EDITOR’S FOREWORD

            I have made the following essay publicly available in order to preserve Miss Walker’s work, and in hopes that the subject may be of interest to others. This paper was prepared as a scholarly survey of the topic at hand, and as a result Miss Walker generally refrains from incorporating value judgments about her subjects. For the modern reader, who may be less familiar with background of the Roman Civil War, it is important to keep in mind that Cicero and Caesar were great opponents in the most important struggle of the age – those who wished to preserve the system of Republican freedom as against those who sought to replace it with a dictatorship. In contrast, Vergil was primarily a poet, whose sympathies for Republican virtues embodied by Cicero’s party were tempered by his dependence for his life on Caesar’s nephew, the emperor whose reign put a final end to the Republican form of government. Such background would have been common knowledge to the audience for whom this paper was written, so only in passing does Miss Walker touch on that essential subtext.

            For example, in discussing events leading up to the divorce of Cicero and Terentia, Miss Walker notes that “Tullia [Cicero’s daughter] and Terentia implored him to follow Caesar, or, at least, to await in Italy the outcome of Caesar’s campaign in Spain. Terentia even pleaded with him in tears, it is said.” Ms. Walker does not herself draw the conclusion, but it seems obvious that Terentia’s urging that Cicero take the side of those who were out to destroy the Republic would have placed unbearable pressure on their marriage, no matter what other marital troubles may have been brewing.

            To state explicitly what is only implicit within this paper, Cicero and his party represented many of the finest aspects of Roman (and Western) civilization, Caesar and his party embodied the opposite, and Vergil, who did not participate in the Civil War, was simply an artist who conveyed the merits of the first while under the watchful eye of the second. Cicero ultimately failed in his political ambition to preserve the Republic, but he succeeded in setting a standard for resistance to dictatorship that has inspired for centuries. When George Washington staged Joseph Addison’s play “Cato” during the winter of 1777 at Valley Forge, he was endorsing to America the battle fought by Cato and Cicero against Caesar’s impending dictatorship.

            In his philosophical writings, Cicero’s efforts produced more lasting results. His speeches against the dictator’s would-be successor, Mark Antony, have been preserved as eloquent rebuttals to dictatorship, and his political writings on the nature of law, such as the following excerpt from The Republic, foreshadow those of Jefferson and Locke:

True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, though neither have any effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge. Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst penalties, even if he escapes what is commonly considered punishment.

            Cicero was not primarily a philosopher, and his efforts fell short of producing a comprehensive philosophical basis for virtue or liberty (for that, the editor would refer the reader to the work of twentieth century novelist and author Ayn Rand). And in evaluating that Caesar was able to proceed as far as he did before his death, the reader should keep in mind that he did not at first appear to be what he turned out to be, and that he had long been respectful of many traditional Roman virtues. In fact, up to the Ides of March, he had repeatedly declined the title of “king” urged on him by the more radical of his supporters. The study of the Roman Civil War provides much insight into the decay of free societies, and to the threats posed by dictatorships when free societies fail to identify and honor the philosophical underpinnings which sustain them.

            The topic here, however, is the influence of the women closest to them on the lives of these three famous Romans, and the following work provides an interesting overview of that subject.

- LMH December 29, 2004

FOREWORD

            Of the ancient Romans, the men best known today are Cicero, Caesar, and Vergil. Whether justly or not, their writings have been accepted as models of their native Latin and for nearly two thousand years have been read by all students of that language. Furthermore, the name of Caesar is familiar even to those who have not the courage to attempt the study of Latin as one of the greatest military geniuses in history; and that of Cicero, as an orator probably better known than the great Greek, Demosthenes.

            Each of the three, however, can be understood and appreciated thoroughly only by reading with increasing sympathy what he has to say in his own language, the Latin, enriched and brought to its most perfect form by Cicero as a vehicle for use in his powerful and perfect orations, and no less famous treatises. Vergil used it for the first time in a great narrative poem in dactylic hexameter. Caesar used it no less correctly for thoughts more familiar to Romans in writing the greatest of all histories of a series of military campaigns. Each was great in his own way and in his own time, and each has still his own particular influence upon the civilized world. For the very reason that their fame and influence refuse to die out, I have found it interesting to make a study of their lives. In this foreword I wish to mention certain noteworthy parallels and differences in their lives and work before proceeding to the phase with which I have dealt in my thesis, the very natural question of the women who influenced their lives.

            Since Cicero was born in 106 B.C., Caesar, in 100, and Vergil, in 70, all lived in the first century before the birth of Christ, one of the most significant periods in history because of the great religious, cultural, social, and political changes taking place.

            Each was affected by the gradual but widespread loss of faith in the Roman gods which prepared the way for the Christian era. Cicero and Caesar, most affected by current thought, became deeply skeptical, in common with the most thoughtful men of their time. Caesar, whose life was most strenuous at the last had not time to puzzle over such things, and seems to have been satisfied to believe only in “Fortuna”, his good luck. Cicero, particularly after the death of his daughter, was profoundly interested in questions about spiritual matters, and has given us in his philosophical treatises as interesting insight into his spiritual gropings. Vergil, the latest but most conservative of the three, kept his faith, it seems, and glorified the Gods in his “Aeneid”.

            In common with most educated Romans of that century, all were products of the Greek culture which had “conquered” Rome. All studied under Greek teachers; Cicero, later, in Athens; and Caesar, at Rhodes. Caesar’s oratorical powers, second among Romans only to those of Cicero, were perfected at Rhodes. Cicero’s oratory and literary productions show Greek influence and he became so interested in Greek philosophy as to be the first Roman to express in Latin the teachings of the great Greek philosophers, before then recorded only in Greek. The influence of the Greek writers upon Vergil’s work was such as to give rise to the charge, made at various times, of too great dependence upon the Greeks, especially upon Homer in the planning and writing of the “Aeneid”. That charge is made, however, only when not enough thought has been given to the fact that whatever Vergil used from the Greek he made his own and so we read in the “Aeneid” most distinctly Roman Vergil and not Homer.

            Cicero, Caesar, and Vergil each had the benefit of the best educational advantages of that day and was prepared for the same career, the public life of a Roman advocate and politician. Cicero and Caesar spent their lives as contemporaries on opposing sides in the very thick of Roman politics. Vergil was the friend of Caesar’s great heir, Augustus, but he himself retired as far as possible from public life.

            Of their private lives, which will be discussed later, it may be noted that not one of the three was either a Cincinnatus of the plow or a Nero. They lived at a time between extremes in Roman life and each reacted in a characteristic way to the changing social conditions. They were alike in two ways. Each lived a life of ease but each was free from coarse living and debauchery.

            In any period of history men of great natural abilities enhanced by culture would undoubtedly been known; but Cicero, Caesar, and Vergil lived in a time when great crises arose and influenced their lives. Caesar, impressed by the teachings of Marius and the group around him, from the beginning took the side of reform in politics against the all-powerful Senate. He seems to have seen from his entrance into public life that changes in the constitution were inevitable, and it was as a natural consequence of his insight into the situation that he finally took the government of Rome into his own hands and became the great Dictator, for whom the history of Rome from the end of the Punic wars surely prepared the way.

            The unsettled time in which he lived was not so well suited to the talents of Cicero. He was a man fitted to plead in the courts, to administer public office fairly for the good of Rome as he knew it. In the great crises, he did not see his way as clearly as did Caesar. For that reason, he has been called vacillating by critics who do not pause to think how infinitely hard it was to see the best thing for Rome while actor in those stirring scenes in the century before Christ.

            Vergil, at 26, had no part in Roman life on the Ides of March, 44 B.C., when Caesar was killed in the midst of his great reforms, or in the following year when Cicero was great and sure of himself in his unselfish opposition to the plans of Mark Antony. Vergil had already written his first great work, the Eclogues, at his home near Mantua, but it was in the time of Augustus, with the decisive battle of Actium not yet fought, that he wrote the Georgics, and did his bit for Rome when he supported the policy of Augustus in the "Aeneid".

            In the case of no one of these great Romans was his career an accident or the outcome of circumstances. Each built his life on a conscious purpose with a very definite idea from boyhood of what he wanted to be and do. Each was actuated by the driving power of a will to accomplish that purpose, and by the genius which made remarkable results possible. One question remains. In the lives and careers of these outstanding figures in the history not only of Rome but of the world, what part did women have and what influence did they exert?

Chapter I Cicero

Helvia

            To find traces of feminine influence in the life of Marcus Tullius Cicero, it is natural to turn first to the facts known of his early home life and consider what is said of his mother. There is no doubt that the impress of his childhood home near Arpinum remained with him. He was loyal to his family and to his birthplace, and his loyalty seemed to become even greater as his fame increased and he became one of the greatest figures in Rome. Probably the contrast between his early home and the life in which his manhood was spent deepened his appreciation of the worthiness of his first environment. Cicero of Arpinum he has been called because throughout his life he remained more the Arpinate and a "peregrinus" rather than one in sympathy with the lives and tastes of those of equal standing in the corrupt society of the Rome of his day. In the treatise "De Legibus", written in 52 B.C., the scene is laid at Arpinum and Cicero when his fame had been won, describes the little town near the Liris "as the background against which he wished to appear."

            We know that his mother’s name was Helvia, that she was well-born, and of the equestrian rank and sturdy stock to which her husband also belonged. Her son’s pride in his birth was shown when he wrote in “De Legibus”, “Here, descended from a very ancient race, we first saw the day. Plutarch relates as a story commonly told that a vision appeared to his nurse and foretold that she was nurturing a great blessing to all Romans. He says further that Cicero’s mother was of good family and conversation but that different origins were given for his father, also called Marcus, some saying that he was born and reared in the workshop of a fuller, others that his descent could be traced back to Tullus Atticus “who reigned with distinction among the Volsci and fought against the Romans with no small vigor.” Though his grandfather is the first member of the family about whom anything is known, most authorities are agreed that the Ciceros were farmers and had been of good position, even leaders, in Arpinum for many generations. Furthermore they were counted as knights and according to the Roman law had to be worth from $16,000 to $20,000.

            From the fact that his decedents, though many people made a joke of the name Cicero, were not only not ashamed of it but even showed pride in it, Plutarch infers that the first of the family who got the cognomen was a man of note. He accounts for the name in this way. “Cicer” in Latin means the vetch and the first Cicero had at the end of his nose a cleft or split like the cleft in the vetch.. Hannis Taylor suggests that the cognomen was derived from the cultivation of the vetch, if not from an ancestor who had a wart on his nose. He adds the statement that “Tullius originally meant a spring or rivulet.” When Marcus Tullius Cicero entered public life he was advised to change his name but replied that he would make the name famous.

            It seems that Helvia did not live to see much of “the promise or ripening powers of her son.” Probably her influence was felt only in his boyhood. Though the Romans laughed at the people of the country districts as rude and old-fashioned, it was in such simple homes as that of Cicero’s father on the Tibrenus, an affluent of the Liris in southeastern Latium, that the ancient virtues of the Roman people were still respected and preserved. We may surmise that the mother of the family still held an honored place and that Cicero’s mother helped to mold in his youth the best characteristics of her son. He himself writes in 6 B.C. of “hard work coupled with scrupulous integrity” as “the two conditions and powers with whose aid he expects to go forward to the remaining honors of public life.” There is every evidence to show that he lived up to that ideal. One writer, referring to the fact that when governor in Sicily at the time of a famine in Rome, he sent large cargoes to Rome without practicing extortion, says, “like few Roman officials” he “was capable of genuine moral enthusiasm.” It was an understood custom for Roman provincial governors to be cruel and dishonest but there is no doubt of Cicero’s honest and humane treatment of the people of Sicily in 75 B.C. and of the people of Cilicia during his proconsulship in 51 B.C. Though ready to lend and borrow and careless of his accounts, he was always honorable in money matters. Though the chief aim of his life was to gain praise and glory and to gratify his vanity, he did not stoop to win elections by large expenditures of money. He was temperate in eating and drinking. His personal morality was astonishing in an age of such licentiousness that even Cato divorced his wife for her to marry Hortensius, then received her back, a rich widow, when Hortensius died. He was true to his friends, to his home and family, to his work as orator, statesman, and writer, and to his love for Rome. I do not believe that Peterson exaggerates when he writes, “It can probably be maintained with an exceptionally high degree of likelihood that if the great Romans of his day had taken a vote to decide which one among them stood highest as a representative of unselfishness in public service, of culture, and of good breeding, the outcome would have been the same at the time when the colleagues of Themistocles took their famous vote. Each one, like a true son of Romulus, might have put himself in the first place, but he would have given the second place to Cicero.” Such a man was not an accident but should be compared to a tree which was bent the right way when it was young.

            Since Cicero’s extant correspondence does not begin until 68 B.C. when he was thirty-eight years of age, his letters contain no information about his mother. Quintus Cicero has shown his mother to have been a careful housewife and a thrifty disposition by relating in a letter to Tiro in 44 B.C. the incident of her sealing empty wine flasks to prevent the possibility of their having been emptied by servants. It is probable that she helped to build up or at least to maintain the substantial property which enabled Cicero’s father to buy a house in the Carrinae in Rome and to spend at least from October to June there in order to give his sons the advantage of studying under the best teachers, such as the Greek poet, Archias, and of acquiring that Greek culture which added to his genius enabled Cicero to mold the Latin language to the perfect form of his great prose writings.

            It was through his mother’s family that Cicero made some of his most valuable contacts in Rome. Her sister married C. Visellius Aculeo, of equestrian rank and no especial culture, but eminent in the Roman civil law, and for that reason well known to L. Licinius Crassus and Marcus Antonius who then were the foremost figures at the Roman bar. Both had profited by the Greek culture and learning, just beginning to be appreciated in Rome, and Antoninus knew the language. Cicero heard and questioned both. The sons of Aculeo and their cousin studied under such teachers as Crassus approved. Sihler says that “Crassus seems to have taken a kindly interest in studies for whose choice he had assumed a certain responsibility.” With his cousins Cicero was invited to the house of Crassus and that association must have meant much to the ambitious young student.

            Cicero’s mother was evidently not ignorant or unintelligent, and was probably ambitious for her sons, but his father seems definitely to have hoped for them to enter politics and establish senatorial families, an ambition which was Cicero’s from boyhood. The elder Cicero lived until about 67 B.C. and, an invalid in his later years, spent his time in quiet study in the villa three miles from Arpinum on the site of the home where Cicero was born. He approved of Greek culture and was interested in the past and present of Rome and must have been so much in sympathy with his son that their discussions strengthened the early impressions from which Cicero derived his love for Rome and its past, and his respect for the Republican constitution, qualities which made his political life what it was. Arpinum was too far away for the changes in Roman political life to be appreciated. People in outlying districts are always conservative and Cicero, the Arpinate, never saw the situation in Rome as Caesar saw it.

            In another way Cicero’s political life was affected by his family. His work was made harder; but his political success was finally assured by the fact that he belonged to the equestrian rank and remained loyal to those whom he called the “true Roman people.” Opposed to radical reforms, he was not popular with the masses who, moreover, accepted the preeminence of the aristocracy and were not inclined to vote for a “novus homo” for the higher magistracies in Rome. Looked down upon always by the Roman aristocracy, he had to face the united opposition of the established ruling class. Political success in Rome was not easy for a man whose family was unknown. It was Cicero’s influence with the Italian middle class which elected him quaestor, curule aedile, praetor, and consul at the earliest age allowed. It was their demand for his recall which ended his exile in 57 B.C., as soon as the active opposition of Caesar was removed, and it was his strength as their leader which made Caesar wish to have his support in 49 B.C.

Terentia

            Some time between 78 B.C. and 73 B.C., Cicero married Terentia and, in so doing, furnished a seemingly undying subject for debate for those writing upon or merely interested in the life of Cicero. The debatable question is whether Cicero or Terentia was more to be blamed for the marital troubles which ended in their divorce in 47 B.C. or early 46 B.C. The date of the marriage is not known, but this trace of it occurs in 73 B.C. that, according to Plutarch, there was mention of Cicero having Terentia’s marriage portion. It is hardly to be thought that he married before he returned home from the East in 77 B.C., having gone there to study in 79 B.C. as a matter of precaution after having opposed a favorite of Sulla in the defense of Roscius.

            Of Terentia it is known that she was well-born and possessed of a considerable fortune. If her fortune was one of her attractions, it must have been a disappointing one because she kept control of it, and exercising the privilege which Roman women were enjoying, in that changing time, of taking part in financial dealings, she had her own steward and became interested in financial enterprises which seem finally to have involved her husband’s money also. Probably her social standing was her chief attraction. Though Cicero continued to be of an “equestrian consciousness”, he was ambitious to win a high position in Rome and may have married Terentia because she was an aristocrat and had a substantial fortune as well. Her dowry of about $18,000 was not to be despised by an ambitious young man who had very little with which to begin life except his genius and a determination to win the praise and glory which he mentions in the oration “Pro Archia” as the one thing to be desired in life. His father left him the house in the Carinae in which he lived until 62 B.C. when he bought the mansion built by Crassus on the Palatine. As his father probably left him little money and as his own earnings as an advocate, depending as they seem to have done on gifts, loans, and legacies from grateful clients, must have been slow in accumulating, the dowry of Terentia should have been very acceptable. The reproach of Mr. Hannis Taylor that Cicero resented not getting sufficient financial aid while with Pompey’s army from “the wife whose independent fortune he had always enjoyed” does not seem just. No mention is made of his using Terentia’s money or of her loosening her grip upon it to aid him in any financial difficulties. Probably she was managing his property at the time with the aid of her freedman, Philotinus, whom Cicero seems to have with good reason to have distrusted. When Cicero began to improve his way of living in accordance with the idea he himself advances in his treatise on “Duty” that “a man of prominence should live in a house befitting his station,” his first purchase, the villa at Tusculum, was made with borrowed money, and, even if he had had the use of it, Terentia’s property could have meant little to Cicero who in 62 B.C. paid $150,000 for the mansion on the Palatine. Apparently he received huge sums as gifts and legacies, for he owned eight villas, at Tusculum, Formiae, Antium, Astura, Sinuessa, Cumae, Puteoli, and Pompeii, besides four lodges, as stopping places while he was traveling, the family home at Arpinum, and several houses in Rome.

            When the villas at Tusculum and Formiae were sacked by the bands of Clodius during his exile, the Senate allowed him $22,000 for the first and $11,000 for the other, neither sum having been considered sufficient by Cicero. That he made a great deal of money and that his credit was good in spite of his reckless expenditures and careless business methods we infer from his own statement in a letter to Sestius in 62 B.C., “Let me tell you I am so deep in debt as to desire to enter into a conspiracy myself. But my credit is good in the Forum.” His very carelessness in regard to finances makes it natural to suppose that Terentia acquired some control over his money rather than he over hers.

            Terentia was an ambitious woman and must have appreciated fully the possibility of the brilliant young orator’s rise to fame and power. She seems to have been interested in his political career and that may have been a bond between them until that career reached the highest point to which a Roman could attain when Cicero was elected to the consulship in 64 B.C. There are some instances of her influence upon his work but there is no evidence to show that he owed his success in the slightest degree to his wife’s influence.

            On the night of December 3, 63 B.C., after the conspirators had been put in custody, Cicero did not go to his home but deliberated at the house of a friend because that was the night of the annual rites in honor of the Bona Dea. Since Cicero was consul and the ceremonies were held at the house or a consul or a praetor, they took place at his house. In 65 B.C. a prodigium had happened to Cicero’s wife at that ritual. The sacrifice having been made, Terentia poured a libation upon the ashes. From the ashes a flame shot up, a sign that her husband would be consul in a year. Cicero was sufficiently impressed or sufficiently vain to mention the fact in a poem on his consulship. On the occasion of the ritual in 63 B.C. under the same circumstances a great flame shot up and the Vestal Virgins urged Terentia, as Plutarch says, “to go with all speed to her husband and tell him to take in hand what he had resolved on behalf of his country, for the goddess was displaying a great light to lead him to safety and honour.” He adds, “Terentia, who generally was not a woman of a mild temper nor naturally without courage, but an ambitious woman and, as Cicero himself says, more ready to share in his political perplexities than to communicate to him her domestic matters,” reported this to her husband and stimulated him against the conspirators. What part Terentia had, if any, in causing the enmity between Cicero and Clodius I shall discuss later. That her aristocratic relatives aided Cicero’s career there is no evidence. It is probable that her resentment aggravated the ill will between Cicero and Cataline, but it did not cause it. Cicero had real friends among the aristocrats but he made those friends by his own ability to attract people to him.

            There are different inferences drawn as to the influence of Terentia in Cicero’s purchase in 62 B.C. of the mansion on the Palatine, the most distinguished residential section of Rome. Plutarch says that Cicero’s chief aim was that his clients might not have far to go, but Sihler sees as other motives Cicero’s own social aspirations “which were always ahead of his purse” and, besides, those of Terentia whose birth led her to wish to live in an aristocratic neighborhood.

            We can only surmise what their relationship was until his extant letters begin in 68 B.C. Their home life seems to have been decorous and happy and there must have existed between them for many years a real affection. There is no doubt that Cicero’s conduct in his home was honorable and that his personal morality cannot be questioned. He himself said at the house of Volumnius in 46 B.C., seeing the evident captivation of Antony by the actress Cytheris, “As for me, none of these things ever affected me, not even in my youth, let alone when I am an elderly man.” He might have said the same thing of the licentious pleasures of the Romans, for a youth devoted to hard study had left him no taste for such things. His life was filled with his career as a statesman and an advocate until his exile in 58 B.C. and as an advocate and writer until 51 B.C. when he went to Cilicia as proconsul. It was a life in which Terentia could have little share and it may be surmised that they drifted apart. It seems that for many years Cicero let Terentia have her way entirely in household matters. Sihler gives as a reasonable excuse for his carelessness in his accounts that his law cases left him no time. It was probably true, also, that Cicero was too engrossed with public affairs to be seriously affected by the growing causes of unpleasantness in his family. It was not until other troubles began to fall upon him after his consulship that there is evidence of friction between him and his wife. That he showed consideration for her opinions and interests his letters prove. Terentia was a devout believer in prodigies and the predictions of the soothsayers. As late as the time of the Civil War when he was leaving Italy for Pompey’s camp, he wrote her of an illness the night before to “some god. Evidently it was Apollo or Aesculapius.” He asked that she give thanks with her customary devoutness. In his treatise “On the Nature of the Gods”, he avows himself a sceptic and could have written as he did only to please Terentia.

            In Cicero’s letters to Atticus during the eleven years from 68 B.C. until his exile in 58 B.C., there are no references which show discontent or criticism of Terentia, though he was writing very freely to an understanding friend.

            In his letters written during his exile until October 5, 57 B.C., when he met Tullia but not Terentia at Brundisium, there is unfailing evidence of his love for his family in which he always included Terentia, Tullia, and young Marcus. Allowing for the fact that his exile was a terrible blow to Cicero and that it was natural for him to draw near to his family in his time of trouble, his letters, as Taylor says, “the tenderest ever penned,” must be accepted as evidences of kindly feelings towards Terentia. One shows appreciation for the difficulties she has had to contend with and admiration for her as well as affection: “I learn that you are showing a virtue and courage surpassing belief;... Ah me! To think that a woman of your virtue, fidelity, and kindness should have fallen into such troubles on my account.” Terentia had remained in Rome, possibly from ill health and from a wish to save what could be saved from the wreck of Cicero’s fortunes. When the house on the Palatine was burned, she fled to the Temple of Vesta but Clodius forced upon her the unpleasant task of appearing in public to make required statements in regard to the property of Cicero which had been proscribed. Another letter has this evidence of a longing to see her: “Lost and afflicted as I am, why should I ask you to join me? You, a woman weak in health, worn out in mind and body.” The letter ends, “Farewell, my Terentia, my most faithful and best of wives and my dearest daughter, and Cicero, our only remaining hope.” In the four letters written to his family from exile there is the same tone of longing and affection. In one letter he expresses the wish that he had not clung to life and adds that if there is no change, his only wish is to see her again and die in her arms. At the same time he wrote to Quintus that he had been singularly fortunate in his brother, his children, and his wife.

            When he returned some cause for coolness had arisen between them. In letters after his return, he rejoices in his renewed association with Atticus, his brother Quintus, and Tullia, but does not mention Terentia in that connection. In two letters to Atticus, certain references show an immediate coldness. During the six years before Cicero went as proconsul to Cilicia, the estrangement between him and his wife must have become definite. Cicero was not happy or engrossed in public life any longer. He continued to have serious trouble with Clodius until the latter was killed by the bands of Milo in 52 B.C. The triumvirs were all powerful in the Roman world and their agreement was renewed at Lucca in 55 B.C. Cicero still had his work as an advocate but what public work he did at that time was undertaken in support of the triumvirs and his heart was not in it. During that period he did some of his most brilliant literary work. The rhetorical treatise, “De Oratore”, was published in 55 B.C. and “De Republica” in 51 B.C.

            The conditions under which he was living could easily have weakened the tie between him and Terentia. He was showing a cheerful face in the Forum; but his dissatisfaction with the political situation in Rome would have made it harder for him to endure lack of sympathy at home. And the facts we know of Terentia’s disposition indicate that lack. His letters show that she was economical, but disagreeable and hard to live with. Cicero’s regard for her superstitions points to that. She was evidently determined and thought her way best. His unfailing, but, at the last, probably perfunctory, solicitude for her health shows that her health was not good. As early as 68 B.C. she was troubled with severe rheumatism. Plutarch says that she was an ambitious woman and not of a mild temper.

Suppose her ambitions ran along other lines than Cicero’s! She had money and controlled it with increasing interest, depending on her freedman’s assistance and advice against her husband’s wishes. Such a situation could cause a divorce at any period of history. Cicero speaks of her as a good manager and as “strong of heart as any man.” Now Cicero himself was not a good manager and one of his faults was his vacillation. If Terentia, sure of herself in her small domain, showed contempt for Cicero’s lack of regularity and carelessness in regard to money, then she found his most vulnerable point, his vanity. To a man whose orations swayed his audiences, who had gained by his own genius great influence in Rome and other cities of Italy, and counted as his friends the most prominent and cultured men in the Roman world, Terentia’s criticism of his ways, and bickering with her over small matters must have been peculiarly irritating.

            Other causes of friction between them may have existed. A possible cause was Terentia’s jealousy of Cicero’s love for his daughter, which she must have realized was greater than his love for her. Terentia had a will of her own, which may have caused her to resent having to be second, even to her own child. Her jealousy may well have been greater because she herself seems to have felt no interest in Cicero’s literary work, and it was in Tullia that he found the kindred enthusiasm which he must have looked for in vain from his wife. His father, his children, and his brother are mentioned in his writings; but there is no reference to Terentia.

            Terentia on some occasions disagreed with Cicero’s brother, Quintus, and did not seem to get along well with his wife, Pomponia. Cicero loved his brother and could not have been indifferent.

            When Cicero left Rome for Cilicia in 51 B.C., he left to Atticus some supervision of his affairs but made no provision for Terentia. During the eighteen months he was away, he wrote only one letter to Terentia and that contains a reference to her fear that he had not received all her letters. It seems that she had written often to give reports of various things. That one letter, however, is warmly affectionate and he asks her to come as far to meet him as her health will permit.

            When he returned in 50 B.C., Terentia met him at Brundisium and greeted him in the Forum. Her first news was of the political situation, but there is no evidence of unpleasantness between them. In later letters he is considerate enough to take upon himself the blame for the marriage between Tullia and Dolabella, arranged by Terentia while he was in Cilicia. One cause of friction evidently was increasing, however. While he was away, Cicero believed that Philotimus, Terentia’s freedman and business adviser, had been false in his accounts in settling the affairs of Milo, whose administrator Cicero seems to have been. The distrust of Philotimus thus begun we know finally extended to Terentia, also, because she seems to have insisted on keeping the freedman against Cicero’s wishes.

            The Civil War was then at hand. On January 12, 49 B.C., Caesar crossed the Rubicon and January 17, Pompey left Rome. On January 18, Cicero, in great doubt as to the right course to pursue, secretly left Rome for his villa at Formiae. He seemed very much concerned about his family and wrote Atticus of his fear that Terentia and Tullia would be in danger in Rome. His family and that of Quintus followed him to Formiae. Tullia’s husband, Dolabella, was with Caesar. Tullia and Terentia implored him to follow Caesar, or, at least, to await in Italy the outcome of Caesar’s campaign in Spain. Terentia even pleaded with him in tears, it is said.

            At that time and after he joined Pompey’s army in Greece, Cicero’s chief concern seemed to be for the financial support of his family. His exile had dealt a heavy blow to his finances from which they probably never recovered. The estate he had been building up for twenty years was despoiled by the disorderly bands of Clodius, all his villas having been burned. After 51 B.C. his work as an advocate was over, and there seems to have been no further additions to his finances except through legacies. The money he had acquired as governor, though an honest governor, in Cilicia he had turned over to Pompey for the expenses of the Civil War. Dolabella in 48 B.C. was insisting that Tullia’s dowry be paid. Apparently his finances were at a low ebb when he left Italy, and he was not in a favorable humor to forgive the further financial embarrassment caused by Terentia’s mismanagement of his affairs.

            There seemed to be no longer any affection between them. He wrote her cold, short notes from Pompey’s camp, and, on his return to Brundisium in 47 B.C., he wrote her not to come to him, that he did not see what particular good she could do him. He spent eleven unhappy months in retirement in Brundisium before Caesar returned and received him cordially. He occupied himself with literary work and some of his most famous essays were written at that time. Tullia spent some of the time with him but he evidently did not want any consolation from Terentia. His letters to her were short and matter of fact. He seemed to have lost all confidence in her business integrity, and, in a letter to Atticus, urged that she should arrange in her will to pay her debts. A report of her financial dealings was such as to disturb even Atticus who was not over scrupulous in business matters. Cicero himself could scarcely believe what he heard. It is said that at one time Terentia retained L 480 of her daughter’s dowry, and there is a reference to Cicero’s failure to receive the rents from his lands. Her debts are mentioned amid other instances of dishonest dealings.

            Cicero’s last letter to Terentia, written on October 1, 47 B.C., on his way home from Brundisium was a very business-like request that she get the Tusculan villa ready for him and possible guests.

            Soon after that he divorced her, giving as the reason, according to Plutarch, that he was “neglected by her during the war, so that he set out in want even of necessaries for his journey.” He wrote to Cnaeus Plancius thus, “I should not have taken any new step at a time of such general disaster, had I not on my return found my private affairs in as sorry a position as the public. There was nothing safe within the walls of my home, nothing that was not the subject of some intrigue.” Exactly what he meant we do not know. We do know that we have from him no word of regret for having divorced Terentia. His letters prove that for many years he loved his family tenderly. However, it does not seem at variance with our knowledge of his sensitive nature that he wished to sever the bond between his wife and himself when his home life became hopelessly unpleasant, and conflicts over financial matters had worn away all kindly feeling between them.

            It seems that it was the custom in Rome for a man to divorce his wife when it suited his convenience, and he was not obliged to show cause. The only redress the wife had was the repayment of her dowry. That redress Terentia claimed, seemingly with interest. She turned the matter over to Balbus, high in Caesar’s cabinet, and Cicero thought she wished to embarrass him with the Caesarians. Atticus attended to that matter for Cicero and also the matter of Terentia’s accusation that Cicero was not making proper provision in his will for Tullia’s child. During the short time he had still to live, he seemed to feel no further interest in Terentia, but as a matter of honor let her have her way in business matters that had to be settled between them.

            It is said that Terentia lived to be one hundred and three years old, and that she married the historian Sallust and possibly two others after Cicero divorced her.

Tullia

            Of the feminine influence which meant most in the life of Cicero, there is no question. The first place goes to his daughter, Tullia, his pride and joy from her babyhood. All through his voluminous correspondence runs the unbroken thread of his love for the child for whom he cared more than for any other human being. In the happy busy years before his exile, his letters contain many references which show his delight and satisfaction in his daughter.

            In his first extant letter to Atticus, written in 68 B.C., she sent a greeting to her father’s friend. “Ascribit”, the word is. It seems that Tullia at about eight years of age was admitted to an interest in her father’s correspondence and was allowed to write a little message at the end. In another letter he speaks of her as “my darling little daughter.” Again we read, “Tulliola, who is dearer to me than life itself.” From exile in the East he writes, “That my little Tullia should reap such a harvest of sorrow from the father from whom she used to receive such abundant joys.” That his love was mingled with anxious concern we know from such passages as in this letter to Atticus, “My dear Tullia’s ill health and weakness frighten me to death. I gather that you are showing her great attention for which I am grateful.” A human little touch is found in a letter to Atticus in 67 B.C., in which Tullia has her father to remind him of gifts he promised to send her. The reminder is later repeated. Cicero seems to have been jokingly refusing to supply the gifts himself. The acquaintance must have been made through Cicero’s loving references to his “sweetheart” as he sometimes calls her, for Atticus had been in Greece for more than ten years at that time - hence the name Atticus - and probably had not even seen Tullia.

            Cicero seems to have taken particular interest in her education, training her in the studies he loved, even in philosophy. Finding that she responded to his efforts, he brought her up according to his ideal, encouraging her to care for study and to acquire a culture which fitted her to be a companion and consolation to him in his later years.

            As a child and as a young woman she was perfect in his eyes. There is no word of criticism of Tullia in his letters. Unfortunately we have no letter which she wrote, and no personal references to her which can tell us anything of Tullia as others saw her. There is no doubt that she was in intellectual and cultured young woman. Cicero mentions “the charm of her conversation.” Mark Antony spoke of her as “lectissima femina.” Whether he admired Tullia or was being sarcastic we do not know. He was not a friend to Cicero. That she grew to be very like her father we know. He wrote, “I find in her my features, my words, my mind.”

            Boissier in Cicero and His Friends would like to know Tullia better and is afraid that Tullia suffered from the kind of education which her fond father thought so much of, that she was too learned. He admits that similar training was the custom of the time. Hortensius had made his daughter an orator, and she proved to be a good advocate at the bar. Again we must remember that in Cicero’s time women were no longer satisfied to devote themselves exclusively to household tasks, and that Cicero’s friends were cultured and capable of appreciating a woman of Tullia’s intellectual attainments. We know, at least, that Tullia was human, too human, perhaps, for her own good. She loved the attractive Dolabella, surely against her own judgment, and she endured the sorrow he caused her until pride must have required her to divorce him. And we are told that she repaid her father’s love for her with tender affection and loyalty.

            As early as 67 B.C., Cicero mentions plans for Tullia’s future. At that time she could not have been more than nine years old. The exact date of her birth is not know, but in 63 B.C. Cicero mentions his son-in-law in the fourth oration, “In Catilinam.” She was probably married in that year, 63 B.C. She must have been about fourteen years old when she married, the year of her birth, 76 B.C., and the year of Cicero’s marriage, 77 B.C. In 67 or 66 B.C., a marriage was arranged between her and C. Piso Frugi, of a well-known patrician family. Tullia was then less than ten years old but such early betrothals were not unusual in Rome. Cicero mentions briefly in a letter to Atticus the betrothal of his “darling Tullia.”

            The marriage seems to have been a happy one. In the oration mentioned Cicero refers to his son-in-law together with his family as interested in the outcome of that day. He showed his confidence in his loyalty by sending him to intercede with Pompey in his behalf at the beginning of his trouble with Clodius. And Piso took Cicero’s part even in opposition to other members of the Piso family. Unfortunately Piso died in 57 B.C. before Cicero returned from his exile at Thessalonies, and Tullia was a widow at about twenty years of age. Her story from that time on is a peculiarly sad one. All her father’s love and care could not insure for her a happy life. She was betrothed again in 56 B.C. to Furius Crassipes, a man of good birth. There is mention of the domestic celebration on April 6. Plutarch does not mention the marriage to Crassipes but Sihler says she was married in 56 B.C. When she was divorced and why we do not know. Crassipes was living in 50 B.C. when she married Dolabella.

            Whether Tullia was of an attractive personality, or whether her father’s wealth and influence made her desirable is not clear. But she had several suitors after her divorce, even young men of illustrious family, among them Servius Sulpicius, a son of the consul of that name, and P. Cornelius Dolabella, a dissipated patrician of twenty-one years, younger than Tullia. Cicero himself suspected that they thought he would return from his governorship in Cilicia rich enough to pay a son-in-law’s debts. Cicero seems to have given Terentia and Tullia the authority to decide about the marriage when he left Rome in 51 B.C. Another suitor, Tiberius Claudius Nero, to be remembered in history as the father of the emperor Tiberius, went to Cilicia to press his suit and Cicero favored it. It was too late, for Terentia and Tullia had already decided in favor of Dolabella, won by a young spendthrift’s fascinating personality and polished manners.

            They were married some time in 50 B.C. In February of that year, Caelius had written Cicero in Cilicia as a matter of gossip that Dolabella’s wife had left him. And yet he had been a favored aspirant for Tullia’s hand long before. Evidently it was not according to Roman ideas of decorum to delay a second marriage long after a death or a divorce.

            Cicero had not approved of the marriage, and neither had Atticus. Later Cicero blamed himself and thought that he should have prevented it. Hoping for the best at first, he admitted that Dolabella had “any amount whether of ability or culture.” “Other points in his character,” he added, “with which you are acquainted must be tolerated.”

            Dolabella was much liked by the populace in Rome and stood so well with Caesar that his influence may have been of some advantage to Cicero; but he later denied that he had received aid from Dolabella. It was because of a letter from Dolabella, written from Caesar’s camp near Dyrrachium, full of confidence in Caesar and urging Cicero to consider his own interests, that Cicero returned to Italy in 47 B.C. It is thought that Caesar told Dolabella to write to his father-in-law and urge him to return to Italy.

            The marriage proved to be a most unfortunate one, and Cicero, in the midst of the political situation that made his life hardly worth while, had the added sorrow of seeing his beloved daughter made more and more unhappy, grieved and humiliated. Dolabella did not keep his promises to reform; the description Cicero gives of Catiline in his orations against him would very nearly fit his own son-in-law. Dolabella became notorious for his wastefulness and profligacy. His conduct was a scandal even in the licentious society of Rome. He spent his own fortune, then his wife’s dowry, and threatened to divorce her if she objected. He made little effort to disguise his intrigue with Caecilia Metella, one of many favorites. By his scandalous misconduct he finally drove Tullia to return to her father’s house. It seems that she really loved him and delayed getting a divorce as long as possible.

            After the divorce in November of 46 B.C., she was at her father’s house in Rome and there she bore a son of Dolabella about the fifteenth of January, 45 B.C. When she seemed strong enough, she was removed to the villa at Tusculum where she died about January 15, 45 B.C., in her thirty-first year.

            Her death was the hardest blow that had ever come to Cicero. Just when he needed the companionship of his daughter most, he lost her. He had divorced Terentia in the beginning of that year and his son was of little pleasure to him. Thus he was alone. In every period of his life, Tullia had been an unfailing source of pleasure to him, and in unhappy times a consolation. He seems to have loved the very name “Tulliola”, which he used for her in her childhood. When the first coldness arose between him and Terentia, Tullia met him at the Brundisium to rejoice with him over his return from exile. The townspeople there, realizing, perhaps, that nothing could give him greater pleasure, celebrated his return on her birthday. In the years from 57 to 51 B.C. during the triumvirate, when things were not well with Cicero because of his love for the constitution of the republic, the support and affection of his family meant very much to him. He rejoiced in the companionship of Atticus, his brother Quintus, and Tullia. The affectionate disposition he shows in his letters seems to have found a counterpart in Tullia, and he could talk with her of his deepest feelings. When the Civil War began, Tullia came to Formiae to beg him not to join Pompey in Greece. When he was waiting through dreary months in Brundisium, she came, if only for a little while, to show her sympathy for his misfortune. She had a place in every phase of his life. Her name, with those of his brother and young Marcus, occurs often in his writings. One of his complaints against Terentia had been that when Tullia was setting out on the long way to Brundisium, her mother had not given her “suitable attendance nor any means.”

            When Tullia died, he was utterly desolate, and for a time he could scarcely endure the pain of his sorrow. He could not remain at Tusculum, the scene of her death but went to the house of Atticus at Rome, sending away the young wife he had married a few weeks before Tullia’s death. Atticus had one of the best libraries in Rome, and Cicero read all the books he found there which discussed grief and how it might be lessened. After three weeks, feeling that he must be alone, he went to Asture, to a villa near the sea which he had recently bought and which was free from associations with Tullia. For three days in letters to Atticus, he gave way to his emotions, to his inconsolable sorrow. On March 9, he wrote, “In this lonely place I have no one with whom to converse, and, plunging into a dense and wild wood early in the day, I do not leave it till evening. Next to you I have no greater friend than solitude. In it my one and only conversation is with books. Even that is interrupted by tears which I fight against as long as I can.”

            Soon after he had reached Astura he wrote that he was resolved to show his grief to none, and his letters changed, but he continued to write almost every day for a month, finding in his letters some respite from his loneliness. It seems that he was influenced by the teaching of the Stoics that a man was not truly wise who gave way to depression. Though he was distressed by the feeling that even an outward appearance of calm was disloyal to Tullia, he tried to gain self-control, something he had not shown during his exile at Thessalonica. Then his pride and vanity were hurt, now his deepest feelings. Though he wrote in the “Consolatio” that Fortune had beaten him and said, “I yield and raise my hand,” in a sense he did not yield. As in the period of depression during the triumvirate, he turned to the only resources left him and tried to hide the pain for which he found no cure.

            His friends wrote letters intended to be consoling but all failing to help him. A rather harsh letter from Brutus rebuked his weakness, since he had been accustomed to advise others to be strong. Later Servius Sulpicius, governor of Achaea, heard of his loss and wrote a letter famous for the typical Roman ideas expressed. This letter was kinder but showed little appreciation of Cicero’s grief. His answer reveals his feelings of desolation, “My daughter at least was left me. I had a place to which to retire and rest. The charm of her conversation made me forget my cares and sorrows, but the dreadful wound I have received in losing her re-opened in my heart all those wounds I thought closed. Formerly I retired into my family to forget the misfortunes of the state; but can the state offer me any remedy to make me forget the misfortunes of my family. I am obliged to shun at the same time both my home and the Forum, for my home no longer consoles me for the trouble the republic causes me, and the republic can not fill the void that I find in my home.”

            Caesar sent a letter of consolation from Spain and Dolabella wrote a letter which it is unfortunate that we cannot read. Plutarch says that “the philosophers came from all quarters to console him.” Atticus strongly urged that Cicero return to the Forum to find solace in public life; but it was not until Caesar returned from Spain at the end of the summer that Cicero returned to Rome and took some part in the life there, chiefly aiding such exiles as Marcellus to become reconciled to Caesar. In May at Astura he was planning a political treatise, hoping for the rebuilding of the state, we learn from letters to Atticus, written in reply to reproaches that he was giving way to his troubles.

            He tried every source of comfort; reading, study, and writing, for it was as second nature to him to pour out his feelings in words, and he was one who needed to be accomplishing something always. On the second day at Astura he sent to Atticus an essay on Grief and how to meet it. That essay has been lost. In the first few weeks of his bereavement he wrote “Consolatio seu de luctu minuendo.” Nothing diminished his grief but gradually his writing filled his days. Even at night, for at first he could not sleep, he wrote or dictated to his faithful freedman, Tiro.

            The extent of his literary productions, in the year before the Ides of March, 44 B.C., is remarkable, and he continued to give time to writing until the end of that year. After Tullia’s death he turned to philosophical writing, for a Roman had only the doctrines of the philosophers to teach him how to live and to gain strength to bear a great sorrow. His first work finished was the “Hortensius,” intended as an introduction to a series of philosophical works, presenting the Greek doctrines of philosophy. The “Academica”, and “De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum”, or “What is Happiness?”, followed.

            The treatise, “De Republica”, published in 51 B.C. had contained “Scipio’s Dream”, which Hannis Taylor calls “the clearest, the most confident, and most brilliant confession of faith in the immortality of the soul, and in a higher existence uttered in the ancient world before the inspired declarations of Saint John and Saint Paul.” Some time in 45 B.C. Cicero began the “Tusculan Disputations” dealing with the same subject, but written from the viewpoint of one who wanted to believe more than anything else that all was well with the dead. In that treatise is this passage, “Whatever that is which feels, which has taste, which lives, which has strength, it must needs be celestial and divine and, therefore, eternal.” Because Tullia was not forgotten the doctrine of the immortality of the soul appealed to him.

            In the field of metaphysics, he wrote “De Natura Deorum”, “De Divinatione”, and “De Fato.” It was Fate which had deprived him of his daughter and his mind must have been filled with that thought.

            During that year he wrote, also, “De Senectute” and “De Amicitia”, the best known of his treatises. Both commemorate the long and faithful friendship of Atticus. The treatise, “De Officiis” concluded his philosophical writings and was published after the Ides of March, 44 B.C.

            His sorrow had not dimmed the flame of his genius and it is pleasant to think that his beloved daughter influences so much of the literary work on which Cicero’s true fame rests. Working with a definite plan, he gave to Roman civilization something noble to be passed on to later times through the medium of the Roman empire for which even then Caesar was laying the foundation.

            At first Cicero was not willing to think of Tullia as dead but began to think of her as one of the gods, in accordance with the idea that the gods were once human beings. His love caused him to feel that she could well be admitted to the company of the gods because of the purity of her soul.

            Later he seems to have turned from that idea, for he began to plan a memorial so that Tullia might not be forgotten on earth. Many letters to Atticus deal with his plans in detail. The shrine was to be near Rome and in a much frequented place. He intended to spare no expense even though he should need to sell some of his lands. Atticus seems to have been willing to help but we do not know that anything came of the plan. It may be that the assassination of Caesar interfered and we know that a great change took place in Cicero’s life after he delivered the first Philippie against Antony on September 2, 44 B.C.

            Little more is known of the baby Tullia left. In Cicero’s letters of 45 B.C., he asks Atticus to assign slaves to care for the child, and we assume that it was in his care that year. In the incident concerning Cicero’s will, he is referred to as Lentulus - Dolabella was called Lentulus also, and must have been adopted by one of that name. It was one of the friendly services of Atticus to visit the child at his nurse’s home and see that it wanted nothing. In a letter to Atticus, Cicero had mentioned the birth of another child to Tullia on May 19, 49 B.C. As there are no later references to either child, it is probable that both died in childhood.

            As to Dolabella, Cicero does not seem to have been bitter against him. In his notes in answer to Dolabella’s letter, he said that “altho’ not a broken man, he had lost that gaiety and charm which used to delight Dolabella above all others.” He even mentioned later with seeming pleasure the prospect of seeing Dolabella again. The great part of Tullia’s dowry was never repaid, though Dolabella was a favorite of Caesar and probably was able to pay his debts.          Sihler suggests that prudence may have dictated Cicero’s friendly attitude toward the friend of Caesar, but it does not seem necessary to find a reason other than the unconcern with which Romans looked upon divorce. After Caesar’s death, Dolabella was consul with Antonius and then governor of Syria. There to avoid capture by Cassius he ordered a soldier to kill him.

Publilia

            In the usual life of Cicero, we find the statement that he married again after he divorced his wife, but that the second marriage was short-lived. It is only fair to read further and understand how very little his second wife meant in the life of Cicero.

            One effect of the second marriage apparently was to give Mark Antony a weapon to use against Cicero in response to the bitter Philippics which Cicero hurled at him in the last months of his life. Referring to the marriage, Antony seems to have dwelt upon the idea that Cicero had put out of his house the wife who was old. Such personalities were common in Roman political speeches. Cicero himself used them. And probably Antony’s friends mad the most of such taunting references to Cicero’s divorce and second marriage.

            Terentia also held the second marriage up to scorn, asserting that Cicero had fallen passionately in love with the beautiful young girl. She also used as a basis for her charge that Cicero had not protected the interests of Tullia’s child in his will, that the witnesses were not dependable. One of the witnesses was Publilius, Publilia’s brother. Cicero explained through Atticus how the witnesses were chosen, offered to prove his provisions as generous as hers by allowing his will to be read if she would allow hers to be read, and took no further interest in the matter. Surely his conscience was clear, for it is not to be credited that Cicero could have failed to make proper provision for Tullia’s child.

            We have no evidence that Cicero thought of a possible marriage to Publilia before he divorced Terentia; and it is not reasonable to assume that a man of sixty-three, who had cared nothing for the society of women all his life, immediately upon finding himself free, fell deeply in love with a very young girl, almost a child.

            It seems to have been generally expected that Cicero would marry again. He himself said in the letter to Cnaeus Plancius, “I made up my mind that I must arm myself by the faithful support of new marriage connections against the perfidy of the old.” He had made no choice. Otherwise, the matchmaking ladies of Rome would not have become interested. And we know that several prospective brides were suggested to him, among them the daughter of Pompey, and that he cried out that one was “the ugliest thing he ever saw.”

            Apparently he was not indifferent to the idea of marrying again and economic considerations decided the matter for him. Plutarch says that Cicero’s freedman and secretary, Tiro, in his biography of his beloved master made the statement that Cicero “was persuaded by his friends and relatives to marry the girl, notwithstanding the disparity of ages, and to get rid of his creditors by making use of her property.”

            Under those circumstances, it was easy for him to make a choice, it would seem. His ward, Publilia, whose estate had been left in his charge, was very rich, and had a worldly mother, a widow, who recognized the advantage of an alliance with the great orator. Publilia probably had no choice in the matter but was perfectly amenable.

            The marriage took place in 45 B.C., only a few weeks before Tullia’s death, and the daughter and step-mother had not become friends. Tullia was older than Publilia, and Plutarch says that Publilia seemed to take pleasure in her death. Cicero sent her away at once, saying only that he wished to be alone.

            Only her mother’s ambitions, in which she acquiesced, can account for the fact that Publilia wrote to Cicero and begged to be allowed to return. Cicero refused, and thought that her mother had probably written the letter. In May while Cicero was at his villa at Pompeii, Publilia again sought a reconciliation and was refused. Cicero’s friend, Carellia, who will be mentioned later, took an interest in the matter at that time, but without effect. Cicero had no money and was getting old. Such persistence was a tribute to his fame and to his prominence in Rome.

            Later Publilia even attempted to gain by a certain maneuver an entrance into the house which had been her home for so short a time. She wrote that her mother and brother were coming to visit Cicero and that she wished to accompany them. Cicero wrote her not to come, though we do not know what answer he made to the mother and brother. Then to be sure of avoiding them, he asked Atticus to learn when they proposed coming, as he intended to be with Atticus at the time. We know he soon left Astura and gave Publilia no further attention.

            There must have been a formal divorce, for Publilia’s dowry was repaid in great part. Consequently Cicero received no pecuniary advantage from the imprudent marriage, which Atticus with the best intentions had advised.

            Possibly Publilia married again, for there is mention made of the marriage of a wife of Cicero to Vibius Rufus.

Fabia and Pomponia

            Two women who must be mentioned among those who had a place in the life of Cicero are Terentia’s half-sister, Fabia, and Pomponia, the sister of Atticus, who was the wife of Cicero’s brother, Quintus.

            Fabia was a Vestal Virgin, one of those guardians of the sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta who were held in the highest esteem in Rome in the time of the Republic. It was a coveted honor to be a Vestal and only young girls from prominent families were chosen. On the other hand, they were bound by severe restrictions and were expected to be above reproach.

            The story is that in 73 B.C. Fabia was brought to trial charged with having received as her accepted lover Lucius Sergius Catiline who, in 63 B.C., formed the famous conspiracy against the state. In 73 B.C. his reputation was none too good, and had not been so from his youth up. It seems that the well-known character of Catiline had more to do with the charges made against Fabia than any facts discovered. Fabia was acquitted and absolutely cleared of blame. The importance of the story lies in the effect which it must have had upon her family. We can imagine the bitter feelings of Terentia and be sure that she hated the very name of Catiline. Some of her feeling may have communicated itself to Cicero and found expression on the several occasions when he arraigned Catiline in his famous orations. It did not cause his opposition to Catiline - that was a political matter - but it could have made that opposition stronger and more personal.

            We know that Cicero remembered. In 64 B.C. when he was a candidate for the consulship, and made, a few days before the election, a speech against Catiline and Antonius, attacking, as usual, the private as well as the public lives of the opposing candidates, he went so far as to hint at the old story of the connection between Catiline and Fabia. Like Caesar in the defeat of the Tigurini, Cicero had in dealing with Catiline not only public but also private wrongs to avenge.

            It seems that one of Cicero’s good qualities was his ability to get along with people easily. That quality was put to a severe test in his acquaintance with his sister-in-law, Pomponia. She seems not to have got along with anybody. In Cicero’s relations with Pomponia, he started off handicapped because he had advised the marriage between her and his brother, and always must have felt a little guilty.

            It is not known when the marriage took place, but it was doomed to failure from the beginning because of the dispositions of the two concerned. In the first place, Marcus Cicero made a mistake in supposing that Pomponia had an easy, agreeable disposition such as her brother’s. They were very different. Atticus never aroused resentment or made enemies. He was a friend to everybody. Pomponia seemed to delight in annoying people in some instances and certainly did not have an easy disposition. On the other hand she and her husband were very much alike. Both were hot-tempered and hasty, but it seems that when trouble arose, it was Quintus who was easy-going enough to give way. Pomponia was as strong-minded as Terentia and even more jealous and suspicious. Cicero represents his brother as lovable and long-suffering, but strained relations as early as 68 B.C. show that he and his wife did not agree.

            Besides their dispositions an early cause of unpleasantness was the lack of fortune which Quintus had no means of alleviating except when given official duties in the provinces or when serving with the army. His talents were different from his brother’s. He had a home at Arpinum and what further property he inherited from his father, but not enough to help support his home. It may be that Pomponia, jealous of her brother-in-law’s rise to fame and wealth, made Quintus feel her displeasure at his own inaction. Through Cicero’s influence, Quintus was given a chance with Caesar in Gaul, and there received special praise from Caesar for his manner of conducting a difficult campaign in 54 B.C.

            Whether Pomponia knew of Cicero’s influence in the marriage and blamed him for it or not, she was not always a satisfactory sister-in-law. When a messenger was leaving to carry letters to Atticus in Greece, she did not always let Cicero know. Again she would let him know only a short time before a messenger started, even though she was aware that Cicero had a letter from Atticus to answer.

            On one occasion, when Cicero was visiting his brother at Arpinum, Pomponia became offended about some matter, flared up and went to her room, then refused to eat the food Quintus sent to her. Quintus remarked that his brother was seeing what he had to put up with every day. Cicero, recounting the scene in detail to Atticus, expressly said that he did not let his sister-in-law see his annoyance. But he was writing with the suggestion that Atticus interfere. He frankly said that Pomponia did not act like a lady. In Cicero’s eyes, Quintus bore the situation admirably.

            As to the effect of the marriage of Quintus and Pomponia on the friendship between Cicero and Atticus, some say it was strengthened; some, weakened. It gave them a common personal interest, at least. However, Atticus and Quintus seem to have disagreed, an unusual thing for Atticus. That Pomponia did not try to make peace, and may have caused the disagreements made Cicero think less of her.

            Naturally, Pomponia and Terentia did not get along well together. We do not expect to find that they did. For one who was thinking of his brother’s welfare and appreciated home life, Cicero seems to have shown poor judgment in choosing his wife and his sister-in-law. He thought little about women, and probably made little effort to understand those few who influenced his life. With Pomponia, he was careful not to disagree; in the case of Terentia, he let her have her way as long as possible. An easy-going man where women were concerned, he unfortunately had for sister-in-law and wife exactly the kind of women who would impose upon him and disagree between themselves. Both were strong-minded, and possibly antagonistic. Pomponia was hot-tempered; Terentia, more calculating. Terentia was a member of a prominent Roman family; Pomponia was of the equestrian rank, and, without money, was at a disadvantage. Possibly Terentia made her sister-in-law feel the difference in their stations.

            All things considered, Pomponia seems to have been placed in a rather difficult position, and her reactions to it are hardly surprising. Her story is told by Cicero, who carefully remembered to assure Atticus of Terentia’s affection for his sister, possibly to keep peace in the family, but who did not like her. It may be that Pomponia deserves more sympathy than she has received.

            The scene in her home, described by Cicero, indicates long years of rather noisy bickering, which finally ended in a divorce about 50 B.C. It was in February of that year that Caelius wrote Cicero that the gossip was that Quintus was considering divorcing Pomponia.

            Quintus and Pomponia had only one son, Quintus, born in 67 B.C., who, however, did not seem to bring unity into the home as Cicero had hoped he would. This nephew and his father turned against Cicero about the time he returned to Italy after the battle of Pharsalus, and grieved Cicero for some time. There was a reconciliation, and they were with Cicero in his last days. Both were killed shortly before Cicero met his death in 45 B.C. There was left of the family only the son of Cicero, saved because he was still in Athens.

Laelia

            In Cicero’s life there was one woman, not always mentioned, who deserves to be remembered for the influence she had upon Cicero in his youth, when his character and ambitions were being developed. That woman was Laelia, the wife of Quintus Mucius Scaevola, the augur.

            When Cicero’s father took his sons Marcus and Quintus to Rome to study, they were so fortunate as to be pupils for many years of two great public men of that day, Quintus Mucius Scaevola, the augur, and his nephew, Quintus Mucius Scaevola, the Pontifex Maximus. Both were men of fine character, great orators, and the most learned jurists of their time. They not only taught the young Ciceros, but, because they were his father’s friends, they received them into their homes, and they came under the influence of the women of their families. Referring to them later in his writings, Cicero mentions especially Laelia, the wife of the augur, and the daughter of Laelius, who had been the friend of Scipio Africanus.

            About the year 90 B.C., when Cicero had recently assumed the “toga virilis”, the Scipionic Circle still remained intact, and high ideals of public and private conduct, and of service to the state were not only discussed but upheld. Cicero’s heart was stirred by what he heard. He appreciated the privilege of associating with the great nobles, and the welcome he received in their homes. Laelia, the daughter of one great Roman and the wife of another, was a very significant figure to the young student and her influence never entirely left him. She seems to have been a woman of noble character, of culture, and of intelligence, an example of Roman womanhood at its best.

            The influence of these great nobles made a profound impression upon Cicero, and affected his whole life. They were often the speakers in the dialogues which he used in his philosophical treatises. He quoted their opinions, and always reverently. While they taught him Roman law, they taught him the standards of political life which they cherished.

Fulvia, The Spy

            Cicero’s career not only reached its peak when he attained to the position of consul but it very probably would have ended before his consulship was over, if it had not been for the part a very ordinary woman played. The woman was Fulvia, the mistress of Q. Curius. She was a woman of rank but of shady reputation, who apparently was interested in Curius only for the money he could spend.

            In November, 63 B.C. Lucius Sergius Catiline, defeated for the consulship, had determined to get control of the government of Rome by force and had already collected a band of followers under the command of Manlius at Faesulae, near the modern Florence. It remained for the consul who suspected the conspiracy to be killed, then Catiline was ready to leave Rome for Faesulae. At a meeting at the house of Laeca on November 6, Catiline’s plans were completed. Two knights, L. Vargunteius, and C. Cornelius, had offered to kill Cicero and were to accomplish their purpose early the next morning by going among his clients to greet the consul before he arose from his bed.

            That Cicero heard of the plot in time to place guards around his home and have the two assassins refused admittance was due to Fulvia. She had shown loss of interest in Curius when his money was spent. Some time before November 6, he suddenly began to boast and to promise Fulvia “seas and gardens.” It seems that Fulvia’s curiosity was aroused and she persuaded him to reveal the fact that a conspiracy was planned, from which he hoped to become rich. He had at one time been expelled from the senate and seems to have fallen very low. Fulvia revealed the plot to Cicero, and she and Curius became his paid spies. It was through Fulvia that a full account of the meeting at the house of Laeca was revealed to Cicero immediately, and he could take the necessary precautions. The details of Catiline’s guilt which Cicero revealed in his arraignment of Catiline before the Senate in the Temple of Jupiter Stator on November 8, he had learned through Fulvia.

            Unfortunately, the two spies, Fulvia and Curius, were of such low repute in Rome that their testimony could not be used as proof of the conspiracy before the Senate or before the assembled people when Cicero spoke to them from the Rostra on November 9, congratulating them on Catiline’s departure from the city, and describing the classes to which the conspirators belonged. It remained for the consul to secure that proof through the Allobrogues by skillful management, and finally to break up the conspiracy and save the government from further danger.

Clodia, Pompeia, Mucia, and Julia, The wife of Pompey

            In December 62 B.C., the ritual of the Bona Dea was held at the house of Julius Caesar, who was praetor and living in the official residence of the Pontifex Maximus. There an incident occurred which proved in the end as disastrous to Cicero as to those actually involved.

            Clodius, a young aristocrat of the famous Caludian line, was carrying on an intrigue with Pompeia, the wife of Caesar. Aurelia, the mother of Caesar, lived in his home and seemed to keep a sharp eye on her daughter-in-law as a matter of prudence. Pompeia must have had difficulty in meeting Clodius, for she took advantage of the rites of the Bona Dea to arrange for Clodius to come to the house disguised as a female lute player. One of Pompeia’s slave women let him in the house, then went to summon her mistress. There was some delay, and Clodius, attempting to find his way in the passages of a large house in the dark, was accosted by one of Aurelia’s slave women, who asked his name. When he replied that he was looking for a woman called Abra, Clodius’s voice betrayed him and the woman screamed. Clodius was discovered, where he had taken refuge in the room of the woman who had let him in. The Vestal Virgins, finding a man present at the sacred rites, dealt with him violently, tearing his disguise off and driving him out of the house unclothed and wounded.

            The incident did not prove the existence of an intrigue. Clodius was reckless enough to have gone to the house from curiosity; but the story of the intrigue seems to be generally accepted. Caesar immediately divorced Pompeia. His attitude at the time will be discussed later.

            The senate, urged by Cato, Hortensius who was to serve as prosecutor, and Messala, one of the consuls, ordered the College of Priests to hold an inquiry. The consul, Piso, spoke in favor of Clodius. The college found that Clodius had committed sacrilege, and the regular course was for him to be brought to trial. After some delay, caused by the activities of the friends of Clodius, a very objectionable but aristocratic set of judges was chosen. The trial seems to have created a stir in Rome, for Clodius had many friends. He was a skillful leader of the Roman mob, and was supported by the patricians because he belonged to a famous family, was the brother-in-law of Lucullus, and related by blood or marriage to some of the most prominent members of the senate.

            However, the case against him was so clear that all thought he would be convicted; but, during the night before the second day of the trial, Crassus sent for the judges one by one. He gave them money, and their sense of justice was so biased as a result that thirty-one out of fifty-six voted for Clodius’s acquittal.

            The acquittal aroused Rome still more. Cato threatened the judges with impeachment, and what had been a personal matter acquired political significance. Cicero made in the senate the first of the taunting speeches against Clodius which helped to make Clodius his bitter personal enemy.

            Cicero at first was in favor of the trial of Clodius, then, possibly influenced by his political alliance with the aristocratic party, changed to the opinion held by many that the affair was a matter of personal immorality, and should not be dealt with too severely. Before the trial, however, he made this prophetic remark, “I am apprehensive lest this matter, treated with indifference by the upper classes, and championed by the vicious, may be the germ of great troubles to the state.”

            When the trial was held, Cicero became a voluntary witness for the prosecution. Clodius declared that he was absent from Rome at the time the incident at the house of Caesar occurred; but Cicero ruined this alibi by testifying that Clodius had called at his house three hours before the incident referred to. Clodius got the idea that Cicero was the chief one advocating the proceedings against him, though it seems that Cicero merely disapproved of an irregularity in choosing the judges and remarked that those finally chosen looked more like gamblers than judges.

            Various explanations have been given for the attitude of Cicero in the Bona Dea affair. Those who free Cicero from any suspicion of indulging in intrigues support the view that he told the simple truth and was influenced only by a wish to see justice done in accordance with the regular procedure.

            Another explanation is that Clodia, the sister of Clodius, had at one time entertained the idea of marrying the great orator; that Cicero was flattered and allowed the matter to go so far as to arouse the jealousy and suspicion of his wife Terentia. According to this view, Cicero at first thought sacrilege should be punished, then became more lenient toward Clodius to please his sister, and, finally, to remove Terentia’s suspicions came forward as a witness against Clodius.

            According to Plutarch there was gossip in Rome in 60 B.C., after Clodius had become Cicero’s open enemy, to the effect that there had been an intrigue between Cicero and Clodia; that Cicero himself had furnished a go-between; that Terentia, since the mansions were close tegether, had become suspicious; and that Cicero had been urged by Terentia to join the attack on Clodia’s brother and give testimony against him at the trail.

            If Cicero’s letters tell the truth about his indifference to women and about the deep aversion he felt for Clodia at the time, there was no foundation for this gossip. His aversion may be explained by natural antipathy toward a woman as notorious as Clodia for her faithlessness toward her husband, the consul Metellus Celer, and for her absolute disregard for any semblance of decorous conduct.

            There seems to be reason to think that a marriage between Clodia and Cicero was proposed. It is suggested that the marriage may have been proposed for political reasons, and favored by Clodia through admiration for a brilliant and influential man. It may be that the brother and sister, who seem to have been very much of a kind and loyal to each other, resented Cicero’s indifference to the proposed alliance with the proud Claudian family; that thus a personal element made Clodius more suspicious of Cicero’s motives in testifying against him, and encouraged Clodia to give her brother the support which caused Cicero to hate her so thoroughly.

            On the other hand, all the facts known of Cicero’s life tend to disprove the charge of an intrigue with Clodia, and to dissipate the idea that Cicero, driven by a jealous wife to clear himself of suspicion, testified against Clodius.

            Granting that Cicero’s wish to uphold the course of justice prescribed by the Roman constitution was his motive in testifying, the fact remains that from that time on, Clodius was Cicero’s bitter and persistent enemy, encouraged by Clodia through personal ill-will toward a man she had once admired. Cicero himself seems to have recognized Clodius as an enemy from the first but made the mistake of under-rating the danger to himself. In that way we can account for the warfare with words that ensued between Clodius and Cicero, to a great extent initiated by Cicero himself, who is said to have continually baited Clodius with expletives and scurrilous epithets in the Forum and elsewhere. Cicero had no match in such a contest, and his stinging taunts and ridicule may have had a great deal to do with the peculiar persistence of Clodius’s enmity. Results show that Clodius did not confine himself to talking, but soon made definite plans to ruin Cicero. The political situation in Rome played into his hands. Cicero was too influential and too clearly opposed to the triumvirate to be safely left in Rome, while Caesar, the guiding spirit of the triumvirate, departed for a five years stay in Gaul. Caesar used the weapon at hand, which happened to be Clodius, and gave his support to a political plot against Cicero, engineered by Clodius. A law was passed, condemning to exile any one who had put Roman citizens to death without trial, clearly aimed at Cicero. Cicero’s friends of the middle class were without a leader. Pompey, on whose support he had a right to depend, deserted him for two reasons. To strengthen his power in Rome he had united with Caesar and Crassus in the first triumvirate, and had recently married Caesar’s daughter to cement the alliance. It was Crassus who bribed the judges in favor of Clodius, and Caesar was more or less openly opposing Cicero. Added to that reason there seems to have been another, the fact that Pompey had come to love his wife, Julia, the daughter of Caesar, and she was devoted to him in spite of the great difference in their ages.

            There was nothing left for Cicero but armed resistance or exile, and he chose exile in 58 B.C. During the year of his exile, Clodius used armed bands to destroy practically all of Cicero’s property, burning the house on the Palatine and all of his villas. On his return in 57 B.C., Clodius continued to be his evil genius, using every means to annoy and injure him until he himself was killed by bands of Milo in 52 B.C.

            The part that Clodia played in all this is not clear, but Cicero hated her particularly and did not refrain from insulting references to her in his attacks on Clodius. It seems that in 62 B.C., the tribune, Metellus Nepos, brother of Metellus Celer, who was then in the north, had used some form of pressure against Cicero through Clodia and Mucia, the half-sister of the Metalli and the wife of Pompey, then in the East. Mucia herself was not above reproach and was divorced by Pompey before his return from the Mithridatic war because of a reputed intrigue with Julius Caesar. It can be imagined how dangerous such a woman as Clodia could be, who was at the same time criticized for her indecent behavior, admired for her intellect and daring, and deferred to because of her patrician birth. Probably she was not as absolutely depraved as Cicero represents her to be, but she was certainly one of those Roman women who took full advantage of the freedom accorded the women of her day to divorce her husband when it suited her fancy or to take part in an open intrigue without the form of a divorce. Among her numerous lovers were Caelius, the young friend of Cicero, and the poet Catullus, who immortalized her as Lesbia. Her affair with Caelius ended because he became weary of her, and Clodia was so enraged by such an unusual ending to one of her intrigues that she had him brought to trial on several charges, one, the charge of having attempted to poison her. Then Cicero had his long deferred chance for revenge for the harm he had received from the Claudian family. He defended Caelius in court and it is said that “that day Clodia suffered for her whole family.” Caelius was acquitted.

Caecilia Metella

            Caecilia Metella, wife of an ex-consul, Lentulus Sphinther, was a woman of fashion in Rome and a typical member of the licentious set for which Cicero had so little sympathy. She was connected with the saddest time of Cicero’s life. She it was who encouraged Dolabella to spend on her all of his fortune and his wife’s dowry which he had not already spent on others like her. There is a story that, later, she led to ruin, also, the son of the tragic actor, Aesopus, who, with some queer idea of pleasing her, on one occasion gave her a pearl worth L 800 to dissolve and swallow. The story shows the influence she was capable of exerting. When Dolabella came under her spell, he seems to have become lost to all sense of honor or regard for his reputation, and all feelings of consideration for his wife. It was because of Caecilia Metella that Tullia decided to return to her father’s house and to get a divorce soon after. Heartbroken, and weakened by the strain of her life with Dolabella under such circumstances, she died in a month after the birth of her child, in February of 45 B.C.

Hirtia

            It seems that other women besides Publilia appreciated the distinction to be derived from marriage with Cicero. When he had divorced Publilia, he was no longer young, and his finances were in a desperate condition, and he himself was sad because of the death of his daughter. But his name and fame remained, and Hirtius, his friend and the friend of Caesar, came to offer him the hand of his sister, Hirtia. We know nothing further about her. Cicero had no thought of marrying anyone and refused Hirtia because, as he said, he would find it hard to attend at the same time to marriage and philosophy. She was merely a woman of prominence in Rome who was willing to marry Cicero because of his fame.

Caerellia

            Caerellia seems to have had a pleasant place in Cicero’s life. He himself says that she was his friend, and there is no real evidence on which to base a contention that she was anything less worthy. She was several years older than Cicero, and he was not young, for we hear of Caerellia in the last few years of his life. She was on friendly terms with Terentia, and that was not possible if there was the least romantic feeling between her and Cicero.

            It seems that we must conclude that Cicero was so fortunate at the time when his life held so little joy as to have a friend who appreciated his literary efforts, was one to whom he could write informal and joking letters, and took a real interest in his welfare.

            Caerellia was a wealthy and cultured woman who apparently lent Cicero money at one time, and for several years gave him the intelligent sympathy in his literary work he had failed to get from Terentia. Their acquaintance seems to have begun because of their common interest in philosophy. She read all of the new philosophical treatises he produced, and even had “De Finibus” copied for her use before Atticus published it. She borrowed it from Atticus’s copyists without asking permission from Cicero. Such interest must have been very pleasant to Cicero; but he was not unduly impressed. She seems to have had over him the influence of a trusted friend, and felt free to approach him in May of 45 B.C. when he was at Pompeii and suggest that he become reconciled with Publilia. She had been sent by Publilia’s mother and brother, but did not persist in urging Cicero when he promptly refused. The story of an intrigue between Caerellia and Cicero comes from Dion, and is based on insinuations made by Mark Antony and his friends in answer to the famous speeches of Cicero against Antony. Just as we do not give credit to all that Cicero says against Clodia, we should not give credit to the slurs of Antony. Political controversies were carried on in that way in Rome in Cicero’s time, and Antony was trying to answer a master orator.

            Some writers also found fault with Cicero’s letters to Caerellia. They are lost now, but seem to have been full of a type of wit common in that time, but, from a later viewpoint, unrefined. Caerellia was a particularly well-educated woman, and Cicero seems to have enjoyed her conversation and to have felt at ease with her. He was noted for his wit and evidently wrote to Caerellia as he would have talked. Dio’s comment on the letters is, as usual with Dio, unsympathetic toward Cicero.

Cleopatra

           Though Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, apparently did not influence the life of Cicero for good or ill, he did not like her, and was probably resentful of her presence in Rome.

            Cicero had made surmises as to the situation in Alexandria before Caesar returned, and wrote to Atticus, “For he seems to hold Alexandria in such a way as to be ashamed to write about matters there.” When Caesar returned to Rome and later had Cleopatra to follow him there, Cicero probably made shrewd estimates as to the kind of person Cleopatra was and as to the possible effect of her coming upon the future of Rome

            He seems to have had some personal contact with her. On June 15, 45 B.C., he wrote of an incident which is not quite clear. She had, through a steward, promised Cicero some presents, such as suited a scholar, and were in accord with his own distinction.

            Probably Cleopatra offended Cicero’s equestrian pride by haughtiness of manner, as it is thought that she must have offended many. Caesar himself was beginning to assume more and more the trappings of royalty and Cleopatra may have thought that all of her dreams of power would soon be realized.

            At that time Caesar’s cordial attitude had made Cicero feel more secure in public life than he had felt for years. He spoke freely in the Forum, and usually in behalf of republican exiles who had not yet been reconciled to Caesar. He had a service to render and he was no unimportant person in Rome. Naturally, the foreign queen, whose very presence was suspicious, was not a person for whom Cicero had very kind feelings. She represented the power of Caesar, which Cicero would have liked to forget. In a letter to Atticus he wrote that he detested the queen.

            After Caesar’s death, it seems, he wrote, “Reginae fuga mihi non moletta,” “I am not sorry to hear of the flight of the queen.” And that is the only proof we have that Cleopatra ever came to Rome.

Julia, the Mother of Antony, and Fulvia, the Wife of Antony

            The struggle between Cicero, as consul, and the conspirator, Catiline, and the enmity between Cicero and Clodius had far-reaching effects on Cicero’s life. They aroused such bitter partizanship that traces of the ill will felt toward Cicero may be seen even in the last year of his life. When he realized that Mark Antony was not a friend to the republican form of government and began to deliver those famous Philippics by which he hoped to turn the people against Antony and break his power, he met in Antony not only a political enemy but an opponent prejudiced against him because of the course he himself had followed on the occasions mentioned.

            It so happened that Mark Antony was the son of Julia, who as her second husband had married that Publius Lentulus whom Cicero had put to death without an appeal to the people, disregarding the Valerian laws, and depending for authority upon the decree of the senate. Many people at the time questioned the justice of the execution, and when the excitement and danger were over, even more questioned. Is there any wonder that the families of the condemned men were no friends to Cicero? Antony referred to the matter and even claimed that the body of Lentulus had not been given to his family for burial until his wife, Julia, made a personal appeal to Terentia, the wife of Cicero. However, Plutarch says that this story is not true, that none of the bodies were refused the honor of burial. Julia is said to have been a noble and virtuous woman, who reared her son after his father’s death and naturally had a great deal of influence on his prejudices. There is reason to think that her story, probably often told, of the events of December 63, B.C. and her hatred of Cicero laid the foundation of Antony’s bitter enmity.

            We do not know that Julia took any part in the struggle between Antony and Cicero, or even that she was still living. But Fulvia, the wife of Antony, also had reason to hate Cicero and was as violently opposed to him as Antony himself. Of course, to a great extent, her hatred of Cicero was due to those stinging Phillipies, delivered against Antony with all the telling force of a great orator aroused to his last glorious fight. The wife of Antony could not have failed to hate Cicero, but it is also true that she had had no kindly feelings toward him for many years. She had been the wife of Clodius and had married Antony after Clodius was killed by the adherents of Milo in 52 B.C.

            There is abundant proof that Fulvia was of a disposition that made her a good match for Clodius. Probably she had encouraged him in his attacks on Cicero as she encouraged Antony. She was not the kind of woman to forget easily, and we can be sure that the old hatred intensified the new. As Cicero delivered the Phillipies, the same sharp arraignments full of personalities and insulting reference, with which he had stung and taunted Clodius nearly twenty years before, the whole affair of Clodius must have come back to Fulvia.

            Not that she needed memories or loyalty to Antony to arouse her rage. Cicero did not spare her in his terrible invectives any more than he spared Antony. Fulvia was of humble birth and Cicero ridiculed her family history without mercy, exposing it to scorn before the patricians of Rome. History has portrayed Fulvia as unwomanly and brutal because, after Cicero was dead, she took up his severed head, pulled out his tongue, and pierced it with her bodkin. That she gave way to uncontrollable rage and addressed words of bitter insult to the head of her dead enemy is not surprising. Nothing shows more clearly Cicero’s genius than the effect of the stinging repartee, of which he was so marvelous a master, upon Fulvia and Antony. After he was dead, they exposed his body to inhuman indignities, nailing his head to the rostra, with one of his hands on each side. That Antony had won was not enough, they needed an outlet for their pent-up rage and found it in exposing his head and hands upon the Rostra from which he had spoken.

Chapter II Caesar

Aurelia

            Although, in the life of Julius Caesar, many women played a part, his mother seems to have played the leading part; and she was worthy to play it.

            Aurelia, the wife of Gaius Julius Caesar, was of the finest type of Roman woman, such a woman as Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi. She was a stately matron, secure in her wealth and in her social position, and not influenced in her ways or in her opinions by the new ideas prevailing in Rome in the last century of the republic. Whether the family wealth was hers or her husband’s is not clear, but there was no display of it made in her home. The ways of her household were simple, for her ideas were strict and severe. Her love for her home and her children and the happiness of the home life are shown by the devotion and close sympathy which existed between her and her son in later years.

            She was a member of the Cotta “gens”, a distinguished family, usually conservative in politics but not absolutely opposed to reforms. In two instances, Caesar’s career is known to have been affected by the prominence of his mother’s family. It was partly through the intercession of his aristocratic kinsmen, Aurelius Cotta; probably his mother’s brother; and Marcus Aemilius that he received amnesty from Sulla at the first political crisis of his life. Because of the social influence of the Cotta family he was elected pontifex in 73 B.C., when his uncle, M. Aurelius Cotta, the pontifex, died, while proconsul of Gaul.

            Caesar’s father’s family was a branch of the Julian “gens”, and traced its ancestry back to Iulus, the son of Aeneas, the legendary founder of the Roman race, who was the son of the goddess Venus and the Trojan prince, Anchises. At the beginning of the republic, the Julian line was prominent politically. In 489 B.C. Gaius Julius Caesar was consul. Later they ceased to be so important and for more than a hundred years the family “seems to have lived in a kind of political obscurity.” When they came into prominence again, the surname (“cognomen”) “Caesar” had been adopted by the whole Julian “gens”.

            The origin of the word, “Caesar”, is uncertain. One explanation is that it was derived from the Moorish word for elephant, because of an exploit on an elephant hunt in Africa during the Punic Wars; another, that it was due to the first Caesar’s having entered the world by the aid of a surgeon’s knife. Two explanations refer to physical characteristics, one, that Caesar meant “blue-eyed”; the other, that it meant “born with a shock of hair”. The last explanation, which is in accordance with the usual origin of Roman surnames, is “vouched for by the distinguished antiquarian, and domestic tutor of the grandsons of Caesar Augustus himself, viz., by Verrius Flaccus.”

            The pedigree of the Dictator can be traced only to his grandfather, Sextus Julius Caesar, who was consul in 157 B.C., and had married Marcia, supposed to have been a descendant of Ancus Marcius, the fourth king of Rome. He left three children, Gaius Julius, Sextus, and Julia. Julia married Gaius Marius. Little is known of Caesar’s father, Gaius Julius Caesar, except that in public life he had risen only to the office of praetor. He died, when of middle age, at Pisa, on the Tuscan coast, his death caused probably by the bursting of a blood vessel in the brain, while he was occupied one morning with the rather complicated process of tying his shoes. It is suggested that here also there “was a physical diathesis due to heredity, for his own father had died in exactly the same way, at about the same stage of life.” The death of his father, when Julius Caesar himself was in his sixteenth year, greatly strengthened the influence of Aurelia over her son.

            Caesar’s boyhood seems to have been uneventful. Of his education, it is known that he was taught Greek by Antonius Gnipho, a Gaul from northern Italy. He may have acquired through him his first interest in the people of Cisalpine Gaul, whose patron he was to become later. In boyhood, he wrote a poem to honor Hercules and a tragedy based on the story of Eedipus. It is an interesting fact that the closest friends of his boyhood were the younger Marius and the two Ciceros, Marcus and Quintus. Through the circumstance that Marius was from Arpinum, the four boys were on very intimate terms.

            No further reference is made to his studies until 74 B.C., when, critical of his own oratorical ability, though he had very creditably established his place at the Roman bar by the prosecution of Dolabella and of Antonius, he decided to go to Rhodes and study oratory under the famous Apollonius. On the way he met with the adventure in which he was captured by, and shortly captured and executed, the pirates. His studies were interrupted, while, acting on his own initiative, he drove out the commander of rebellious Mithridates and restored Roman authority in his province. His interest in Graeco-Roman culture was shown in 48 B.C. when, after the battle of Pharsalus, the people of Athens surrendered to his lieutenant, Fufius Calenus, and he spared them, saying that, “although they had committed great misdemeanors, they were saved by their dead.” His deep culture and literary ability are apparent in his own writings; his appreciation of literature, in the men whom, in his later years, he admitted to the inner circle of his friends, such men as Hirtius who completed the “Commentarii de Bello Gallico”, and Matius who translated the “Iliad”.

            When Caesar returned to Rome from Rhodes in 73 B.C., he was made military tribune in recognition of his services against Mithridates. During the next ten years, he lived with his mother and his wife in a simple home, gradually establishing his position in public life as leader of the “populares”, and acquiring popularity with the masses. He was looked upon as a charming companion in social life, and no one suspected his political ambitions or saw any promise of his military genius. In 68 B.C., he served as quaestor, beginning his “cursus honorum”, and in 65 B.C. as aedile. It was not until 63 B.C., the year of his election as praetor, of his oration in favor of life imprisonment of the Catilinarian conspirators, and of his surprising but successful candidacy for the office of Pontifex Maximus, that the senatorial party recognized that Caesar was a politician who must be reckoned with.

            During those early years and later, the close association between Caesar and his mother was not broken. He was her only son, and she lived in his house until her death in 54 B.C. The few incidents known of her life prove that she continued to keep in close touch with his interests and career, and that he depended upon her sympathy and understanding.

            Such an incident is connected with his candidacy for the position of Pontifex Maximus in 63 B.C. When he was leaving for the Forum on the day of the election, and his mother, in tears, kissed him goodbye, Caesar, embracing her, said, “Mother, today you shall see your son either Pontifex Maximus, or an exile.”

            In 62 B.C., Aurelia’s prudent watch over her young daughter-in-law, Pompeia, led to the presence of Clodius at the Bona Dea festival, and it was her waiting woman who discovered him in disguise and reported the matter. Though Caesar refused to testify at the trial of Clodius for sacrilege, Aurelia, strict matron that she was, gave a full account of the affair and had her daughter to testify also.

            Whatever may be said in criticism of Caesar’s intrigues with women, his debts, and his unscrupulous political methods, where is no doubt that, in his home, he respected his mother’s opinions and lived in accordance with her teachings. Until he removed to the official residence of the Pontifex Maximus in 63 B.C., he continued to live simply in an unpretentious house. Even in the years after 73 B.C. when, for political reasons, he entertained lavishly and expensively, he himself was never guilty of over eating or hard drinking, and the same restraint was true of him throughout his life. In fact, Cato is said to have remarked that Caesar was the only man who attempted to overthrow the government while sober.

            In one respect, Caesar lived up to his mother’s training at home and abroad. He was always a gentleman, calm, courteous, and charming. His tastes were refined; he did not indulge in coarse debauchery or care for the cruel amusements of the usual Romans. As a result the friends who knew him well worshiped him, and women found him especially attractive.

            His admiration for his mother had taught him to enjoy the society of a cultured woman; but, when he showed a preference for the society of women, the worst interpretation was put upon his conduct.

            We may see Aurelia’s son in his assured manner and aristocratic bearing, and in some of his most distinctive characteristics, his self-confidence, his courage, his coolness at a crisis, and his remarkable self-control.

            He showed himself worthy of his mother when at the age of twenty he won the civic crown for bravery under Thermus in Asia, and when he exhibited throughout his life the traits which gained for him the loyalty and deep affection of such faithful friends as Hirtius, Balbus, Matius, Oppius, and Pollio. 

Julia, Caesar’s Aunt

            The importance in Caesar’s life of Julia, his father’s only sister, seems to have been due in great measure to the fact that she married Gaius Marius, the famous general and leader of the popular party. Neither the marriage itself nor the few facts that we know of her subsequent life tell us much of Julia as an individual. As it was the custom in Roman aristocratic families for the marriage of a daughter of the house to be arranged by her father, Julia’s marriage to Marius, implying her father’s willingness to be allied with the party of the “populares”, seems to have been purely a political matter, and indicates that a change had taken place in the political opinions of that branch of the family to which Caesar belonged. The Caesars had been conservatives; and several members of the older branch of the family, among them C. Julius Caesar, and L. Julius Caesar Strabo, the orator and writer, were put to death by Marius as aristocratic conservatives in 88 B.C.

            Very friendly relations seem to have existed between the family of Marius and that of Caesar’s father. Caesar apparently felt a genuine respect and affection for his aunt and was predisposed to admire and respect her husband. At any rate, he was brought into the closest association with Marius until the latter’s death which occurred when Caesar was in his fourteenth year.

            This personal contact with Marius is said to have influenced Caesar to support the popular party from his youth and so to have determined his career in public life as the recognized leader of the party of the people and the adversary of the senatorial oligarchy.

            Ferrero goes so far as to say, “The prime reason for Julius Caesar’s becoming the chief of the popular party is to be found neither in his ambitions nor in his temperament, and even less in his political opinions but in his relationship to Marius.” That his association with Marius as the husband of his father’s sister made a profound impression upon the receptive mind of the boy Caesar there is no doubt, nor that, when he married Cornelia at the age of seventeen, he was willing to be committed to the popular party as the nephew of Julia and the son-in-law of Cinna. In the two weeks of his seventh consulship, Marius had recognized his young nephew and identified him with his own political fortunes by appointing him a priest of Jupiter and a member of the Sacred College with a handsome income, at the age of fourteen. That Caesar’s father was willing for his son to be thus publicly credited with Marian sympathies makes it reasonable to conclude that he and Marius held the same political opinions, and that the young Caesar frequently heard the prominent members of their party who gathered around Marius discuss, as they occurred, the significant events of the years between 91 and 86 B.C.: the Social War, and its result in the final granting, to all Italy south of the Po, of the full Roman citizenship which Caesar himself in 49 B.C. gave to Cisalpine Gaul; the Civil War between Marius and Sulla, followed by the massacre of the Democrats by Sulla and his departure for the East; and finally, the establishment by Marius and Cinna of the autocratic government which gave temporary peace and security to all Italy and probably in Caesar’s eyes offered a favorable contrast to the terrible proscriptions of Sulla. Such occurrences as the invasion of the city by the army of Sulla, the flight of Marius with his young son to be hunted down like a “wild beast” , and the terrible retaliation he in his turn inflicted on the supporters of the absent Sulla must have made a deep impression upon a boy of Caesar’s age, and excited his partisanship. As a result, he was undoubtedly in full sympathy with Marius before he died, and had developed an antagonistic attitude toward Sulla as the adversary whom he had heard denounced by Marius and his friends. Marius, called the “Savior of Rome”, who had conquered Jugurtha, defeated the vast and terrifying hordes of the Cimbri and Teutones, and entered upon his seventh consulate, was probably a hero to the young Julius Caesar. The impression made by Marius himself must have been a lasting one; but the effect of the return of Sulla and the events that followed must not be disregarded. Not only did Sulla arouse the personal antagonism of Caesar who at eighteen was remarkably independent, but he called into revolt against the senatorial party of which he was the sole leader, all of Caesar’s loyalty to his family and friends. Caesar was to remember the death of Cinna, killed by a mutinous soldier in the midst of preparation for a war against Sulla, and the fate of his cousin, the younger Marius, who killed himself in despair when Sulla had eight thousand Sammites killed with the spear in one terrible massacre. The head of the young consul was sent to Rome and nailed with spikes to the Rostra by the command of Sulla who taunted the youthfulness of the democratic leader, “One must first become an oarsman before handling the rudder.” Is it surprising that Caesar, having seen the party of his father and uncle reduced to a mere name and his friends either scattered or dead, refused to accept the promises of Sulla or obey the command that he divorce his wife and marry a lady suggested by Sulla? 

            Plutarch says that the cause of the enmity between Caesar and Sulla was Caesar’s relationship to Marius. Caesar had definitely but not permanently committed himself to the Marian party when he married Cornelia. His defiance of Sulla seems to have identified him irrevocably with the party opposing the aristocracy. When Sulla pardoned him, “either by divine inspiration or a shrewd forecast”, said: “Have your way and take him; only bear in mind that the man you are so eager to save will one day deal the death blow to the cause of the aristocracy, which you have joined with me in upholding; for in this Caesar there is more than one Marius.” Caesar at once left Italy for military service in Asia.

            When Sulla died and Caesar returned to Rome, he began to oppose on behalf of the people abuses for which the aristocratic control of the government was responsible. He refused to join Lepidus in a plot to discredit the senatorial party, “through lack of confidence both in that leader’s capacity and in the outlook which he found less promising than he expected.” However, he soon gained popularity with the people because of his well-known support of their cause.

            In his frequent references to Marius in his public career, Caesar spoke of him always with the deepest respect. It is probably that his attitude toward Marius continued to be influenced by affection for Julia and loyalty to her family, as well as by the memory of the grim old man whom he had loved in his boyhood. After Caesar reached maturity, however, his keen discernment and clear judgment probably prevented him from idealizing Marius, who had not been a successful political leader. As a partizan leader, Caesar had no criticism to make of the renowned democrat. The name of Marius was a kind of rallying cry to the members of the popular party and especially to the Italian people in southern Italy, whose demands for the full rights of Roman citizens Marius had supported.

            When his aunt Julia died in 68 B.C., Caesar, just beginning as quaestor his “cursus honorum”, took advantage of a chance to appear before the populace, to whose favor he was aspiring, as the nephew of Julia, and the “political heir” of Marius. In defiance of the Senate, which had declared Marius and his son public enemies, under the rule of Sulla, Caesar had the images of Marius placed in a conspicuous place in the funeral procession. The result was in the nature of a victory for this surprise attack on the defenses of the senatorial party. Caesar saw one of the first demonstrations of his popularity with the people. Though a few friends of the senate objected, the people clapped their hands and shouted that he had brought back “the glories of Marius” to the city.

            When Caesar as a near relative delivered in the Forum the customary funeral oration in honor of his aunt, he stressed the illustrious ancestry of his family: “The maternal descent of my aunt Julia came from the kings, the paternal is associated with the immortal gods. For from Ancus Marcius are the Marcii Reges, of which name was her mother; from Venus are the Iulii, of which stock is our family. There is therefore in our pedigree both the august eminence of kings who have the greatest power among men and the religious solemnity of gods in whose power the kings themselves are.” It may be that, in this story, we see evidence of the personal influence upon her nephew of his aunt Julia. He must have heard her tell many times the story of the goddess ancestress of the Julian “gens”. On that occasion he publicly “set up their family claim to divine extraction”. His good fortune, to which he himself referred, seems to have helped gain credence for his claim. At any rate in 46 B.C., he dedicated in the new Forum Iulium the temple to “Venus Genetrix” which he “had vowed to his mythical ancestress on the battle field of Pharsalus.”

            Apparently Caesar could make this claim to divine descent without prejudicing his future as a democratic leader. In fact he must have expected his noble lineage and high social position to advance his cause with the people. That democratic leaders in Rome were not expected to be “socially democratic” is shown also in the case of Marius himself, who had become very wealthy, and when middle-aged, had married into an aristocratic family to gain the social recognition from which his own low birth barred him. Marius acquired additional prestige as the husband of Julia because she belonged to an old patrician family; but, reading between the lines in the story of Julia, one is inclined to feel that Julia was more than the patrician wife of Marius and the aunt of Julius Caesar, that in the eventful years of her life with Marius and in the eighteen later years, of which we know nothing, she showed herself a woman to be respected in her own right. Married, apparently through paternal arrangement, to a man twenty years her senior, and a rough plebeian, one of the central figures of the most trying period in the history of the city of Rome, she had little chance of happiness or even security. She saw her husband and son treated as public enemies, then saw them in a dangerous position of autocratic authority. After the death of Marius, her only son died a suicide. Perhaps Julia’s fortitude then and in the lonely years after was worthy of her long and proud descent.

            In 65 B.C., during Caesar’s aedileship, when he was making his spectacular bid for popular favor by the most profuse expenditures on games and public entertainments, he used again the magic name of Marius to strengthen and consolidate his party. One morning the people saw on the Capitol gilded images of Marius, accompanied by statues of the goddess of Victory. The populace knew well who had caused the images to be placed there and admired Caesar’s boldness in “reviving those testimonials of honour which had been buried in the earth by laws and decrees of the senate.” The veterans of Marius shed tears of joy, it is said, and the people gathered in crowds and made a noisy demonstration in honor of Caesar. Some, not so favorable, said that Caesar wished to make himself tyrant and was testing the people. The senate called a meeting, at which Catulus Lutatius made the charge, “Caesar, no longer are you taking the state by underground approaches, but by storming engines.” But Caesar made a speech and successfully defended himself before the senate. As a result of the incident, Caesar then stood forth as the unrivaled chief of the “populares”, whom the people called the “only man worthy to be a kinsman of Marius.”

Cossutia and Cornelia

            A possible effect upon Caesar’s life of Julia’s marriage to Marius may be seen in his relations with Cossutia and Cornelia.

            Before Caesar assumed the “toga virilis”, probably before his sixteenth year, he had been betrothed to Cossutia, “a lady of only equestrian rank but very wealthy.” When his father died in 84 B.C., Caesar became at once civilly independent, “sui iuris”, since he was in his sixteenth year, and the civil law freed from guardianship a youth who had completed the fourteenth year.

Taking advantage of his independence, Caesar immediately broke the engagement with Cossutia. Some modern historians, depending upon Plutarch, refer to Cossutia as Caesar’s first wife but the more conservative writers accept the account of Suetonius who says that he “broke his engagement with Cossutia.”

            At any rate, some time after January 1, 84 B.C., - Suetonius says “in the next consulate” - Caesar married Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, who entered upon his fourth and last consulate, January 1, 84 B.C., and was second only to Marius in the popular party. Cinna was killed some time in 84 B.C., before the return of Sulla, and it is not known whether the marriage took place before his death or not. Very probably Sulla had not returned to Italy. Certainly the political situation was uncertain at the time of the marriage. It was unusual for a boy to marry so young, particularly when he had decided for himself as Caesar apparently had. His mother’s brothers were with Sulla in Asia; and it is not known whether she approved of the marriage or not.

            The simplest explanation of Caesar’s marriage is that he broke his engagement because he had fallen in love with Cornelia and wished to marry her instead of Cossutia. That explanation leaves out of consideration the Roman attitude toward marriage and Caesar’s own ambition. Romans did not marry for love or to find happiness. They married, and often were divorced and married again for political, financial, or social reasons, whether the marriage was that of children arranged by their fathers, or that of an older man undertaken for his own advantage. The engagement to Cossutia could have been arranged by Caesar’s father for one or both of two reasons: for the sake of the fortune of Cossutia, and for the purpose of strengthening the family of Caesar politically by an alliance with an equestrian family. At the time of the engagement, the Marian party was in power and closely allied with the knights. As has been shown in connection with the marriage of Julia, that branch of the Caesar family to which the Dictator belonged was no longer conservative, and was willing to show its recently acquired popular sympathies by a political marriage. Then why did Caesar marry Cornelia? The answer seems to lie in the political situation. Things had changed, Marius was dead, the senatorial party, allied with Sulla, was regaining its strength, and Caesar, a member of the Julii, whose desertion to the opposite party the old aristocracy particularly resented, had no chance of advancement in public life except through definite adherence to the party of Marius. Caesar, more ambitious than his father, did not see sufficient advantage in a marriage with Cossutia but aspired to a family alliance with no less a person than Cinna, himself an aristocrat who had deserted to the “populares”. The continuation of the power of the party of Marius and Sulla was doubtful, and the position of Caesar as an aristocrat allied with Cinna would be a dangerous one. It seems that Caesar knowingly adopted a hazardous course, displaying for his age, “an almost uncanny faculty to determining” for himself and to determine with a view to politics.

            There is no doubt that the political significance of the marriage was understood. When Sulla returned to Rome in 83 B.C., Caesar was not proscribed, but he was under suspicion, both as the nephew of Julia and as the son-in-law of Cinna. Then occurred the incident so differently interpreted. Sulla demanded of Caesar that he should break with his democratic associates, divorce his wife because she was Cinna’s daughter, and marry a woman to be selected by Sulla. Caesar flatly refused.

            Pompey had complied with Sulla’s demand that he should divorce Antistia and marry Sulla’s step-daughter, Aemilia. M. Calpurnius Piso had divorced Annia, the widow of Sulla, and Julia, it seems, had even then been born to Caesar. An explanation given for his conduct is that he dared to defy the dictator because his naturally independent spirit revolted at the suggestion that he should divorce his wife, the mother of his daughter, and marry some other woman at Sulla’s suggestion; another is that, when Sulla ordered him to divorce her for political reasons, he naturally refused to put away the wife whom he loved.

            Suetonius gives as the result of his refusal that “he was held to belong to the other party,” and it seems reasonable to suppose that in that result may be seen the motive for his refusal, the same motive which caused his marriage to Cornelia, the determination, based on loyalty to Marius and ambition for a prominent place in public life, to show himself definitely a supporter of the party of the people. In any case, Caesar revealed in that act an unusually strong and self reliant character. In the courage he displayed, Froude sees revealed a trait to which the facts of Caesar’s life give credence, “a singular indifference to life”, an intention “if he was to life at all, to live master of himself in matters which belonged to himself.”

            Sulla attempted to force Caesar’s compliance. He was deprived of his priesthood and his wife’s dowry. His own property, inherited from his father, was confiscated. He was “made over to the assassins and a price was put upon his head”. He fled from Rome and wandered in the mountains, changing his place of rest every night. On one occasion he was captured and escaped by bribing the detectives of Sulla. Finally, because of the intercession of prominent members of the aristocracy and the Vestal Virgins as well, Sulla reluctantly pardoned him, with the famous remark quoted in the story of Julia to the effect that there was in Caesar more than one Marius.

            Caesar found it prudent to leave Rome during the administration of Sulla. It was then that he left his young wife and little Julia and went to Asia where he served in his first campaign during 81 and 80 B.C., on the staff of Thermus, winning the civic crown at the storming of Mitylene, a wreath of oak leaves, given for saving the life of a fellow citizen. It is not known how he spent the year 79 B.C.; but he served for a short time in 78 B.C. under Servilius Isauricus in Cilicia. On the death of Sulla he returned to Rome but, finding himself unoccupied because of the continued supremacy of his political adversaries, he went to Rhodes to study oratory, and to develop “the great talent for discourses on political matters” which Plutarch says he cultivated most diligently. In the meantime, he had recovered his property and his priesthood.

            Suetonius mentions that in the year 70 B.C., by speaking in favor of a bill proposed by Plotius, Caesar was instrumental in causing the recall of his wife’s brother, Lucius Cinna, as well as of the others who had had a part in the revolution planned by Lepidus. Lucius Cinna does not seem to have been particularly grateful as he is mentioned as one of the conspirators against Caesar, though it is possible that he only approved. Plutarch tells that C. Helvius Cinna, a friend of Caesar, went, out of respect, to the Forum where Caesar’s body was burning, and the multitude tore him to pieces thinking that he was the guilty Cinna.

            After her marriage nothing is known of Cornelia. Until after her death Caesar continued to live in a modest home in the Subura though he had become known for profuse entertaining. No doubt, Cornelia, directed the preparation of those elaborate feasts and managed Caesar’s house efficiently in accordance with his ideas and those of his mother, Aurelia. When she died in 68 B.C., Caesar delivered a funeral oration in her honor, such as it was an ancient Roman custom to pronounce at the funerals of elderly women. Caesar was the first to pronounce a funeral oration over his wife, and by doing so he won the sympathy of the people and their approval of him as a “man of kind disposition and full of feeling.”

Pompeia, the Wife of Caesar

            When Cornelia died, Caesar again made a political marriage, choosing for his second wife Pompeia, the very young daughter of Pompeius Rufus, and the granddaughter or, as some say, the niece, through her mother, of Lucius Sulla. Pompeia, like Cornelia, was an aristocrat, but she was one whose family was among the noblest of the conservative aristocracy. She was closely related to Pompey, at that time the most prominent figure in Rome.

            The interesting fact of Caesar’s marriage with Sulla’s granddaughter can be accounted for in the changes which had taken place since the proscriptions of Sulla in 80 B.C. The Roman people had not forgotten the bloody reprisals of the Civil War, but, for a time, they had lost sympathy with such extreme violence. The political situation was calmer and a general tendency toward conciliation prevailed. Caesar had exhibited the images of Marius in 68 B.C. without being subjected to violence, and even the political adversaries of the famous popular leader were beginning to think of him again as the hero who saved Rome from the Cimbri and Teutones. Pompeia could now marry the nephew of Marius without committing a crime.

            Caesar’s position as leader of the popular party was now established, and he had gained great popularity with the plebeians. He was in open conflict with the Senate, and in this marriage was evidently bidding for the support of Pompey against the senatorial oligarchy.

            Pompey, six years older than Caesar, was already called “Magnus” because of his military fame, gained in his seven years of war against the Marian, Sertorius, in Spain, and in service with Crassus in the slave war. Though not a politician, he had been consul with Crassus in 70 B.C. In that year much had been done to weaken the power of the Senate and strengthen the plebeians. In the meantime, the Senate had alienated Pompey through jealousy of his prestige. There was a chance, then, to gain his co-operation with the opposing leaders. In the ten years between 70 B.C. and the forming of the triumvirate in 60 B.C., Caesar let no opportunity slip by to cultivate Pompey as the most influential man in Rome and Crassus as the wealthiest, his final aim being to undermine the Senate.

            To injure the prestige of the Senate he had exhibited the images of Marius at the funeral of Julia in 68 B.C. For the same reason he restored the statues of Marius on the Capitol in 65 B.C. In his marriage with Pompeia, may be seen an effort to gain the same end through the influence of Pompey. Caesar was preparing the way to gain for himself even greater power than Pompey then enjoyed.

            Soon after his marriage in 67 B.C., Caesar, his quaestorship over, was sent to Farther Spain to settle the financial affairs of that province. Possibly we may see here evidence of Pompey’s influence exerted as a result of the newly formed marriage connection. During the next two years Caesar made himself useful to Pompey by throwing the weight of his influence in favor of the “Plebiscitum” proposed by Gabinius in 67 B.C. to give to Pompey for three years an extraordinary command that he might free the Mediterranean from pirates.

            In 66 B.C., Caesar together with Cicero, who had his own ends to gain, strongly advocated the Manilian law, intended to give Pompey command against Mithridates in Asia. In advocating these great provincial powers, which the Senate violently opposed, Caesar hoped to receive his reward in Pompey’s support for similar powers for himself when he, in the regular “cursus honorum”, should become proconsul. It is said also that Caesar hoped to gain further favor with the plebeians who voted these commands for Pompey, and to drive a wedge between Pompey and the Senate by granting to Pompey more authority than the Senate was willing for any one man to have.

            The marriage to Pompeia lasted only five years. While Pompey was still in Asia, it came to an abrupt end. As has been told in connection with the story of Clodia, Pompeia apparently had become involved in an intrigue with Clodius Pulcher, a dissolute young member of the Claudian family. Plutarch says “Clodius was in love with Pompeia, and Pompeia was in no way averse to him.” The watchfulness of Caesar’s mother, Aurelia, made it difficult for the two to meet, but Clodius, a bold, reckless boy, saw his opportunity when the rites of the Bona Dea were to be held at the official residence of the Pontifex Maximus in December of 62 B.C. Since Caesar was praetor, Pompeia was to preside at the festival. Clodius, who was slender and so girlish of countenance that Cicero later called him “Pulchellus Puer”, ‘the pretty boy”, thinking he could avoid detection “because he was not yet bearded”, went in at the open door in disguise as a woman. Unfortunately he came in contact with one of Aurelia’s slave women, was detected and violently expelled from the house by the Vestal Virgins and others. The trail of Clodius is of interest here only because of Caesar’s attitude. He immediately divorced Pompeia. As president of the College of Priests he agreed to their decision that Clodius must be tried for sacrilege, but he did not himself demand that Clodius should be punished. When he was called as a witness during the trial, he said that “he knew nothing about the matters that Clodius was charged with.” Yet Aurelia and her daughter, Julia, had given the jurors a complete account of the incident at Caesar’s house. When the prosecutor asked him why he had put away his wife, Caesar made his famous answer, “Because I maintain that the members of my family should be free from suspicion, as well as from guilt.”

            It is possible, as some said, that Caesar did not express his real opinion but spoke to please the people, who were determined to see Clodius acquitted; but Suetonius mentions this incident to prove that “even in avenging wrongs he was by nature most merciful.”

            Before the trail was over, Caesar left Rome to serve as proprietor in Spain.

            Two years later we find Clodius as Caesar’s political associate, for the trial was not without its indirect effect upon Caesar’s career. It caused bitter enmity between Cicero and Clodius, as has been shown, and placed in Caesar’s hand a weapon, which he did not scorn to use, to check Cicero’s opposition to the plans of the triumvirate.

            Of Caesar’s part in making it possible for Clodius, as a plebeian tribune, to begin his attack on Cicero, Suetonius has this to say, “Because Cicero, while pleading in court, deplored the state of the times, Caesar transferred the orator’s enemy, Publius Clodius, that very day from the patricians to the plebeians.” Plutarch implies that Caesar gave Clodius further support, when, condemning as scandalous the election of Clodius as tribune, in view of his intrigue with Pompeia, he adds: “But he was elected to ruin Cicero, and Caesar did not set out for his province till with the aid of Clodius he had put down Cicero by his cabals and driven him out of Italy.”

Calpurnia

            Sometime during the year of his consulship, 59 B.C., Caesar married his third wife, Calpurnia, the daughter of Lucius Calpurnius Piso, a very influential senator, a member of the popular party, and one of Caesar’s close political associates. This marriage, which Caesar entered upon in his forty-first year, proves even more than his other marriages the truth of the statement, “Whoever studies the history of the influential personages of Caesar’s time, will find that their marriages follow the fortunes of the political situation.” We may believe, if we like, that Caesar loved his young wife, Cornelia, or that he was attracted by the aristocratic Pompeia, but by no degree of imagination can we find anything but political expediency in his decision to marry Calpurnia.

            The triumvirate had been formed, although it may not have been revealed. Supported by Pompey and Crassus, Caesar had been elected consul. For his consular measures, particularly the agrarian law, he needed all the support possible from the popular party. The political situation offered no chance of a compromise with the Optimates. They believed the proposed agrarian law “would advance both the power and ambition of the very man who was the most consistent foe of senatorial privilege then in public life.” Caesar, “turning his back on the Senate forever”, resolved that the agrarian bill and all his future measures should be passed by the plebeian assemblies, as “Plebeseita”. Plutarch says, “As he had long been looking for pretext, he exclaimed with solemn adjurations, that he was driven against his will to court the favor of the people by the arrogance and obstinacy of the Senate.” Under those circumstances he married the daughter of Piso, and had Piso, with Gabinius as colleague, named as consul the next year. Cicero had a poor opinion of both; but Caesar wanted consuls who were strong partisans and could be depended upon to check any efforts to repeal the “Leges Juliae”. Cato is said to have objected and to have said “that it was in intolerable thing for the chief power to be prostituted by marriage bargains and that they should help one another, by means of women, to provinces and armies and political power.” At the end of his consulship, Caesar chose Gaul as his province and, backed by Piso and Pompey, not only received, for five years, Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum, but also was given Gallia Comata by the Senate, “Since the members feared that even if they should refuse it, the people would give him this also.”

            To Calpurnia, during the years from 58 to 49 B.C., her marriage to Caesar meant little, except that she was mistress of his household. Early in 58 B.C., the year after his marriage, Caesar departed for Gaul and did not see Rome again for nine years. When he returned to Rome in March of 49 B.C., during the Civil War, it was for only a short stay before he left for the campaign against the forces of Pompey in Spain. For more than three years he was in Rome very little. After his return from Spain in September of 45 B.C., he seems to have spent most of his time in the home of which Calpurnia was mistress, - whatever may be imagined of his visits to Cleopatra. He lived plainly and his life with Calpurnia must have been pleasant; but it is said that he would have divorced Calpurnia to marry Cleopatra, if he could have done so without offending public taste. It is also said that Helvius Cinna had, already drawn up, a bill, which Caesar intended for him to put before the people after he himself left Rome, to make it lawful for Caesar to have “what wives he wished and as many as he wished.”

            Apparently, Calpurnia had learned to care for Caesar. Her anxiety for his safety on the day of his death indicates that. In the century after Caesar’s death various stories were told of strange happenings on the night before his assassination. Suetonius’s version is that Caesar himself dreamed “now that he was flying above the clouds, and now that he was clasping the hand of Jupiter.” Plutarch tells that, while Caesar was asleep, all the windows and doors in the house flew open at the same time, and Caesar, aroused by the noise and by the moonlight in his room, notices that Calpurnia was muttering and groaning in her sleep. It seems that “she was dreaming that she held her murdered husband in her arms and was weeping over him.” Another story is that she dreamed that a pediment fell. In either case, when day came she begged Caesar not to go out, if it were possible, and to postpone the meeting of the Senate, or, at least, to inquire by sacrifices and by other modes of divination of the future. It indicates pleasant relations between them that Caesar respected her fears, “for he had never before detected in Calpurnia any womanish superstition, and now he saw she was much disturbed.” When the seers reported that the omens from the sacrifices were unfavorable, he decided to have Antonius dismiss the Senate. But the conspirators, for fear the plot would become known, sent Decimus Brutus to urge him with the plea that the Senate would be insulted if dismissed until a time when Calpurnia had better dreams.

            Little more is known of Calpurnia. Probably it is true that when Antony, on the night of Caesar’s death, went to the Forum where Caesar’s body lay, Calpurnia was there and asked him to take charge of all Caesar’s documents and valuables. The Roman people, it is said, were sorry for her because of Cleopatra’s arrival in Rome. Of all the women whom Caesar’s life affected she was most deserving of sympathy.

Julia, Caesar’s Daughter

            The most attractive story of a woman’s place in Caesar’s life, next to that of his mother, is the story of his daughter, Julia, his only child, with the exception of the child of Cleopatra. Julia was the child of his young days, the daughter of Cornelia, whom, in the eyes of the world, he honored, whatever may have been his real reason for his act, when he refused to divorce her at Sulla’s dictation. Who knows that the baby, Julia, did not influence Caesar in the stand he took at that time? We have no reason to think that Caesar regretted his act, and Julia may have been the dearer for being associated with that early time. There is no doubt that Caesar loved his daughter. It is true that she was involved in one of his political alliances, but that does not indicate a lack of affection on his part.

            In 59 B.C., Caesar, anxious to strengthen his alliance with Gnaeus Pompey, arranged for him to marry his daughter. Julia was then twenty-three years of age and Pompey, forty-seven. She was already betrothed to Servilius Caepio, who had greatly aided Caesar in his contest with his consular colleague, Bibulus; but Pompey promised to Caepio his own daughter, although she was betrothed to Faustus Sulla. Pompey had already been married three times, and had divorced two wives. Mucia, he had divorced in 62 B.C. because of a report, carried to him in Asia, of her intrigue with Julius Caesar. Apparently, the story of Mucia’s affair with Caesar had been found to be untrue, or Pompey had forgiven it.

            Caesar, having determined to secure for himself the proconsular province of Gaul, evidently was unwilling to leave Rome without making provisions for his interests during his absence. The alliance with Crassus and Pompey seems to have given less security than Caesar wished, because of Pompey’s instability of character and his very natural jealousy of Caesar. Pompey was older than Caesar, was accustomed to being lauded and given precedence because of his great services to Rome, and could not observe with indifference Caesar’s rising glory and his obviously superior ability and strength of character. Caesar and Pompey had become political allies because of their similarity of opinions, their military resentment of disorder, and their common interest in forcing the Senate to give justice to the plebeians and to the army. Each brought strength to the alliance: Pompey through his popularity with the army; Caesar through his popularity with the people. If Caesar was to be absent from Rome for five years, a new tie was needed to maintain the alliance.

            The first effect of Pompey’s marriage to Caesar’s daughter probably was to make clear in Rome the existing political alliance between Caesar and Pompey. Cicero, a great admirer of Pompey, did not approve of the marriage. In a letter to Atticus he referred to it as a dynastic match which meant “autocratic government in Rome.”

            Caesar, as consul, disregarding precedent which demanded that he should continue the procedure adopted on the first of January, began calling on Pompey first for his opinion in the Senate, although he had begun in January to call on Crassus.

            The most important single result of the marriage was that Caesar, backed by Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar’s father-in-law, Piso, succeeded in securing Gaul as his proconsular province.

            Whether Pompey was persuaded by Caesar to marry his daughter or had already become attached to Julia is not clear; but the strength of the bond caused by the marriage proved greater than was to be expected from a political marriage. The mutual love of Julia and her middle-aged husband was such as to cause much comment in Rome. It even brought severe criticism upon Pompey that, having been given the two provinces of Iberia and Libya, as well as four legions, when Caesar received Gaul, and Crassus, Parthia and Syria, he gave up his provinces to “legati”, and he himself “spent his time in places of amusement with his wife, either because he loved her, or because he could not bear to leave his wife who was attached to him.”

            In one instance, Pompey failed to respect an old obligation because he was unwilling to oppose the interests of Julia’s father. As has been mentioned in the account of the enmity between Cicero and Clodius, Cicero appealed in vain to Pompey for help when he faced the prospect of exile. Pompey even left Rome and stayed at his Alban villa rather than meet Cicero, who had helped him many times, securing the passage of measures in his behalf by means of his eloquence and political influence.

            In the meantime, the rivalry between Caesar and Pompey had increased, and, undoubtedly, the love both felt for Julia was a strong bond to hold together her father and her husband. Unfortunately, Julia died, in 54 B.C., at the birth of her child, and the child, a boy, survived only a few days. Thus the tie of Julia’s influence was broken, and, at the same time, the great bond of a common interest in the child who was Pompey’s son and Caesar’s only grandson. Caesar received the news of his daughter’s death through friends writing from Rome when he returned to Gaul after his second invasion of Britain. Plutarch refers to the great grief of Caesar and Pompey and to the anxiety of their friends because “the relationship was now dissolved which maintained peace and concord in the Senate.”

            Though Pompey intended to bury his wife at his Alban villa, the people, with whom Julia seems to have been a favorite, took her body by force and carried it to the Campus Martius where they buried it “more from pity for the young woman than to please Pompeius and Caesar.” Of the two, however, they seemed to prefer to honor Caesar.

            In the next year Crassus was killed in Mesopotamia and another obstacle in the way of the threatening Civil War was removed.

            In 52 B.C., while Caesar was still in Gaul, he arranged, in memory of Julia, for an elaborate feast to be given for the people in Rome and a very carefully planned gladiatorial combat. After the battle of Thapsus he again gave gladiatorial shows and naval combats in her honor. Nine years after Julia’s death, no doubt the memory of his own daughter caused him to write from Spain a letter of condolence to Cicero when Tullia died.

Octavia and Pompeia, the Daughter of Pompey

            And incident occurred in 52 B.C., after the death of Julia, Pompey’s wife, which helps to show both Caesar’s complete indifference to Calpurnia and the extent to which his private life was influenced by his political career. It seems that his relations with Pompey were becoming strained. Pompey had turned from Caesar somewhat and had joined with the Optimates. He had been honored by being made consul without a colleague and given the power to choose his own colleague later. The turn of events was not favorable to Caesar. To form a bond between himself and Pompey, he proposed for Pompey to marry his grand-niece Octavia, who had been married to Gaius Marcellus; and he himself offered to divorce Calpurnia and marry Pompeia, the daughter of Pompey, who had already been betrothed to Faustus Sulla. Pompey married Caecilia Metella, the widow of young Crassus, and a cultured member of the aristocracy. No reason is given for Pompey’s refusal of the new connections. Evidently he and Caesar had come to the party of the ways. Of Octavia we hear again as the sister of Octavius and the mother of the young Marcellus whom Vergil immortalized in the sixth book of the Aeneid.

Julia, the Sister, and Atia, the Niece, of Caesar

            Among the women who were very near to the real Caesar, the women of his own family, there remain to be mentioned, Julia, his younger sister, and Atia, her daughter. Julia was the wife of Marcus Atius Balbus, who had been a member of the commission, chosen by Caesar during his consulship, to carry out the land act. Atia married first C. Octavius, who was praetor in 61 B.C. After his death in 59 B.C., she married Philippus. Atia was the mother of Octavia, who married Gaius Marcellus, and of Octavius, better known as Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus.

            It is said that Caesar dearly loved his sister, Julia, and her close connection with his life and interest was shown when she testified against Pompeia, who had brought discredit upon Caesar’s house. Julia evidently died in 51 B.C. It is said that Augustus, when twelve years old, delivered a funeral oration in honor of his grandmother, Julia. It seems that when Caesar returned from Gaul and entered upon the last great period of his life, he had already lost through death the sympathy and influence of his great mother, his sister, and his daughter.

            Atia, the niece of Caesar, is chiefly of interest as the mother of the young Octavius whom Caesar chose as the heir of his wealth and of his name. Caesar apparently knew his niece’s family well, was on friendly terms with Philippus, and was accustomed to visit his home. Cicero tells of such a visit in a letter to Atticus of December 19, 45 B.C. Caesar, attended by a body of two thousand troops, had spent the day before on the estate of Philippus on the gulf of Naples near Puteoli and Cicero tells of the incidents of the day. Caesar received no one, had a retinue of only nine persons, and enjoyed the usual pleasures of the private beach and an informal dinner at Cicero’s “Puteolanum” that night.

            Evidently, on similar occasions, he had learned to know the young Octavius whom, at the time of which Cicero writes, he had already adopted, and sent to Apollonia on the coast of Illyricum, to finish his education under the famous rhetorician, Apollodorus.

Servilia and Tertia

            Of all the women whose names the gossip of his own day linked with that of Julius Caesar, the one who seems to have held the longest away over Caesar’s fickle affections was Servilia, the mother of Marcus Junius Brutus, and the half-sister of Marcus Cato. Suetonius says, “But beyond all others, Caesar loved Servilia.” The report seemingly accepted in Rome gave Servilia the name of having been the object of Caesar’s passionate love; and of having begun an intrigue with him so early in his life that it was said that Brutus, born in 85 B.C., was Caesar’s son. Plutarch says of that, “For when he was still a youth, he had known Servilia who was passionately in love with him and as Brutus was born about the time when her love was most ardent, he had in some degree a persuasion that Brutus was his son.” The persistence of the gossip and the general credence given to it in Rome leave little doubt that Caesar at one time was passionately in love with Servilia, that their intimacy continued for many years, and that their feeling of mutual affection lasted until his death. However, no modern authorities accept the report that Brutus was Caesar’s son. The fact of Caesar’s youth - he was scarcely fifteen years of age - at the time of the birth of Brutus, is a reasonable answer to the charge.

            That their relationship was notorious in Rome in 63 B.C. when Brutus was twenty-two years old, is shown by an incident recorded of the time when the Senate was deliberating concerning the punishment of the Catilinarian conspirators. Cato and Caesar were on opposing sides in the debate and were standing engaged, evidently, in a heated argument, when a small letter was handed to Caesar, which he read with no comment. Cato charged him with receiving communications and letters from their enemies, and quite a disturbance was caused. Caesar handed the note to Cato, who found that “it was a passionate letter from his sister, Servilia.” He read it, threw it back with the remark, “Take it, Drunkard”, and turned again to his argument. Evidently he knew of the scandal, as did the other senators. At that time Servilia was the wife of Decimus Junius Silanus, consul for 62 B.C., whom she had married on the death of the elder Brutus.

            Suetonius tells the story that in his first consulship, in 59 B.C., Caesar paid six million sesterces for a pearl as a gift for Servilia. In 44 B.C. after Caesar’s death, Cicero refers to Servilia as the “one time favorite of Caesar.”

            An interesting feature of their relationship is the friendship and mutual interest which seems to have existed between them as they grew older. In several instances Caesar is said to have favored Brutus because he was the son of Servilia. In 59 B.C., Caesar planned to discredit some of his political opponents by having the informer Vettius report, as undertaken by certain young men of the aristocracy, a plot to assassinate Pompey. At first the name of Brutus was on the list of the plotters. At the next appearance of the list the name of Brutus had been removed. Cicero gave as a reason “the peculiar and scandalous relations then existing between Caesar and Servilia.”

            Brutus, influenced by his uncle, Cato, joined Pompey’s forces and fought against Caesar at Pharsalus. In that battle, it is said, “Caesar...gave orders to those who commanded under him...not to kill him in the battle and if he resisted to let him alone and not force him.” He did this to please Servilia.

            After Pompey’s defeat, Caesar not only pardoned Brutus but extended to him various favors. He was praetor together with his brother-in-law, Cassius, when he helped to kill Caesar. And he had been nominated to be governor of Macedonia. He seems to have been the one of Pompey’s supporters whom Caesar trusted most freely.

            In Brutus’s acceptance of Caesar’s favors and in his apparent gratitude there seems to be evidence that he did not know, or, at least did not credit the gossip that he was Caesar’s son. There is not evidence that Brutus in joining the conspiracy was actuated by bitter feeling caused by Caesar’s relations with Servilia; but his personal friendship for Caesar does not prove that those relations did not exist. The very fact of his love for his mother and his reported yielding to her influence and that of his sisters, even to the extent of committing faults, could account for his excusing her intrigue with Caesar. He seems to have accepted his uncle, Cato, as a model for his own public and private life; but we must not forget that Cato divorced his wife at the request of Hortensius and received her back when Hortensius died Roman society does not seem to have ostracized Servilia. She was one of the social leaders who, as a matchmaker, encouraged the suit of young Servius Sulpicius for the hand of Cicero’s daughter, Tullia, in 50 B.C. Caesar himself says of the strongest characteristic of Brutus, his persistent adherence to an idea, when it was once entertained, “It depends a great deal on what he wills, but whatever he wills, he wills it strongly.” Possibly the intrigues of his mother and of his sisters, neither of whom was above reproach, were matters of which he did not know or in which he did not believe, or it may be that, from his Roman viewpoint, he did not consider that they affected his public relations. Probably we should give Brutus greater credit for his own integrity and sober living under such influences.

            Servilia deserves credit for her faithfulness in her relations with Caesar. But the account of her later determination to keep her hold over Caesar and to use it for her pecuniary advantage does not inspire admiration. It is said that as she grew older and felt that her attractions were no longer holding Caesar, she encouraged an intrigue between Caesar and her daughter, Tertia, the wife of Cassius. After Pharsalus she used her influence with Caesar to secure valuable property which had belonged to the supporters of Pompey. On one occasion, at a public auction, some fine estates went to her at so low a price that some expressed their surprise. Suetonius quotes Cicero’s witty reply, “It’s a better bargain than you think, for there is a third off,” - a reference to Servilia’s daughter, Tertia.

Porcia

            When the conspirators were urging Brutus to join them, knowing that his character and courage would strengthen their cause, Servilia seems to have used all of her influence to draw him closer to Caesar, and to persuade him to forget, if only for his own advantage, his resentment of Caesar’s autocratic power. But it happened that her influence was weakened by the recent marriage of Brutus to his cousin, Porcia, the daughter of Cato, and the wife of Bibulus. Porcia hated Caesar on her own account as the cause of the death of her father and the ruin of her family, but back of her own feeling was Cato’s influence. Always an enemy of extraordinary powers, he had steadfastly and bitterly opposed Caesar’s political measures since 63 B.C., and had killed himself at Utica after the battle of Thapsus. Bibulus, consul with Caesar in 60 B.C., had been Caesar’s bitterest enemy. He it was who made the motion in 52 B.C. to make Pompey consul without a colleague, and Cato had seconded the motion. Cato’s brother-in-law was Domitius Ahenobarbus, Caesar’s enemy till his death, who, as consul in 54 B.C., had opposed the people proposing to bury Julia on the Campus Martius, saying that it was not possible according to the religious precedent for her to be buried there, unless some action was taken by the government. Such was Porcia’s background. It seems that she and Servilia disagreed from the first, possibly because both tried to bend Brutus to their wishes, and their purposes were absolutely opposed. No doubt Servilia lost some of her influence over her son in a contest with his young wife.

Mucia

            A study of the women who influenced the life of Julius Caesar must necessarily take into account one of the greatest faults attributed to him, a tendency to yield to his fancy for any attractive woman with whom he came in contact.

            That it was believed, a hundred years after his death, that, in his own day, his immorality was a byword, there is no doubt. Suetonius makes this statement, “That he was unbridled and extravagant in his intrigues is the general opinion.” Then he proceeds to give certain details which had persisted until his time, among them a list of “illustrious women”, who were supposed to have been guilty of intrigues with Caesar. That Caesar carried on intrigues in one province and possibly in others is indicated by a song which was sung by the soldiers as they marched in his triumph after his campaigns in Gaul:

            “Men of Rome, keep close your consorts, here’s a bald adulterer,

             Gold in Gaul you spent in dalliance, which you borrowed here in Rome.”

Another song, sung on the occasion of his triumph in 46 B.C., “taunted him with his passion for Cleopatra.” To prove that Caesar found queens attractive also, the name of the little known Eunoe is added to the famous one of Cleopatra.

            A peculiar circumstance is the fact of Caesar’s reputed intrigues with those “illustrious women”, whose husbands were his friends or political associates, men whom it certainly was to his interest to conciliate. A famous instance is that of Mucia, the wife of Pompey, which occurred just as Pompey, having triumphed over Mirthridates, was on the eve of returning to Rome, with all the influence of his glory and popularity to be thrown into the political scale on one side or the other. The Senate, jealous of his victorious campaign in Spain, had alienated Pompey to some extent, in other ways, as well as by opposing the extraordinary powers given to him for his war against the Mediterranean pirates and against Mithridates. Caesar had approved of the Mediterranean command and had actively assisted in sending Pompey to Asia, evidently with a desire to win his political support. Yet, while Pompey was still in Asia, he was told that Caesar had taken advantage of his absence to carry on an intrigue with his wife. It seems that, at first, Pompey held the report in contempt, but, on his way toward Italy, he gave to matter more serious consideration and, as a result, sent Mucia a notice of divorce giving, however, no reason for his act. Cicero, in a letter to Atticus, says only that Pompey was not blamed for the divorce; but Suetonius says that even Mucia, the wife of Pompey, was one of the women of high degree whom Caesar loved, the word, “even”, seeming to stress the general surprise at the circumstance. When, about three years later, Pompey, his resentment having vanished in the face of political expediency, married Caesar’s daughter, the two Curios, father and son, openly reproached him for having married the daughter of a man whom he had called an “Aegisthus” and because of whom he had divorced his wife, the mother of his three children. Does it show how reckless were Caesar’s intrigues that he prejudiced his political future, to which he was accustomed to make all other things subservient, for the sake of a brief intrigue with the wife of a man whose friendship he had already made great efforts to gain?

Lollia and Tertulla

            Equally interesting is the report, to which Suetonius gives only a bare mention, of Caesar’s intrigues with Tertulla, the wife of Crassus, and Lollia, the wife of Gabinius.

            Whether these affairs, as some one has said, were maintained at the same time with that with Mucia or not, they apparently occurred during the period when Caesar was engaged in efforts to win over, or to keep Crassus as a member of the all-important triumvirate. Gabinius, too, was one whom Caesar could hardly have wished to antagonize. As tribune in 67 B.C., he had proposed in the assembly the plebiseitum which gave Pompey his command against the pirates, and had thus shown himself out of sympathy with the Senate and at the service of Pompey.

            As consul with Caesar’s father-in-law, Piso, in 58 B.C., he had joined with his colleague in adopting the suggestion of Caesar’s agent, Clodius, for Cato to be sent away from Rome, nominally as the financial administrator of Rome in Cyprus. In the background was Caesar’s unwillingness to take up in Gaul his recently acquired extraordinary power, leaving in Rome the outspoken Cato, the consistent foe of all such powers for individuals under the Roman government.

            There is no evidence that his intrigues with Tertulla and Lollia weakened Caesar’s political alliances with Crassus and Gabinius; and naturally suspicion arises as to whether or not his friendships with their wives were intended rather to strengthen him with his political allies. When we recall that Caesar married three times for political reasons and arranged a political marriage for his daughter, it is natural to suppose that he made use of other women, the wives and daughters of his friends and adversaries in public life, if possible, to further his plans. He seems to have been peculiarly attractive to women; and it is very probable that he shrewdly used his power over them for political purposes. Such may have been the case in his intrigues with Tertulla and Lollia.

Postumia

            An even clearer case of an intrigue with a political background is Caesar’s love affair with Postumia, the wife of Servius Sulpicius Rufus, the friend of Cicero.

            Servius Sulpicius, consul in 51 B.C., was the most distinguished jurist of his time and one of the finest characters of that time. Far-sighted and truly patriotic, he foresaw the probability of civil war, and had warned the Senate against an ill-considered course which might provoke such a war, as a result of the tension which existed in Rome as early as his consulship. Like Cicero he saw little choice between the possible supremacy of Caesar and that of Pompey, though, when the civil war broke out, he stood by the republic and supported Pompey. He was not definitely identified with either party, but seems to have tried rather to reconcile the two. Yet, during his consulship, he consistently supported Caesar’s interests against the active opposition of his colleague, Marcellus, who wished to relieve Caesar of his command in Gaul. Since he was a man not to be won by promises or any prospect of his own advantage, the inference generally drawn is that Caesar won him to his side by first winning his wife, Postumia, whom Suetonius mentions as one of the “illustrious women” loved by Caesar. It seems that Postumia’s reputation was not spotless and Cicero says that she ruled her husband. Evidently she ruled him to Caesar’s advantage.

Eunoe

            Very little is known of Eunoe, wife of Bogudes, King of Maurentania, who seems to have taken Cleopatra’s place with Caesar during some part of the time he spent in Northern Africa, before and after the battle of Thapsus, on April 6, 46 B.C.

            She is mentioned as a queen whom Caesar loved in addition to Cleopatra. In the words of Suetonius, “He had love affairs with queens also, including Eunoe, the Moor, wife of Bogudes, on whom as well as on her husband he bestowed many splendid presents.”

            Rather pathetic, because of its very brevity, is the story of Eunoe, who was for only a few months the object of the passing fancy of the great Dictator. Possibly, to the Moorish queen, the arrival of the famous Roman was a wonderful event, like the coming of a glorious star, which appeared for a short time on the horizon of her life, then vanished.

Cleopatra and Arsinoe

            Among the women who influenced the life of Caesar, the one whose story has aroused most interest since her time is Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt.

            Legend has been so busy with the romantic story of her connection with Caesar that it is difficult to distinguish historical from imaginary details; but we can, at least, be reasonably sure of when and how she met Caesar. When Caesar, pursuing the defeated Pompey, landed at Alexandria on October 2, 48 B.C., he found a civil war in progress between the heirs of Ptolemy Auletes. The thirteen-year-old Ptolemy XIV, influenced by three “palace intriguers”, the eunuch, Potheinos, Accillas, commander of the palace troops, and Theodotes of Chios, tutor to the king, had driven Cleopatra into Syria, and was then stationed at Pelusium, near the border of Egypt, to resist the approach of the young queen with an army of mercenaries. Pompey had been treacherously murdered, and Theodotes presented his head as a gift to Caesar. Caesar’s lack of gratitude was so obvious that the frightened Greek fled from Egypt.

            Egypt, at that time, was a free and rather important country, but because of the late king’s financial difficulties and his troubles with his subjects, individual Romans had become financially interested in the kingdom, and Pompey had been the patron of the Egyptians for many years. Caesar who had gone to Egypt to prevent a rally of Pompey’s forces there, seems to have decided to impress upon the people of Alexandria his power as the representative of Rome, and so make it possible to settle in a short time the matters needing his attention. Consequently he advanced into the city, with his lictors carrying the “fasces” before him, and took possession of the king’s palace. The Egyptian leaders evidently resented his presence, and would immediately have served him as they had served Pompey, if he had allowed them an opportunity.

            He at once summoned the heirs of the king to appear before him. The young king returned from Pelusium, and there were then in the palace with Caesar the two young sons of Ptolemy, Arsinoe, the second daughter, and Potheinos, the eunuch. In taking this action to end the civil war, Caesar seems to have felt an obligation to see the king’s will carried out because it had been in his consulship that “Auletes had entrusted his children to the Roman people and had made the Republic the executors of his will.” The will had been in the care of Pompey, whose place as patron Caesar seems to have decided to take. He could accomplish nothing until Cleopatra arrived; and she evidently understood that her only chance of recovering her throne was to get in personal touch with the Roman general. Yet knowing the danger of her assassination at the hands of emissaries of her brother, or of Achillas, whose troops were between her and Alexandria, she could not risk entering the city openly.

            From Plutarch and from Dion Cassius we have the familiar story of Cleopatra’s dramatic appearance before Caesar. Having set out, probably the last of October, by ship from Pelusium for Alexandria, when she was still at some distance from the city, she changed to a small boat and with only one companion, the Sicilian, Apolloderus, as darkness came, approached the walls of the palace. To reach Caesar without detection, “she got into a bed sack and laid herself out at full length.” Apollodorus then tied the sack and, taking up the roll, passed safely into the palace and into the presence of Caesar. It is said that Caesar was first attracted to Cleopatra by her daring entrance, then “completely enslaved by his intercourse with her and her attractions.” At any rate, he arranged for her and the young Ptolemy to rule jointly in accordance with the terms of their father’s will.

            A question which has interested historians is that of the extent to which Cleopatra influenced Caesar’s subsequent acts. Did he stay in Egypt longer than he intended on account of Cleopatra? And what kind of person was Cleopatra? She is variously represented by ancient and modern historians as a designing girl of sixteen who “favored the story of her intrigue with Caesar”, as a fascinating woman who completely captivated Caesar, as a woman supremely conscious of the possession of those gifts with which she quickly made her play at the sensuality and the erotic susceptibility of Caesar, and as a wild, irresponsible girl of twenty-one, whose love Caesar deliberately planned to win, both because he recognized a kindred spirit, and because he saw a chance to control Egypt. On one thing only do historians agree, and that is to accept the report given by both Suetonius and Plutarch of the intrigue between Caesar and Cleopatra, which seems to have begun shortly after her arrival in the palace, where she evidently remained, in close daily contact with Caesar.

            From the beginning there had been hostile acts committed both by Caesar’s soldiers and by the people of Alexandria. A war between the Roman forces and the Alexandrian army soon broke out, some said because of Caesar’s passion for Cleopatra, while others, evidently the greater number, blamed “the king’s party and chiefly the eunuch, Potheinos, who...was secretly plotting against Caesar”. The war became a more serious matter when Arsinoe, the younger princess, escaped from the palace with her attendant, Ganymedes, and became the nominal leader of the Egyptians. Caesar, suspecting Potheinos of plotting against him with Achillas, had the eunuch put to death. Achillas and Ganymedes quarreled and the former was assassinated. Finally, Caesar decided to send the young king to his army, with the ostensible purpose of allowing him an opportunity of arranging terms of peace. A supposition is that his real object was to get him out of the way that Cleopatra might be left as sole ruler of Egypt.

            Soon after his arrival in Egypt with the small force of three thousand and two hundred foot-soldiers, and eight hundred cavalry, to oppose to Achillas’s twenty thousand, Caesar had sent to Asia for reenforcements. Strengthened by the coming of the Thirty-seventh Legion from Asia Minor with much needed supplies, he attacked and defeated the Egyptian fleet in its own harbor, then took possession of the island of Pharos. In an attack upon Alexandria from the island, however, his forces were badly defeated. The soldiers were driven back to their boats, in such numbers that the boat Caesar entered capsized, and he had to swim for his life, carrying, it is said, a bundle of valuable papers in one had, and dragging his scarlet military cloak, the sign of his rank, with his teeth. He succeeded in getting to one of his boats but lost the cloak. With the arrival of further reenforcements under Mithridates of Pergamum, the war was brought to an end, on March 27, 47 B.C.

            It seems that when the Roman forces began to enter his camp, Ptolemy attempted to escape in a boat; but others filled the boat and it sank. The king was not seen alive again; and it is said that his body was found and recognized by his golden corselet.

            Caesar, then in complete command of the situation, gave the joint rule to Cleopatra and her younger brother. Dio’s comment is, “He gave Egypt as a gratuity to Cleopatra, for whose sake he had waged the war.” Arsinoe was held a prisoner and later sent to Rome to honor Caesar’s great fourfold triumph in August of 46 B.C. Of this war, which some critics say Caesar took too long to conclude, Suetonius says in Caesar’s favor, “A war in truth of great difficulty, convenient neither in time nor place, but carried on during the winter season, within the walls of a well-provisioned and crafty foe, while Caesar himself was without supplies of any kind and ill prepared.”

            Now the puzzling questions are: Why did Caesar stay in Egypt until July of that year, 47 B.C., and what effect did the influence of Cleopatra and his close association with her in the palace have upon his later purposes and plans? One modern writer, Weigall, in a burst of most vivid imagination depicts the glorious holiday time which Caesar enjoyed with Cleopatra in that supposedly welcome lull in his strenuous activities. He sees Caesar finally as the fond father of Cleopatra’s infant son, departing from Alexandria after his nine months stay, full of plans to make himself king of Rome, with Cleopatra as his consort.

            Caesar’s first plan, to win Egypt through his attractions for its queen, is represented as having been made as a result of his initial conference with the queen. An epitaph still preserved and inscribed in the “twentieth year of the union of Cleopatra with Amon,” apparently accounts for the statement that, toward the end of his stay, Caesar “was allowing himself to be recognized by the Egyptians as the divine consort of the queen, and impersonation of the god, Jupiter-Amon, on earth.” His early boast of his divine descent is referred to in order to make plausible the suggestion that Cleopatra, supposed to have been herself of divine descent, and certainly ambitious for herself and her family, encouraged in Caesar’s mind vague plans to establish a dynasty in Rome, with Cleopatra’s child as his heir, to rule over the world empire which he would form. It is said of Cleopatra, “Historians, both ancient and modern, are agreed that Cleopatra was a woman of exceptional mental power. Her character, so often wayward in expression, was as dominant as her personality was strong; and she must have found no difficulty in making her appeal to the soaring ambitions of the great Roman.”

            Of the events of the period before Caesar left Egypt the ancient writers have little to say. Suetonius says that with Cleopatra “he often feasted until day break and he would have gone through Egypt with her in her state-barge almost to Aethiopia had not his soldiers refused to follow him.”

            It seems very probable that the child of Cleopatra was Caesar’s son. Evidently with Caesar’s consent he was named Caesarion, a Greek diminutive for Caesar. He is said to have resembled Caesar in face and figure. After Caesar’s death Mark Antony made the statement in the Senate “that Caesar had really acknowledged the boy, and that Gaius Matius, Gaius Oppius, and other friends of Caesar knew this.” But Gaius Oppius published a book to prove that the son of Cleopatra was not Caesar’s child. Plutarch says that soon after he left Egypt, she gave birth to a child of Caesar which was named Caesarion, and Dio mentions the child of Caesar which Cleopatra bore.

            It was not until July 25, 46 B.C. that Caesar, having defeated Pharnaces of Pontus at the battle of Zela, in July, 47 B.C. and the Pompeian leaders in Africa at the battle of Thapsus on April 6, 46 B.C., returned to Rome free to celebrate his great triumph. Apparently, his love for Cleopatra had cooled or had never been an engrossing passion, for we hear of his intrigue with Eunoe, the wife of Bogudes, King of Mauretania, during his campaign in northern Africa. Yet, it seems that shortly before or after his return he “called” Cleopatra to Rome with her son. It is not clear whether she was in Rome to witness the triumph or came later, but it seems reasonable to suppose that she came at the same time as the Egyptian prisoners, who were to be shown in the triumph, chief of whom were the princess, Arsinoe and the eunuch, Ganymedes. It is suggested that Caesar would have wished to show by her presence, as a witness of the triumph celebrating his Egyptian conquest, that she was a queen whose cause he had championed in contrast to Arsinoe who was compelled to walk in chains through the streets of Rome. That is a natural conclusion, if Caesar intended to become king with Cleopatra as his queen, ruling over Rome and Alexandria.

            From Cicero’s letters we know that she was established in state in Caesar’s trans-Tiberine villa, in the gardens he willed to the people of Rome. He wrote, on June 13, 44 B.C., “The queen’s insolence too, when she was living in Caesar’s trans-Tiberine villa, I cannot recall without a pang.” In the same letter he wrote, “I can’t stand the queen.” It is taken for granted that the queen was Cleopatra; and it may be that she offended others by her pride, and was not generally liked in Rome. She was a foreigner; and it was natural for the Romans to sympathize with Calpurnia to whom the evident dignity assigned to Cleopatra was an affront if not a threat. The pity which some felt for Arsinoe because of her degradation in Caesar’s triumph may also have reacted against Cleopatra.

            Her relations with Caesar must have been understood and condemned as openly as, under his power, was safe. His disregard of possible criticism, in passing a “senatus consultum”, giving her the title, “Friend and Ally of the Roman people”, undoubtedly was resented.

            The “insolence of which she was accused may have been an unconscious result of the atmosphere of absolutism, to which she had been accustomed, but it has been interpreted to show her feeling of the nearness of the triumph of her ambitions, as Caesar assumed more and more autocratic power and showed, as the Romans thought, his desire for kingly power. If, as is possible, Cleopatra encouraged Caesar to wish to be king, then she helped to bring upon him the fate which meant disaster for her also, for Plutarch says, “But the most manifest and deadly hatred towards him was produced by his desire of kingly power.”

            Probably in December, 46 B.C., Caesar left Rome for the Spanish campaign and did not return to Rome until September, 45 B.C., after his defeat of the sons of Pompey at Munda, March 17, 45 B.C. No doubt Cleopatra and the boy Caesarion remained in the villa across the Tiber during his absence from Italy.

            Probably Caesar continued to visit Cleopatra frequently and felt for her more than friendship and the bond of their common ambitions, if such existed, because of the child, Caesarion. Suetonius says that “he did not let her leave until he had laden her with high honors and rich gifts”, showing the difficulty in accepting the legends about Cleopatra, for it is not thought that she left Rome until after Caesar’s assassination. The usually conservative Sihler suggests that Caesar’s particular enjoyment of the laurel wreath, granted to him by the senate to wear always, was due to his desire to conceal his baldness - and his age - because “Cleopatra still resided in his park”.

            After his return from Spain, however, his custom evidently was to stay in the house of which Calpurnia was mistress; and the evident accord between them on the morning of his death gives the impression that he drew nearer to Calpurnia in the last few months of his life. Yet his purpose to marry Cleopatra, if only through ambition, seems to have persisted, for it seems that, after his death, Helvius Cinna, tribune of the plebs, claimed to have a bill drawn up and ready to be presented to the people in Caesar’s absence, which would allow Caesar “to marry what wives he wished and as many as he wished.”

            In the letter written after Caesar’s death, in which Cicero speaks of her insolence, he further says, “I won’t have anything to do therefore with that lot. They think not so much that I have no spirit as that I have scarcely any proper pride left.” Did Cleopatra make an effort to advance the claims of her son as the heir of Caesar, and fail to meet with success? Cicero’s last reference is to her flight from Rome. Evidently she was no longer safe there.

            It is probably that she came in contact with Mark Antony in Rome. He was a prominent Caesarian and naturally Caesar’s followers were cordial to Cleopatra. But it was not until 41 B.C. that he summoned her to Cilicia to answer to certain charges of having aided Cassius in his resistance to Antony. It was then that Antony’s infatuation began, and he followed her to Alexandria.

            It is not necessary to give here the details of her life until 30 B.C., when Augustus took the city of Alexandria and Antony committed suicide. Having been secretly informed of the intention of Augustus to hold her a prisoner and display her in his triumph, she killed herself, it was thought, by attracting the bite of an asp, which had been concealed in a basket of figs. The truth is not known, for the asp was not seen or any sign of other poison.

            After her death, Augustus put to death her son, Caesarion, but her other children, twins, Alexander and Cleopatra, the children of Antony, were spared, and Antony’s wife, Octavia, the sister of Augustus, reared them with her own children.

Chapter III Vergil

The Women who Influenced the Life of Vergil

            It is unusual to trace the events of the life of a famous man to his death at the age of fifty-one, and find no evidence of the influence of any woman upon his life or work. Yet that is true of the poet, Vergil. Gossip, however, did not leave him absolutely unscathed. It was commonly reported that he had an intrigue with Plotia Hieria. As to that, Asconius Pedianus declares that Plotia Hieria herself, when she was old, used to say that Varius had suggested such an intrigue to Vergil but he had “obstinately refused.”

            Prescott finds in “Catalepton I” the only “possible evidence of amatory adventures” on the part of Vergil. There an epigram addressed to Plotius Tucca represents a married woman’s return to town as failing to console the poet because her husband keeps her “under lock and key.”

            To offset gossip and such interpretations of his poems, we have the word of Vergil’s intimate friend, the poet, Horace, who praised Vergil and his friends, Plotius Tucca and Lucius Varius as “the purest souls earth ever bore.” Furthermore, according to Prescott, “his maturer work is remarkably free from any indication of interest in the sensational erotic themes that attracted Hellenistic poets in their choice of subject matter from mythology, or legends, or from supposedly personal experiences.” So much for attempts to prove Vergil no better than the usual Roman of his day.

            The one woman in Vergil’s life was his mother, and she lived until after he reached manhood. She must have meant something to him because he apparently spent his time, except for his ten years of study in Rome, with his father, mother and brothers, in his old home, until he went to Rome sometime after 42 B.C. His mother survived his father and married again. This is shown by the fact that among his “herides”, he named his half-brother, Valerius Proculus, and left him one-half of his property. The other heirs were Augustus, Maecenas, Lucius Varius, and Plotius Tucca. One of his own brothers, Silo, had died in childhood; another, Flaccus, in early manhood. The latter is lamented as Daphnis in the fifth Eclogue.

            Vergil does not mention his mother, except presumably among “those he loved”. According to legends, she was Magia Polla, the daughter of Magius, a minor public official. In the name, Magia, is to be seen a possible foundation for the legends of the Middle Ages that Vergil was a “magnus”, a magician.

            There is a legend that the night before his birth, his mother dreamed that she had borne a laurel branch which, immediately upon touching the ground, “took root and grew at once to the size of a full grown tree, covered with fruits and flowers.” The Latin word for branch, “virga”, used in this legend, may have influenced the later spelling of the name, “Vergil”.

            Another story is that the mother of Vergil, on her way with her husband to a neighboring part of the country, turned aside from the road and gave birth to her son in a ditch.

            The poet was born, October 15, 70 B.C., at Andes, a village three miles from Mantua, an ancient town remaining in the Transpadane region of northern Italy. Andes disappeared long ago, but in Dante’s time tradition had identified the present village of Pietole with Vergil’s birthplace, and that view may still be accepted.

            It is not known to what race the poet’s family belonged. He has this to say in the “Aeneid”: “Mantua, rich in ancestry, yet not all of one blood, a threefold race, and under each race four cantons; herself, she is the cantons’ head, and her strength is of Tuscan blood.” Some writers see in Vergil’s genius a Celtic descent; another recalls that Italians from the south throughout the second century, B.C., were emigrating to the region known as “Gallia Cisalpina”. It had been a “main dwelling place of the Etruscans” and they stayed in Mantua, especially, defended by the marshes of the Mincius, until the time of the empire. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff says that Maro was an Umbrian name for a village official.

            The view that Vergil was on the old Latin stock is strengthened by the fact that Vergil’s father sent his son to Rome to be trained for a political career, possible only to a Roman citizen. As it is known from the fourth “Catalepton” that the father spent his early life at Cremona, it may be that he was a descendant of Roman citizens who colonized Cremona in 218 and 190 B.C. An interesting but not particularly important fact is that Vergil was tall and dark, whereas the Gauls were usually fair with light hair, and the Etruscans dark but not tall.

            His father’s first name is not known, and the ancient authorities differ as to his means of livelihood. If he was a potter, as has been said, he was not necessarily a peasant. It seems that at that time the potters of northern Italy owned factories with large outputs, and, because they used a product of the soil, were in the same class with farmers.

            The story commonly told is that he began life at Cremona and was the hired man of Magius, a “viator”, or courier of the magistrates. He showed himself so industrious and ambitious that he was allowed to marry his employer’s daughter. He owned a farm of sufficient value to be the subject of controversy between Vergil and one of the veteran soldiers of the triumvirs, and seems to have greatly increased his income by keeping bees and by buying up woodland tracts to sell the lumber. Apparently he had an income large enough to educate his son and to allow him to live a life of leisure until he went to Rome at the age of thirty. Probably the father had little education, but he had the foresight and intelligence to determine that his son should have the best educational advantages possible.

            It may be that Vergil began his education at his home or in Mantua, but when he was a boy the family moved to Cremona, a town fifty miles west of Mantua. He continued his studies there until he assumed the “toga virilis” at the age of sixteen. He then stayed for a while in Mediolanum, the modern Milan, taking a course, probably consisting chiefly of literature, and more suited to the career he finally adopted than the more practical course given in Rome. Since his father intended him for public life, he went to Rome in 53 B.C. to take the training leading to a forensic career. There he studied under the best masters, among them the Greek poet, Parthenius, and the great Epicurean philosopher, Siro. Having finished his studies, he pleaded one case at the bar, and his career as a lawyer ended. His love for literary pursuits and his lack of physical vigor were against it as well as his rather halting speech and rustic manner, a manner never quite lost.

            With his education completed, Vergil returned to Mantua to live a life of retirement, interested in agriculture, science, and literature, and devoting himself seriously to pastoral poetry. Shortly after 42 B.C. there occurred the incident which was to change his life. After the battle of Philippi, the triumvirs assigned to their veteran soldiers all the lands held by supporters of Brutus in the Transpadane region. Cremona and the adjacent territory were condemned. Because Cremona did not supply sufficient land, its neighbor, Mantua, lost a part of its territory. The farm of Vergil’s father was confiscated, but was restored temporarily by Asinius Pollio, the governor of the province, who had become a friend of Vergil through interest in his poems. At the same time, Vergil seems to have secured, probably through Pollio, the patronage of Cornelius Gallus and Varus, who had been his fellow-students in Rome. When his farm was again threatened during the governorship of Varus, he went to Rome and recovered his farm through an interview with Octavianus, to whom he was introduced through Pollio, Varus, and Gallus, or possibly through Gallus alone. He commemorates his visit to Octavianus in the First Eclogue in which he is happy because a “god” has helped him. From the reversed chronological order of the two Eclogues dealing with the loss and recovery of his farm has arisen the belief held by some that Vergil twice both was dispossessed and appealed to Octavianus. About the same time Vergil became the friend of Maecenas and received aid from him when he nearly lost his life in a dispute over his farm with one of the veteran soldiers.

            By 38 B.C. Vergil had gained Octavianus and Maecenas as friends and patrons, and had entered upon the life of financial ease and literary accomplishment which continued until his death. During that time he finished his two greatest works, the “Georgics”, written in honor of Maecenas who had saved him from violence, and the “Aeneid”, written to glorify Rome and honor Augustus. His first important work, the “Eclogues”, had been begun in 42 B.C. at the request of Pollio, and published in 37 B.C.

            Of the influence of his father on Vergil’s life the first evidence has been seen in his education. Apparently, his father, instead of depreciating the literary work which could have meant little to him, encouraged it, and left the poet free to follow his own bent. When his own genius and vision had made him Rome’s greatest poet, his love for his father and his gratitude found expression, in the “Aeneid.” The most beautiful thought in the “Aeneid” is the filial loyalty seen in the relations between Aeneas and his father, Anchises, and represented as the most worthy quality of the Roman race. It is seen again in the eighth book when Iepas decides to be a physician rather than a poet in order to cure his blind father. Vergil’s father also was blind and it is felt that his son would have been willing to make the same sacrifice.

            When Vergil was driven from his farm, his first care was for his father and he found a refuge for him at the villa of Siro, his former teacher. After Vergil himself was living in ease in Rome or in Naples, he still took care of his father and sent him money regularly each year.

            The lack of evidence of his mother’s influence probably can be accounted for in her own character. Possibly she was of a patient, self-effacing type, whose place in her son’s life was so insensibly felt that it did not occur to him to speak of it. His mother was “one of those he loved”, and she was satisfied that it was so. That his mother was not a self-assertive woman may be inferred from the type of women he portrays as wives and mothers in the “Aeneid”. His mother was the only woman he knew well. Naturally, she was the prototype of Creusa, the colorless Lavinia, and Andromache, the wife of Hector, who asked nothing for themselves and accepted things as they came. Even Dido pitifully asks at the last only for “empty time, a respite and breathing space until fate shall teach me, though vanquished, to grieve.”

            We find abundant proof of the influence, on Vergil’s character, life, and work, of his childhood home, upon which his mother’s personality must have been impressed. The well known simple and virtuous life of the people around Andes was the life of Vergil’s parents, and it is not surprising that it left an indelible impression upon his character. When he became a part of the court life in Rome, the purity of his character was put to a test, and he showed himself so modest in speech and thought that at Naples he was called “Parthenias”, the maiden. When Augustus offered him the estate of an exiled republican, Vergil refused. He had gained sympathy and understanding. “Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt”, “There is compassion for suffering, and the misfortunes of mortals touch the heart.” This was no idle phrase to the writer of the “Aeneid”.

            Born of rustic parents and brought up in the bush and forest, still rustic in appearance, as Melissus, the freedman of Augustus, says, Vergil did not find it easy to adapt himself to life in Rome. It is said that whenever he appeared in Rome - and that was seldom - he would take refuge in the nearest house when people followed and pointed him out. He felt more at home in the quiet life of Naples and there - partly because of his health - he spent most of the last twenty years of his life. He was buried there by the roadside, as was the custom, in a tomb for which he is said to have written this inscription:

            “Mantua me genuit; Calabri rapuere; tenet nune Parthenope; cecini pascua,

            rura, duces.”

            Because of his early environment, there was more in Vergil’s loyalty to Augustus than the natural gratitude of a Roman poet to a generous patron. The people of Cisalpine Gaul had looked to Julius Caesar as their patron since 68 B.C. It was by Caesar that they were given Roman citizenship in 49 B.C. The republic meant little to them except the oppressive power of the Senate. Their outlook was fresh, and free from bias in favor of any party. Their recently gained citizenship had been involved in Caesar’s success and they had been strong supporters of his dictatorship. Vergil had known their feeling from childhood, had grown up with the national idea, that all Italy should have the same rights. His sympathy was with Caesar and his successor who had made all Italy one. Possibly when Vergil was a boy, he had seen Caesar and had read the “Bellum Gallicum”. His horror at the murder of Caesar is described in the first Georgic. Octavianus was Caesar’s chosen heir. Vergil had seen a strong government restored and peace brought to all Italy. Probably the closing of the doors of the Temple of Janus had been a very significant thing to the peace-loving poet. In his country home he had developed the idealism with which he now looked upon the great Dictator and Augustus; upon the city of Rome which Augustus had made beautiful; and its history and its gods. He was thoroughly in sympathy with the policy of Augustus, as Dr. Knapp expresses it: “to commend his sovereignty by emphasizing the grandeur of Rome and the continuity of the state and by reviving the worship of the national gods.” We realize that it is true when re read the Aeneid, his great national epic, in which he tells of the origin of Rome and of Augustus, and of the influence of the gods.

            The effect of Vergil’s early environment on his works is seen first in the Eclogues which portray throughout the simple country life. In the Georgics, he tells of the virtues of the Italian farmer - industry and freedom from unworthy ambitions; - of the purity of his home; of his solid comforts and independence; and of the few pleasures he enjoyed. In the “Aeneid”some of the most beautiful passages are reminiscent of the poet’s boyhood. He had learned to know and love nature, the trees, the beasts, and the birds; and he refers to them in the similes with which he enriches the “Aeneid.” Because his father raised bees, he knew their ways well, and we find:

            “Qualis apes aestate nova per florea rura exercet sub sole labor”.

            “Such labor as in the early summer occupies the bees through the flowery meadows.”