A virtually undiscovered poet, her work long buried among a man's less talented verses, will next month make her debut in English letters in her own right.

Take a bow, Sulpicia. The recognition has come slightly late for her. Yet her voice is unmistakably modern: direct, impassioned and unstaunchably erotic as she tries to talk her lover into bed:

Let each of us be bound with a tight bond

No future day shall break. The young man wishes

The same things I do, but doesn't want to

Blurt it out too openly.

And she berates her uncle Messala for coming between them.

Messala is much better known than his niece. GCSE students will recognise him as the character in Julius Caesar who tells Brutus of Cassius's death.

Even in Shakespeare's time, he was antique. He fought at the battle of Philippi in 42BC, surviving to become a literary patron in the reign of the emperor Augustus.

Sulpicia's poems have lain almost hidden to a general readership for more than 2,000 years. Now they are to be published together, for the first time in Britain, as the only works by a woman to have survived from all the literature of ancient Rome.

She was born before Jesus Christ, in the same generation and private literary circle as male poets Ovid, Catullus, Horace whose names lived down the ages.

No known image or biography of her exists. All we have is her father's first name, Servius. She is known only through eight love elegies incorporated, without definite attribution, in four volumes left by a male elegiac poet from her circle, Tibullus. Six poems are now regarded as hers and two more as possibles.

The 19th century German and English scholars who established the texts of classical literature "thought Tibullus wrote them for her", John Heath-Stubbs, the English classical poet who has done the new translation, said yesterday.

"They knew little, one feels, about women. They were reluctant to believe that any woman could - or should - write poems as passionately outspoken as these are," he said. "They would have preferred her to be cosy like Elizabeth Barrett Browning."

These were the years, Heath-Stubbs added, in which inhibited dons insisted the Greek lesbian poet Sappho "was simply the headmistress of a select finishing school for well-connected young ladies on the isle of Lesbos".

Even so, the 19th century German scholar CG Heyne called Sulpicia's fragments within the Tibullus "a marvel - the most beautiful relic of the whole of Latinity". Another, Emil Bahrens, noted the difference in style from Tibullus, concluding the sections "could only have been written by a poet of the first rank".

Tibullus's reputation waned, with only two British translations of his work in the 20th century. But Sulpicia's star has begun to rise, with most scholars and classical societies accepting that her poems are separate and distinctive.

"It's wonderful stuff," Denis Feeney, tutor in classical language and literature at New College, Oxford, said yesterday. "People are always very surprised and knocked back to find that there is somebody writing as she does, although she still gets scooped into modern editions of Tibullus. The more general readers she gets, the better."

Oliver Lyne, professor of classical languages and literature at Oxford, said: "The poems which we most plausibly attribute to her are very affecting and, I think, convincing. More and more people are writing about her."

In the new volume, to be published on July 1, Heath-Stubbs has included one poem which he is convinced was written either by Sulpicia or by Ovid. In it, she imagines interrupting a wild boar hunt, a distraction of her Greek lover, Cerinthus:

I'd lain in your arms beside the tackle,

Then let the boar come up to the nets indeed -

He can go scot-free if he doesn't disturb our lovemaking.

But without me, forget about sex.

The new book leaves one paradox unsolved. A century after Sulpicia, the Roman author Martial praised a woman of that name and period as having been a model, docile wife.

"There may therefore have been two Sulpicias", Heath-Stubbs writes in his preface. "Or - a rather depressing thought - Tibullus's friend may have dwindled into respectability in her later years."

Love has come at last. The very idea

That I'd hide it makes me more ashamed

Than openly confessing. Won over

By my Muse's supplication, Cythera's Goddess

Has brought him to me, placed him in my arms.

What Venus promised, she has fulfilled.

Let them tattle who have missed their chance.

I'll not entrust the news to a sealed letter

That none may read of it before my lover does.

I loathe to wear a mask in deference

To what the world may say. Let everyone hear

That we have come together - each of us

Deserving the other.

Sulpicia

• Poems of Sulpicia. Hearing Eye, 99 Torriano Avenue, London NW5 2RX (£6 plus postage).