Sulpicia has been tentatively identified as the granddaughter of Cicero's friend Servius Sulpicius Rufus, whose son of the same name married Valeria, sister of Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, an important patron of literature who also launched the career of Ovid.
Sulpicia's surviving work consists of six short elegiac poems (3.13–18), which have been preserved as part of a collection of poetry, book 3 of the Corpus Tibullianum, initially attributed to Tibullus.
[3][5][6] In an overview of Sulpician criticism, Alison Keith described the logic of Hubbard's article as "tortuous" and also highlights problems in Holzberg and Habinek's attempts to efface female authorship.
[8] Laurel Fulkerson, in her 2017 commentary on the Appendix Tibulliana,[9] presents arguments on both sides of the debate and concludes that, while the question cannot be answered based on the existing evidence, “much is gained, and little lost, in treating the poetry of Sulpicia as an authentically recovered female voice from antiquity”.
[11] While academics traditionally regarded Sulpicia as an amateur author, this view was challenged by Santirocco in an article published in 1979,[12] and subsequently the literary merit of this collection of poems has been more fully explored.
Calling him "my light" (mea lux), Sulpicia tells her lover that she has never done anything so foolish as she did the previous night when she refused to sleep with him for fear of making her love to him too obvious.