[Footnote 7:  Another of the same name was an eminent man of letters of Cicero’s own time.]

Terentia’s daughter, Tullia, had a short and unhappy life.  She was born, it would seem, about 79 B.C., and married when fifteen or sixteen to a young Roman noble, Piso Frugi by name.  “The best, the most loyal of men,” Cicero calls him.  He died in 57 B.C., and Rome lost, if his father-in-law’s praises of him may be trusted, an orator of the very highest promise.  “I never knew any one who surpassed my son-in-law, Piso, in zeal, in industry, and, I may fairly say, in ability.”  The next year she married a certain Crassipes, a very shadowy person indeed.  We know nothing of what manner of man he was, or what became of him.  But in 50 B.C.  Tullia was free to marry again.  Her third venture was of her own or her mother’s contriving.  Her father was at his government in Cilicia, and he hears of the affair with surprise.  “Believe me,” he writes to Atticus, “nothing could have been less expected by me.  Tiberius Nero had made proposals to me, and I had sent friends to discuss the matter with the ladies.  But when they got to Rome the betrothal had taken place.  This, I hope, will be a better match.  I fancy the ladies were very much pleased with the young gentleman’s complaisance and courtesy, but do not look for the thorns.”  The “thorns,” however, were there.  A friend who kept Cicero acquainted with the news of Rome, told him as much, though he wraps up his meaning in the usual polite phrases.  “I congratulate you,” he writes, “on your alliance with one who is, I really believe, a worthy fellow.  I do indeed think this of him.  If there have been some things in which he has not done justice to himself, these are now past and gone; any traces that may be left will soon, I am sure, disappear, thanks to your good influence and to his respect for Tullia.  He is not offensive in his errors, and does not seem slow to appreciate better things.”  Tullia, however, was not more successful than other wives in reforming her husband.  Her marriage seems to have been unhappy almost from the beginning.  It was brought to an end by a divorce after about three years.  Shortly afterward Tullia, who could have been little more than thirty, died, to the inconsolable grief of her father.  “My grief,” he writes to Atticus, “passes all consolation.  Yet I have done what certainly no one ever did before, written a treatise for my own consolation. (I will send you the book if the copyists have finished it.) And indeed there is nothing like it.  I write day after day, and all day long; not that I can get any good from it, but it occupies me a little, not much indeed; the violence of my grief is too much for me.  Still I am soothed, and do my best to compose, not my feelings, indeed, but, if I can, my face.”  And again:  “Next to your company nothing is more agreeable to me than solitude.  Then all my converse is with books; yet this is interrupted by tears; these I resist as well as I can; but at