"Gods!

"Gods! What horror! My father's head!" cries Tullia, beholding the remains of the executed Cicero.

Mark Antony, who together with Lepidus and Octavian Augustus had established in Rome the regime of the Second Triumvirate, declared Cicero, the most influential of the senators, an enemy of the people and prevented his flight from Rome: the assassins overtook Cicero at his villa. After the murder the body of Cicero was desecrated: he was beheaded and his hands were cut off, and both were displayed in the Roman Forum as a warning to all who might dare to oppose the power of the Triumvirate. Rumour had it that Mark Antony's wife stuck pins into Cicero's tongue.

However, the scene in the engraving by Marillier and Trière, which prefaces the opening of Prosper de Crébillon's drama «Le Triumvirat» in the 1785 edition that I am now reading, does not correspond to the facts. Tullia, the only daughter of Marcus Tullius Cicero, did not outlive her parents and died two years before Cicero, which spared her the terrible fate of contemplating the mutilated corpse of the dearest person to her