The remarkable story of one Roman woman, pieced together from fragments over many centuries, reveals insights into family life more than 2,000 years ago. Mary Beard gives voice to the long-silent Turia
ILLUSTRATION BY HUGH COWLING
During the civil wars that tore apart the Roman Republic in the middle of the first century BC, leading to the birth of the empire, one Roman woman was facing her own crises – both public and private.
Usually known to us as ‘Turia’, she was born into a high-ranking family and by the late 50s BC had become engaged to be married. It was obviously a ‘good match’ with a man of prospects. But before the wedding could take place, not only had her fiancé suddenly quit Rome to fight under Pompey the Great – in other words, on the losing side in the war against Julius Caesar – but, tragically, her mother and father had also been murdered in their remote house in the country.
Turia moved in with her future mother-in-law, but seems to have been largely left to cope with her problems alone, or with the help of just her sister. She managed to take vengeance on her parents’ murderers and successfully fought off some of her own relations who contested her inheritance. At the same time, she sent supplies to her absent fiancé, selling off some of her own jewellery to do so.
Things looked up, albeit briefly. Although Julius Caesar was victorious in the war against Pompey, he pardoned his enemies and allowed them to return to Rome, so Turia and her fiancé were eventually able to get married. But worse was to come. Just a few years later, after Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, the junta who ruled the city put a price on her husband’s head, and he was forced to leave the city again. It was only thanks to Turia’s intervention on his behalf with Lepidus, one of Rome’s so-called ‘ruling three’ (alongside Mark Antony and Octavian, the future emperor Augustus), that he was allowed back – but not before she had been horribly insulted and beaten black and blue by some of the regime’s apparatchiks.
Peace finally came to Rome more than a decade later, under its first emperor, Augustus – who by then had cannily reinvented himself as a responsible elder statesman. The marriage of Turia and her husband lasted 41 years, with only one major disappointment: they did not have any children.
Eventually, in despair, Turia suggested that her husband divorce her, so that she her
