By Liv Smith, Staff Writer
On Tuesday, Oct. 21, the College hosted Dr. Erin Hanses of Penn State University for a lecture about women in antiquity held in the Joseph Theater. The event was organized by the Ancient Greek and Roman Studies Department, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department and the English Department of Gettysburg College.
Hanses is an assistant teaching professor at the Penn State Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, as well as that of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Classics from Harvard University and her PhD in Classics from Fordham University.
Associate Professor Rachel Lesser, chair of the ancient Greek and Roman studies at Gettysburg College, introduced Hanses as “an accomplished teacher who has taught a wide range of courses in Latin language and literature, and in ancient Greek and Roman mythology and civilization, as well as a Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course called ‘Sex, Gender in the Body.’” She added that Hanses was also the recipient of the Family Teaching Award at Penn State University in 2024.
After Lesser’s introduction, Hanses began her lecture, titled “Smart Girls,” to discuss the female Roman poet, Sulpicia, who, according to Hanses, was “one of the few women from the ancient Roman world whose writings appear to have survived.”
Hanses told the audience that she sought to explain the different details, identity and existence of Sulpicia “because claims that she was a woman who wrote poetry, or even that she was a woman at all, are certainly not without their scholarly detractors.”
Following this, Hanses wanted to “problematize the process of recovering Sulpicia and constructing any sort of biography in acknowledgment of the fact that seeing her as a woman who is lost to time, who needs to be rescued, inevitably limits us to what we want her to be.”
Hanses then explained that she coined her lecture as “Smart Girls” in reference to Sulpicia’s persona, ‘docta puella,’ and other female characters of the genre of Roman love elegy. She acknowledged that the identity of Sulpicia has never been confirmed, which she claimed to have contributed to her investigation of the poet.
Hanses told the audience that her interrogation of who Sulpicia was in regard to this identity would be conducted through critical phenomenology, namely in the poems written by Sulpicia and poems that mentioned Sulpicia, so as to “offer all of the possibilities of the who or the whether of this poet’s existence, leaving room for all genders, for the freeborn, the freed and the enslaved to be Sulpicia.”
According to Hanses, Sulpicia is not a known individual, rather a persona and narrator, as well as a focus, of 11 poems written in the genre of Roman love elegy, though Sulpicia “is often identified as a particular, real, Roman woman.”
Furthermore, these poems were survived by and used to supplement the works of a male Roman love elegist, Tibullus, which consisted of references to Sulpicia.
Many of the poems, as explained by Hanses, are heavily contested as to who could have written these poems; perhaps written by a multitude of individuals, or a man or woman, which was a central point made by Hanses.
Another point that Hanses made was in reference to the known persona of Sulpicia, ‘docta puella,’ which offered many different translations and meanings, with Hanses claiming that this term is not something positive, rather derogatory “and a bit belittling as something that’s a commentary on a young woman who is under male power,” and as Hanses continued, “is why I offer Smart Girls.”
Additionally, Hanses explained that Sulpicia is portrayed and self-acclaimed to be a ‘learned girl,’ and that this was a point to note because “Never in elegy do we see a learned girl calling herself a learned girl, because of course, she can’t,” as it was the “men who are traditionally the ones in Roman society able to judge who is learned and who is not.”
Sulpicia, then, “distills for us the power dynamics inherent in elegy, specifically because she subverts them,” which led Hanses to investigate other female personae in Roman love elegy.
Hanses explained that it was the scholarly divide over Sulpicia’s identity that led her to employ critical phenomenology as she wanted “to use this to read the poems and to consider the questions of the ‘who’ of Sulpicia.”
Lastly, Hanses presented a case study in which she explained that critical phenomenology allowed for her to conduct a closer reading and analysis of Sulpicia’s poems, which in turn, aided in her approach to discovering not the ‘who’ of Sulpicia, but “the whether of the existence of a poet, someone who wrote these works.”
After concluding her lecture, Hanses opened the floor for members of the audience to ask questions.
The lecture was then followed up by a reception held just outside Breidenbaugh 201, where audience members were given refreshments and able to converse with Hanses further.
