Terentia, Tullia and Publilia, Vol. 1 Book

This book did not really deliver what the title promised, but, to be fair, it is hard to know how the promise could have been kept. We know very little about the two wives of Cicero, Terentia and Pulilia or his daughter Tullia, but because of Cicero's vast surviving correspondence, we have details about their lives that are not recoverable from other women of the period. There was next to nothing that could be said about Publila, the teenage bride that Cicero embarrassingly married when he was about 60, so her inclusion in the title is particularly optimistic. With the other two women, there are lots of 'probablys', 'perhaps' and even 'we hope'. I'm not sure there is much here that an imaginative reader could not have extrapolated for themselves from a biography of Cicero, e.g. no doubt Cicero being sent into exile was a very stressful time for his wife and daughter. The book could have been brought further to life, perhaps, with more about Pomponia, Cicero's difficult sister-in-law of whom the author mentions more than she tells. Perhaps a more general book on women in the Late Republic, using these women as primary exempla would have been more interesting and informative rather than a book that wasn't a proper biography of Cicero but told us an awful lot more about him than about his family.