A Grief Observed: Cicero on Remembering Tullia

Abstract

This paper presents a new analysis concerning the grief of the Roman politician Cicero over the death of his daughter. I argue that existing characterisations suffer either from methodological weaknesses or from a misguided perspective on the appropriateness of the expression of grief emotions. I will suggest that the study of emotion in historical documents can benefit from a comparative analysis: personal accounts of the grieving process by highly literate individuals of the modern age can assist in characterising the nature of Cicero's grief, in particular how it transpires in his correspondence. Some modern insights into the grieving process will also serve as an analytical tool for an accurate description of the grief we find in his works. My analysis will be based mostly on reassessing the evidence in the letters during the early stages of his grief. This paper is part of a larger project (see Baltussen forthcoming-2b, 3) which aims to look at the consolation as a form of (psycho)therapy in antiquity and beyond