Laelia

1. The elder of the two daughters of C. Laelius, surnamed the wise. She was married to Q. Mucius Scaevola, the augur, by whom she had two daughters, Mucia major and minor. Laelia was celebrated for the purity with which she spoke her native language, and she transmitted her conversational excellence to two generations-to her daughters the Muciae, and to her grandaughters the two Liciniae. Her son-in-law, L. Licinius Crassus [Crassus, No. 23], whose eloquence profited by her instructions, describes Laelia's conversation as a perfect model of the antique tone of Naevius and Plautus; and Cicero, in whose early manhood she was still surviving, represents her diction as possessing a certain indefinable Roman grace and propriety, of which highly educated women were the best depositaries, and which conveyed a correct and lively image of the eloquence of her father Laelius and his illustrious friend, the second Africanus. The conversation of Laelia gave the tone to the polished society of her age, and was distinguished from that of Cornelia, the mirror of a later generation, by its native Latinism, and by its sincerity and earnestness, which qualities were in some degree sacrificed afterwards to exotic graces, and to a composite idiom borrowed from the schools and sophists of Athens. (Cic. Brut. 58.111, de Or. 3.12.44.)

2. The younger of the two daughters of C. Laelius the wise, married C. Fannius Strabo. (Cic. Brut. 26.101.) [W.B.D]

plebeian, appears in the Fasti for the first time in B. C. 190. Its only regular cognomen is Balbus [BALBUs], though Laelius who was the friend of the younger Scipio Africanus was sometimes surnamed Sapiens.

The following stemma exhibits the extinction of one branch of the Laelii in the male line after the fourth generation, and the marriages and descendants of the female line: --

LAE´LIA (Λαιλία, Ptol. 2.4.12: Aracnea or El Berrocal), an inland city of the Turdetani, in the W. of Hispania Baetica, not far from Italica, is one of the Spanish cities of which we have several coins, belonging to the period of its independence, as well as to the early Roman empire. Their types are, an armed horseman, at full speed, with ears of corn, boughs, and palm-trees. (Florez, Esp. S. vol. xii. pp. 256--258; Med. vol. 2. p. 489, vol. 3. p. 92; Mionnet, vol. 1. p. 19, Suppl. vol. 1. p. 35 ; Sestini, Med. pp. 20, 65; Num. Goth.; Eckhel, vol. 1. p. 25; Ukert, vol. ii. pt. 1. p. 373.)