Did Fulvia Really Stab Cicero’s Tongue With Hairpins?

On 7 December 43 BC, Cicero was murdered while trying to escape the men sent to kill him. His killers removed his head and at least one hand and brought the remains back to Rome. Mark Antony, whom the former consul had fiercely attacked in a series of speeches, had them displayed on the rostra, the public speaking platform in the Roman Forum.

Cassius Dio describes another scene after the killing. He says Antony’s wife Fulvia placed Cicero’s severed head on her knees, drew out the tongue and drove her hairpins through it. In Dio’s account, the act targets the tongue with which Cicero had attacked his opponents. His speeches had helped turn opinion against Antony and made Fulvia herself a target of ridicule.

Dio’s account was written more than two centuries after the murder. Other important ancient historians describe Cicero’s death and the public display, but omit Fulvia’s alleged act. The killing and display are better documented than the episode involving Fulvia. Their hostility developed through political conflicts that predated Cicero’s confrontation with Antony.

The feud began with Fulvia’s first husband

Fulvia married three influential men during the last decades of the Roman Republic. Her first husband, Publius Clodius Pulcher, came from the aristocratic Claudian family. He arranged adoption into a plebeian family to qualify for the tribunate, an office intended to protect the interests of ordinary citizens. As tribune in 58 BC, he supported popular legislation, drew on Rome’s political associations and helped drive Cicero into exile. Their feud had begun earlier, when Cicero testified against Clodius after a scandal involving the Bona Dea, a religious ceremony restricted to women.

Exile cost Cicero his property and his home on the Palatine Hill, which was destroyed. He returned in 57 BC only after powerful allies assembled enough support for his recall. Clodius remained active, increasingly locked in conflict with Titus Annius Milo, another politician backed by men willing to fight in the streets. Rome continued to hold assemblies and elections even as rival political factions resorted to gangs, intimidation and murder.

Clodius encountered Milo on the Appian Way near Bovillae in January 52 BC. Their followers fought; Clodius was injured and later killed. Ancient sources give differing accounts of how the violence began. Milo was prosecuted, and the sight of Clodius’s wounds became an important part of the public response. When his supporters cremated him inside the Senate house, the building caught fire and was destroyed. Asconius, in his commentary on the Pro Milone, preserves details of the confrontation, the funeral and the resulting trial.

Fulvia appeared in the legal proceedings herself. She and her mother Sempronia testified against Milo, bringing the death of Clodius before the court as a loss suffered by his family. Scholarly analysis of Fulvia’s public mourning notes that a widow’s public grief could influence politics, without showing that every display was intended to provoke disorder. Her testimony and mourning placed her visibly on the opposite side from the man Cicero had chosen to defend.

Cicero represented Milo, who was nevertheless convicted and sent into exile. The Pro Milone that survives is Cicero’s revised, published defence rather than a verbatim record of his performance in court. It casts Clodius as a threat to public order and argues for Milo’s justification. Fulvia had watched Cicero defend the man held responsible for her husband’s death. Her opposition to Cicero had a documented political basis, regardless of later stories about private insults.

From Clodius to Curio to Mark Antony

After Clodius died, Fulvia married Gaius Scribonius Curio. He was a tribune who came to support Julius Caesar and died in North Africa fighting on Caesar’s side in 49 BC. Once again Fulvia was a widow, this time amid the civil war between Caesar and Pompey’s supporters. Her third husband, Mark Antony, belonged to Caesar’s closest political and military circle. The marriage tied her future to the contest for power surrounding Caesar.

Antony held the consulship in 44 BC, the year Caesar was assassinated on 15 March. Caesar’s death intensified the contest over who would govern Rome. Caesar’s supporters retained armies and offices, while the conspirators, notably Brutus and Cassius, hoped to defend senatorial rule. Alliances changed as both sides sought support. Cicero had taken no part in Caesar’s assassination but now saw Antony’s growing command over Caesar’s former position as a danger to the Republic.

For someone in Fulvia’s position, political marriage created ties between families, property, supporters and children who could inherit both wealth and enmities. Clodius, Curio and Antony connected her in turn to three influential circles often at odds with leading senators. Her children’s prospects depended in part on the fortunes of those alliances. She held no elected magistracy and commanded no army by constitutional entitlement, yet elite Roman women could exert real influence within these networks. Fulvia played an active part in those networks.

What Cicero actually said about Fulvia

Cicero’s campaign against Antony survives in fourteen speeches and pamphlets called the Philippics. Their name recalls the orations of the Athenian Demosthenes against Philip II of Macedon. Written in 44 and 43 BC, they were not all speeches actually delivered before an audience. The Second Philippic in particular was a literary attack presented as though spoken in the Senate. Cicero’s accusations against Antony and his household belong to this sustained political attack.

In the Second Philippic, Antony is represented as wasteful, morally uncontrolled and hostile to republican freedom. Cicero also brings Fulvia into the attack. Section 95 alludes to royal business supposedly conducted in a women’s apartment, suggesting that political decisions were being made through female influence at Antony’s home. At section 113 Cicero jokes viciously about Fulvia having already lost two husbands and implies Antony could become the third to die.

These remarks served Cicero’s political campaign. He wanted Roman senators and commanders to turn against Antony, while Antony had obvious reason to resent a well-known former consul urging resistance. Roman invective often attacked a man by portraying him as ruled by greed, pleasure or the women around him. Fulvia’s standing was damaged through the assault on her husband. No surviving letter or memoir records Fulvia’s reaction.

His political authority depended heavily on his oratory and writing. As a novus homo, the first in his family to reach the consulship, he had built his influence through his public career, reputation and unmatched ability in debate and writing. He had allies, but lacked a private army comparable to those of Caesar’s former generals. The Philippics sought to influence the men who controlled armed forces. If those men made peace with Antony, Cicero would be left exposed.

The triumvirate made Cicero a legal target

Cicero’s position grew dangerous in 43 BC. Antony fought forces backed by the Senate and by Octavian, the young man adopted as Caesar’s heir. After the consuls Hirtius and Pansa died and the political situation changed again, Octavian joined Antony and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. Their agreement became the Second Triumvirate. Legislation in November gave the three extraordinary power to reorder the state. Its victims could include Caesar’s assassins, opponents of the triumvirs and wealthy citizens whose assets the new rulers wanted to seize.

The triumvirs revived the proscriptions made notorious under Sulla. Names were publicly listed, and anyone on those lists could be killed with official approval. A helper risked punishment; a killer could claim a reward. Appian, Civil Wars 4.5–11 describes political enemies being exchanged between the triumvirs and specifies financial incentives: 25,000 Attic drachmas for a free person delivering a proscribed head, or 10,000 together with freedom and citizenship for an enslaved person. These are the Greek monetary terms preserved in Appian’s account.

Estimates for those targeted vary among ancient sources. Appian gives roughly 300 senators and 2,000 members of the equestrian order, though inclusion on a list does not establish that an individual was killed, and the lists could be altered. Property and family rivalries also shaped who became a target. The proscriptions brought together confiscation, the destruction of rival factions and the threat of death as instruments of government.

Cicero was among the most prominent victims. Plutarch, Life of Cicero 46 reports that Antony insisted on his execution and that Octavian resisted for two days before conceding on the third. Plutarch frames these bargains as evidence of leaders surrendering friends and relations to each other’s vengeance. His story cannot settle the exact sequence of private negotiations. Whatever the private negotiations, Octavian accepted the arrangement that condemned Cicero.

Cicero’s murder on 7 December 43 BC

Cicero attempted to leave Italy. In Plutarch’s narrative, he and his brother Quintus parted because they lacked the resources to flee together. Cicero passed through his coastal estates, contemplated sailing towards Macedonia and was eventually carried in a litter near his villa at Formiae. There the pursuers overtook him. Plutarch, Life of Cicero 48 names the centurion Herennius as the man who killed Cicero after his attendants were ordered to lower the litter.

The surviving accounts differ on particulars. Plutarch says that Herennius, acting on Antony’s instructions, severed Cicero’s head and hands. Appian names Popillius Laenas as the killer and speaks of one hand being cut off. Neither account is a contemporary eyewitness record capable of resolving those differences. Both place the essential events beyond serious doubt: Cicero was pursued under the proscriptions, murdered and mutilated, and his remains were carried back to Rome.

Cicero’s head and severed hand or hands were put on the rostra, the Forum platform from which Roman politicians addressed the people. Displaying the remains on a speaking platform humiliated an orator whose speeches had attacked Antony. Plutarch, Life of Cicero 49 describes the horror of onlookers and treats the spectacle as an exposure of Antony’s cruelty. Appian likewise writes of the display and the crowds who assembled to see it.

The writers document the public treatment of Cicero’s remains, but offer no account of spectators seeing Fulvia use hairpins. The writers who describe the display do not record what the crowd knew of any supposed encounter between Fulvia and Cicero’s head, or even establish that such an episode occurred. Their condemnation concerns the murder, proscriptions and public mutilation.

What Cassius Dio says Fulvia did

The fullest ancient narrative of Fulvia’s alleged actions appears in Cassius Dio, Roman History 47.8.3–4. Dio reports Antony’s abuse of the head and his order to place it above the rostra beside Cicero’s right hand. Before that display, he says, Fulvia spat on the head, held it in her lap, forced open the mouth, drew out the tongue and pierced it with her hairpins while speaking abusively. Dio specifies neither gold hairpins nor Fulvia’s precise words, and he does not say that she ordered Cicero’s assassination.

The alleged action has an evident literary symbolism. Cicero used his tongue to condemn Antony and insult Fulvia; the tongue becomes the object of revenge. His head was then displayed where he had exercised his influence as an orator. Dio’s choice of hairpins also gives the violence a specifically domestic instrument associated with women’s dress. The details can be interpreted as choices made in the telling. They provide no evidence that Fulvia planned the symbolism or that Roman law treated hairpins as a special weapon of female revenge.

The surrounding narrative makes Fulvia appear particularly ruthless. Dio alleges that she pushed for people to be killed over property and private grievances, including individuals Antony scarcely knew. Dio was himself a senator writing in Greek in the early third century AD. His depiction of the collapse of republican government often relies on moral judgments, and ambitious women frequently appear in ancient political narratives through hostile stereotypes. Those accusations reveal Dio’s portrayal of Fulvia and cannot be independently confirmed from his narrative alone.

Did the hairpin incident actually happen?

Plutarch and Appian both describe Cicero’s death and the display of his body parts, yet neither supplies the account of Fulvia extracting his tongue. Versions of the episode occur later in Byzantine compilations. The Byzantine texts may repeat earlier accounts or borrow from one another, so they cannot be counted as independent witnesses without further evidence. The evidence for the hairpins therefore remains thinner than the evidence for the murder.

A possible connection was proposed by J. Lea Beness and Tom Hillard in their 2024 study Fulvia and the Cheeky Rhetor. Suetonius preserves a joke attributed to the rhetorician Sextus Clodius about Fulvia’s swollen cheek and a pointed writing instrument. Beness and Hillard suggest that the remark could reflect rumours about Cicero’s tongue, with a stylus serving as the implement in one version. They emphasize the chronological difficulty: the joke may date from before Cicero was killed, although Suetonius did not necessarily arrange his anecdotes in strict order. The relationship between the joke and the later hairpin story remains speculative.

The possible exchange between a writing stylus and a hairpin helps explain how such an anecdote might develop. Both are pointed implements, while Cicero’s tongue was identified with speech. Beness and Hillard consider whether later storytellers sharpened the accusation by making a woman’s everyday accessory the weapon. Their argument describes one possible route by which the anecdote developed; repetition in later texts cannot confirm its historical accuracy. It cannot establish the actions of Fulvia on a particular day in 43 BC.

Suzanne Dixon reached a similarly cautious assessment in Unsexing Fulvia. She places the most familiar version of the incident within a later tradition hostile to a woman regarded as politically overbearing. Several ancient authors record Cicero’s murder and the display of his remains. The accusation that Fulvia pierced his tongue rests chiefly on Dio’s much later narrative, whose precise details remain unverified.

Why the story suited Roman ideas about power

An orator’s voice was a practical source of influence in republican Rome. Magistrates spoke at popular assemblies, advocates argued in the courts and senators competed through public persuasion. Cicero also prepared speeches for circulation in written form, sometimes revising them after delivery. His words continued to reach readers beyond the original occasion. The tongue thus represented the political influence lost with Cicero’s death; the severed hand, connected by ancient authors with writing the Philippics, carried a related meaning.

Fulvia’s role in the allegation also reflects Roman expectations about women and authority. Elite women could own estates, cultivate influential connections and protect family interests, yet elected magistracies remained closed to them. Their public activity could be approved as loyalty to a husband or criticized as an intrusion into male political affairs. Dio’s image of a wife turning her hair ornaments against a dead statesman was capable of presenting her as both an avenger and a breach of accepted gender roles. Neither reading establishes Fulvia’s thoughts or actions.

Literary symbolism does not resolve what happened after Cicero’s death. Dio leaves out Fulvia’s precise words and any explanation of her intentions; the other major accounts do not corroborate the hairpin episode. An interpretation of Dio’s imagery cannot establish the events he describes.

Fulvia was more than Antony’s wife

Fulvia’s wider political activity is better documented. She testified during Milo’s trial, sustained alliances through three marriages and became involved in the later confrontation between Antony’s supporters and Octavian. In Roman History 48.4, Dio depicts her as extraordinarily influential while Antony was away from Rome. His suggestion that public affairs could scarcely proceed against her wishes is likely exaggerated, but her visibility in political conflict is supported by more than the tongue allegation.

Coinage provides material evidence of Fulvia’s public prominence. The Roman Provincial Coinage catalogue, RPC I 3139 identifies bronze coinage produced in about 41/40 BC at Eumeneia, a Phrygian city renamed Fulvia. It records a woman’s head on the obverse, identified as Fulvia in the guise of Nike, the figure of victory, as well as the inscription, date, issuing official and known specimens. The coins do not reveal her private intentions; they do show a striking public association between a living Roman woman and civic identity.

The dispute grew into war in 41–40 BC. Fulvia and Antony’s brother Lucius opposed Octavian amid struggles over land redistribution and settlements for military veterans in Italy. Lucius was eventually besieged in Perusia, now Perugia, and defeated in the conflict known as the Perusine War. Fulvia supported and organized the Antonian cause. Claims that she personally commanded eight legions in battle go beyond the surviving evidence. Lucius was the consul and military commander.

Fulvia escaped Italy after the defeat and died in Greece in 40 BCE. Antony then married Octavian’s sister Octavia, a marriage intended to support their renewed political understanding. Some ancient accounts blamed the war on Fulvia after her death. Celia E. Schultz’s biography Fulvia: Playing for Power at the End of the Roman Republic examines the relationships and actions of Fulvia’s entire career, showing why they merit attention apart from Cicero’s alleged mutilation.

A death remembered through hostile stories and paintings

The execution of Cicero exposed the violence underlying the triumvirs’ settlement. A former consul could be condemned, hunted down and publicly displayed in the very centre of Roman political life. Antony’s opponents could condemn that treatment, while later historians found in it a memorable example of civil war’s cruelty. The episode’s historical significance rests on the documented murder and display, irrespective of the disputed hairpin scene.

Artists have continued to depict the alleged scene. In 1888, Francisco Maura y Montaner painted Fulvia and Mark Antony, or The Vengeance of Fulvia, now recorded in the Museo del Prado collection. The painting imagines the aftermath of Cicero’s death and reveals something about nineteenth-century interests in ancient cruelty and powerful women. It is a nineteenth-century interpretation, not a visual record of Fulvia’s actions in 43 BC.

There were clear reasons for hostility between Fulvia and Cicero. He had defended the man convicted of killing her first husband, and he later attacked her household as part of his campaign against Antony. Cicero was executed once Antony and Octavian joined forces. Dio added Fulvia’s alleged treatment of the severed head to that political history. The tongue-piercing scene has powerful political symbolism, but far weaker historical support than Cicero’s murder and the display of his remains.