This is, perhaps, a good opportunity of saying something about the lady herself.  Who she was we do not certainly know.  There was a family of the name in Rome, the most notable of whom perhaps was the Terentius Varro[7] whose rashness brought upon his country the terrible disaster of the defeat of Cannae.  She had a half-sister, probably older than herself, of the name of Fabia, who was a vestal virgin.  She brought her husband, to whom she was married about 78 B.C., a fair dowry, about three thousand five hundred pounds.  We have seen how affectionately Cicero writes to her during his exile.  She is his darling, his only hope; the mere thought of her makes his eyes overflow with tears.  And she seems to have deserved all his praise and affection, exerting herself to the utmost to help him, and ready to impoverish herself to find him the means that he needed.  Four letters of this period have been preserved.  There are twenty others belonging to the years 50-47 B.C.  The earlier of these are sufficiently affectionate.  When he is about to return to Rome from his province (Cilicia), she is still the most amiable, the dearest of women.  Then we begin to see signs of coolness, yet nothing that would strike us did we not know what was afterwards to happen.  He excuses the rarity of his letters.  There is no one by whom to send them.  If there were, he was willing to write.  The greetings became formal, the superlatives “dearest,” “fondest,” “best,” are dropped.  “You are glad,” he writes after the battle of Pharsalia had dashed his hopes, “that I have got back safe to Italy; I hope that you may continue to be glad.”  “Don’t think of coming,” he goes on, “it is a long journey and not very safe; and I don’t see what good you would do if you should come.”  In another letter he gives directions about getting ready his house at Tusculum for the reception of guests.  The letter is dated on the first of October, and he and his friends would come probably to stay several days, on the seventh.  If there was not a tub in the bath-room, one must be provided.  The greeting is of the briefest and most formal.  Meanwhile we know from what he writes to Atticus that he was greatly dissatisfied with the lady’s conduct.  Money matters were at the bottom of their quarrel.  She was careless, he thinks, and extravagant.  Though he was a rich man, yet he was often in need of ready money, and Terentia could not be relied upon to help him.  His vexation takes form in a letter to Atticus.  “As to Terentia—­there are other things without number of which I don’t speak—­what can be worse than this?  You wrote to her to send me bills for one hundred and eight pounds; for there was so much money left in hand.  She sent me just ninety pounds, and added a note that this was all.  If she was capable of abstracting such a trifle from so small a sum, don’t you see what she would have done in matters of real importance?” The quarrel ended in a divorce, a thing far more common than, happily, it is among ourselves, but still a painful and discreditable end to an union which had lasted for more than five-and-twenty years.  Terentia long survived her husband, dying in extreme old age (as much, it was said, as a hundred and three years), far on in the reign of Augustus; and after a considerable experience of matrimony, if it be true that she married three or even, according to some accounts, four other husbands.