"I am not not speaking against that woman, but let us suppose that there is another woman, different from her, who gives herself freely to everybody-I mean everybody-who always has a lover to show off; let us suppose that in her garden, in her house, in her villa at Baiae, she gives complete freedom to the pleasures of all; that she goes so far as to maintain young men and to compensate with her largesse for the stinginess of their fathers; let us suppose that this woman is a widow and lives freely; that she is a hussy and lives brazenly; that she is a wealthy woman and lives extravagantly; that she is a slave to her appetites and lives like a whore. Should I consider a man an adulterer if he takes a little liberty when he meets her?" Cicero, Pro Caelio, 16.

Unfortunate in her own time to have been immortalized as a beautiful slut by two of the greatest writers of the time - Catullus and Cicero - Clodia, the immortal "Lesbia," has come down to us as a symbol of late-Republican decadence. She also illuminates the hatred of men in her time for a woman who indulged her sexual appetites. By the very hostility poured upon Clodia, the changing mores of the Empire were clearly defined as they affected upper-class women who did not behave traditionally. Livia, wife of Augustus, would choose to portray herself as the polar opposite of notorious women like Clodia.

Clodia was one of the three sisters of P. Clodius Pulcher, rabble-rouser extraordinary and bane of Cicero and others in the '60's and '50's BC. The family name was Claudius (Clodius and Clodia changed theirs to a more plebian-sounding version); thus her family was one of the most illustrious patrician clans in Rome, with a family stretching back for centuries. Ironically, it included black sheep with the white, such as the notorious Claudius who had attempted to rape Verginia in legendary days. The Claudii were apparently known as an unpredictable patrician clan to whom a rebel streak was not unknown.

Born in approximately 95 BC, Clodia was married to her first cousin, Q. Caecilius Metellus Celer. She is first mentioned in a gossipy letter of Cicero's in 62 BC (Plutarch, Cicero, 29). A rebellious and wild generation had grown up following the turbulent civil wars of Marius and Sulla; it was viewed with the deepest suspicion by the Roman old guard. Cicero and others commented that they seemed to live only for pleasure, dicing, gaming, drinking, spending money (usually on credit) and scandalous sexual escapades. Clodia's associates were agreed to be the fringe end of that circle.

Fresco, House of Venus, Pompeii. Courtesy of K. Andrus.

Catullus' "Lesbia"

Sometime before Metellus' sudden and suspicious death in 59 BC, Clodia had begun a scandalous liaison - one of many- with a brilliant young country-born poet, Catullus. In his love poems, he called her Lesbia. Catullus' poems sketch the overarching, hopeless importance of the affair in his mind; Clodia's feelings were, certainly, much less engaged and she dismissed him for other lovers, including Catullus' friend M. Caelius Rufus. The searing pain this caused Catullus, and his resulting hatred and despair, vibrate from his poetry even today and helped make his fame. He died several years later.

The Medusa of the Palatine

During her long affairs with Catullus and Caelius, her unstable but brilliant brother, Clodius, was making a deliberate political strategy of disrupting Roman politics using mob violence. In addition, Clodius created a nine-days'-wonder of scandal when, disguised in women's clothes, he sneaked into Julius Caesar's house in 62 to keep a liaison with Caesar's wife in the midst of the most holy woman's festival in Rome, Bona Dea, at which men's presence was sacrilege, Pompeia. Clodius was tried for sacrilege and acquitted only by massive bribery. He thus acquired the unending dislike of Cicero, a feeling which was mutual. Whether Cicero enjoyed attacking Clodia to strike at her brother, or whether he was honestly appalled at the apparent luxury, immorality, and depravity of the family - including rumors of incest between Clodius and all his sisters - Clodia came in his sights when she accused Caelius of attempting to poison her after their affair cooled.

Cicero, hired to defend Caelius in April, 56, pulled out all the stops against Clodia, not only because he routinely did so in defending favored clients, but because a bitter enmity with Clodius demanded it. His speech resonated with scalding disapproval for her lifestyle. With a humor far more devastating than outrage, he painted her as epitomizing everything that respectable Roman woman of the past abhorred. Significantly, he thundered that she had betrayed the honor of her illustrious family and shamed her noble ancestors - to a Roman, one of the severest reproofs imaginable.

Detail from Grand Frieze, Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii.
Courtesy of Erotic Art of Ancient Rome.

Clodia is one of the first well-born women we know of to have paid the full price for what was viewed in her time as a dangerous sexual revolution. Sexual repression had been a sine qua non of feminine respectability for centuries. Cato the Censor's thunder about the dangers of female sexuality a century before were, by Clodia's time, too distant to stop the sweep of license and wealth that flowed through Rome from its new Empire. Clodia - and her impossible brother - were inviting targets for all those who felt that the moral fiber of Rome had become irretrievably damaged. When Cicero laughingly referred to Clodia as "The Medea of the Palatine," and openly stated she had slept with her own brother, her reputation and influence were, by all accounts, destroyed.

Little is ever heard of Clodia after 56 BC, although Cicero, towards the end of his life, casually mentions she was still living after the Civil War. He even considered buying property from her. By then, her brother was dead, murdered by a political faction, her position in society was long gone, and she had (presumably) withdrawn from the notorious circles she had once embraced. Although other Roman women would be attacked for sexual license in following years - for example, Messalina in the next century, adulterous wife of the Emperor Claudius - it was Clodia's misfortune to live on forever in the poems of Catullus and the dismissive contempt of Cicero's Pro Caelio. Women in the future, if they wished for the open sexual freedom of men, would look to her as an example of its price.

Sources:

Catullus' poems are accessible through VROMA/Catullus. Biography links may be found at Gaius Valerius Catullus. Link to Clodius courtesy of Thinkquest's Forum Romanum. Link to Messalina courtesy of Master & Margarita.