r Tullia. He is not
offensive in his errors, and does not seem slow to appreciate better
things." Tullia, however, was not more successful than other wives in
reforming her husband. Her marriage seems to have been unhappy almost
from the beginning. It was brought to an end by a divorce after about
three years. Shortly afterward Tullia, who could have been little more
than thirty, died, to the inconsolable grief of her father. "My grief,"
he writes to Atticus, "passes all consolation. Yet I have done what
certainly no one ever did before, written a treatise for my own
consolation. (I will send you the book if the copyists have finished
it.) And indeed there is nothing like it. I write day after day, and all
day long; not that I can get any good from it, but it occupies me a
little, not much indeed; the violence of my grief is too much for me.
Still I am soothed, and do my best to compose, not my feelings, indeed,
but, if I can, my face." And again: "Next to your company nothing is
more agreeable to me than solitude. Then all my converse is with books;
yet this is interrupted by tears; these I resist as well as I can; but
at present I fail." At one time he thought of finding comfort in unusual
honors to the dead. He would build a shrine of which Tullia should be
the deity. "I am determined," he writes, "on building the shrine. From
this purpose I cannot be turned ... Unless the building be finished this
summer, I shall hold myself guilty." He fixes upon a design. He begs
Atticus, in one of his letters, to buy some columns of marble of Chios
for the building. He discusses the question of the site. Some gardens
near Rome strike him as a convenient place. It must be conveniently near
if it is to attract worshipers. "I would sooner sell or mortgage, or
live on little, than be disappointed." Then he thought that he would
build it on the grounds of his villa. In the end he did not build it at
all. Perhaps the best memorial of Tullia is the beautiful letter in
which one of Cicero's friends seeks to console him for his loss. "She
had lived," he says, "as long as life was worth living, as long as the
republic stood." One passage, though it has often been quoted before, I
must give. "I wish to tell you of something which brought me no small
consolation, hoping that it may also somewhat diminish your sorrow. On
my way back from Asia, as I was sailing from Aeigina to Megara, I began
to contemplate the places that lay around me. Behind