“HER HUSBAND—I MEAN HER BROTHER.”

HER HUSBAND—I MEAN HER BROTHER.” A fiction writer would have difficulty in inventing or making plausible Clodia Pulcher, the sister of Clodius Pulcher. She has been described as “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.” She is generally thought to be the Lesbia who appears in great love poems of Catullus. Clodius Pulcher became a great enemy of Cicero after his trial for violating the rites of the Good Goddess. One of the issues at that trial was the claim by Lucullus that when Clodia was his wife, she had committed incest with her brother, Clodius Pulcher. All this is background for one of the great moments in Roman legal history. Cicero was defending a young man named Caelius, and it was Clodia who was the moving force behind the charges. People in the audience would have known that Cicero would have to take Clodia on, but there would have been suspense as to how he would do it. Clodia was from one of the greatest patrician families, which boasted of generations of consuls. Here is some of the speech. The key is in section 13. Cicero says that he is proceeding with circumspection in talking about Clodia, but in the middle of this circumspection, he refers to “the animosity between me and this woman’s husband-excuse me, brother, I always make that mistake.” It is then that Cicero launches a full-scale assassination of Clodia’s character.