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Cornelia, the good daughter

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Cornelia, the good daughter.
Scribonia had children by both her husbands and they were all very good persons. One of the child she had from Cornelius Scipio became consul for the 16 B.C. and Cornelia her first daughter was a very sweet young woman and when she died the poet Propertius sang her in his verses. She had been married and bore three children. Her life had been a model to be imitated and her family loved her deeply. Unluckily death took her when she was still young.
Propertius elegy begins with the lugubrious sound of the horns, a lament which was raised high at the exact moment in which the fire was set at the pyre. The flames were now enveloping the body of the young woman and nearby the husband and his children sobbed bitterly. Cornelia was soon reduced to a little mound of ashes, but her ghost, now passed in the afterlife, was remembering all her life and all the deceased world stood still to listen her. Cornelia presenting herself to the underworld judges explained who she was and told them that she was a woman belonging to a most noble lineage and that from one side she descended from Scipio the African and from the other she belonged to the Libonian family.
Her story, she asserted, was simple and without blemish, she had just left her childhood dresses when came the nuptial torches to light her way toward her husband’s home. To him she had been joined in their bed and this bed she had left only when she died. All this could be read on her epigraph and any wayfarer who, passing before her tomb had briefly stopped, would see that her greater pride was the fact to have been “univira”: wife of only one man.
All her ancestors, claimed the young woman, could attest to the purity of her customs, confirm how much she had always been full of self-restrain, and how she never tried to interfere with her husband business or influence him when he was Censor. Between the nuptial torches and the funeral’s ones her life had passed serene and faultless and she proclaimed herself to have been honest not because fearing the laws but for her same nature. Any woman could be proud to sit near her. Even her ancestress Clodia who, when she had been slandered and her chastity had been doubted, prayed Cybele, whose boat had ran aground when they were steering it toward Rome, to give a proof of her purity; and the Great Mother helped her and the boat moved only when Clodia, having tied her belt to the boat’s prow, steered it to the mooring place.
Cornelia too, as her ancestress, had always been pure and had always been a good wife and a good daughter. Not even to her mother, Cornelia, had never done a wrong, and it was a sure fact that in all her daughter’s life the only thing which had pained her had been her immature death. Everything in her life had been perfect and that was proved by her honorary apparel, a dress that could only be wore by the three children mothers, the three children Cornelia had, and about them she prided herself because she had not left without heirs her husband house. Over these children now she set all her hopes. For the daughter she wished to have a married life just as the one she had and she augured that she could be the wife of only one man, and for her children she wished that they could have many descendants.
Then the deceased woman felt anxious about the ones she had left in this world and she started to give them those sweetest advices which are particular to a good family’s mother. thus first she addressed herself to her husband asking him to be both father and mother for their children and to this, moreover, she added “ If you have to weep, do it when the children are not there. When they will come deceive them with dry eyes and cheeks”.
Cornelia could not however forget that her still young husband could console himself and take another wife. She worried about the impact that such a thing could have on her children and on the consequences that could derive from it. She knew that it was absolutely necessary that they could be loved by their stepmother, therefore she told them that if some day another “Lectus genialis” was set in the “atrium”, they had to be very kind with the new bride sitting troubled on it and show to her that they willingly bore their father’s marriage. “Your goodness will win her affection, but in front of her remember not to praise me too much. This could hurt her. Remember never to compare her who is there with me who are no more.
If anyway her husband would not remarry, she asked them to stay near him and always assist him. At last she entreated the gods to add to her children life all the years that have been taken from her, and thanking heaven that she never had to mourn for one of them, she affirmed that she was glad that all her children could escort her to her tomb.
To see such sweet creature die had made many mourn her and among them also her stepfather Augustus. Thus proudly Cornelia said “..... My ashes had been glorified also by Caesar’s sharp sorrow. Sobbing he said that in me his daughter had a worthy sister and with his grief proved that also the gods can cry”
We don’t know if Augustus took really part of the funeral train. Probably he did it: Cornelia had been his stepdaughter and, what was more, she was his daughter’s sister. In this occasion among the mourners he probaly saw again Scribonia. Poor Scribonia, she really did not have a very happy life, and with her daughters she had no luck. If Cornelia broke her heart dying, the other daughter made it bleed living and forced her to hard sufferance that she serenely stood to be able to give to this wicked creature, who anyway she herself had brought in this world, a little solace in the hour of disgrace.

Bibliography
Scientific divulgation
E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, L'amore a Roma in Archeo, VII, 10 (92) October 1992, pp. 54-99

Book
E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI - Amori ed amanti tra la repubblica ed il principato, Editore. L’Erma di Bretschneider, Roma, 1992