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Updated: June 20, 2025
Between the return of Cicero to Rome in 77 B.C. and his election as Quæstor in 75, in which period he married Terentia, he made various speeches in different causes, of which only one remains to us, or rather, a small part of one.
He soon after defended the great comedian Roscius on a charge of fraud in a civil speech still extant, and apparently towards the end of the same year was married to Terentia, a lady of high birth, with whom he lived for upwards of thirty years. In 75 B.C. Cicero was elected quaestor, and obtained the province of Sicily under the Praetor Sextus Peducaeus.
The lyre had an effect something between that of a guitar and a harp, with some of the characteristics of the modern banjo, zither and mandolin. Since the lyre was looked upon as frivolous and unsuited to the gravity of a Vestal, Brinnaria introduced Terentia to the organ.
For remember the story of Terentia who was first married to Cicero, then to Sallust, and at last in her old age married a young nobleman, who imagined that she must possess some secret which would convey to him eloquence and genius. A letter he found waiting from Johnson, together with one announcing the death of his mother. No more was heard about a second year at Utrecht.
Terentia and Pomponia and their kind seem to have had nothing in the way of "higher education," nor do their husbands seem to have expected from them any desire to share in their own intellectual interests. Not once does Cicero allude to any pleasant social intercourse in which his wife took part; and, to say the truth, he would probably have avoided marriage with a woman of taste and knowledge.
For the game- preserving tendencies of the great oligarchs, he had a hearty dislike and contempt; in spite of the ill-looking, though obscure, episode of his divorce from his wife Terentia, he was evidently a man of strong family affections, the natural adjuncts of moral purity; he is inconsolable for the death of his daughter, spends days in melancholy wandering in the woods, and finds consolation only in erecting a temple to the beloved shade.
Married about B.C. 80, Cicero seems to have lived in harmony with her at least till the time of his return from exile, during which unhappy period he acknowledges the activity of her exertions in support of his recall, and the drain which his ruin was making upon her resources. Terentia had a large private fortune, and apparently used it liberally in his service.
These difficulties led him to take a step which it has been customary to regard with great severity; the divorce of his wife Terentia, though he was then in his sixty-second year, and his marriage with his rich ward Publilia, who of course was of an age disproportionate to his own.
There are many letters to Terentia, more in number than we have ever known before, but they are all of the same order. I translate one here to show the nature of his correspondence: "If you are well, I am so also. The times are such that I expect to hear nothing from yourself, and on my part have nothing to write.
Cicero, indeed, wrote in a similar strain to his wife Terentia, and used even tenderer diminutives than Pliny, but the sequel was that he soon afterwards divorced her and married a rich ward. We do not know the sequel in the case of Pliny.
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