Iulia Balbilla

Iulia Balbilla accompanied the emperor Hadrian and his wife, Sabina Augusta, as they travelled up the Nile to Egyptian Thebes in November 130 ce . Her precise status in the group is unclear, but she commemorated the imperial visit by inscribing four poems—a total of fifty-four lines—in Greek on the left leg of the Memnon colossus. The colossus had become a site for sacred tourism a century earlier because of a mysterious sound that emanated from the stones each morning; it was covered with Greek and Latin inscriptions left behind by visitors announcing that they had “heard Memnon.” Balbilla wrote her poems in an archaizing Aeolic dialect and style that have been compared to that used by Sappho, although the poems’ elegiac metre and content are quite different from those of her archaic predecessor. While documenting the miraculous voice, Balbilla also alluded to Hadrian’s royal power, Sabina Augusta’s beauty, the colossus’s complex history, and her own noble ancestry.