A WOMAN SCORNED?

Pro Caelio

Cicero

Translated by William Guthrie, 1741

A theatrical episode from a real defence speech delivered by the great orator, lawyer and statesman Cicero (106–43 BC) in Rome in April 56 BC. A young man named Caelius Rufus has been implicated in the assassination of an Alexandrian. First, it is alleged, Caelius borrowed gold from a woman named Clodia and used it to pay slaves to carry out the murder. Then he supposedly attempted, unsuccessfully, to silence Clodia with poison. Cicero happened to be a mentor to the defendant and an enemy of Clodia’s brother. His defence speech provided him with an opportunity to denigrate Clodia and her family. A member of the aristocracy, whose ancestors had ruled Rome for centuries, Clodia was married to a senator named Metellus Celer until he died unexpectedly in 59 BC. Cicero capitalises on the rumours surrounding her private life. Not only did she commit incest with her brother, he suggests, but she murdered her husband, just as Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon (see Story 14). Cicero’s trick is to present Clodia as little more than a common prostitute (a ‘quadrans’ was the price of entry to the cheap baths). Like Medea, who took vengeance upon her lover Jason when he spurned her (see Story 43), Cicero suggests, Clodia has been spurned by Caelius and is seeking revenge in court. Cicero even goes so far as to adopt the persona of Clodia’s illustrious ancestor Appius Claudius Caecus.

There are two charges (one relating to gold, the other to poison) urged against the same person. It is said that gold was borrowed of Clodia, and a poison prepared to despatch her. Every thing else urged is not criminal, but scandalous, and more properly the subject of a scolding, than a public trial. To call adulterer, whoremaster, pimp, is to rail, not to accuse. For such charges there is not so much as a foundation where you can fix them; they are opprobrious terms, rashly poured out, without any grounds, by a passionate accuser.

I have the source, I have the author, I have the precise principle and rise of all these calumnies in my eye. There was a necessity for gold; he borrowed it of Clodia; he borrowed it without any evidence, and he had it as long as he pleased. Here I can perceive a strong presumption of a certain prodigious intimacy. He had a mind to kill the same lady; he looked out for poison; he applied to all he could; he prepared it; he fixed on the place; he brought it. Here again I can discern the most inveterate hatred, with a most cruel quarrel broken out. In this whole affair, my lords, we have to do with Clodia, a woman not only noble, but notorious; of whom I shall say nothing, but so far as I am obliged for the vindication of my client.