They are followed in the collection by a further group of six short elegies ostensibly written by Sulpicia herself describing the same affair.
The speaker (evidently Sulpicia) begins by begging the wild boar to spare her young man, who has gone hunting, and asks the god of love, Amor, to protect him.
Meanwhile, she begs him to remain chaste, like the hunting goddess Diana, and prays that any girl who tries to seduce him may be torn to pieces by the wild animals.
The speaker addresses the god of healing, Apollo, and begs him to come and cure the girl's illness; he asks him not to torment her young man, who is saying countless prayers for her.
On her birthday, the docta puella ("learned girl", i.e. Sulpicia) has dressed herself up in honour of the goddess Juno (but secretly to please her young man).
Because of the similarity of consonants (c, r, n, t),[7] as well as the metrical equivalence of the two names, and the resemblance between Greek κέρας keras "horn" and Latin cornu "horn", it has been suggested that Cerinthus may be the same as the friend, Cornutus, to whom Tibullus addresses a birthday poem (Tibullus 2.2), as well as a longer poem (2.3).
[8] The close verbal echoes between 2.2 and some of the poems in the Garland (see below) are also suggestive that the works are in some way connected and that Cornutus and Cerinthus are the same person.
[9] However, the question is made more complicated by the fact that Horace, in Satire 1.2.81, addresses a young man called Cerinthus, advising him that it is safer to have sex with a freedwoman than a rich lady.
Since book 1 of the Satires was written about 35 BC, it seems unlikely that Horace's Cerinthus is the same as Tibullus's Cornutus, despite the similarity of the situation.
Jacqueline Fabre-Serris similarly points out the many words shared in common between 3.9 and Virgil's Eclogue 10, Tibullus 1.4 (lines 49-50), and Propertius 2.19.
[14][15] Despite such arguments, several recent critics, such as Tränkle (1990), Holzberg (1998), and Maltby (2021), have supported the idea that the poems of book 3 are not by Tibullus and his contemporaries but pseudepigrapha, written many years later.
For example, in his review of Trānkle, J. L. Butrica writes: "conceivably (Tränkle) is right in all his contentions, but it is still possible to believe that these poems are precisely what they seem to be, a celebration of Messalla's consulship and the love-poetry of family members."