Terentia, Tullia and Publilia

The Women of Cicero's Family

Susan Treggiari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134264568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Studying references and writings in over 900 personal letters, an unparalleled source, this book presents a rounded and intriguing account of the three women who, until now, have only survived as secondary figures to Cicero.

In a field where little is really known about Cicero's family, Susan Treggiari creates a history for these figures who, through history, have not had voices of their own, and a vivid impression of the everyday life upper-class Roman women in Italy had during the heyday of Roman power.

Artfully assembling a rounded picture of their personalities and experiences, Treggiari reconstructs the lives of these three important women:

• Cicero's first wife Terentia: a strong, tempestuous woman of status and fortune, with an implacable desire to retain control of both
• his second wife Publilia: shadowy and mysterious, the young submissive who Cicero wedded to compensate for her predecessor's steely resolve and fiery temper
• his daughter Tullia.

Including illustrations, chronological charts, maps and glossaries, this book is essential reading for students wishing to get better acquainted with the women of ancient Rome.

1
The rank into which they were born

… certare ingenio, contendere nobilitate, noctes atque dies niti praestante labore ad summas emergere opes rerumque potiri.

… competing with inborn ability, striving with nobility, night and day struggling with outstanding effort to win through to the greatest resources and gain control of the world.

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 2.11–13

Terentia, her daughter Tullia and her husband’s second wife, Publilia, who was young enough to be her granddaughter, were born into wealth, position and power, when the Roman Republic was relatively secure in its dominance of the Mediterranean, although domestic problems were intensifying. They were free, when others were slaves; they were Roman citizens; they shared in Graeco-Roman high culture. Since their socio-political status depended initially on that of their parents and later on that of their husbands, and since Terentia and Tullia at least were deeply involved in their husbands’ politics, the context in which their men functioned is essential background. Apart from biology, they had less in common with women of lesser status than with men of their own class. Some six hundred senators and their families were at the vertiginous peak of a social pyramid, formed of tens of millions of inhabitants of the Roman Empire and a million in Rome itself.

People born into the upper classes, when Rome ruled all of the world which mattered, were extraordinarily privileged.¹ Given a sufficient fortune and a suitable education, a young male Roman might hope, by talent and hard work, to climb the political ladder, increase his property and, if he achieved a year of office as consul, control his world for a time. Those who began the race as members of senatorial families with high officials among their ancestors had the advantage of ‘nobility’ and had the best chance of reaching the top. Those who rose to the highest elected offices usually proceeded to govern a province, where they ruled supreme without colleagues and had opportunity to win glory and legitimate profit (not to mention rich illicit pickings which might give rise to prosecution and disgrace). The Epicurean philosopher, like Lucretius (quoted above), might idealise contemplative detachment, but in practice any Roman man born into the upper classes was likely, out of duty or ambition, to get involved in public service. The possibilities were exciting.

Rome’s position in the world also affected the lives of Roman women. This is the age of widowed mothers who pushed their sons into politics, of sisters who helped their brothers, of wives whose dowry and diplomatic abilities smoothed the career of their husbands and of daughters whose marital prospects were enhanced by their father’s political promotion and who might influence his decisions and act as intermediaries between him and husbands’ families.

Rome, Italy, the Empire

The Romans traced their origins to villages on the hills at the lowest crossing of the Tiber, which coalesced into a city-state around the eighth century.² Women were citizens with private rights (not the vote, the rights to stand for office or serve in the army) and transmitted the citizenship to their children in valid Roman marriage or outside marriage. By a process of conquest and absorption, the Romans gradually extended their power, first in the surrounding plain of Latium and then over neighbouring territories. From the beginning, as Cicero saw it, they had extended Roman citizenship to others:

What in particular undoubtedly founded our empire and increased the race of the Roman People was that our leader, the creator of this city, Romulus, by his treaty with the Sabines taught us that we ought to increase this state by welcoming even those who had been our enemies. By his authority and example, our ancestors never left off their generosity in granting and sharing citizenship. So many from Latium, for example the citizens of Tusculum and Lanuvium, and whole races from other groups were welcomed into citizenship, for instance the Sabines, Volscians, Hernici.

(Balb. 31)

In peninsular Italy, not only Latins (whose customs and language were the same as those of the Romans), but also Italic peoples of other languages and culture, whole city-states of the Etruscans or Greek colonies might become Roman. The Volscians, who swept into southern Latium from the Apennines in the fifth century and fought the Romans hard, were subdued by the late fourth century. Volscian Arpinum/Arpino, which was to be Cicero’s home-town, received limited citizenship at that time, and full citizenship in 188. By the mid-second century, the map of peninsular Italy was a mosaic of Roman territory; cities (coloniae) founded by Rome and populated by people with full Roman or the more limited Latin rights; allied cities and tribes. But all were dominated by Rome and contributed to Rome’s fighting forces.

Once Romans dominated the peninsula, they came up against foreigners beyond the sea, initially across the narrow straits which divide the toe of Italy from Sicily. As a result, in the mid-third century, Sicily became the first ‘province’: the Roman Empire had begun.

For you ought to take care of all the allies and provinces, but especially, judges, you ought to take care of Sicily, for many just reasons, first of all because Sicily was the first of all foreign nations to attach herself to the friendship and good faith of the Roman People. She first of all was given the name of province, which is an ornament of empire; she first of all taught our ancestors how glorious it was to rule foreign races.

(Verr. 2.2.2)

Like Italy itself, the Empire was a mosaic. It was not a geographical bloc with defined frontiers, but rather everything the Roman People could control, whatever fell under their power, imperium populi Romani, to which they could give orders (imperare) or (as I have translated above) which they could rule.³ The startling expansion of the 60s and 50s must have impressed Terentia and Tullia, especially when Q. Cicero, with Caesar, crossed the terrifying Channel and could study the landscape and peoples of Britain.⁴ The Empire included provinces administered by Roman governors, in which there would be cities with degrees of self-government, even ‘freedom’, and attached to which there might be whole kingdoms, allied to Rome but still ruled by kings. Members of the provincial elite might be granted Roman citizenship. There was a rich cultural mix. In the eastern Mediterranean, the common language for the upper classes and anyone involved in trade was Greek. In the West, Latin was making headway. Roman soldiers and merchants spread Roman ways. But the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Empire spoke their own native languages and followed their local customs and laws. Rome itself was a cosmopolitan city, of free foreign immigrants as well as slaves and ex-slaves of foreign origin.

The fundamental division in the world known to Romans was between slave and free.⁵ Slaves were chattels, without legal rights. All the societies with which Rome came into contact practised slavery. The unusual characteristic of Romans was that, if they freed their slaves, they made them citizens.

In areas controlled by Rome, to be born not only free but Roman seemed to Romans to be a distinct privilege, as in the nineteenth century, for many reasons among which the existence of the Empire was prominent, being born British was a privilege.⁶ The elite of a Greek city, say Naples, might despise Romans as culturally inferior and not cherish any wish to be offered Roman citizenship or to speak Latin, but the practical benefits of Roman private rights (marriage, contracts, owning Roman land, benefiting under Roman wills) and the right of appeal against Roman officials became obvious, by the second century, to Italians from allied communities who were trading in the provinces. The breakthrough the Romans made was to allow the acquisition of Roman citizenship without the renunciation of prior ties and loyalties. After the war with the allies, which brought about the extension of the Roman franchise to peninsular Italy, Cicero (Leg. 2.2.5.) could say of the natives of Italian towns, municipia (of which Arpinum was one): ‘I hold that all citizens of municipia have two fatherlands, one according to nature and one according to the state.’

How did a person acquire citizenship? First, by birth, as the child of a valid Roman marriage. A marriage was valid when made by two Roman citizens as long as there was no incapacity, such as close relationship (marriage was forbidden between ascendant and descendant [e.g., parent and child] or collaterals closer than first cousins [e.g., brother and sister, uncle and niece]) or being under age. The right of intermarriage with Romans might also be acquired by citizens of other communities: if the father were Roman, then the marriage was valid in Roman law and the children acquired his citizenship. Second, a child born to a Roman woman not validly married in Roman law acquired her citizenship according to ius gentium, the law observed (in Roman thinking) by all human beings.⁷ Next, citizenship might be acquired, by free aliens, a group or an individual person or family, through a law or by executive action on the part of a Roman official. It was also possible, and common, for an individual Roman citizen, man or woman, to transmit citizenship by the act of freeing a slave, for liberty and citizenship went together.

Citizens had the right of marriage with other citizens (conubium), the right to make contracts according to Roman law (commercium), the right of appeal against action by elected officials (provocatio), and, if male and adult, the vote, the right (in theory) to stand for public office and to serve in the army. The Roman People was sovereign: it met as a group in several differently organised assemblies to pass laws, decide on war or peace and elect men to annual office.

Within the citizen body, there was a marked hierarchy or, as Cicero would see it, a series of steps of varying worthiness and status (dignitas).⁸ Social status depended in part on political rank and was supposedly associated with moral desert. At the top were the ordines, ranks (you could picture them in the front rows at the games or as soldiers drawn up for battle) of senators and equites. Beneath them was the populus Romanus or the Roman plebs, the common people, as a whole.

Senate and equites

If you wanted to find out if a man was a senator, you could check for his name on the list of senators or look and see if he was wearing the gold ring, latus clavus (a broad upright purple stripe on his tunic) or special red shoes (calcei mullei or patricii, if he had held curule office), which were senatorial privileges.

The Senate (senatus) was made up of men who had held elected office. In practice only men of considerable wealth and position could afford to stand. Candidates might be sons of senators or belong to wealthy families which had not yet achieved senatorial rank. These, the pool from which the Senate was drawn, were from 70 onwards known as equites, cavalrymen (though their connection with cavalry was historical rather than current, except that when they served in the army they, as officers, mostly rode with the infantry rather than marching on foot). Cicero tells us in 54 that standing for office had ‘always been open to men risen from this equestrian order of ours’ (Planc. 17).

The senators were elected by the People. Some senatorial families cease to be attested, perhaps because their fortunes were diminished, or because they failed to produce sons who reached the age at which they could stand for office. As a result, a constant intake of new blood was needed so this was not a closed hereditary aristocracy. A man who could not point to an ancestor in the direct male line who had been a senator was a new man, novus homo.⁹ Many such men would reach only the lowest rung of senatorial office, the quaestorship, and remain among those in the Senate who were not called upon to speak but merely voted. Some might aspire to the praetorship, a more hotly contested office, and the rare few, the famous novi, of whom Cicero is the most famous, reached the consulship.

But the consulship, the summit of a senatorial career, open to only two men a year, was carefully guarded. As Sallust (Jug. 63), a former eques, wrote of the l...