Cicero (21 page)

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. A
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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

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.

A
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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.

This sounds exaggerated, but Cicero should have known what he was talking about, for he was brought in as mediator and persuaded Curio's father to pay off his son's debts. Antony was barred from the house and for a while latched himself on to Clodius. Their relationship did not last, perhaps because Antony had an affair with Clodius's wife, Fulvia, whom he was later to marry. Also he grew uneasy with Clodius's extremist politics and the opposition they were arousing. Deciding it was time for a fresh start, he went to Greece for military training and to study public speaking.

In fact, although Cicero deeply disapproved of such goings-on, he knew many of the younger generation quite well. For a time he was friendly with Clodius, who had been a member of his consular bodyguard, until Terentia began to worry that he was attracted to Clodia. (It is hard to imagine a more implausible romance.) He became very fond of the brilliant but volatile Caelius, whom he first met in 66, when he took him on as an informal pupil to study public speaking. Caelius became a sharp-eyed observer of the Roman scene, delighted in gossip and had an excellent sense of humor; ten years on he kept Cicero, who would forgive a lot for a good joke, up-to-date on the latest events in the city when the reluctant elder statesman was in Asia Minor on a foreign posting.

Catullus knew Cicero too and respected him enough to write him a charming poem:

It seems odd that Cicero was on such good terms with people whose behavior he found morally objectionable. The fact is that he liked young men and, as he grew older, took much pleasure in bringing them on, developing their talents and promoting their careers. He enjoyed the liveliness of their company. Caelius was the first in a succession of youthful
friends—the last and trickiest of whom was to be Caesar's adopted son, the young Octavian, later the Emperor Augustus.

None of this is to suggest that Cicero was homosexual. He explicitly disapproved of same-sex relationships. In an age when politicians hurled every conceivable accusation of sexual malpractice against their opponents, this charge was very seldom laid at his door. Apart from the probably abusive suggestion that he lost his virginity to an older classmate in his youth, the only direct piece of evidence on the matter is a flirtatiously erotic ode he penned to a young slave of his, Tiro. But this is best seen as a playful imitation of Greek love poetry.

The Senate was uncertain how to handle the Good Goddess scandal. A trial would only cause trouble and might ignite the
populares
, but it seemed that there was no alternative. A bill to set up a special tribunal was agreed on by the Senate and the proposal was then considered by the People. Cicero was there and described the scene: “When the day came for the bill to be put to the assembly under the terms of the Senatorial decree, there was a flocking together of our goateed young bloods, the whole Catilinarian gang with little Miss Curio at their head, to plead for its rejection. Clodius's roughs had taken possession of the gangways.”
It seems to have been impossible to take a vote and the matter went back to the Senate. Eventually, in July 61, a court was established, but on terms favorable to Clodius. Crassus, Catilina's shadowy financier, happy as ever to make trouble for the Senate, came forward with funds to bribe the jurors.

Clodius pleaded that he could not have been the intruder, for he had been out of Rome at the Etruscan town of Interamna (where he wielded considerable political influence and, according to Cicero, employed gangs to harass the countryside). Terentia, still irritated by the visits she believed her husband to be paying Clodia, goaded Cicero to take the witness stand and break Clodius's alibi by reporting that he had seen him in Rome on the day in question. The trial started well, the jury asked for a guard (which suggested honesty), and it looked as if it was an open-and-shut case. But then Crassus's cash began to do its work.

Cicero reported to Atticus:

Clodius was acquitted, but he was a vindictive man and made up his mind to punish Cicero for having testified against him.
For a while, though, nothing happened and Cicero could not help amusing himself at his expense. He liked to call him Pretty-Boy (making a play on his
cognomen
Pulcher, the Latin word for “beautiful”). There were a number of barbed exchanges at Senate meetings and elsewhere over the next year or so.

“You bought a mansion,” Clodius sneered.

“One might think he was saying I had bought a jury,” Cicero riposted.

On another occasion, the two men happened to be taking a candidate for political office down to the Forum together and entered into conversation. Clodius asked if Cicero was in the habit of giving Sicilians who were in his
clientela
seats at gladiatorial shows. Cicero said he was not.

“Ah,” replied Clodius. “But I'm a new patron of theirs and I'm going to institute the practice. But my sister, with all that free space at her disposal as an ex-Consul's wife, only gives me one wretched foot.”

Unable to resist referring to the gossip about their relationship, Cicero remarked: “Oh, don't grumble about
one
foot in your sister's case. You can always hoist the other.”

This kind of jibe was not overlooked. A
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often in his career, Cicero let his sense of humor do serious damage to his prospects.

Sometime towards the end of 62 or perhaps in early 61, Pompey returned to Italy after nearly six years of campaigning. He had swept the seas clear of pirates, the war against Mithridates, King of Pontus, had been won, and Syria from the Euphrates to the frontiers of Egypt had been annexed to the Empire. Trade with Asia Minor could now resume and money flooded back into Rome.

Pompey was an able rather than a great general, but he was an administrator
of the first order. The campaign against Mithridates had been long and hard fought, for the king was a wily foe. Hostilities opened after he invaded Bithynia, a new Roman province, thirteen years previously. When Pompey arrived to take over command of the Roman forces in the east from his able predecessor, Lucullus, he found that final victory was close at hand. The groundwork had been done for him and he had only to stamp out the final flames of resistance. Pompey persuaded the King of Parthia to invade Armenia, which was ruled by an ally of Mithridates, while he himself marched into the enemy's homeland, Pontus. With overwhelming superiority of numbers, the Romans won a crushing victory.

The indomitable old king tried to keep going, seized the territories of a treacherous son, raised fresh troops and meditated an invasion of Italy. But his much put-upon subjects had had enough and revolts ensued. The great game was finally over. Holed up inside a remote citadel, Mithridates tried to poison himself, without success thanks to the physical immunity he had laboriously built up, and was forced to get a slave to stab him.

After some mopping-up operations, Pompey marched south to deal with a civil war in Palestine and visited the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. He dreamed of advancing Roman arms to the Red Sea, but when the news of Mithridates' death reached him he moved from military to organizational matters. His task was to reorder the eastern empire in such a way that its long-term security was assured. His settlement of the eastern provinces was so well judged that it was to remain in place mostly unchanged until the next century. A chain of directly governed Roman provinces was established along the Mediterranean seaboard, stretching from Pontus in the Black Sea to Syria in the south. Their eastern frontiers were protected by a series of quasi-independent kingdoms which were allowed to manage their internal affairs without interference but whose foreign policy was in Roman hands.