib. 1.2, Am. 1.6; even in Propertius 1.16 it is distanced by attributing the account of the miser-
able lover to the door itself.
2 And e.g. Tib. 1.5.67–74; Prop. 1.3.36; 1.9.28 nec uigilare alio limine; Ovid, Am. 1.9.19; Ars 3.71–
2; Fast. 5.339 ebrius ad durum formosae limen amicae | cantat.
3 dissimilis dominae is an exempli gratia substitution for the much amended difficilis domini of
the paradosis: the domina is not herself dura and firma but, the poet hopes, mollis.
4 ‘A savage watch has been placed on my girl, and the sturdy door is closed with a tough bar.
Door unlike your mistress, may the rain beat you, may thunderbolts attack you, sent by Jupiter’s
command. Door, may you be conquered by my complaints and accessible in future to me alone,
and make no sound, opened on a secretly turning hinge.’

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 70 � S.J. Heyworth

me retinent uinctum formosae uincla puellae, 55

et sedeo duras ianitor ante fores.5

In verse 55 it is tempting to print retinet … cura (‘love holds me back’), which

Broukhusius claimed to have found in a manuscript; the retinent … uincla of the
main tradition renders uinctum (an obvious source of the supposed corruption)
superfluous: Tibullus likes repetition, but this seems inelegant — unless the point
is to contribute a vivid detail to the ianitor of the pentameter: he is not just bound
to his mistress, but actually in shackles (cf. 1.6.38 detrecto non ego uincla pedum,
‘I do not object to shackles on my feet’; and Ovid’s address to the chains of the
door-keeper at Am. 1.6.47 in me durae transite catenae, ‘transfer to me, harsh
chains’). So entrenched is Tibullus at the girl’s door that he can cast himself as a
metaphorical doorkeeper, effectively chained in position, a slave in a demeaning
position at the doorway, and thus doubly contrasted with Messalla. The patron
travels land and sea with military might, equivalent to Caesar in the similar anti-
thesis between dynast and poet at the end of the Georgics (4.559–66). But whereas
Caesar’s glory will lead him to Olympus (uiamque adfectat Olympo, 562), Messalla
brings his spoils home, and uses them to aggrandise his house in Rome. Not only
does the Tibullus of this poem not travel, but the home to which he is attached is
not his own property: Messalla’s house casts an impressive shadow over the
doors that Tibullus guards.
The other parts of the domus that regularly signify the elegiac life are the tri-
clinium and the bedroom. Thus Tibullus 1.2.19–24 follows the hopeful sententia
‘Venus herself aids the brave’ (fortes adiuuat ipsa Venus, 1.2.16) with the se-
quence: door, bedroom, and (implicitly) symposium:

illa fauet, seu quis iuuenis noua limina temptat,

seu reserat fixo dente puella fores;
illa docet molli furtim derepere lecto,
illa pedem nullo ponere posse sono,
illa uiro coram nutus conferre loquaces
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blandaque compositis abdere uerba notis.6

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5 ‘You it suits, Messalla, to fight wars by land and sea, so your house may display enemy spoils;
I am held back, bound by the bonds of a beautiful girl, and I sit as a doorkeeper in front of her
hard doors.’
6 ‘She favours any youth who tries an unfamiliar doorway, any girl who fits in a spike and un-
bars the door; she teaches how to creep away unnoticed from a soft bed, how to be able to tread
without a sound, how to exchange meaningful nods in a husband’s presence, and to hide sug-
gestive words in coded signs.’

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 Place and Meaning in Tibullus, Lygdamus, Sulpicia � ��

However, in accounts of the symposium it is never the room but rather the social
interactions that the elegists mention (as here),7 or the wine, garlands, and per-
fumes, and occasionally the furniture (the table or couch).8
Not surprisingly the bed is often a highly significant feature of erotic relation-
ships, sometimes set in antithesis to the doorway, as at Propertius 1.3.34–6:

sic ait in molli fixa toro cubitum:

tandem te nostro referens iniuria lecto
alterius clausis expulit e foribus?9

And very pointedly at Propertius 2.16.3–4:

horum ego sum uates, quotiens desertus amaras

expleui noctes, fractus utroque toro.10

where fractus utroque toro refers to the pain the lover feels, physically from the
hardness of the doorstep or street, and emotionally from knowing that someone
else is in the bed of the puella.

Tibullus
Tibullus 1.1 begins indirectly (Diuitias alius), and when he turns to himself in
verse 4, it leads to a long passage full of visions of the countryside: though this is
a place where another may own vast acreage (verse 2), the elegist himself looks
only to enjoy a modest but pleasant rural life (1.1.1–48).11 From verse 7 to verse 44
virtually every couplet has diction directly evocative of the countryside or the ac-
tivities of farmers or herdsmen: uites, 7; rusticus, 8; frugum, 9; musta, 10; agris,
11; pomum, 12; agricolae, 14; rure, 15; spicea, 16; hortis, 17; agri, 19; soli, 22; rustica,
23; messes … uina, 24; umbra, 27; bidentem, 29; boues, 30; agnam … capellae, 31;
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pecori, 33; grege, 34; pastorem, 35; Palem, 36; agrestis, 39; fructus, 41; messis, 42;
seges, 43. Tibullus thus associates himself emphatically with the countryside

��
7 Also e.g. Lygdamus in [Tib.] 3.6.
8 E.g. Tib. 1.6.17–20; Prop. 2.34.57–9, 4.8.35–46.
9 ‘This is what she said, her elbow firmly planted on the soft bed: “Has wrongdoing expelled
you from another's closed door and brought you back to our bed? …” ’
10 ‘I am a poet of these subjects as often as I have spent bitter nights abandoned, broken by
both beds.’
11 On the political and poetical aspects of rura for Tibullus, see Solmsen 1962, 297–312.

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 72 � S.J. Heyworth

from the first. And yet this extended opening self-identification with the rus is not
a statement of fact: though there are present indicatives in 11–14 (and perhaps in
15–18, if the conjectures fit and donatur are correct for sit and ponatur), the pas-
sage begins with futures and subjunctives, and continues with imperatives, fu-
tures and subjunctives, save where he is stressing his existing piety or building
the contrast between present poverty and past wealth. Even when he turns to his
desire for rest in a soft bed at 43, the couplet begins parua seges satis est: the
embrace of his mistress in 45–6 is thus predicated on satisfaction with his life as
a farmer. Modern interpretation has rightly spotted the implicit disconnect: thus
Boyd cites Guy Lee’s nice formulation, ‘women of Delia’s kind … do not live bur-
ied lives in country towns or country houses’; and then continues, ‘thus, in poetic
terms, when Tibullus shifts his attention to Delia he implicitly abandons his
farm’.12 Others13 have seen the similarity to Horace’s Second Epode, where the
praises of life in the country that occupy the first 66 lines turn out in 67–70 to be
spoken by Alfius, a moneylender, who never fulfils his wish to move out of the
city.
Like the opening Diuitias alius this initial identification with the rus proves to
be misdirection. The next two poems begin with Tibullus far from the agricultural
world: in 1.2 he is engaged in a komos and addresses the door of his mistress in
verses 7–14; in 1.3 (despite the claims about commitment to Delia in 1.1) he has
followed his patron Messalla out of Italy, and lies sick in Phaeacia, a Ulysses in
epic territory. In both poems he speaks wistfully of country life, in 1.3 describing
the idyllic Golden Age, when men lived under Saturn, before they started to travel
and wage war (1.3.41–6). In 1.2.73–6 he fantasizes about living with Delia in the
country, linking the pleasures of agriculture and of life with her even more tightly
than in 1:

ipse boues mea si tecum modo Delia possim

iungere et in solito pascere monte pecus,
et, te dum liceat teneris retinere lacertis,
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mollis et inculta sit mihi somnus humo.14

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12 Boyd 1984, 277, citing Lee 1974, 103.
13 See e.g. Jacoby 1961, 136–8; Cairns 1975; Murgatroyd 1980, 49.
14 ‘… if only along with Delia I may myself yoke oxen and pasture a flock on the familiar moun-
tainside; and, provided I could hold you with loving arms, sleep would seem soft to me on rough
ground.’

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 Place and Meaning in Tibullus, Lygdamus, Sulpicia � 73

The theme is reprised in 1.5.19–34, but here the vision is marked both at start and
end, not just as a fantasy,15 but as unrealized and unrealizable:

at mihi felicem uitam, si salua fuisses,

fingebam demens, sed renuente deo. 20
‘rura colam, frugumque aderit mea Delia custos,
area dum messes sole calente teret,
aut mihi seruabit plenis in lintribus uuas
pressaque ueloci candida musta pede;
consuescet numerare pecus, consuescet amantis 25
garrulus in dominae ludere uerna sinu. …16

huc ueniet Messalla meus; cui dulcia poma

Delia selectis detrahat arboribus,
et tantum uenerata uirum, nunc17 sedula curet,
nunc18 paret atque epulas ipsa ministra gerat.’
haec mihi fingebam, quae nunc Eurusque Notusque
iactat odoratos uota per Armenios.19

Agricultural themes are broached again in 1.7, but it is not Tibullus himself who
is set in the country. The celebration of Messalla’s birthday leads to consideration
of places his travels have taken him, ultimately the Nile, and thus to Osiris and
the invention of agriculture and viticulture, then wine and partying in 27–48. In
1.10 verses 15–26 describe rustic ritual, and we keep returning to the countryside,
with the family’s enjoyment of a traditional drunken festival; but when the poet

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15 So e.g. Lee-Stecum 1998, 165–6; Miller 1999, 187.
16 ‘I was foolishly imagining a happy life for myself, if you survived, but the god refused. “I
shall cultivate the countryside, and my Delia shall be there to protect the crops till the harvest
be threshed in the hot sun, or else she shall keep an eye on the grapes in full vats and the foaming
must pressed by swift-treading feet; she shall get used to counting the flock, and the chattering
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slaveboy to playing in the lap of a loving mistress …” ’

17 nunc Wölfenbüttel Gud. 392, Hamburg Univ. scr. 139: hunc A, codd. plerique: tunc Vienna
243. hunc leaves an unparalleled hiatus after uirum. I draw on Luck 1988 for information about
variants and conjectures.
18 nunc Wölfenbüttel Gud. 392: huic A, codd. plerique.
19 ‘ “Here my friend Messalla will come; let Delia pluck sweet fruit for him from choice trees,
and having greeted so great a man, let her now refresh him, now prepare and bring in a feast,
herself acting as waitress.” This is what I was imagining, but now the East Wind and the South
are tossing these prayers among the perfumed Armenians.’ Armenia is known for its tigers in
poetry, not perfume (but Jacoby 1918 compares Pliny, Nat. 12.49), and it is possible Tibullus
wrote Arabios or Assyrios (cf. Smith 1913 ad loc. ‘Armenios for the usual Assyrios (1.3.7 n.) appar-
ently because Armenia is itself high and windy’: not a plausible explanation given the epithet
odoratos).

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 74 � S.J. Heyworth

is introduced himself, he is again only fantasized as potentially present, e.g. in

41–4:

ipse suas sectatur oves, at filius agnos,

et calidam fesso comparat uxor aquam.
sic ego sim, liceatque caput candescere canis,
temporis et prisci facta referre senem.20

And at the poem’s end, he is absorbed into a generic nobis, and the scene is one
of Augustan peace, without a hint of Delia, Marathus, or anything erotic (1.10.67–
8):21

at nobis, Pax alma, ueni spicamque teneto,

perfluat et pomis candidus ante sinus.22

There are further variants in the truncated book 2.23 The opening poem is emphat-
ically rural, a visualization of an agricultural festival, a lustration of the estate in
honour of Bacchus and Ceres (2.1.1–4): rura cano rurisque deos (‘I sing the coun-
tryside and its gods’) he announces in verse 37. In 31–6 Messalla returns from
book 1; but not Delia, the passage on Amor (born among the herds in the coun-
tryside, but now plying his art more widely: 67–72) is expressed in general terms,
aside from the exclamation ei mihi that conveys the poet’s hurt.24 After the birth-
day poem for Cornutus (2.2), the countryside returns forcefully in 2.3 Rura meam,
Cornute, tenent uillaeque puellam (‘My girl is at a country house’): the puella is
eventually named (51),25 but as Nemesis, not Delia. Unlike her predecessor she is
actually in the countryside;26 but Tibullus still is not. He has two fantasies, first

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20 ‘He follows the ewes, his son the lambs, and as he tires his wife prepares a warm bath. So
may I be, and my head shine with white hair, and as an old man let me tell tales of time past.’
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21 Wifstrand Schiebe 1981, 92 notes the echo of Dike, catasterized as Parthenos (= Virgo) and
holding an ear of corn in her hand at Aratus, Phaen. 97: despite alma, Pax is thus pictured as a
virginal figure.
22 ‘Come to us, nurturing Peace, holding an ear of corn, and may your lap overflow in front with
fruit’.
23 On the premature ending of the book, see Reeve 1984.
24 The expression of the countryside in 2.1 is explored at length by Ross 1986. He brings out the
element of fantasy and wishful thinking.
25 Cf. 1.1.57 for the delayed identification.
26 Bright 1978, chapter 7, discusses Nemesis as an anti-Delia, and a commentary through inver-
sion on earlier experience; note in particular ‘Tibullus had dreamed so hard of getting Delia to
the country, and now the Nemesis series begins with the lady in the country, but all is worse
than ever’ (192).

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 Place and Meaning in Tibullus, Lygdamus, Sulpicia � ��

that he had wealth, so that Nemesis might parade through the city displaying the
gifts he had given (per urbem | incedat donis conspicienda meis, 51–2); and then,
on realising that his rival, an ex-slave, is now in charge (59–60), he wishes to
return to pre-agricultural days, so that there would be no need for life in the coun-
try. In the final couplet he promises to head for the fields and to submit there to
his mistress’s commands. Scenes of country life are prominent again in 2.5, but
again the poet himself is either absent (as in the account of the pre-Romulean site
of Rome in 25–38) or merely foreseeing a wishful future (83–100). The intervening
elegy, 2.4, abandons the countryside, and sets Tibullus outside Nemesis’ unre-
ceptive house (22; cf. 31–2); and in the final surviving poem too he is once more
on the doorstep (2.6.13–14, 47–8), and all that takes him to the world of the
farmer, the fowler, the fisherman, is a disquisition on the deceptive nature of
hope (19–24).27

Lygdamus (3.1–6)
Lygdamus, the ‘I’-figure of Corpus Tibullianum 3.1–6, upsets the norms of elegy
by seeking marriage. His collection opens with the celebration of the Matronalia
in 3.1: he imagines gifts passing along the streets of the city and around the
houses (perque uias urbis munera perque domos, 3.1.4); the Muses are sent to Ne-
aera’s domus to present her with his libellus (ite domum cultumque illi donate li-
bellum, 3.1.17). Neaera’s family home appears again at 3.4.91, where her lover des-
perately asserts that she was born not in the wilder parts of the natural world or
from some monster such as Cerberus or Scylla: she is the child of kindly parents
and a civilized house, not one to be inhabited by the harsh and unfeeling (culta
et duris non habitanda domus). Elsewhere we hear of Lygdamus’ pyre and his
tomb (rogum, 3.2.12; in marmorea … domo, 3.2.22), we see him lying sleepless and
then dreaming of Apollo in his own bed in 3.4 (n.b. 24 nostra sede),28 drinking at
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a symposium in 3.6.
At the start of poem 3, he expresses the conventional elegist’s desire for love
rather than wealth.29 Even in aspiration he identifies himself neither with a grand
house in the city (3–4) nor a large estate in the countryside (5–6): what matters is

��
27 Contrast the (slightly) more hopeful nec Spes destituat at 1.1.9.
28 For the lectus as symbolic of sickness, see e.g. Prop. 2.4.11, 2.9.27; Ovid, Ep. 21.
29 Cf. Tib. 1.1, Prop. 1.14, 3.5, e.g.

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 76 � S.J. Heyworth

growing old with Neaera (7–8). The point is then reprised as the poem continues,
at 3.3.11–16:

nam graue quid prodest pondus mihi diuitis auri,

aruaque si findant pinguia mille boues?
quidue domus prodest Phrygiis innixa columnis,
Taenare siue tuis, siue Caryste tuis,
et nemora in domibus sacros imitantia lucos 15
aurataeque trabes marmoreumque solum?30

The rejected notion of wealth is again associated with ploughed fields (12; cf. 5),
while the costly materials of which the rich man’s domus might be built are given
greater specificity — possible sources are listed for the marble, now used explic-
itly for columns and floors — the roof beams are gilded, and the gardens are
planted with trees that recall the uncut groves which mark out religious sanctu-
aries — but all this is not what Lygdamus wants from life or where he expects to
be.
However, in the short corpus of six poems that have reached the modern
world, the most interesting use of place comes in 3.5, a poem in which he depicts
himself as sick — perhaps love-sick, for it is spring and not the fever-bringing
Dog-days of late summer (verses 2–4):

Vos tenet Etruscis manat quae fontibus unda,

unda sub aestiuum non adeunda Canem,
nunc autem sacris Baiarum proxima lymphis,
cum se purpureo uere remittit humus.
at mihi Persephone nigram denuntiat horam: 5
inmerito iuueni parce nocere, dea.31

He is so ill, he claims, that he is likely to die, and thus prays to Persephone. Lyg-
damus himself is presumably at home, in his sickbed, but it is the location of his
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��
30 ‘What is the use to me of a heavy weight of gold, and if a thousand oxen were to plough my
fields? Or what use a house built on Phrygian columns, or made of your rock, Taenarus, or yours,
Carystos, and of woods inside the house imitating sacred groves, and gilded beams and a marble
floor?’
31 ‘The stream that flows from Etruscan springs is your location, the stream that is not to be
approached under the heat of the Dog-Star, but which now, when the earth is relaxing in the
brightness of spring, is second only to the sacred waters of Baiae. But for me Persephone has
pronounced a dark hour: do not harm an innocent young man, goddess.’ The underlined words
will be discussed later, in connexion with Propertius 1.11.

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 Place and Meaning in Tibullus, Lygdamus, Sulpicia � 77

friends that begins the poem and matters here, swimming in the Tiber, where he
pictures them once again at 29–30:

at uobis Tuscae celebrantur numina lymphae,

et facilis lenta pellitur unda manu.32

The Tiber is a place where youths swim in Horace’s Odes: Sybaris at 1.8.8, Enipeus
at 3.7.27–8, Ligurinus (and Horace himself in his dreams) at 4.1.40. But the com-
bination of Baiae and swimming in the Tiber rather recalls Cicero’s pro Caelio.
The prosopopoeia of Clodius addressing his sister has him telling her not to be so
bothered about Caelius (Cic. Cael. 36):

Habes hortos ad Tiberim ac diligenter eo loco paratos quo omnis iuuentus natandi causa
uenit; hinc licet condiciones cotidie legas; cur huic qui te spernit molesta es?33

The pro Caelio has five references to Baiae, which is named in none of the other
extant speeches. Three times it appears alongside the infamous gardens: si fas est
defendi a me eum qui nullum conuiuium renuerit, qui in hortis fuerit, qui unguenta
sumpserit, qui Baias uiderit (‘if it is right for me to defend a man who has turned
down no party invitation, who has been in gardens, who has used perfume, who
has set eyes on Baiae’, 27); cuius in hortos, domum, Baias iure suo libidines om-
nium commearent (‘into gardens, house, and place at Baiae the lusts of all freely
came’, 38); and finally in chapter 49, a climax in Cicero’s account of the life of
love:

Si quae non nupta mulier domum suam patefecerit omnium cupiditati palamque sese in
meretricia uita conlocarit, uirorum alienissimorum conuiuiis uti instituerit, si hoc in urbe,
si in hortis, si in Baiarum illa celebritate faciat, …, cum hac si qui adulescens forte fuerit,
utrum hic tibi, L. Herenni, adulter an amator, expugnare pudicitiam an explere libidinem
uoluisse uideatur?34
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��
32 ‘You are celebrating the divinities of the Etruscan river and the yielding water is driven back
by the leisurely movements of your hand.’ For Tuscus and Etruscus referring to the Tiber when
applied to water, cf. e.g. Horace, Carm. 1.2.14, Ovid, Met. 14.615, Fast. 1.500, 5.628, 6.714, Ibis 138.
Navarro Antolín 1996 is misled by his concentration on Martial as a source for Lygdamus, and
thinks the reference is to a spa.
33 ‘You have gardens by the Tiber carefully placed where all the young men go to swim; so you
can set up an affair any day — why are you troubling one who rejects you?’
34 ‘If an unmarried woman has opened her house to the lusts of all and shown herself openly
to be living the life of a prostitute, and started holding parties with men with whom she has no
family connexion, if she does this in the city, in her gardens, in the famous hotspot at Baiae …,

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The evocation of the pro Caelio through these two significant places seems to
mark an acknowledgement that Cicero’s depiction of Clodia’s world is founda-
tional for the elegiac lover, but one from which Lygdamus himself is excluded. A
further point is that his two descriptions of swimming recall a couplet from Prop-
ertius’ poem about Baiae, 1.11.11–12:

atque utinam mage te remis confisa minutis

paruula Lucrina cumba moretur aqua, 10
aut teneat clausam tenui Teuthrantis in unda
alternae facilis cedere lympha manu,
quam uacet alterius blandos audire susurros
molliter in tacito litore compositam.35

Propertius there pictures Cynthia’s possible activities when staying at the resort,
so when Lygdamus calls the water of the Tiber sacris Baiarum proxima lymphis he
nicely positions his imitation (as I take it to be) within the elegiac sequence.

Sulpicia (3.8–18)
Sulpicia is the central figure of poems 3.8–18 in the Tibullian corpus, in company
with a beloved called Cerinthus. She is usually treated as the author of the shorter
poems 13–18, with the more elegiac 8–12 regarded as the work of an amicus or
imitator. But she is the ‘I’ figure in 9 and 11, and might easily be taken as the writer
of 10, 12, and perhaps even 8, though there her beauty is praised in a way that is
hard to read as self-observation. Here I shall simply treat the sequence as a group
to be read together. As Lygdamus upsets elegy’s conventions by supposing a
lover who wishes to be a husband, so Sulpicia inverts the norms by making the
expressive lover female.
Sulpicia is implicitly set in the city in 3.8, on the occasion of the Matronalia
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(like Lygdamus in 3.1); and her presence in the city is essential to the argument
of 3.9, where she regrets that Cerinthus is absent in the countryside hunting, fan-
tasizes about joining him, and curses any girl who sets out to seduce him in

��
if some young man has spent time with her, do you think him an adulterer or a lover, Lucius
Herennius, that he has tried to lay siege to chastity or just to assuage his desire?’
35 ‘Would that you (i.e. Cynthia) might rather be occupied with a dinky little boat trusting in
tiny oars on the Lucrine lake, or that you be held enclosed by the fine water of Teuthras yielding
easily to one arm, then the other, than that elegantly resting on the silent shore you have the
time to listen to the charming whispers of another man.’

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 Place and Meaning in Tibullus, Lygdamus, Sulpicia � 79

Sulpicia’s absence: this plays effectively with patterns set up in separation poems
such as Propertius 1.11 (where Cynthia is in Baiae, as we have seen) and 2.19
(when she is in the country, where he heads too, with the intention of hunting for
a few days before he joins her). In 3.10 Sulpicia is ill, in an unspecified place, but
with access to a temple of Phoebus when she recovers; similarly in 3.12 she is
heading to a temple of Juno to celebrate her birthday. Such scenes apparently
imply presence in Rome.
The most striking use of place in the Sulpicia sequence comes in the pair 3.14
and 3.15: in the first she recounts with dread how her relative, Messalla, is drag-
ging her to the country for her birthday:

Inuisus natalis adest, qui rure molesto

et sine Cerintho tristis agendus erit.
dulcius urbe quid est? an uilla sit apta puellae
atque Arretino frigidus amnis agro?
iam, nimium Messalla mei studiose, quiescas; 5
non36 tempestiuae saepe, propinque, uiae.
hic animum sensusque meos abducta relinquo
arbitrio quam uis non sinit37 esse meo.38

Unfortunately the text of these poems is rather corrupt: the version above is that
found in Postgate’s generally sensible OCT. He accepts two readings not in the
oldest MS A. In 6 neu tempestiuae is transmitted: a negative is needed (Sulpicia
does not think the journey ‘timely’), but neither a connexive nor a jussive are ap-
propriate. tempestiuus occurs 9 times in Augustan poetry, never negated; intem-
pestiuus appears 8 times in Ovid. We might therefore prefer intempestiuae (tenta-
tively suggested in Lenz’s apparatus) over non tempestiuae. And in 8 quam uis …
sinit is Statius’ conjecture for the transmitted quamuis … sinis; although quamuis
cannot be right — there is nothing concessive in the sense of this line — Messalla
looks a far more natural subject than the conjectured uis: Sulpicia is subject to
the authority of the paterfamilias rather than ‘force’. I suggest that a better con-
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jecture would be quam tu … sinis (‘I whom you do not allow to be under my own
control’): this gives the accusative the sentence lacks as subject of esse, and tu,

��
36 non recc.: neu A.
37 quamuis A: quam uis Statius: quoniam G; sinit Statius: sinis A.
38 ‘A hateful birthday is imminent, which will have to be spent in the troubling countryside and
without Cerinthus. What is sweeter than the city? Is a villa suitable for a girl, and the chill river
in the territory of Arezzo? Please relax now, Messalla, too concerned for my own good: journeys
are often not timely, uncle. If I am led away I leave behind here my mind and consciousness,
whom force does not allow to be under my own control.’

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 80 � S.J. Heyworth

in its contrast with quam and meo, helps bring out Messalla’s role in showing
Sulpicia how little is the control that she has over her own life.
In 4 Heinsius’ Arnus for amnis is tempting: sequences of minims are regularly
confused and names of rivers glossed by amnis in annotated MSS. In 6 the vague
truism ‘journeys are untimely’ looks out of place, especially when generalized
further by saepe; Unger’s saeue gets rid of that problem, but only at the cost of
creating an excessively aggressive address to Messalla, particularly odd after the
more understanding mei studiose in 5. I conjecture intempestiua est ista … uia
(‘this journey of yours is not timely’), supposing that false word division pro-
duced the plural tempestiuae and led to further corruption. My alternative text
would thus read as follows:

Inuisus natalis adest, qui rure molesto

et sine Cerintho tristis agendus erit.
dulcius urbe quid est? an uilla sit apta puellae
atque Arretino frigidus Arnus agro?
iam, nimium Messalla mei studiose, quiescas: 5
intempestiua est ista, propinque, uia.
hic animum sensusque meos abducta relinquo
arbitrio quam tu non sinis esse meo.

The opening couplet (like 3.9) alludes to Propertius 2.19, notably the opening cou-
plet of that poem:

Etsi me inuito discedis, Cynthia, Roma,

laetor quod sine me deuia rura coles.39

Here it is not only the male lover who is discomfited by the absence of the puella
in the countryside: Sulpicia is herself unwilling to go. sine Cerintho matches sine
me (also used by Propertius at 1.8.32, of another potential departure, to be dis-
cussed below). As we have seen, rural life plays a major part in Tibullian elegy;
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here it is summarily rejected. Contrasts with Ovid, Amores 2.16.33–40 effectively

bring out the unorthodox viewpoint adopted by Sulpicia:

at sine te, quamuis operosi uitibus agri

me teneant, quamuis amnibus arua natent,
et uocet in riuos currentem rusticus undam, 33
frigidaque arboreas mulceat aura comas,
non ego Paelignos uideor celebrare salubres,

��
39 ‘Although you leave Rome against my will, Cynthia, I am glad it is the out-of-the-way coun-
tryside that you will frequent without me’.

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 Place and Meaning in Tibullus, Lygdamus, Sulpicia � 81

non ego natalem, rura paterna, locum –

sed Scythiam Cilicasque feros uiridesque Britannos,
quaeque Prometheo saxa cruore rubent.40 40

Ovid presents the cool climate of Sulmo as potentially delightful; so too Horace,
at Epistles 1.15.9 speaks of frigida rura — the context is about the search for a
healthy location. Verses 3–4 of Sulpicia’s poem imply that Messalla (or other
members of the family) have been doing the same for the villa near Arezzo. But
as the surrounding poems confirm, Sulpicia is non frigida uirgo (Ovid, Am. 2.1.5);
understandably she finds no attraction in cool weather when what she feels and
enjoys is the heat of desire, as described by Ovid in another couplet of 2.16 (11–
12):

at meus ignis abest — uerbo peccauimus uno:

quae mouet ardores est procul; ardor adest.41

The following poem, 3.15, moves the story on:

Scis iter ex animo sublatum triste puellae?42

natali Romae iam licet43 esse suo.44

��
40 ‘But as I’m not with you, though I am amid farms busy with vines, though the fields swim
with streams, and the countryman summons running water into the channels, and a chill breeze
soothes the leaves in the trees, I do not seem to be living in the healthy climate of the Paeligni,
nor in my birthplace, the country of my forefathers, but Scythia, among the fierce Cilicians and
green-painted Britons, and the rocks red with the blood of Prometheus’.
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41 ‘My fire is absent — I made a mistake over a single word: what causes the heat is absent; the
heat itself is here’. More generally for frigidity set in contrast to the erotic, cf. Ovid, Ars 3.70
frigida deserta nocte iacebis anus, Ep. 19.69 cur ego tot uiduas exegi frigida noctes?; Horace, Carm.
1.1.25–6.
42 It is not immediately clear whether to punctuate with a question mark or not. Editors do so
at Ovid, Amores 1.8.23 scis here te, mea lux, iuueni placuisse beato? (at the start of the lena’s
speech); but not elsewhere when sequences begin with Scis, including Prop. 2.22.1–2. However,
if we keep necopinanti nunc tibi forte uenit in 4, that implies uncertainty about the state of Cer-
inthus’s information; I therefore retain the usual question mark.
43 iam licet F: non sinet A.
44 suo recc.: tuo AF, which removes the connexion with 3.14 (where verse 2 works if the refer-
ence is to Sulpicia’s birthday, but not for Cerinthus’s). Alternative possibilities are meo
(Huschke) and tuae (recc.).

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 82 � S.J. Heyworth

omnibus ille dies nobis natalis agatur,

qui necopinanti nunc tibi forte venit.45

Again in this quatrain there are a number of linguistic or textual difficulties. In

verse 1 ex animo, literally ‘from the mind/spirit’, also has the idiomatic sense ‘sin-
cerely’.46 Lyne (2007, 357) compares Plautus, Casina 23 eicite ex animo curam
atque alienum aes (‘cast anxiety and debt from your heart’), but curam (to which
aes alienum is attached by zeugma) works far more naturally with ex animo, and
there is no equivalent to puellae, which without ex animo would function as a
dative of (dis)advantage. I therefore suspect that ex animo has replaced an epithet
for puellae; the most obvious substitute would be exanimi (or exanimae). For this
epithet of the emotionally distraught see Ovid, Amores 1.7.35 exanimis artus et
membra trementia uidi (‘I saw her body lifeless and her limbs trembling’; Vergil,
Aen. 4.672 (Anna) audiit exanimis; they refer to a moment, not a continuing state,
but the hyperbole would effectively echo Sulpicia’s phrasing at 3.14.7 animum
sensusque meos abducta relinquo. Such revisiting of the language and themes of
the previous poem can be seen also in iter … triste, which picks up on tristis
(3.14.2) and uia(e) (6).
In omnibus … nobis (3), the relevance of ‘all’ has puzzled critics, but no one
seems to have suggested the obvious substitution utrique (‘each’). For the pros-
ody, cf. Ov. Am. 3.1.64 uos ūtramque rogamus, Ars 2.683 ūtrumque and frequently
ūtrăque (e.g. Prop. 2.25.44 ūtrăque forma rapit, 4.11.32); for ūtrique itself Statius,
Theb. 7.468, 11.150. The word is elided at Vergil, Geo. 3.33; Prop. 3.9.53; [Tib.]
3.7.176 utroque idem. The apposition, though it might have seemed odd enough
to provoke the gloss or interpolation omnibus, is found elsewhere in elegy: Tibul-
lus 1.6.86 nos, Delia, amoris / exemplum cana simus uterque coma (‘may we each
be a white-haired example of love’), Ovid, Amores 3.1.61 per uos utramque.
After natali in 2 and ille dies, natalis is superfluous, and pointlessly so when
we need something to express how the day is to be spent. Baehrens’ tam laetus is
one possible reading; Tränkle 1990 accepts genialis (‘joyful’, but hinting at the
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visit of the genius or Iuno). The conjecture appears in the 1481 Vincenza edition
(as well as some late MSS); its author presumably drew on Juvenal 4.66–7 genialis
agatur / iste dies (‘let this day [on which the turbot is presented] be marked by a
party’), which nicely illustrates the use of an adverbial adjective in such a phrase.

��
45 ‘Do you know that the grim journey has been taken from your girl’s heart? Now it is possible
for her to be in Rome on her birthday. Let that natal day be passed by us all, which now perhaps
comes to you against your expectations’.
46 Tränkle 1990, 310–11 ineffectually explores this possibility.

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 Place and Meaning in Tibullus, Lygdamus, Sulpicia � 83

The final verse offers an unorthodox usage of forte, which is frequent in the
elegists after si and ne, and regular in past narrative, but hard to fit into this con-
text. However, it is no more attractive to write necopinata … forte (‘by unexpected
chance’; though Tränkle 1990 prints this, elegy does not use oblique cases of fors
as a functional noun), nor Heyne’s necopinata … sorte (‘by unexpected circum-
stance’), partly because of the significant allusion to Tibullus 1.9.43 (of his efforts
bringing Pholoe to Marathus) saepe insperanti uenit tibi munere nostro (‘often
through our help she came to you when you didn’t expect it’): for Sulpicia the
birthday encounter depends on chance, not another’s gift.
In 3.14 the combination of rus (1) and uilla (3) evokes Tibullus 2.3.1: Rura
meam, Cornute, tenent uillaeque puellam (‘The countryside and a villa have re-
ceived my girl, Cornutus’).47 In 3.14.3 dulcius urbe quid est? (‘what is more pleas-
ant than the city?’) reprises Propertius 1.8.31–2, where Cynthia too has rejected
travel without Propertius:

illi carus ego et per me carissima Roma

dicitur, et sine me dulcia regna negat.48

Once again Sulpicia’s sine Cerintho recalls a model. The relationship between
3.14, in which a journey is threatened, and 3.15, in which the idea is abandoned,
precisely reprises that between Propertius 1.8A and 1.8B. Though sine and dulcius
are found in the first of the imitative pair, the name of Rome is saved for the sec-
ond poem, and Sulpicia’s expression of the joy of staying in the city. For her, as
for the male elegists, this is her proper home.49

��
47 The rustic tone of uilla is also shown by usages at Ecl. 1.82 (only here in Vergil), Met. 8.684
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Baucis and Philemon (only otherwise in the Met. at 1.295, during the Flood) and Fasti (only at
4.695 of the rustic house at Carseoli ‘held up by a prop’). Something grander is implied, however,
at times in Horace (e.g. Epod. 1.29–30), and at Ovid, ex Ponto 1.8.70. Most suggestive among the
poetic uillae is Catullus 44 O funde noster, whose uilla (7) he uses to throw off the cold (gravedo
frigida, 13; frigus, 20) acquired through reading Sestius’ frigid speech against Antius.
48 ‘To her I am dear, and thanks to me Rome is said to be the dearest place in the world, and
she says that without me no kingdom would be pleasant.’
49 My interest in Lygdamus and Sulpicia was re-awakened by Laurel Fulkerson’s presence in
Oxford in 2014–15, working towards Fulkerson 2017, and the seminar that we organized together.
A first version of this paper was delivered at the meeting of the Augustan Poetry Réseau in Flor-
ence, in November 2016: I am grateful to the organizers (Mario Citroni, Mario Labate, Gianpiero
Rosati), and to the participants generally, especially Melanie Möller, who spoke on Tibullus 2
(deliberately given little attention here).

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Uppsala.
Copyright © 2018. Walter de Gruyter GmbH. All rights reserved.

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