trying in other ways to a husband so excitable and vacillating.  We find stories of her in Plutarch and elsewhere which represent her as shrewish, too careful of her own money, and so on;[230] but facts are of more account than the gossip of the day, and there is not a sign in the letters that Cicero disliked or mistrusted her until the year 47.  Had there really been cause for mistrust it would have slipped out in some letter to Atticus.  Then, after his absence during the war, he seems to have believed that she had neglected himself and his interests:  his letters to her grow colder and colder, and the last is one which, as has been truly said, a gentleman would not write to his housekeeper.  The pity of it is that Cicero, after divorcing her, married a young and rich wife, and does not seem to have behaved very well to her.  In a letter to Atticus (xii. 32) he writes that Publilia wanted to come to him with her mother, when he was at Astura devoting himself to grief for his daughter, and that he had answered that he wished to be let alone.  The letter shows Cicero at his worst, for once heartless and discourteous; and if he could be so to a young lady who wished to do her duty by him, what may he not have been to Terentia?  I suspect that Terentia was quite as much sinned against as sinning; and may we not believe that of the innumerable married women who were divorced at this time some at least were the victims of their husbands’ callousness rather than of their own shortcomings?

The wife of Cicero’s brother Quintus does, however, seem to have been a difficult person to get on with.  She was a sister of Atticus, but she did not share her brother’s tact and universal good-will.  Marcus Cicero has recorded (ad Att. v.  I) a scene in which her ill-temper was so ludicrous that the divorce which took place afterwards needs no explanation.  The two brothers were travelling together, and Pomponia was with them; something had irritated her.  When they stopped to lunch at a place belonging to Quintus at Arcanum, he asked his wife to invite the ladies of the party in.  “Nothing, as I thought, could be more courteous, and that too not only in the actual words, but in his intention and the expression of his face.  But she, in the hearing of us all, exclaimed, ‘I am only a stranger here!’” Apparently she had not been asked by her husband to see after the luncheon; this had been done by a freedman, and she was annoyed.  “There,” said Quintus, “that is what I have to put up with every day!” When he sent her dishes from the triclinium, where the gentlemen were having their meal, she would not taste them.  This little domestic contretemps is too good to be neglected, but we must turn to women of greater note and character.