Imperium

on the ninth day following the birth. The ceremony was held at the Temple of Tellus, next to the family house, and I doubt whether any nephew could have had a more doting uncle than Cicero, who insisted on commissioning a splendid amulet from a silversmith as a naming present. It was only after baby Quintus had been blessed by the priest with holy water, and Cicero took him in his arms, that I realized how much he missed having a boy of his own. A large part of any man’s motivation in pursuing the consulship would surely have been that his son, and grandson, and sons of his sons to infinity, could exercise the right of ius imaginum, and display his likeness after death in the family atrium. What was the point in founding a glorious family name if the line was extinct before it even started? And glancing across the temple to Terentia, carefully studying her husband as he stroked the baby’s cheek with the back of his little finger, I could see that the same thought was in her mind.
    The arrival of a child often prompts a keen reappraisal of the future, and I am sure this was what led Cicero, shortly after the birth of his nephew, to arrange for Tullia to become betrothed. She was now ten years old, his cynosure as ever, and rare was the day, despite his legal and political work, when he did not clear a little space to read to her or play some game. And it was typical of his mingling of tenderness and cunning that he first raised his plan with her, rather than with Terentia. “How would you like,” he said to her one morning when the three of us were in his study, “to get married one day?” When she replied that she would like that very much, he asked her whom in all the world she would most like to have as a husband.
    “Tiro!” she cried, flinging her arms around my waist.
    “I am afraid he is much too busy helping me to have time to take a wife,” he replied solemnly. “Who else?”
    Her circle of grown-up male acquaintances was limited, so it was not long before she raised the name of Frugi, who had spent so much time with Cicero since the Verres case, he was almost a part of the family.
    “Frugi!” exclaimed Cicero, as if the idea had never before occurred to him. “What a wonderful thought! And you are sure this is what you want? You are? Then let us go and tell your mama immediately.”
    In this way Terentia found herself outmaneuvered by her husband on her own territory as skillfully as if she had been some cretinous aristocrat in the Senate. Not that she could have found much to object to in Frugi, who was a good enough match even for her—a gentle, diligent young man, now age twenty-one, from an extremely distinguished family. But she was far too shrewd not to see that Cicero, by creating a substitute whom he could train and bring on to a public career, was doing the next-best thing to having a son of his own. This realization no doubt made her feel threatened, and Terentia always reacted violently to threats. The betrothal ceremony in November went smoothly enough, with Frugi—who was very fond of his fiancée, by the way—shyly placing a ring on her finger, under the approving gaze of both families and their households, with the wedding fixed for five years hence, when Tullia would be pubescent. But that night Cicero and Terentia had one of their most ferocious fights. It blew up in the tablinum before I had time to get out of the way. Cicero had made some innocuous remark about the Frugis being very welcoming to Tullia, to which Terentia, who had been ominously quiet for some time, responded that it was indeed very good of them, considering .
    “Considering what?” asked Cicero wearily. He had obviously decided that arguing with her that night was as inevitable as vomiting after a bad oyster, and that he might as well get it out of the way at once.
    “Considering the connection they are making,” she responded, and very quickly she was launched on her favorite line of attack—the shamefulness of Cicero’s lackeying toward Pompey and his coterie of provincials, the way that this had set the family in opposition to all who were most honorable in the state, and the rise of mob rule which had been made possible by the illegal passage of the lex Gabinia . I cannot remember all of it, and in any case what does it matter? Like most arguments between husband and wife, it was not about the thing itself but a different matter entirely—that is, her failure to produce a son, and Cicero’s