Fulvia by Jane Draycott: The woman who outwitted Cicero and then spat on his corpse

In 43BC the Roman matriarch Fulvia arranged for Cicero’s decapitated head to be brought before her.

In full view of the crowd she spat on his remains and then retrieved a hairpin from her elaborate coiffure and stabbed his tongue.

It was her revenge for Cicero publicly claiming she was nothing but ‘a shameless and wanton courtesan’.

This was not how women were to behave in Ancient Rome. As Jane Draycott explains in this fine biography of Fulvia, public utterance was the preserve of men such as Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.

A Roman matron, by contrast, was expected to run the family estate and supervise the servants while her husband was busy in the Senate or leading an army.

But Fulvia, who was independently wealthy thanks to an inherited fortune, had other ideas. She was, said the historian Plutarch disapprovingly, ‘a woman who took no thought for spinning or housekeeping’ and instead ‘wished to rule a ruler and command a commander’. Trouble, in other words.

The first inklings of Fulvia’s ambition came in 52BC, when her first husband, a popular politician called Publius Clodius Pulcher, was murdered by a rival called Titus Annius Milo. Instead of being prostrate with grief, Fulvia set about getting vengeance. She stripped her husband’s body and displayed his wounds to stir up the mob.

It worked: Milo was charged with murder and Fulvia appeared as a prosecution witness, something unheard of for a woman. Milo was found guilty and sent into exile, while Cicero, who had acted as his counsel, spent the rest of his life plotting his revenge against the woman who had so publicly defeated him.

From here Fulvia moved on scandalously fast. Her next husband was another demagogue who would be killed fighting in North Africa. She then married Antony (of Cleopatra fame). Cicero spitefully claimed that Antony had married Fulvia only for her money to pay off his debts.

Cicero also sneered that Antony was so henpecked that he handed over control of his Italian interests to Fulvia when he left Rome in 41BC to visit the eastern provinces. Far more likely, suggests Draycott, is that Antony knew just what a competent and confident caretaker Fulvia would be.

She tactically married off her teenage daughter to Octavian, Antony’s chief rival, as a way of neutralising his threat. Octavian, however, quickly divorced his wife and started publishing obscene poetry (too rude to quote here), claiming his mother-in-law had pestered him for sex.

Fulvia raised an army against him, leading her troops into what became known as the ‘Perusine War’. It was at this point her luck ran out and she was exiled.

How much of this is true, let alone fair? Draycott argues that Fulvia is the victim of centuries of misogyny and slipshod scholarship. Once Cicero set the ball rolling with his spiteful portrait of her as ‘a woman as cruel as she is greedy’, it was open season.

Generations of big-name historians including Plutarch, Livy and Suetonius piled in with spicy anecdotes about Fulvia without fact-checking them. It was more important to them to tell a cautionary tale about the disastrous consequences of women getting ideas.

Draycott is too scrupulous a scholar to suggest that she has uncovered new facts about Fulvia’s life. Instead, she makes a persuasive case that, in the Roman Republic, any woman who dared do things differently was virtually certain of going down in history as an evil femme fatale.