Definition: Sulpicia appears to have been the author of some of the elegies attributed to the Roman poet Tibullus, whom Quintilian thought was the most refined of the Roman elegists. The poetry attributed to Sulpicia is erotic, some dealing with her love for a man named Cerinthus. Scholars had thought that Tibullus had donned the persona of a woman to write the Sulpicia elegies.
In her poems, her persona says she is the daughter "of a Servius (16.4) with property in Etruria (14.4), and that a Messalla is her kinsman." (Lowe, p. 197) This may mean that she was the daughter of Messalla's sister and the granddaughter of Servius Sulpicius Rufus who was consul in 51 B.C. Messalla was a patron of the arts in the Augustan era whose poets included Ovid, Tibullus and Sulpicia.
Source: "Sulpicia's Syntax", by N. J. Lowe The Classical Quarterly 1988.
