Antistia (wife of Pompey)

The lack of secure historical information on Antistia's life freed later dramatists and writers to fictionalise her feelings and motives in her marriage, and to invent more elaborate endings to the story.

Beginning with the French dramatist Pierre Corneille, who included her in his 1662 play Sertorius, Antistia has been presented as a cruelly-treated victim of Pompey's political ambition, whose love for her husband proved little obstacle to his own self-interest and the machinations of Sulla.

[5] The relevant sections of the Life of Pompey have been characterised as primarily concerned with making political points about Sulla's tyranny and presenting the affair through a tragic lens, with comparatively little regard for the facts of the story or its chronological accuracy.

[15] Around 86 BCE,[a] in his capacity as iudex,[b] Antistius presided over the trial of Pompey for embezzlement of public funds (peculatus) during the Social War.

[22] This fact, however, became common knowledge: when Antistius announced the verdict of acquittal, Plutarch reports that the crowd began shouting Talasio!, the customary acclamation of a marriage.

[22] Erich Gruen has described it as the first of Pompey's marriages intended to give him "access to the inner citadels of senatorial power",[24] though the alliance ultimately proved of little political value to him.

[5][35] For Antistia, the divorce was part of a period of great misfortune: her father had been killed in 82 BCE by Marian supporters, the so-called Cinnani,[6] during a senate-meeting at the Curia Hostilia.

The murder was instigated by the praetor Junius Damasippus, who viewed Antistius as unreliable, despite his earlier co-operation, due to his marriage alliance with Pompey.

[36][37][f] The damage to Pompey's reputation caused by the divorce has been cited as a contributing factor towards his cultivation of an alliance with Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, the father of the future triumvir, in 79 BCE.

[3] Pompey, similarly, is presented as having loved Aristie, but reluctantly divorced her in order to follow Sulla's commands, and so to maintain his favour and eventually succeed to his power.

[49] Aristie has been described as a 'feminine' counterpoint to the play's other major female character, the fictional warrior-queen Viriate, who rejects love and sees marriage as a purely strategic decision.

[51] In the 1929 Latin-language play Filius Imperatoris (The General's Son), a fictionalised romance between Antistia and Pompey during the Social War becomes a minor plotline.

Aemilia hears the news of Calpurnia's suicide during a wedding ceremony and is so upset for Antistia's pain that she suffers a seizure that results in a miscarriage and her own death.

Photograph of a marble statue of a young woman's head
Roman portrait head of an unknown woman from c. 30 BCE . No portrait of Antistia survives from antiquity, but the style of this example is typical of female portraits of the 1st century BCE, which tend to be more idealised and conventionalised than those of men. [ 1 ]
Marble bust of Pompey at the Louvre , Paris
Drawing of a balding man, seated, with his child on his hand as if in thought.
A seventeenth-century portrait of Pierre Corneille , who created a highly fictionalised portrayal of Antistia for his 1662 play Sertorius .