How to Grieve

At the age of 33, Tullia Ciceronis died from complications due to childbirth. Her father, the consul Marcus Tullius Cicero, was utterly distraught, as his contemporary letters and passages in the Tusculan Disputations make clear. And in an effort to grieve, Cicero did something new in world history: for the first time, he wrote a consolation speech-not for others, as had always been done, but for himself. This was his coping strategy, and it prefigures the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and so many other thinkers throughout history who write letters to themselves. Cicero's Consolation was lost in antiquity. In the Renaissance, a philologist named Charles (Carlo) Sigoni recreated the speech. He gathered all the extant quotations and, on the analogy of restoring missing pieces of sculpture or lost paintings, he drew on everything he could find in Cicero to write a new speech that effectively recreated the lost one. And for a while, it worked. For centuries many great scholars believed Sigoni really had discovered the speech, rather than recreated it. Alas, subsequent scholarship has proven the opposite. Signoni very probably did write it. But the authorship question is less important than the contents. The speech shows that Sigoni knew all the conventionsof the Consolation genre, and the historical events of Tullia's life, at least as well as any scholar then or now. It is a masterpiece: a fascinating read in Classical Latin, and it deserves a wide audience--