Tullia
Tullia was Cicero's daughter, and her death produced the strangest project of his life. She was born about 79 BC, betrothed at a few years old, and married three times in a career of alliances she seems to have handled better than her father did. Her first husband died; her second, Furius Crassipes, she divorced; her third was Dolabella, a charming, violent partisan of Caesar's whom Cicero disliked and whose politics were the opposite of his own. She married him while Cicero was governing Cilicia and had not been consulted. The letters are the reason she is more than a name. Cicero writes about her constantly, calls her his delight, worries about her dowry through a civil war, and takes her advice on his own position. She divorced Dolabella in 46 BC while pregnant, and died in February 45 shortly after giving birth, at about thirty-three. The child did not survive long. Cicero collapsed. He withdrew to Astura, refused company, wrote to Atticus that he had nothing left but reading and writing, and composed a Consolatio addressed to himself, which is lost. He then tried to build her a shrine - a fanum, not a tomb - and spent months hunting for a site and haggling over gardens on the Tiber, on the explicit intention of having her treated as a deity. Friends found it excessive and said so, and Servius Sulpicius wrote him a letter of consolation that survives and is one of the coldest comforts in Latin: he had sailed past the ruins of Corinth and Aegina and asked why the death of one small woman should move a man who could look at that. The shrine was never built, and Caesar was murdered the following March.
- Lived: 79 BCE – 45 BCE
- Nationality: Roman
- Roles: aristocrat
