Tullia,
5th August, 79BC
TW - Grief
One of the most satisfying realizations I have seen on the faces of people that I have helped learn about history over the years is when it begins to dawn on them that not only is the past not another dimension, but the people who lived in it where humans just like you and me.
That might sound obvious - we’re all Homo sapiens, after all - but because we build idealized versions of people from the past in our heads, be it good ideals or bad ones, we are sometimes guilty of thinking of them as somehow fundamentally different to us. It’s very easy to think of ourselves as superior to them, both morally and intellectually, despite all the evidence to the contrary that, for example, the 20th Century can throw at us. Were humans really any more morally or intellectually superior in 1942 than in 42AD? The answer is no, of course. Humans have been pretty much the same for several hundred thousand years. We think that because we have iPhones and touch screen refrigerators that we are more ‘advanced’ than the Romans, but then marvel at how advanced the Romans were ‘for their time’. One reason people invent daft ideas about how the pyramids were built is because they’re staggered to think that people who they either subconsciously or consciously think were one step removed from ugga-booga caveman could have performed such staggering tasks of engineering might. Well of course they could, because they did. Humans 2,000 years ago were as fully formed and capable of solving complicated problems as they are now. The only difference between us and them is 2,000 years of experience in solving those problems.
Emotionally they were the same, too. People tend to form their ideas of what the Romans were like from boring text books at school which show people standing around in togas looking at things being built, or hitting barbarians in the face with pointy things. Watch almost any documentary on Roman history (the cheap ones that have a question for the title - Caesar’s Tomb Discovered? or something like that) and most of the filler shots will be of dour looking military types marching about menacingly. Watch something on Vikings and most of it will be full of bearded blokes running around shouting. And they’ll all have swords and be white. These are the images we have formed in our heads of the past and media producers give us the images we want to see.
The reality is that the Romans were just like you and me. They cried and loved, they laughed at jokes, they were happy and sad, they sang stupid songs and loved the arts, they were violent and peaceful, thoughtful and inane, good and bad. They lived in a society that was somewhat different than ours and had a different set of moral values, but it wouldn’t have been an entirely alien world to us. It’s very common to see the phallus as a symbol in Roman iconography and the traditional viewpoint has always been that they are good luck symbols. And they were. But I also suspect that, like now, Romans just found dicks funny and liked to draw them on things for a laugh.
When it came to emotions, the Romans obviously experienced all the same ones we do now, including grief. But we cannot assume that their emotional landscape was the same as our own, particularly in one where mortality was so high and one that is skewed by the bias of the sources, which are overwhelmingly the view of rich, educated men. There were intellectual attempts to define what grief was and to explore it as an emotion, but in similar ways to more modern thinking, such emotions were things that were to be overcome or at least moderated in some way. The Stoic view was that such emotions could disrupt normal human behavior and that philosophical discussion could act to restore the balance. Grief was not always seen as a separate emotion and was instead a subset of pain. The Roman orator and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero classed grief under the passion of aegritudo (distress), which he described as the most challenging:
..but aegritudo involves worse things—decay, torture, torment, repulsiveness. It tears and devours the soul and completely destroys it…
And he would know, because a large part of his life was consumed by it.
Cicero’s first child, and only daughter, from his marriage to Terentia was known simply as Tullia, sometimes referred to affectionately as Tulliola ("little Tullia"). She was born on 5th August, 79BC, although very little is known of her early life. Her younger brother, Marcus Tullius Cicero Minor, born in 65, served as consul in the year 30.
Tullia was married to Gaius Calpurnius Piso Frugi in 63, when Tullia was fifteen or sixteen, and Piso not much older. He engaged in public life, becoming quaestor (a generic term for a public official with a variety of responsibilities) in 58, although he died the following year. In 56, she married Furius Crassipes and although it seems they had a happy marriage, they nonetheless divorced in 51, for reasons that remain uncertain.
During the Civil War between Julius Caesar and Pompey (49-45BC), Tullia stayed with her father at Brundisium and Cicero's complains that Terentia had failed to provide Tullia a proper escort for the journey, or enough money to cover her trip. It was clear he was a fussing and devoted father.
In 50BC, Tullia married Publius Cornelius Dolabella, although er father had not consented to the match, and instead wished for her to marry Tiberius Claudius Nero, who was not that Tiberius, that Claudius or even that Nero. Tullia and her mother had instead chosen Dolabella while Cicero was out of town, being governor of Cilicia (in Turkey) and they were married before Cicero could do anything about it. Cicero may have had a point, because although they had two sons, their marriage was an unhappy one. The first son would die on May 19th, 49BC and Tullia would divorce him in 46, whilst pregnant with their second. Roman divorce was a relatively straightforward process, as was marriage, and either side could initiate it as long as you could find enough people to witness the proceedings.
Tullia died in 45BC at Cicero’s villa in Tusculum in Italy, a month after giving birth to the second child, who initially survived only to die a few weeks after his mother. Cicero was devastated by the deaths and his friends and colleagues, including Julius Caesar and Marcus Junius Brutus wrote him letters of condolence, some of which still survive. His second wife, Publilia, showed little sympathy for him, having been jealous of the love and attention he showed for his daughter who was much older than Publilia. He divorced her as a result.
Riven by grief, he was stunned by his loss: “I have lost the one thing that bound me to life,” he wrote to his friend, Titus Pomponius Atticus. Atticus invited Cicero to visit him at his villa near Arpinum, so that he could comfort him. In Atticus’ libraries, Cicero sought the words of all the great Greek philosophers on overcoming his pain, "but my sorrow defeats all consolation.”
Although Atticus did his best to console his friend, it didn’t seem to work and in March Cicero left the villa. It may have been that he was unable to express his grief in person and felt better able to do so in writing, because over the series of letters that he then wrote to Atticus, whilst he never again mentioned Tullia by name, he talks openly about his own ‘pain’, which he talks of as a physical wound such as here, when he discusses the funereal monument he will build to his daughter:
In trying to escape from the painful sting of recollection I take refuge in recalling something to your memory. Whatever you think of it, please pardon me. The fact is I find that some of the authors over whom I am poring now, consider appropriate the very thing that I have often discussed with you, and I hope you approve of it. I mean the shrine. Please give it all the attention your affection for me dictates. For my part I have no doubt about the design (I like Cluatius' design), nor about the erection (on that I am quite determined) ; but I have some doubts about the place. So please consider it. I shall use all the opportunities of this enlightened age to consecrate her memory by every kind of memorial borrowed from the genius of all the masters, Greek and Latin. Perhaps it will only gall my wound: but I consider myself pledged by a kind of vow or promise; and I am more concerned about the long ages, when I shall not be here, than about my short day, which, short though it is, seems all too long to me..
(Letters to Atticus, XII.21.5)
He speaks about his life before grief as his ‘happy days’ and how he must now ‘take his medicine’ as part of the process of mourning. Whether he was actually taking any medication isn’t clear and, in this respect, he means medication as a metaphor for suffering. The pain of grief, and how to resolve it, was commonly discussed, again predominantly in philosophical literature where grief is expressed as an illness. Cicero is searching, both in his friend’s solace, the works of the great philosophers and the process of memorializing his daughter, for a cure from his sickness. Cicero views his grief as something that can be treated by intellect and learning and on the one hand, such comparisons suggest that grief was considered a disease or an enemy that must be cured or defeated, and thus if these attempts failed, it represented a weakness in his own character. He viewed himself to an extent as a doctor who must heal himself, even if, as some of his friends suggested, he was not the doctor to do the healing - someone else should have been.
On the other hand, these medical analogies suggest an acute awareness of the intensity of grief and its potentially debilitating nature; that moderating the emotion of grief was not straightforward. It was not something that people would just get over. People needed help.
Cicero was an intellectual and philosophically educated man, yet in his letters following the death of Tullia we have a man who presents us with the genuine grief felt by a Roman. Cicero was suffering from acute grief in the months that followed Tullia’s death, and it’s easy to characterize this period as a major depressive episode. But his grief is sometimes portrayed as being at the extreme end of such reactions, which is an unwise comparison to make simply because no other person in Roman literature charts their grief in such a manner, leaving us unable to judge what may have been extreme, less extreme, normal or abnormal. Cicero may have felt his daughter’s death more than another person and the humanity and eloquence of his writing certainly enables him to portray it so. We have to bear in mind that at this point in his life, Cicero has also suffered many other blows, both in his personal life and career and so he might have been more susceptible to this final one. But that doesn’t mean that other, lesser educated Romans didn’t feel the same devastation at the loss of loved ones. Just that they were either unable to express it in a similar way, or they expressed it and such records are lost.
His sorrow is heartbreaking:
In this solitude I don't speak to a soul. In the morning, I hide myself in a dense and wild wood, and I don't come out till the evening. After you I have not a greater friend than solitude. In it my only converse is with books, though tears interrupt it. I fight against them as much as I can: but as yet I am not equal to the struggle
(Letters to Atticus, XII.15)
But it is not unique. Sometimes we find the grief-stricken words of lesser people than Cicero, written in funerary inscriptions, that are no less moving:
To the spirits of the departed. You wanted to precede me, most sainted wife, and you have left me behind in tears. If there is anything good in the regions below [the afterlife], be happy there too, sweetest Thalassia, married to me for forty years. Paprius Vitalis, of the painter’s craft, built this for his incomparable wife, himself, and their family.
(CIL Vol VI. 9,792)
In the 15th Century, a tomb was discovered in Rome that was attributed to that of Tullia. Reports claimed that the corpse inside looked as though it had been buried that same day and that a lamp had been still burning inside since the day it had been buried, 1,500 years earlier. English poet, scholar, soldier and cleric, John Donne, alludes to this legend in the eleventh stanza ("The Good-Night”) of his Epithalamion, 1613. Decemb. 26, composed for the marriage of the Earl of Somerset and Frances Howard:
Now, as in Tullias tombe, one lamp burnt cleare,
Unchang'd for fifteene hundred yeare,
May these love-lamps we here enshrine,
In warmth, light, lasting, equall the divine..