“Gender and Genre Play in the Copa”

In this talk I look at the literary texture and allusions in the Copa, its mix of high and low vocabulary and culture, and show how Surisca’s gender and status color the poem’s sophisticated presentation of the garden space. The copareplaces and unmans (24 sed non et uasto est inguine terribilis) Priapus’ usual masculine control over the garden (see Richlin 1992) and in the process reverses many earlier literary tropes. Rather than warning people away from the garden, she issues an invitation. The sexy copa and her call to pleasure in her salax taberna represents not only transgressive and low social behavior, but also perhaps the debased literary style often associated with the metaphor of the meretrix (Tac. Dial. 26).

The Copa offers a depiction of a foreign female owner or employee of a tavern, Surisca the copa, who issues an invitation to a passer-by to join her in enjoying the pleasures of her tavern and garden. An ecphrasis describes the adjoining garden (7-24), which contrasts in its sophistication and refinements, both material and literary, with the lowly tavern setting, recalling the literary locus amoenus in its details of shade, grotto, wine, flowers, stream, and even a nymph, suggesting it is more a literary fantasy than an actual tavern garden. Recent papers by John Henderson (2002) and Stefan Merkle (2005) have offered interpretations of the poem that engage seriously with the Copa’s dense intertextuality with Vergil and Propertius. The allusions very specifically target Propertian poems that themselves borrow from Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics. Affinities with Hellenistic epigram, most notably bucolic invitation poems (e.g. Anyte AP 9.313, APlan. 291) have also been recognized (Goodyear 1977). The low social status of the copa and the everyday, grimy world of the tavern (3 fumosa . . . taberna) stand in opposition to the bucolic literary world evoked by the description of the garden landscape in the poem. This creates a sophisticated play with a mode of ‘realism’ that critically responds to Vergil’s idealization of landscape and horticulture by offering debased versions of the pastoral locus amoenus and garden; a mode that has affinities with the satiric epigram tradition (such as the Priapea) and Petronius’ Satyricon. The disapproving reader is warned away from all such poetry that challenges in similar ways “the boundaries between serious poetry and the obscene” (Richlin 1992.10): Copa 34 a pereat, cui sunt prisca supercilia! (cf. Petron. Sat. 132.15.1, Mart. 4.14.11-12, Carmina Priapea 1.1-2). My reading aims to highlight the poem’s satirical intent, which humorously vulgarizes elegy and Vergilian bucolic.