Summary

Servilia (c. 100 bce–?) was one of the most prominent women in the generation of Cicero and Caesar and the older half-sister of Cato Uticensis, who would become a martyr for the republican cause. She was the mother of Marcus Brutus, a leader in the plot to assassinate Servilia’s long-time lover, Gaius Julius Caesar, the dictator. Cicero describes her as having her own political views and as working to influence the chaotic events that unfolded rapidly after Caesar’s murder on the Ides of March 44 bce. Her life exemplifies many aspects that were traditional in the personal aspirations and family situation of elite women in republican Rome, as well as the uniquely harsh experiences of violence, civil war, and political disintegration that few in her generation escaped. Servilia is the subject of the first large-scale book treatment of a Roman family organized around the life of an individual Roman woman, published by Susan Treggiari in 2019.