Terentia, Tullia and Publilia: The Women of Cicero's Family. (Women of the Ancient World) by Susan Treggiari

Abstract

204 PHOENIX This is not to say it was the golden age it sometimes claimed to be—an impossibility, in any event, since as Feeney notes (and here he might have cited Detienne's seminal essay, "Between Beasts and Gods," in R. Gordon, Myth, Religion, and Society [Cambridge 1981] 215-228), stories of a golden race or golden age define by exclusion the characteristics of human existence as experienced by their tellers. According to Detienne, the Greek stories articulate the contrast between life within and life beyond the city-state. For Feeney's Romans, the golden age is nostalgia for a past that can never be recovered. No doubt aspects of each version are present in the other, but what both accounts leave to the side is the ontological force of the myth. The golden age defines not just a life different from the here and now, but an existence different from that of any human existence in time. It is the narrativization of the experience of ritual time, or "time out of time" as it often called. Hence it is not surprising to observe the promulgation of the myth at precisely the period when Romans are being invited to discover or re-discover ritual experience in rebuilt temples, revitalized or newly created priesthoods, new ceremonies and spectacles. We might consider the golden age as not a rival but a complement to the institutionalization of calendrical and chronological time in the form of various fasti. Feeney notes the Romans' concern with time as both an arrow and a cycle: a fuller account of Roman temporality would require consideration of ritual time as well. In short, Caesar's Calendar is a good summary of the present state of thought on the issues it considers, using the methods generally accepted by classicists, especially those whose orientation is chiefly textual in nature. Let us hope that its limitations, rather than foreclosing inquiry, serve as an invitation to other scholars to explore more deeply and more imaginatively the Roman experience of time as one means of access to this stubbornly distant civilization. University of Southern California Thomas Habinek Terentia, Tullia and Publilia: The Women of Cicero's Family. By Susan Treggiari. London and New York: Routledge (Women of the Ancient World). 2007. Pp. 228, xxii. Writing the histories of women in the ancient world is a complicated matter: it is possible to work on the institutions which affect the lives of women and the ideas and attitudes held by men about women, but the voices and experiences of actual women—what they thought about their lives, how they saw their interactions with these institutions, what made them differ from each other—are far more difficult to recover. The editors and authors of this series of biographies of ancient women have set themselves a significant challenge, and the high quality of the work produced so far for it must be encouraging to anyone interested in the subject. This volume in particular, as it deals with the lives not of one but of three women, demonstrates the very different experiences that women—even women of similar social backgrounds—might have. Through the letters and other works of Cicero we know more of his internal life than we do any other figure in the ancient world, and through these same letters we know a good deal more about the women in his family, especially Terentia and Tullia, than we do about most other Roman women. Treggiari's purpose is to show just how much can be known from a careful reading of these letters, but also to demonstrate that even for such well-documented women we are still left with frustrating gaps in our knowledge; in both BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 205 cases, the book is a success. It also provides a counterweight to those biographies of Cicero which see his family relations, and especially his marriage to Terentia, solely from his point of view. There is little filler in this short book: even chapters which appear to be providing background material (such as the first two, overviews of political and social history) contain important points: that women like Terentia and Tullia would have had more in...