Nothing is known of the author other than what he tells us in the dedication of his Institutiones Oratoriae, that he was father-in-law of one Marcus Silo, who had asked him to write a compendium of rhetoric for him. In doing this, he followed the teaching of ‘my masters’.  He mentions among them especially Zeno, though he says that he has treated his sources freely. At one point later, he says that on the topic of praescriptio he has parted company from Zeno and translated Marcomannus word for word. These names give only a vague terminus post quem for Sulpicius, even if the generally accepted identifications are correct. Marcomannus, perhaps in the fourth century AD, wrote a lost commentary, presumably in Latin, on Cicero’s De Inventione that was drawn on by other Roman writers on rhetoric. Much earlier, Zeno of Kition, who worked in Athens in the second century AD, had written, among other things, a lost book in Greek on status-lore. The Greek background is confirmed by some close parallels between Sulpicius and the little work by Cyrus, On the differentiation of issues (Rhet. Gr. 8. 387-99 Walz). [M. Winterbottom].