Authors, Latin -- Biography; Cicero, Marcus Tullius; Statesmen -- Rome -- Biography
His brother Quintus was with him in Cilicia, but of his brother's doings
there he says little or nothing. We have no letters from him during the
period to his wife or daughter. The latter was married to her third
husband, Dolabella, during his absence, with no opposition from Cicero,
but not in accordance with his advice. He had purposed to accept a
proposition for her hand made to him by Tiberius Nero, the young Roman
nobleman who afterward married that Livia whom Augustus took away from
him even when she was pregnant, in order that he might marry her
himself, and who thus became the father of the Emperor Tiberius. It is
worthy of remark at the same time that the Emperor Tiberius married the
granddaughter of Atticus. Cicero when in Cilicia had wished that Nero
should be chosen; but the family at home was taken by the fashion and
manners of Dolabella, and gave the young widow to him as her third
husband when she was yet only twenty-five. This marriage, like the
others, was unfortunate. Dolabella, though fashionable, nobly born,
agreeable, and probably handsome, was thoroughly worthless. He was a
Roman nobleman of the type then common--heartless, extravagant, and
greedy. His country, his party, his politics were subservient, not to
ambition or love of power, but simply to a desire for plunder. Cicero
tried hard to love him, partly for his daughter's sake, more perhaps
from the necessity which he felt for supporting himself by the power and
strength of the aristocratic party to which Dolabella belonged.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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