Now that he no longer had official duties, Cicero kept himself busy as an advocate, but he also had to appear occasionally in court as a witness. One trial at which he gave evidence followed a sensational scandal that took place at the end of 62. He broke the alibi of the unruly young aristocrat Publius Clodius Pulcher, who was accused of sacrilege. Clodius was a member of the patrician Claudius family, although he used a popular version of the name. The Claudii had produced Consuls in every generation since the foundation of the Republic and over the centuries had built up a well-deserved reputation for high-handedness and violence. In one typical incident, a Claudius was leading a Roman fleet into battle. The sacred chickens refused to give a favorable omen by feeding on some corn that was put out for them. So Claudius had them flung into the sea, with the words: “If they won’t eat, then let them drink.”
Clodius possessed a full share of ancestral genes. When serving in Asia Minor during his youth, he had helped foment a mutiny against his commander and later got himself kidnapped by pirates. On his return to Rome he had unsuccessfully prosecuted Catilina on a charge of extortion—with no very serious intent, one guesses, other than to extort money from Catilina’s rich protector, Crassus. He had joined Cicero’s bodyguard in 63, perhaps as much for the fun of it as from political conviction. Now, as Quaestor-designate, he was on the point of starting his political career in earnest. At present he was known as little more than a young roisterer and it would be a year or two before he revealed himself as a serious and ruthless popularis.
The festival of the women’s deity, the Good Goddess, was celebrated in early December every year in the house of a senior government official. Secret mystical ceremonies in the presence of the Vestal Virgins took place which only women were permitted to attend. Little is known about them except that the most important rituals took place at night. Music was played and there was a sacrifice of some kind. The previous year it had been Cicero’s turn—or, more precisely, Terentia’s—and this time the ritual took place at the State House, Julius Caesar’s official residence as Chief Pontiff. Clodius, who had fallen for Caesar’s wife, Pompeia, decided to infiltrate the event in drag. He came dressed as a lute player but lost his way in the corridors of the house. He came across a maid who asked him his name. His masculine voice gave him away, and he ran off. The alarm was given and a search conducted until he was found hiding under a bed. Somehow he managed to escape. Most people thought he was lucky to have survived the incident without injury.
When Cicero wrote to Atticus about the affair, his excited amusement is palpable. “I imagine you have heard that P. Clodius, the son of Appius, was caught dressed up as a woman in C. Caesar’s house at the national sacrifice and that he owed his escape alive to the hands of a servant girl—a spectacular scandal. I am sure you will be deeply distressed!” It was, in fact, as Cicero knew, a serious business. Religious ritual accompanied almost every public event, and to breach it was unforgivable. Clodius would almost certainly face grave charges. Caesar himself was embarrassed and immediately divorced Pompeia, making the famous point that, whether or not she was innocent, his wife had to be above suspicion.
It is difficult to know what to make of the Good Goddess affair. AS far as one can tell, there were no political overtones. But a house crowded with visitors was hardly a convenient rendezvous point for clandestine lovers. Probably all that Clodius had in mind was a dare. It was exactly the kind of practical joke that would amuse Rome’s fashionable younger generation. These young men and women had plenty of money and were socially and sexually liberated. They turned their backs on the severe tradition of public duty. No longer defining themselves exclusively in terms of community—family, gens, patrician or noble status—and rebelling against authority, they lived for the moment.
Many of them had been sympathizers with Catilina (although for some reason Clodius had had little to do with the failed revolutionary) and, even if they had no time for politics now, they emerged later as supporters of Caesar during the civil war. Some became his key associates during his years of supreme power: able, unscrupulous and with huge debts to settle, they had no objection to aiding and abetting the death throes of the Republic, provided that Caesar paid them generously. Although most of them knew one another, they were not a coherent movement. Friendships were made and broken; cliques formed, melted away and re-formed. Respectable opinion deeply disapproved of them. The contemporary historian Sallust claimed they had a
passion for fornication, guzzling and other forms of sensuality. Men prostituted themselves like women, and women sold their chastity at every corner. To please their palates they ransacked land and sea. They went to bed before they needed sleep, and instead of waiting until they felt hungry, thirsty, cold or tired, they forestalled their bodies’ needs by self-indulgence. Such practices incited young men who had run through their property to have recourse to crime.
The great poet Caius Valerius Catullus, a member of Clodius’s circle, fell in love with the eldest of Clodius’s three sisters. After she threw him over, Catullus wrote memorably, with all the rage of discarded passion, of Clodia’s loose way of life. In a poem to Marcus Caelius Rufus, another of her lovers, he described her as loitering “at the crossroads and in the back streets / ready to toss off the ‘magnanimous’ sons of Rome.” She had a house on the fashionable Palatine Hill and gardens on the Tiber conveniently near a public bathing area, where she was accused of picking up young men. Clodia and her sisters were widely supposed to have slept with their brother and, although these kinds of accusations were part of the cut-and-thrust of political life, the rumors of incest were persistent and were confirmed under oath by one of their ex-husbands.
AS a bachelor Caelius lived in a block of apartments owned by Clodius, but eventually relations with his friend’s sister became strained. In 56 Clodia accused Caelius, who shared with Catullus the status of rejected lover, of attempting to poison her. Cicero successfully defended him with one of his most entertaining speeches, in which he gave a devastating exposé of the “Medea of the Palatine” or, in Caelius’s phrase, “that ten-cent Clytemnestra.”
Other members of the young circle included Mark Antony, grandson of the great orator of Cicero’s childhood and stepson of the conspirator Lentulus, and Caius Scribonius Curio. The two were close friends and, according to Cicero, lovers. Curio encouraged his young protégé to run up huge debts for which he stood surety. In one of the Philippics, the sequence of great speeches against Antony which Cicero gave nearly two decades later, this relationship is subjected to lively (perhaps overlively) scrutiny.
You [Mark Antony] assumed a man’s toga and at once turned it into a prostitute’s frock. At first you were a common rent boy; you charged a fixed fee, and a steep one at that. Curio soon turned up, though, and took you off the game. You were as firmly wedded to Curio as if he had given you a married woman’s dress. No boy bought for lust was ever as much in his master’s power as you were in Curio’s. How many times did his father throw you out of his house? How many times did he set watchmen to make sure you did not cross his front door? And yet under cover of night, driven by lust and money, you were let in through the roof tiles.