On Cicero at Astura, the other father, and what a sceptic does with a wish he cannot root out

“… the corpses of so many towns lie in helpless ruin …”

Servius Sulpicius Rufus to Cicero, on the death of Tullia, 45 BCE. Ad Familiares 4.5, translated by Evelyn Shuckburgh

In the spring of 45 BCE the most famous advocate in Rome hid in a wood, wrote that nothing can be affirmed, and shopped for land on which to make his daughter a god. What a mind holds beyond what it writes can only be guessed. This essay makes two guesses and grades both.

By Michael Cummins, Editor · September 23, 2026

Early in the day he goes into the wood. It is dense and wild, he tells his friend, and he does not come out of it until evening. The house behind him stands on the coast at Astura, right in the sea, within sight of Antium and the headland of Circeii. He is sixty-one. He has been consul, exile, governor, and the most famous advocate in Rome, and none of that goes into the wood with him. Books go. He says his only conversation now is with them, and that even this is broken by weeping, which he fights for as long as he can and is not yet equal to. It is March of 45 BCE. His daughter has been dead a matter of weeks; the sources do not agree on how many. Each evening he comes out of the trees and writes to Atticus, and in the first of those letters, in its last clause, he mentions that he would like to buy something: a hiding-place, a refuge for his sorrow.

Hold that clause.

Introduction

This month, in Aeon, Massimo Pigliucci opened an essay on Cicero’s scepticism with a scene: early 45, a villa beside the Lucrine Lake, the Academica being finished while a life comes apart. It is a good scene, and true of the dialogue, whose second edition Cicero set at Varro’s villa by that lake. About the desk it is incomplete. The record of that spring and summer puts the writer elsewhere: at Astura, at a villa of Atticus, at Tusculum, at Arpinum, where he revised the book in the rain. In March, with the Academica still ahead of him, he was here, in the trees by day and at a table by night, and the evidence of where his mind was is unusually thick, because he wrote to Atticus almost every day and the letters survive.

Pigliucci’s subject is the method: Cicero’s probabilia, the things a mind may follow and can scarcely affirm. This essay’s subject is the mind that needed the method that spring. What was in it, beyond what he was writing?

The letters answer part of that. The rest can only be guessed, and a guess about a sceptic ought to be made by the sceptic’s own rules. Carneades, whose arguments Cicero would turn into Latin before the summer was out, graded impressions, as the tradition records his ladder, by the scrutiny they had survived: the merely persuasive; the undiverted, which nothing else one knows contradicts; the examined. There are two guesses in what follows. Each carries its grade in plain sight, and neither is offered as fact. Where the essay invents, it says so and fences the invention.

I

What survives of those weeks is one side of a correspondence. Atticus’s letters are lost. Cicero’s come almost daily from the seventh of March, written for one reader, and from them a day can be rebuilt.

The letters of that spring mourn the daughter and do not describe her. Tullia was in her early thirties. She had been married three times, and had divorced the third husband, Dolabella, while carrying his child. The boy was born in January at her father’s house in Rome. She died about a month later. The child was still alive in March, when Cicero defends what his will does for his grandson. He did not live long.

His mourning had begun, before Astura, in a library. At Atticus’s house he read everything anyone had written on the lessening of grief, and found it was not enough. So he did, in his own words, “what certainly no one ever did before me”: he tried to console himself by writing a book. At Astura he writes all day. He does not claim that it works. Writing and study, he reports, do not soften the feeling; they distract it. What he is trying to recover is composure, “not of heart, yet, if possible, of countenance.”

The book needed examples: Romans who had buried their children and gone on. Here the letters show something no summary of his philosophy would predict. He checks them. Did Caepio die in the shipwreck before his father’s death, or after it? Did Rutilia die in her son’s lifetime, or survive him? Did Clodia outlive hers? Atticus, who kept a chronicle, is told which named people to ask, and is asked again when the answer is slow. “These facts,” Cicero explains, “affect the book.” A few days later he calls such questions “my own triflings,” and sends two more. A father weeks bereaved will not cite another parent’s loss until he knows which of them died first. Grief, at Astura, checks its citations.

The rest of his life arrives by the same courier. There is Terentia’s dowry to repay, and her complaint about the witnesses to his will. There is a son to be kept at Athens on the rents of two city properties. And there is a wife. Publilia, in her middle teens by the modern estimates and married to him not long before, writes begging to be allowed to come with her mother. He tells Atticus about it in a passage he marks as written in his own hand. He has answered that he wishes to be alone. He does not think the letter is her own composition. He concludes that the one way of avoiding the visit is “to fly away,” and he asks Atticus to find out the last day he can stay without being caught.

Then there is a letter that holds the whole season on one sheet. Atticus has been urging him back toward the forum. He replies that he is ruined, that he has known it a long while and confesses it only now, “when I have lost the one thing that bound me to life.” A few lines on, to show that he is “not prostrate,” he changes the subject. Atticus’s chronicle records the year Carneades came to Rome on the famous embassy. What was the reason for it? “It was about Oropus I think, but am not certain.”

It is the kind of question a book on the Academy would need answered. It sits inside the mourning letter, a few lines below the sentence about his life, and it is already phrased the way that book will teach a mind to hold anything. I think, but am not certain.

II

The clause can be released now. The man who in early March wanted to buy a hiding-place spends the rest of the spring trying to buy its opposite.

He calls it a fanum, a shrine. The letters give it a designer, Cluatius, whose plan he likes; a contract for columns with Apella of Chios; and a deadline, this summer. What it lacks is ground. He considers the island at Arpinum and rejects it as too out of the way: it would diminish the honour of the departed. He considers gardens across the Tiber, a cramped lot at Ostia, the grounds of Drusus, of Lamia, of Silius, of Scapula, of Clodia. He does not want plate or fine furnishings or a view, he tells Atticus. He wants this. And of the site he asks one thing, again and again: “what I want is a frequented spot.”

The law is in the way. Spend past a fixed sum on a monument and the same sum is owed to the treasury. The fine is not what troubles him. “I am anxious to avoid any likeness to a tomb,” he writes, so as to come as near as he can “to an apotheosis.” If Atticus can think of a way round the statute, he will take it.

What the letters shop for, the lost book performed. The Consolatio does not survive. But some three and a half centuries later the Christian writer Lactantius, arguing that the pagan gods were only the honoured dead, called Cicero as a witness and quoted him speaking to his daughter: with the approval of the gods he will place her, “the best and most learned of all women,” in their assembly. Lactantius adds that someone may say Cicero raved from grief, and answers that the passage shows constancy and judgment. He needed his witness sane. So the sentence in which a father deifies his child comes down to us because a prosecutor of the practice entered it in evidence.

Was the shrine a breach of his scepticism, or its purest case? The Academic may follow what persuades him and must not affirm what he cannot know. Even the fragment is a promise and not a claim: I will place you, I will consecrate. Nowhere in the letters of that spring does he tell Atticus that Tullia is a god. He says the wish cannot be rooted out of his heart. He calls these “foolish ideas of mine,” and confesses them to be so. He says he knows he is infatuated, and asks Atticus to go on indulging the aberration. By the tradition’s ladder the impression never climbed past the first rung: it persuaded him, and by his own account it failed examination. He followed it anyway, with contracts. It is the one thing that spring he neither affirms nor lets go.

III

There was another father.

In 336, when word came that Philip of Macedon was dead, Demosthenes appeared in public in a garland and white clothing and made thank-offerings. Six years later, prosecuting the proposal to crown him, Aeschines told the jury what week that had been. It was “the seventh day after the death of his daughter,” and the rites of mourning were not yet complete. Then comes the sentence that has outlived the case: he had lost “the first and only one who ever called him father.” Aeschines adds at once that he does not reproach the misfortune. He is only probing the character. A bad father, he explains, can never be a safe guide to the people.

Cicero knew the passage. Against Ctesiphon and the speech that answered it, On the Crown, were the pair he had proposed to put into Latin. And within months of Tullia’s death, in the third book of the Tusculans, the book on grief, he cites it: Aeschines attacks Demosthenes for having sacrificed septimo die, on the seventh day, after his daughter’s death. The day matches Aeschines. Plutarch, who names Aeschines as his source, makes it six. Cicero’s point is that an orator can do anything with the prejudice that good men must grieve as hard as they can. His next sentence is about those who in sorrow seek out solitude, and he quotes Homer’s Bellerophon, eating his own heart, keeping clear of the tracks of men.

In an Athenian court a father was taunted for grieving too little. Rome was murmuring about one who grieved too much; Atticus had warned him what the mourning was costing his influence. The tradition pairs these two as orators. In the book on grief, Cicero paired them as fathers.

Speculation, graded persuasive. The Bellerophon sentence is a self-portrait. The man who wrote it had spent March going into a wood early in the day and avoiding everyone he knew. Nothing proves he meant himself.

Speculation, graded undiverted. The other father was already with him at Astura. No letter to Atticus from that year names Demosthenes. In Books XII to XVI of those letters the name appears once, in 44, in a remark about a speech of Brutus. So nothing in the record turns the guess aside. Silence does not support it either: the higher grade records a test survived, not a stronger case. The guess was run against every letter in those books, where the self-portrait admits no such test. Nothing examines it.

Demosthenes answered the speech and not the taunt. On the Crown is long, and his daughter is not in it. What he says there about mourning concerns the city’s dead: that after the defeat the people chose him, and not Aeschines, to speak over them, and that the families held the funeral feast at his house. What he says of parents is that the Athenians of old each felt he had come into being “not for his father and his mother alone, but also for his country.” Plutarch, centuries later, made the defence he did not make himself: to bear such a loss serenely is no sign of a cold nature.

So the two fathers can be set in one room only by arrangement.

IV

Beyond the record three questions stay open, and each can be argued both ways from the same letters.

Was it grief, or the performance of grief? He manages the look of it. He arranges sworn excuses for his absence from public duties, and would rather be thought away “in virtue of the augural law” than because of sorrow. When Atticus, by Cicero’s account, reports that people are talking, and fears for their influence, Cicero answers like an advocate: his critics could not read as much as he has written, and no caller has found him unwilling to talk. That is a man tending a reputation. But a man who is only performing does not tell his one confidant that the writing fails, that the shrine is an aberration, that he would not lessen the sorrow if he could. His own distinction covers it: a countenance he could compose, and a heart he could not.

Did Servius’s substitution fail? Servius told him to mourn the Republic and not the girl, who had at least outlived it. Cicero’s answer is exact. While she lived, home consoled him for the forum; now neither can console him for the other. Yet everything he went on to write that year was written for Romans, in a Latin he was building for the purpose. The consolation failed in the spring. Whether it worked by autumn, the letters do not say.

And why was the shrine never built? Walter Englert has argued that by the Tusculans he had reasoned himself out of it: a monument, like Artemisia’s, only prolongs the grief. Shuckburgh thought the money ran out, with Terentia’s dowry to repay. The archive holds verdicts as well as facts, and verdicts do not reconcile the way dates do. Even the facts here are loose. Three authorities give three answers to where she died: at Tusculum; at Rome or else Tusculum; in the house of Lentulus.

One thing was not in his mind, because it had not happened. The speeches against Antony, which he would name after Demosthenes’ against Philip, were eighteen months away. Plutarch paired the two men partly for how they ended. Demosthenes took sanctuary in Poseidon’s temple on the island of Calauria, and Antipater’s man came across in small boats to fetch him out. When the proscriptions reached Cicero, Plutarch says, the first place he made for was Astura, to take ship. He was killed near Caieta, in a litter that was being carried “through the wooded and shady walks towards the sea.”

A wood, again, and the sea.

---

At evening he came out of the wood and wrote to Atticus about columns.

That is nearly the last the record shows of the wish: a contract to settle with a man from Chios, a summer deadline, a site not yet found. The shrine was never built. The book he wrote to console himself, the thing he said no one had ever done before him, is lost but for the sentences other men quoted. What he wanted for her was a place people would come to, through the endless generations he counted on, and he did not get it.

He got something else. In June of 1345 Francesco Petrarch, in Verona, came upon the letters to Atticus where he least expected them, lost for centuries, and read them through to the end. He had expected the sage of the treatises. He heard a man “give voice to many laments” and waver in his opinions, and what he did next he had never done before. He wrote back. His letter reproaches and loves in one breath. It is uttered, it says, “not without tears.” It wishes its reader had spent his last years quietly in the country. It says farewell forever.

Cicero would have known the form. In an earlier book he had written a dead man into a living man’s dream: Africanus, appearing in a shape the dreamer knew only “from his picture,” to promise those who served their country a place in heaven. Petrarch knew his dead man only from his letters. After Petrarch, Machiavelli, on his small property outside Florence, would put on court dress each evening to question the men of old, and reports that “they in their benignity answer me.” After Machiavelli, anyone who opens the book.

The frequented spot was the correspondence, and the visitors come for him. Neither that letter nor Petrarch’s second to Cicero names her. The first visitor we know to have answered came nearly fourteen centuries late, and left his address.

“Written in the land of the living … in Verona … in the thirteen hundred and forty-fifth year from the birth of that God whom thou never knewest.”

⁂

Written in full collaboration with the machine, and the ledger requires the name be exact: drafted and edited with Claude Fable 5.1. No quotation in this essay was recalled; each was copied from an open public-domain text. The letters are in Evelyn Shuckburgh’s translation; the Tusculans and the Dream of Scipio in C. D. Yonge’s, who renders septimo die loosely as “within seven days,” where the essay follows the Latin; Aeschines in Charles Darwin Adams’s; Demosthenes in A. W. Pickard-Cambridge’s; Plutarch in Bernadotte Perrin’s; Lactantius in William Fletcher’s; Petrarch in Mario Cosenza’s; Machiavelli in W. K. Marriott’s. On the collaboration → “The Third Thing”