Tibullus – “amicus Sulpiciae”? Hypothetical Considerations

Abstract

Horacy seems to be the literary authority for Tibullus, and his cantos, especially I, 33 and III 12, might have suggested him the idea of showing the emotional relations between various subjects and protagonists. As a poeta doctus, observing the axioms of alexandrine poetics, he tackles the subjects (e.g. homosexual), interests (e.g. rustic), and especially composition rules (e.g. variatio) that were present in it. Despite his own biography he plays the role of a poor lover, alien to all military actions. He stresses his status of a poet that connects him to Lygdamus and Sulpicia, his literary creations, independent of their real models. Both Lygdamus and Sulpicia speak according to the elegiac convention, and the concurrence of motifs, imaging, and the style of Book III and the previous Books may be considered self-paraphrases. Also Panaegyricus Messalae may be an exceptional and marginal attempt to write something in a different genre, although one that would have compositional roots in the whole of Book III, with its construction analogous to the two previous ones, and also signed with the poet’s name. It is not different authors, but impersonating different egos and quoting utterances stylized in various ways that materialize the principle of variatio. For readers who always expect the author and the egos in his poetry to have the same biography the idea has proven too difficult even today. Hence multiplying the authors and the constant identifying of their biographies.