Download CLODIA and

THE FIVE WIVES OF SULLA AND THE FIVE WIVES OF POMPEY
1. I suggested that it was worth looking at the five wives of Pompey - even
though, as with the five wives of Sulla, so little (disappointingly) is known
about them as individuals in their own right.
2. a) In many senses, the reasons why each man married the wives he did appear
to have been similar in each case.
b) With both men, we get both some insight into the dynamics of inter-family
relationships and some sense of how marriages and divorces were used to
enhance a rising political star’s career - with little or no reference to the
wishes of the woman herself - although Caecilia Metella (as we saw)
joined her husband, Sulla, in persuading Pompey to divorce Antistia and
to marry her daughter (Sulla’s step-daughter) Aemilia.
3. As we saw, after Aemilia’s premature death while giving birth and the divorce
of Mucia [his third wife] (by letter) after seventeen years of marriage - for much
of which they were not together - Pompey married JULIA, the only child of
Julia Caesar.
4. a) Despite’s Pompey’s recorded fondness for all his wives, the only reason for
the marriage to Julia was to bind POMPEY more closely to CAESAR in
their private political alliance in “the ‘First’ Triumvirate”.
b) Caesar simply could not allow Pompey to drift away from himself and
Crassus.
GNAEUS POMPEIUS (MAGNUS)
[POMPEY (THE GREAT)]
5. BUT, Plutarch reports [Life of Pompey 53]:
“The young wife's fondness for her husband was notorious, and Pompey, at his age, scarcely
seemed to be a fit object for such passionate devotion. The reason for it seems to have lain
in his constancy as a husband (since he remained entirely faithful to her) and in his ability
to unbend from his dignity as a public figure and to become really charming in his
personal relationships.”
6. i) JULIA (born about 76 BC), at the time when her father offered her to Pompey, was already
betrothed to Quintus Servilius Caepio and was unhappy about the idea of her engagement
being broken
ii) To “free” her her father had Pompey offer Caepio his own daughter, Pompeia, as an
alternative future wife!
iii) But Pompeia did not, in the outcome, marry Caepio; instead she was married to the son of
Sulla!
[All of this demonstrates yet again that, amongst the elite (and possibly lower down the social
scale) it was fathers who decided whom their daughters would marry]
With Julius Caesar himself [see later] marrying his wife Calpurnia for political
reasons and seeing to it that her father was then elected to a consulship (which was
in the gift of the “triumvirs”), Plutarch [in his Life of Caesar 14] (although such
arrangements were by no means unusual) has Cato the Younger (the ultraconservative great grandson of the ultra-conservative Cato the Elder) protest:
“that it was intolerable for marriage to be the medium by which leadership
of the state was bought and sold, and for women to be the means by which
men slotted one another into provincial governorships, military commands,
and the control of resources.”
8. Be this as it may, JULIA, likely still in her teens, found herself married (in April
59 BC) to Pompey who would have been 47 years old at the time.
9. She had a miscarriage in 55 BC and died in childbirth in 54 BC – the baby dying
too.
7.
10. Her death contributed significantly to the break between Julius Caesar and
Pompey and not too much later to the civil war which erupted in 49 BC.
Cornelia
1. Pompey married for the fifth time within two years of Julia’s death – in 52 BC.
2. His new wife was Cornelia, the widow of Marcus Licinius Crassus, the third
member of “the Triumvirate” who had been killed in battle the previous year.
3. a) She was born about 73 BC and so was about 21 at the time of her second
marriage (to Pompey).
[She will have been about 18 at the time of her first marriage to Crassus about 55 BC, when Crassus would have
been close to 60]
b) By now (at the time of his marriage to Cornelia) Pompey will have been 54
years old.
4. Plutarch (in his biography of Crassus) describes Cornelia as “a beautiful woman
of good character, well read and a skilled player of the lyre. She was”, he adds
“also very well educated in geometry and philosophy.”
5. She came from the heart of the “nobility”; her father Quintus Caecilius
Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica was consul with Pompey in 52 BC, arranged the
marriage, and was "the last Scipio of any consequence in Roman history." [Sir
Ronald Syme Historia 7 (1958), p. 187].
6. i) Cornelia followed her new husband to the East when he left Italy to pursue
the civil war, joined him on the island of Lesbos, and accompanied him when
he went to Egypt where he was murdered (in September 48 BC).
ii) We hear no more of Cornelia after this.
a) Before we turn to Julius Caesar’s three marriages (so ‘similar’ to those of
Sulla and Pompey in that they were essentially ‘arranged’ and ‘political’, with
the advancement of Caesar’s career in the fore); and
b) before we consider Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) and his wife FULVIA;
and
c) before we look at CLEOPATRA in her relation to both Caesar and Antony,
……. we shouldn’t leave the “Late Republic” without ssayingomething first
about the “notorious” CLODIA and about Cicero’s two wives (TERENTIA a
and PUBLILIA) and his beloved daughter TULLIA.
CLODIA AND HER CONTEMPORARIES
CLODIA (born ‘Claudia’ ca 95 BC)
Politically, when Julius Caesar had held the consulship in 59 BC and had introduced
legislation in the interests also of his two political partners in the ‘Triumvirate’
(Gnaeus Pompeius [Pompey] and Lucius Licinius Crassus), it was vital to see that
that legislation was not reversed in the following year.
2. To that end the three were successful in having two sympathetic consuls elected for
58 BC.
3. They also arranged for a very radical “tribune of the plebs” to take office to prevent,
through his veto, any of the other nine tribunes reversing what had been achieved in
59 BC.
4. That “tribune of the plebs” was Publius CLODIUS Pulcher, a ‘patrician’ [born
Publius Claudius Pulcher] whom they had had to have adopted into a ‘plebeian’
family before he could qualify for the office.
1.
5. Clodius was already the implacable political enemy of CICERO not least
because of the “Affair of the Good Goddess” (‘the Bona Dea Affair’) of 62 BC:
i) Clodius, dressed as a female, had infiltrated the female-only ceremonies of
the goddess held in the home of the Pontifex Maximus (Caesar) [giving
Caesar an “excuse” [as we’ll see] to divorce his wife Pompeia, the hostess on that
occasion, who was in reality no longer of any ‘use’ to him politically - and
giving rise to the saying “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion”].
ii) Clodius had been charged with sacrilege, brought before the courts in
61 BC, but was acquitted – despite his clear guilt and despite Cicero being
not only the distinguished prosecutor but also disproving his alibi.
TWO DEPICTIONS OF THE “BONA DEA”
(“THE GOOD GODDESS”)
CLODIA
i) CLODIA was CLODIUS’ sister (who had changed her name [from ‘Claudia’] at
the same time as her brother) and the historical problem is whether her
‘notoriety’ is fully deserved or whether her brother’s negative image (as a
‘demagogue’) among Roman political moderates and conservatives has
unfairly coloured her reputation.
ii) That reputation was tarnished further and frozen for posterity when CICERO,
in 56 BC, defended, Marcus Caelius Rufus on a charge of public violence and
poisoning brought, indirectly, by CLODIA and, as part of the no-holdsbarred defence, launched into a “character assassination” of her.
CLODIA’S LIFE AND PUBLIC ROLE
1. a) Clodia was the eldest or middle daughter of one of the consuls 79 BC from the
very distinguished family of the Claudii Pulchri.
b) She is reported as being highly educated in Greek and philosophy and, with
little disagreement, is identified as the “Lesbia” who looms so large as the
mistress of the poet Catullus (ca 84 – 54 BC) in his poetry.
If the identification is valid, then she is depicted by Catullus as fickle,
flirtatious and flighty as a mistress - as in poem 11
“Let her live and be happy with her adulterers,
hold all three-hundred in her embrace,
truly love-less, wearing them all down
again and again: let her not look for
my love as before,
she whose crime destroyed it, like the last
flower of the field, touched once
by the passing plough.”
A MODERN DEPICTION OF CATULLUS’
LESBIA (PROBABLY CLODIA) WITH
THE FAMOUS SPARROW
c) Cicero’s depiction of CLODIA is, in so many ways, similar in the Pro Caelio
[“In Defence of Caelius”].
2. a) CLODIA was the wife of the “stuffed-shirt” Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer
(her first cousin), consul in 60 BC, who was about five years her senior only.
b) The marriage was allegedly not a happy one and the couple are said to have
argued frequently and openly in public.
c) Her husband died suddenly in 59 BC when he was at the most in his early forties
and rumour had it that Clodia had poisoned him – but how far this was, again,
just an accusation brought by her personal enemies isn’t clear; it certainly did
not lead to a trial.
d) Again allegedly she was unfaithful to her husband during the marriage and
did not hesitate to indulge in love-affairs once she was widowed.
e) At dates that cannot be clearly established she is believed [as already noted] to
have become the mistress of the poet Catullus (born about 84 BC and so about ten
years Clodia’s junior).
3.
a) After leaving Catullus, she began an affair (which seems not to have been in
any sense a secret) with Marcus Caelius Rufus who was born in 82 BC and,
so again, at least ten years Clodia’s junior.
b) He was an Italian who belonged to the “Equestrian Order” (not the senatorial),
a lawyer and a correspondent of Cicero’s and clearly known in Roman society.
c) Clodia’s affair with him ended acrimoniously after a relatively short time and in
March 56 BC he found himself charged with several counts of “public violence”
(under a law de vi publica).
4.
The charges against Caelius Rufus brought by a series of prosecutors were:
i) causing civil disturbances in Naples,
ii) committing an assault in Puteoli,
iii) damaging property,
iv) accepting gold to murder Dio, the head of the delegation sent to Rome by
citizens of Alexandria to persuade the Senate not to support the deposed
Ptolemy XII of Egypt in his attempts to regain his throne,
v) the actual murder of Dio, and
vi) attempting to poison Clodia
- all of which he was likely guilty of doing.
d) It was in this case that CICERO acted as a defence-counsel, later publishing
his speech as his Pro Caelio [“In Defence of Caelius”].
CICERO’s PRO CAELIO
1. The thrust of Cicero’s defence was that the (private) prosecutors were being
manipulated by a vengeful CLODIA upset that her affair with Caelius ended
and Cicero was at pains to depict her as ‘a woman scorned’.
2. It seems that the accusers of Caelius had reproached him for his infidelities, his
parties, his revelling, his enjoyment of ‘la dolce vita’.
a) Cicero turned the tables and shamed Clodia in public in court by arguing
that these were precisely the things CLODIA had been indulging in and that
she was the one who had taught Caelius these ‘immoralities’
b) His aim was to divert the attention of the jury away from Caelius’ questionable
political activities (which seem to have included considerable thuggery) and to
play on the jurors’ prejudices by suggesting that someone who was no more that
a loose-living woman had financed her lover’s indulgences.
c) It is most unlikely that Clodia was a chaste, ‘stay-at-home’ widow, but the
charges against her are equally unlikely to be well grounded.
4. Some examples of Cicero’s ‘method’ from the trial may best illustrate how he
designed his attack on Clodia [in a system which had no law of slander] in order to direct the
jurors’ attention away from his client Caelius.
a) Cicero at one point, for example, asks the jurors to imagine what Clodia’s
ancestor, the blind Appius Claudius Caecus, censor in 312 BC would say if he
could come into the court. He would say (Cicero claims):
“What have you to do with a very young man like Caelius?
Why have you been so intimate with him as to lend him gold?
Did you not remember that your father, your uncle, your grand-father,
your great-grandfather, your great-great-grand-father were all consuls?
When you had become a wife, and, coming from a most
illustrious family yourself, had married into a most renowned family
too, why was Caelius so close to you? Was he a relation? Was he a
friend of your husband?
Nothing of the sort!
What then was the reason, other than some folly or lust on your part?
Even if the images of us, the men of your family, had no influence over
you, did not even my own daughter, that celebrated Quinta Claudia,
remind you to emulate the praise belonging to our house from the
glory of its women?
Why have the vices of your brother [Publius Clodius Pulcher]
carried more weight with you than the virtues of your father, of
your grandfather, and others in regular descent ever since my own
time; virtues exemplified not only in the men, but also in the
women?”
In a society where family honour was so highly valued, this appeal to ancestry
would have had a greater effect than might, perhaps, be the case today.
b) Cicero then addresses Clodia himself:
“If, woman, you want us to approve of what you are doing, and what you
are saying, and what you are charging us with, and what you are
intending, and what you are seeking to achieve by this prosecution, you
must give a satisfactory account of your great familiarity, your intimate
connection, your extraordinary relationship with Caelius.
The accusers of Caelius refer, in this court, to lusts and loves on his part
and to adulteries, and goings-on on the sea-shore, and at banquets, and
at revels, and at water parties; and suggest that none of these things is
mentioned without your consent.
In fact, you saw a young man become your neighbour; his fair complexion,
his height, his face, his eyes made an impression on you.
You wanted to see him more often. Sometimes you were seen in the same
gardens with him.
But, despite being a woman of high rank, you have been unable with all
your riches to hold on to him, the son of a thrifty and parsimonious father:
he has kicked out, he has rejected you, he does not think your presents
worth what you require of him.
Go try some one else. You have gardens on the Tiber, and you carefully
made them at the very spot where all the young men of the city come to
bathe.
From that spot you may every day pick out people to suit you.
Why do you annoy this one man, Caelius who in fact scorns you?”
5. a) The speech is a long one.
b) Cicero’s invective against Clodia aimed at vilifying her and diverting
attention away from Caelius worked.
c) Caelius was acquitted of all charges.
d) No more is heard of Clodia, but her reputation has been sullied for all time
by the publication and survival of that forensic speech.
Contemporary with CLODIA in the 60s and 50s BC (and still leaving a footprint in the
40s too) were “the womenfolk of CICERO” (TERENTIA, PUBLILIA, and TULLIA)
and to them we should now turn.