Valeria (wife of Sulla)

Valeria was the fifth wife of Roman dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla. She was the daughter of Marcus Valerius Messalla Niger and a sister of the consul of 53 BC, Marcus Valerius Messalla Rufus.

An "alert young divorcee", as Ronald Syme writes, ^[1] she attracted the notice of Sulla at the theatre, and he married her towards the end of his life. When he retired from public life to a villa in southern Italy, she accompanied him. She was pregnant at the time of his death in 78 BC and had a daughter, Cornelia Postuma, some months later.

Plutarch calls her a sister of the orator Quintus Hortensius, but this is a mistake probably arising from the fact that the sister of Hortensius married a Valerius Messala.^[2]

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: William Ramsay (1870). "Valeria". In Smith, William. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. 3. p. 1215. 

Footnotes