The grief of Cicero
How the greatest mind of his age diagnosed his depression and overcame it, leaving the finest work of consolation ever composed.
This is Who made our minds? my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: The Tao, Female Mystics and Homer’s Psyche.
PS I’ll be discussing my book with Richard Fidler at Bookoccino on 3rd August and then at The Festival of Dangerous Ideas on 25th August. +++Come along!
IN MARCH 45 BCE, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), Roman statesman, politician, philosopher, lawyer and the finest writer of Latin prose, shut himself away in his villa on the then island of Astura, south of Rome, in a state of agonising grief.
A month earlier, his beloved daughter Tullia had fallen gravely ill after giving birth. When she briefly rallied, Cicero’s grief was cruelly, momentarily alleviated. It broke him when she died.
His daughter was the only…