Birth, death and grief
Tragedy almost instantly overtook Cicero’s new marriage. Tullia died soon after giving birth to Dolabella’s son. Cicero appears to have been so incapacitated by grief that he retreated, without Publilia, to his property on the little island of Astura, off the coast south of Rome. His relationship with Tullia had always been very close – rather too intimate, according to the wild gossip of some of his enemies, indulging in the favourite Roman tactic of attacking an opponent through his sex life. It was certainly closer than that with her younger brother, Marcus, who among other minor failings never seems to have enjoyed the intellectual life, and philosophy lectures in Athens, to which his father had sent him. With Tullia’s death, Cicero claimed, he had lost the one thing that kept him committed to life.
The production of children was a dangerous obligation. Childbirth was always the biggest killer of young adult women at Rome, from senators’ wives to slaves. Thousands of such deaths are recorded, from high-profile casualties such as Tullia and Pompey’s Julia to the ordinary women across the empire commemorated on tombstones by their grieving husbands and families. One man in North Africa remembered his wife, who ‘lived for thirty-six years and forty days. It was her tenth delivery. On the third day she died.’ Another, from what is now Croatia, put up a simple memorial to ‘his fellow slave’ (and probably his partner), who ‘suffered agonies to give birth for four days, and did not give birth, and so she died’. To put this in a wider perspective, statistics available from more recent historical periods suggest that at least one in fifty women were likely to die in childbirth, with a higher chance if they were very young.
They were killed by many of the disasters of childbirth that modern Western medicine has almost prevented, from haemorrhage to obstruction or infection – though the lack of hospitals, where infections in early modern Europe easily passed from one woman to another, somewhat lessened that risk. Most women relied on the support of midwives. Beyond that, interventionist obstetrics probably only added to the danger. Caesarian sections, which despite the modern myth had no connection with Julius Caesar, were used simply to cut a live foetus out of a dead or dying woman. For cases where the baby was completely obstructed, some Roman doctors recommended inserting a knife into the mother and dismembering the foetus in the womb, a procedure which few women could possibly have come through safely.
Pregnancy and childbirth must have dominated most women’s lives, including those whom Roman writers chose to present as carefree libertines. A few would have been most concerned about their inability to conceive at all or to carry through a pregnancy. Romans almost universally blamed the woman for a couple’s failure to have children, and this was one standard reason for divorce. Modern speculation (no more than that) is that her second husband may have divorced Tullia, who did not deliver a live baby until her late twenties, on precisely those grounds. The majority of women, however, faced decades of pregnancies without any reliable way, except abstinence, of preventing them. There were some makeshift and dangerous methods of abortion. Prolonged breastfeeding might have delayed further pregnancies for those who did not, as many of the wealthy did, employ wet nurses. And a wide variety of contraceptive potions and devices were recommended, which ranged from completely useless (wearing the worms found in the head of a particular species of hairy spider) to borderline efficacious (inserting almost anything sticky into the vagina). But most of their contraceptive efforts were defeated by the fact that ancient science claimed that the days after a woman ceased menstruating were her most fertile, when the truth is exactly the opposite.
Those babies that were safely delivered had an even riskier time than their mothers. The ones that appeared weak or disabled would have been ‘exposed’, which may often have meant being thrown away on a local rubbish tip. Those that were unwanted met the same fate. There are hints that baby girls may generally have been less wanted than boys, partly because of the expense of their dowries, which would have been a significant element in the budget of relatively modest families too. One letter surviving on papyrus from Roman Egypt, written by a husband to his pregnant wife, instructs her to raise the child if it is a boy, but ‘if it is a girl, discard it’. How often this happened, and what the exact sex ratio of the victims was, is a matter of guesswork, but it was often enough for rubbish tips to be thought of as a source of free slaves.
51. A Roman midwife from the port of Ostia is depicted at her work on a terracotta plaque from her tomb. The woman giving birth sits on a chair, the midwife sits in front of her for the delivery.
52. An ancient Roman vaginal speculum is uncannily like the modern version. But Roman ideas of the female body and its reproductive cycles were dramatically different from our own, from how conception happened to when and how it might be prevented (or encouraged).
Those babies that were reared were still in danger. The best estimate – based largely on figures from comparable later populations – is that half the children born would have died by the age of ten, from all kinds of sickness and infection, including the common childhood diseases that are no longer fatal. What this means is that, although average life expectancy at birth was probably as low as the mid twenties, a child who survived to the age of ten could expect a lifespan not wildly at variance from our own. According to the same figures, a ten-year-old would on average have another forty years of life left, and a fifty-year-old could reckon on fifteen more. The elderly were not as rare as you might think in ancient Rome. But the high death rate among the very young also had implications for women’s pregnancies and family size. Simply to maintain the existing population, each woman on average would have needed to bear five or six children. In practice, that rises to something closer to nine when other factors, such as sterility and widowhood, are taken into account. It was hardly a recipe for widespread women’s liberation.
How did these patterns of birth and death affect the emotional life within the family? It has sometimes been argued that, simply because so many children did not survive, parents would have avoided deep emotional investment in them. One chilling image of the father in Roman literature and storytelling stresses his control over his children, not his affection, while dwelling on the terrible punishment he could exact for their disobedience, even to the point of execution. There is, however, almost no sign of this in practice. It is true that a newborn baby may not have been viewed as a person as such until after the decision whether or not to rear it had been taken and it had been formally accepted into the family; hence, to some extent, the apparently casual attitude to what we would call infanticide. But the thousands of touching epitaphs put up by parents to their young offspring suggest anything but lack of emotion. ‘My little doll, my dear Mania, lies buried here. For just a few years was I able to give my love to her. Her father now weeps constantly for her’, as the verses on one tombstone in North Africa run. Cicero too, in 45 BCE, for a time ‘wept constantly’ over the death of Tullia while documenting his grief and plans for her commemoration in a remarkable series of letters to Atticus.
No details are known about Tullia’s death, except that it happened at Cicero’s country house at Tusculum, outside Rome; and nothing at all is known of her funeral. Cicero almost immediately retreated alone to his hideaway on the island of Astura, where he read all the philosophy he could get his hands on about loss and consolation, and even wrote a treatise on bereavement to himself – before deciding, after a couple of months, that he should return to the house where she had died (‘I’m going to conquer my feelings and go to the Tusculum house, else I’ll never go back there’). By this stage he had already begun to channel his grief into her memorial, which was to be not a ‘tomb’ but a ‘shrine’ or a ‘temple’ (fanum, which in Latin has an exclusively religious meaning). His immediate concerns were with location, prominence and future upkeep, and he was soon planning to buy an estate in the suburbs, near what is now the Vatican, on which to site the building and was pre-ordering some columns.
He was aiming, he insisted, at Tullia’s apotheosis. By this, he probably meant immortality in some general sense rather than any full-blown claim that she was to become a god, but it is nevertheless another instance of the fuzzy boundary that in the Roman world lay between mortals and immortals, and of the way in which divine powers and attributes were used to express the prominence and importance of individual human beings. There is a certain irony, however, in the fact that, while Cicero and his friends were increasingly anxious about the godlike honours being given to Caesar, Cicero was busy planning some kind of divine status for his dead daughter. But the project for the shrine in the end came to nothing, for the whole of the Vatican area became earmarked for a major piece of Caesar’s urban redevelopment, and Cicero’s chosen site was lost.