Cornelia Metella
Cornelia Metella was widowed twice by the collapse of the Roman Republic, and watched the second murder from a ship. She was a daughter of Metellus Scipio, from two of the greatest families in Rome, and was educated in a way the sources treat as remarkable - Plutarch says she knew literature, the lyre, geometry and philosophy, and had none of the unpleasantness such things usually give young women. Her first husband was Publius Crassus, the younger son of the triumvir. He died at Carrhae in 53 BC, cut off on a hillock with his Gallic cavalry and ordering his own shield-bearer to kill him; his head was raised on a spear in front of the Roman line, and his father was killed days later. She married Pompey in 52 BC, when he was over fifty and she was in her twenties, and Rome disapproved on the grounds that a consul in a crisis should not be honeymooning in Alba. By every account the marriage was happy. She followed him through the civil war, was sent to Lesbos for safety before Pharsalus, and rejoined him after the defeat. Off Pelusium in 48 BC she watched from the deck as he was rowed ashore to meet the Egyptians and stabbed in the boat in front of her, and the ship had to run for it. She got his ashes back to Italy and buried them at his Alban estate. Her father Metellus Scipio killed himself in Africa the following year after Thapsus, so within six years she lost a husband, a father-in-law, a second husband and a father to the same war. Nothing further is recorded of her, and she is a reminder that the sources for the fall of the Republic are almost entirely about the men who lost it.
- Lived: 75 BCE – 47 BCE
- Nationality: Roman
- Roles: aristocrat
