Sulpicia, the only Roman poetess whose work is still extant and well authenticated, lived in the time of the Emperor Domitian. She came of a famous patrician family, many members of which had been able men of affairs in their time. She was a great and highly respected friend of the poet Martial, to whose two epigrams on herself and her husband we are indebted for almost all that we know of this talented woman. Her husband's name was Calenus; and with him she lived for fifteen years, in a felicity of reciprocated conjugal affection which, notwithstanding the degeneracy of the age, seems to have been ideal. Martial bears testimony not only to her surpassing ability as a votary of the poetic muse, but also to the fact that in her life and character she exemplified a purity such as would beautify any age or society. There is in existence but one poem known to have been written by Sulpicia; it was called forth by an act of tyranny which she rebuked with as much beauty as spirit. During the reign of Domitian, the philosophers were banished from Rome by edict of the emperor. Those against whom this measure was particularly directed were of the Stoic school; this fact helps to explain the cause of their expulsion and also the poem which Sulpicia wrote upon the occasion. Their tenets inculcated an independence of thought and manner which was entirely at variance with that servility which could allow the people to rest peacefully under the despotism of such a ruler as was Domitian. The philosophers were considered, and probably justly so, a menace to the government of the tyrant. Whether Sulpicia was directly connected with these people and whether she was included in the edict of banishment, we do not know; in any case, it is quite clear that her sympathies were entirely with the expelled philosophers. Her satire on this incident bewails the weakness that had evidently fallen upon the Roman race, causing men to submit so easily to such tyranny as that to which her friends were subjected. She asks if "the Father of the Gods" is about to allow the Romans to revert to primeval barbarism, "to stoop again to acorns and the pure stream"; or if he has forsaken them for the care of other nations. She declares that "adversity alone is salutary for a State," "for when the love of country urges them to defend themselves by arms, and to regain their wives, held prisoners with their household gods, they combine like wasps when their home and citadel is assaulted." Then she implores her divine patroness that at least her husband may not be unwilling to abandon this inglorious ease and to leave Rome and its vicinity, since all the good and estimable have been driven from it. The poem is a noble, high-spirited production; and it proves Sulpicia to have been a woman of extraordinary intelligence and a fearless exponent of principles and ideas which the majority of men in her time found it more convenient to forget.