Caesia Tullia Cicero

"Libertas – nomen tua scio Libertas – senatores vocant Libertas – postremo quando vidi te? (Freedom - I know thy name Freedom - the senators call thee Freedom - when was the last time I've seen you?)"

- Caesia Tullia Cicero

Caesia Tullia Cicero/Cicerona (/ˈsɪsᵻroʊ/; Classical Latin: [ˈkae̯.sɪ.a ˈtʊl.lɪ.a ˈkɪ.kɛ.roː/ kɪ.kɛ.roːna]; Greek: Κικέρων, Kikerōn; 5 August 78 BC – 7 December 43 AD), also known as Cicero minora (Young Lady Cicero) in her youth, and Umbra Augusti (Augustus’ shadow) in her latter days, was a Roman Magistra Magi, General, lawyer, orator, philosopher and military theorist. She is one of the two central characters of the Pax Romana Book I: Cicero, the other being her father. Eldest daughter of the famed philosopher, politician, lawyer, orator, political theorist, consul, and constitutionalist Marcus Tullius Cicero, she came from a wealthy municipal clan of the Roman equestrian order mostly made up of mages, and was one of Rome's greatest generals and mages before the investiture of the gens Titia as emperors. She was the great-grandmother of Aquiliana Tullia Cicero, wife of the eventual Emperor Marius Titius Aquila Romanus Augustus.

She was a close ally, somewhat reluctant friend, advisor and later-on favourite general of Octavian, and was responsible for some important military victories, most notably at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC against the forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, together with Agrippa, as well as the capture of Alexandria and Cleopatra in 30 BC. As a result of these victories, Octavian became the first Roman Emperor, adopting the name of Augustus. The first Roman woman to officially claim the title of Magistra Magi and serve in the military, she would prove herself a cunning warrior and leader early on, originally serving under Caesar in the Gallic campaign in the XII. Legion (Fulminata Magica Sine Auxiliaque), rising from the rank of optio to tribuna laticlavia (second-in-command of a legion) by 45 BC. Upon Octavian’s ascension to Augustus, she became the first Custos Militaris Maxima/Duca Superiora (Supreme Custodian of the Military/Supreme General), the de facto Commander-in-Chief of the Roman military.

As Custos Militaris, her impact on the organisation and administration on the Roman Military was so immense that it was compared to her father's impact on the Latin language, such that the history of warfare was either a reaction against or built from her teachings and rulings. Caesia Cicero introduced several (for the time) unusual tactics to Roman warfare that allowed fighting in more unusual terrain, such as Germanian forests, and elevated the status of non-infantry units through her use of mixed and mounted legions, as well as making the use of mages in warfare a staple of Roman military action, distinguishing herself as military leader, tactician and theorist.

Despite keeping a strict police of neutrality in the civil war, much to the dismay of her father, an Optimate, she would become the Legate of the XII in January 44 BC when her superior died, and thus by extension in command of the XIV and XVIII due to their massive use of military mages. Her neutrality in the political conflict of the Roman Civil War had two sources, that being her being a woman and thus excluded from direct politics, and the belief that neither sides were completely correct. During the chaotic latter half of the 1st century BC marked by civil wars and the dictatorship of Gaius Julius Caesar, Caesia watched with worry her father Cicero championing a return to the traditional republican government, as it endangered their family. As her father made himself (and by extension, his brother and nephew) an enemy of Marcus Antonius with a series of speeches and was nearly murdered for it, by one of her own men no less, she sided with Octavian, who had protested the proscription of the older mage (and subsequently pardoned the Tullii men), but did only join forces after Antonius had left for Egypt.

While Caesia is credited with stopping the uprising of Arminius (who grew up in her household) and completing the conquest of nearly all of Germania, she considered her career as lawyer which she pursued whenever she was home as well as her books her greatest accomplishments. This was noted to be due to her father’s tutelage as jurist, an association she was immensely proud of. Her book De re militare (Of the Warring Arts), which sums up her near-century-long experience as military mage, officer and general is considered to be the western answer to Sun Tzu’s Art of War, while her only purely philosophical work, De culpa (On Guilt) is companion piece to her father’s Consolatio, and contemplates the nature of guilt, whether warranted or misplaced. Her book on the role of investigation in the legal system would set the standard for the Tullian lawyer school for 1000 years.

Caesia Tullia Cicero died on 7 December 43 AD, at 121 years of age of natural causes, in her house on the Palatine. Unlike other close friends of Augustus, her ashes were not entombed in the mausoleum of the first emperor, but in the family graveyard on the road to Arpinum, the Via Latina, side by side with her parents and her husband. Her successor as Umbra Romae and Custos Militaris would be her daughter Caesia minora.

Personal life
Main article: Personal life of Caesia Tullia Cicero

Early life
Caesia was born on 8 August 78 BC in Rome, in the original house of Cicero on the Palatine. Her parents were the then-jurist Cicero, who had won the defence of Sextus Roscius minor two years earlier and his wife Lucia Terentia Varro. Her father would note in a letter to Atticus that it was a difficult birth, with labour lasting well about 28 hours, which was partly due to Caesia being the elder of a pair of identical twins, the younger being Lucia Tullia Cicero, better known as Tullia Ciceronis or Tulliola. By the “eight hour” of the next day, the midwife was out of her wits, and demanded that he would summon a healer. After some technical difficulties, Cicero summoned the then-Master of all Roman Healer-Surgeon mages, Magister Magi Decimus Iunius Pera, who then assisted with the birth.

Pera sensed right away that the elder girl was a mage (so was her father, for the matter), and declared her to be potentially more powerful than himself, possibly the strongest in Rome. He offered his services as teacher to the young and the elder Cicero, but lamented that the legal status of women mages was so unclear that most did not try to become magisters (as it was pointless), despite the obvious favour of magical power for women. While Terentia was not enamoured with the idea (after she recovered), Cicero was inspired, and agreed, especially after realising that his kinsmen were apparently mages by majority, with his own father being an exception.

Cicero named her for the sky, as her eyes were blue-green, and she allegedly kept crying until she was under the open skies of the peristyle. Her praenomen would be probably one of the first publicly and frequently mentioned of a Roman woman, as it was one of the few ways to tell the sisters apart in their childhood.

Caesia’s cognomen, Cicero, comes from the Latin word for chickpea, cicer, and, contrary to Plutarch’s beliefs, hails from the fact that some of her and her father’s ancestors prospered through the cultivation and sale of chickpeas. Romans often chose down-to-earth personal surnames: the famous family names of Fabius, Lentulus, and Piso come from the Latin names of beans, lentils, and peas. As her father had early on been urged to change the deprecatory name when he entered politics (and refused), Caesia would grow up to defend it fiercely from any derogation.

For a mage of this period, it was necessary to know both Latin and Classical Greek in speech and script fluently, with sprinkles of Sanskrit that came over the Silk Road; Pera set a demanding pace for his apprentices, who traditionally began training at age five, liberally using various magical teaching techniques to accelerate their studies. Under him and her father, she was therefore educated in the teachings of the ancient Greek philosophers, poets, historians and mages; she would however never obtain direct education in Greek rhetoric, her entire knowledge on the subject given by her father. It was precisely her broad education that tied her to the traditional Roman elite. The teachings of her father brought her early on in contact with law, and the understanding of keeping secrets. In a letter to Atticus, Cicero noted that “her sense for detail is unmatched”, relating to him an incident that happened in his preparations for the trial of Verres, where the seven year old Caesia helped him sorting his notes and evidence with magic. According to Tacitus, Pera’s prediction on her talents would prove true early on, as her intellect, wit and power attracted attention from all over Rome, predominantly from mages of the equestrian and patrician class, who shared or would begin to share the sentiment of the master healer on the law concerning mage women. Pera officially named her his primum (First) after she beat the other mage apprentices of the master, which were his four children and three other young mages, all by herself.

By the age of 10, she formally graduated as a maga, and then begun training as a maga militaris (military mage), despite the legal troubles, for she sought to join the military, the only way to distinguish herself enough to justify for her father naming her his heir. So in addition to attack magic and close combat, she was given training in the on-the-spot healing series. However, it would take her father becoming consul in 63 BC for her master, her father and most of the mage families in similar predicaments as the Cicero family to push through a legal decree that would tip the scales in favour of female mages. Subsequently, Caesia was named the first Magistra Magi to be recorded in Rome, only days after the law passed the senate.

She joined the military with 17, in 61 BC, and was assigned to the XII Legion, the Fulminata Magica, which was posted in the surroundings of Rome. This and her juridical-magical heritage would become the basis for her later continuous balance between the life of an officer and that of a jurist.

Family
Originally, Caesia had not a good relationship with her mother, being near-exclusively under the care of her father and her mage master, Pera. This has been attributed to the fact that Terentia was not a mage and came from a non-magical environment herself, causing her to subconsciously reject her Tullian daughter. Cicero noted that his wife only changed her attitude after he compelled her to watch Caesia fight off Pera’s entire class alone, but then went out of her way to make up for it, commissioning a mage smith to create what would become the Virga Clementiae. Terentia would also become the person Caesia would consult whenever she had brought back some more unusual war booty that needed to be sold to be of monetary use.

In contrast, Caesia and Cicero were extremely close-knit, to the point he called her his “shadow”. While he found at times her strong similarity to himself worrisome, expressing to Atticus “I wish she would at times be more of herself”, he equally considered the thought of losing her even more distressing than the potential loss of his other daughter and eventually his son. According to Caesar and Quintus, Cicero never even considered the idea of replacing her as his heir, even after the birth of his son Marcus minor, and found suggestions to the same preposterous. However, the most drastic indicator of her association of her father is her reaction to her father’s proscription: Marcus Antonius had ordered Cicero, his brother and his nephew to be assassinated (which was unsuccessful) in 43 BC for the Orationes Philippicae, and as this failed due to her intervention, she angrily formed an (then unofficial) alliance with Octavian, which would last the rest of her life, all so the young man could arrange their pardon.

When in 51 BC her parents were clearly approaching a divorce, she found the idea – and their reasons – so incredulous she reportedly spent three days yelling first at them separately and then at both together, calling them fools for laying the blame at each other’s feet. In the end, Terentia and Marcus tentatively started anew. The episode is mentioned in detail in letters of both Cicero and Caesia to Quintus.

Unlike her younger sister, who was not a mage, Caesia stayed unmarried long into her thirties, a partial consequence of her military and judiciary career, but had been engaged to the slightly younger Lucius Iunius Pera, youngest son of her mage teacher Decimus for years. They married in 42 BC, thus subsequently adopting him into the gens Tullia, and would have four children: Caesia minor, Marcus, Septima and Quintus.

Despite a distance that existed initially between Caesia and Lucia, similar to that with their mother, the sisters would become so close that Caesia would blame herself for Lucia’s death, as she had not been able to heal her. As she grieved with her father, she would eventually write her very first book, the De culpa, to deal with her guilt, grief and shame. Being 13 years her brother’s senior, Caesia’s and Marcus minor’s relationship tended to be distant, more of an idol (due to her military career) and mentor than a sibling (she noted in her memoria that sending her brother to Athens would have been an invitation for him to do anything but study); however, it was Caesia who dashed her father’s hopes of his son becoming a philosopher, pointing out and encouraging his rare talent for divination and spiritualism that eventually rose Marcus minor to the rank of chief augur.

Physical appearance and personality
Caesia Tullia Cicero was a Latinian-Volscian woman of medium complexion with dark brown hair that she mock-lamented in a trial oration to be just the “plain straight brown Volscian affair of [her] father’s” (mocking a Greek conspirator with his curly hair), and was noted by several contemporary authors to have “cutting” blue-green eyes. Caesar observed that, while the sisters were identical in looks, Caesia had grown to the considerable height of her father and was much fiercer, both things he attributed to her magical and military training. Augustus would later note that she was a brave mage warrior and inspiring military leader, capable of instigating loyalty and trust in most troops and rallying them in otherwise difficult situations. In letters to his brother Quintus and his friend Atticus, Cicero both praised and lamented his eldest as “having walked for so long in [his] shadow that she has grown into becoming it”, noting that she was even more similar to him than her identical twin sister, both physically and mentally, making her a very strange reflection of himself. He also noted that she was fiercely loyal to him, their family and to Rome, and was “so devoted a child of whom a father would not even dare to dream”. Augustus also valued this sense of loyalty towards the empire, entrusting her with the administration and later-on leadership of the military. The first emperor of Rome considered her sense of loyalty and family as both reassuring and dangerous, as she “hates with all the same devotion she loves”, referring to the way she committed herself to destroying Mark Anthony for proscribing Cicero. Unlike her explicitly pacifist father, Caesia was a militarist, although she considered peace to be a good thing, courtesy of the long civil war. Indeed her writings and orations indicate that she had inherited much of her father’s wit, cleverness and personality, albeit in a much more aggressive and cynical variant that betrayed her life as a soldier. Her uncle Quintus noticed once that she had not inherited her father’s self-centred streak, something he was intensely grateful for. However, like her father’s penchant for unusual luxuries (such as a table made from citrus wood worth 500.000 sesterces), Caesia was known for her curiosities, such as a table cut from the trunk of an oak sacred to Germans that was war booty used as her desk, or the fact that the Domus Ciceronis/Domus Albicans she had had built in 58 BC was not adorned with frescos but a mix of Roman mosaics and enchanted engravings of all of her father’s speeches and books (and much later her own) into the marble walls of the house. This was in sharp contrast to her general image of a down-to-earth soldier and pillar of pragmatism who was not above turning a forest she’d cut down into “war booty”, indicating the extremes present in her person. She had also inherited her father's and family's penchant for campaigning and crackpot ideas, demonstrated in her crusade-like dealings against Antonius. Throughout her life, Caesia was known to eschew many things un-Roman that were used to replace things Roman society, culture, magic or technology had managed just fine, ranging from having the second house of the family built with Dorian-Roman capitals to a stubborn avoidance of wearing a muscle cuirass even after becoming tribuna laticlavia, preferring the famed lorica segmentata magica of the Roman military. She also avoided wearing the Greek pallium, preferring the toga, or on the rare occasions she dressed as a matron instead of magistra magi, a stola; as such she was known to scoff at lawyers appearing in court in pallium instead of toga, much to the amusement of her friends. However, some of her friends and family noted that she was an avid user of soap, which she had picked up during the Gallic Wars.