Outside on the Statehouse lawn, there is a statue bearing the inscription "These Are My Jewels" portraying a women, her arms outstretched over several great men from Ohio. Perhaps no woman better represented the archetype of the ideal Roman wife than Cornelia.
Cornelia was the daughter of the hero Publius Scipio Africanus, who defeated Hannibal in the second Punic War. She was married to patrician cousin Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and was mother to twelve children. Only three lived to adulthood: a daughter, Sempronia, and two sons, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus. After her husband's death, Cornelia devoted herself to raising her three young children in the highest patrician traditions of service to the state. She was never remarried, which is an example of the Roman ideal of a widow never remarrying out of loyalty to her first husband.
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