Sulpicia's poems are the only literary texts by a female preserved from ancient Rome. Only recently, however, have scholars acknowledged Sulpicia's authorship. Little is known about Sulpicia's life. She wrote towards the end of the first century BC and most probably belonged to her uncle Messalla's literary circle along with Tibullus and Ovid.

In her poems, Sulpicia proclaims her love for Cerinthus and, in doing so, she articulates the female response to the male gaze. The leading suffering throughout her corpus is not the one provoked by the absence of reciprocated love -- as in the male elegiacs --, but the one caused by the panoptic gaze of her male counterparts.