ABSTRACT
The personal was emphatically political within the ruling elite of the Roman Republic, a fact which the reader needs to keep in mind throughout this chapter, which includes a review of the personalities of Cornelia’s family and of those supporters, connections and ill-wishers who affected their fates and their image in posterity. Cornelia was legally a member of the Cornelii Scipiones before her marriage admitted her to the Sempronii Gracchi, the family of her children. By adoption, marriage or entry into the Vestal priesthood, a Roman could change family membership at law but in human (and not-so-human) terms, their loyalties in each case were augmented, not simply transferred.1 Marriages, technically the province of the all-powerful paterfamilias, were typically arranged by older-generation family members in accordance with family strategies – economic, social and political. The process was essentially as represented in the stories reviewed in the previous chapter about Cornelia’s betrothal, but without the dramatic touches.
