Rome’s celebrity politician, scholar and philosopher of 1bc, Cicero made plenty of enemies, and perhaps none so ferocious as Fulvia. She was one of the Late Republic’s most powerful and ruthless women, married thrice (and widowed twice) to rising men of money, power and influence.
Cicero first earned Fulvia’s hatred in around 60bc, when he became embroiled in dispute with her first husband, Clodius, and publicly accused Clodius (among many other things) of incestum with his sister Clodia.
Fifteen years later, when Julius Caesar was assassinated on the floor of the Senate, Fulvia was married to her third husband, the legendary Mark Antony. Cicero was bitterly opposed to Mark Antony’s scramble to power after Caesar’s death and took every opportunity to savage him, both in the Senate and in script, for his loose morals and corrupt governance.
He included Fulvia in his attacks, accusing her and Mark Antony of being adulterous lovers before their marriage, and Mark Antony of marrying Fulvia only for her money.
Cicero died, age 63, in the proscriptions just a year later, when the new triumvirate drew up their tablets of enemies and murdered them all. His death was on the insistence of Mark Antony, and afterward his head and hands were severed, as was the custom, for public display in the Forum.
First, though, the head went to Fulvia, who gleefully stretched Cicero’s tongue from its mouth and stabbed it repeatedly with a golden pin pulled from her hair, crying that at last this was vengeance for the old man’s powers of speech and the harm they had done to herself and her husbands.
Then the mutilated head was taken to the Forum, for display on the Rostra. Cicero was greatly loved in Rome, and his death was met with public grieving and anger. The people widely mourned the loss of a man who dared make enemies of the powerful.
Fulvia herself met a bad end not too long afterward. Mark Antony’s eventual fate is well known. The date of Clodia’s death is unclear, but more than two thousand years later she was the writers’ main source for the fabulous she-wolf Atia in HBO’s Rome.
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