He embarked on the cursus honorum, the course of a Roman political career, serving as quaestor in 58, but he died the following year.

In Cicero's letters, he complains that Terentia had failed to provide Tullia a proper escort, or sufficient money for her expenses.

Cicero's friends and colleagues wrote letters of condolence to the grief-stricken orator; some of these have survived.

Reports of the discovery claimed that the corpse inside looked and felt like it had been buried that very day,[3] and a lamp that the discoverers supposed to have been burning perpetually since Tullia's burial, more than fifteen hundred years earlier.

[4][5] The seventeenth-century English poet John Donne alludes to this legend in the eleventh stanza ("The Good-Night") of his "Epithalamion, 1613.