the bona dea scandal, or: the abbreviated life and chaos of publius clodius pulcher

(marie kondo voice) i love mess

No personal crises in this newsletter, although there’s no dearth of them for me or, I suspect, for any of you. This isn’t the time or the place for me to talk about the modern political situation, but I hope this essay is able to be a reprieve for you in some way. Online communities are communities, too, and I’m so grateful for the ones I’ve been able to build over the past few years.

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the man, the myth, the legend

Entire books could be, and have been, written about Publius Clodius Pulcher. One puny newsletter could never encapsulate the sheer chaos that surrounded this man. In the absence of an entire book, this excerpt from Emma Southon’s A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum provides a pretty good TLDR:

“He was a colossus of a personality. If I had had to live during his lifetime, I would undoubtedly have despised him and the horse he rode in on but, with the benefit of two millennia’s distance between us, I am able to gaze at him with delighted awe. He was simultaneously a theatrical, nose-snubbing, aristocratic, cape-swirling, pantomime villain, the people’s hero and an absolute anecdote machine. Wherever he went, glorious stories followed.”

Here are some fun facts to round out that description:

• As a result of the generationally repetitive Roman naming system, Publius Clodius Pulcher was not the first Publius Claudius Pulcher in his family. What about the spelling difference? One generally accepted view is that Claudius was changed to Clodius as part of a political stance, to accompany his campaign as champion of the people. Claudius was aristocratic, a tie to a family that could trace its lineage back to the earliest days of the Roman Republic; Clodius was approachable, like a rich guy shedding a posh accent in order to endear himself to the masses. It’s more likely, though, that this was just a stylistic choice, wherein the o-form was considered cool and trendy among the sophisticated social circle that Clodius frequented: his most famous and most fashionable sister, Clodia Metelli, used the same variation.

• Relatedly, pulcher is a Latin noun meaning “handsome” or “beautiful.” This cognomen, also following Roman naming conventions, was inherited. But it’s deeply amusing to me that Clodius was going about his daily life with a name that essentially meant Publius Clodius, Handsome Man. Even better, evidence suggests that he was in fact a handsome man.¹

• The Romans had an interesting stance on adoption that boiled down to adoption is for the transfer of power between households or for inheritance reasons, and not at all for family-building or child-rearing. Adults were regularly adopted by other adults all the time. Clodius took this a step further and got himself adopted by a plebeian guy named Fonteius, who was at least ten years younger than him, mainly because Clodius, a patrician, wanted to run for a political office called tribune of the plebs, and legally speaking only plebeians could be tribunes of the plebs. It was very rare for an aristocrat to renounce their patrician status—and its inherent, storied glory and prestige—in favor of becoming a plebeian; but Clodius did it, and then he didn’t even have the courtesy of taking his young adoptive father’s name. He remained Publius Clodius Pulcher—which, if you think about it, meant that he didn’t really lose his Claudian glory or prestige at all.

• After being elected tribune of the plebs, he passed an explicitly anti-Cicero law that resulted in Cicero fleeing Rome and going into exile for over a year. In the meantime, Clodius demolished Cicero’s house and built a shrine to Liberty there.

• He was rumored to have had an incestuous relationship with his sister, the aforementioned Clodia Metelli. We don’t have time to unpack all of that.²

Please do let me know, either in the comments here or through socmed, if any of those things are things you would like to learn more about in a future newsletter. Clodius is my historical version of the “I love him (fictional man I would not tolerate if he were real)” tweet. He was kind of The Worst. I love thinking about him.

For now, we are going to focus on perhaps his most iconic, well-known scandal: the Bona Dea festival of 62 BCE.

Me too, Marie Kondo

the bona dea scandal

Bona Dea, literally “Good Goddess,” was a chastity and fertility goddess who originated from Magna Graecia—the parts of southern Italy originally settled by Greeks—and her worship had been integrated into Roman religious practice by the 3rd century BCE. She had two festivals each year, in May and early December respectively.

Our modern knowledge of the Bona Dea rites is somewhat patchy. This is because the rites were restricted to elite women, and the men who make up the majority of the Roman historical record never had occasion to attend. We do know that the host house was decorated with plants, a banquet was prepared, and the goddess’s cult image was brought from her temple as the guest of honor. In De Haruspicum Responso, Cicero says that any man who caught even a small glimpse of what was happening during these rites could be blinded as punishment.

Good thing no man had ever tried to do that before, eh?

The December festival in 62 BCE took place at the house of the pontifex maximus—literally, the “chief priest,” the most important magistrate in Roman religion—and the pontifex maximus that year happened to be Julius Caesar. His wife at the time, Pompeia, led the rites, accompanied by the Vestal Virgins, priestesses of the goddess Vesta. Everything was going as planned until someone started screaming, at which point it was discovered that Clodius had dressed as a woman and climbed through a window to infiltrate the ceremony.

Michel Pastoureau, drawing on Cicero’s (likely exaggerated) description of Clodius’s disguise, writes that he wore

“… a yellow gown dyed with saffron, a long-sleeved tunic, a headdress in the form of a turban, women’s sandals, crimson ribbons and frills, and even what we would now call a bra, meant to support a bosom that Clodius was apparently not lacking. To this typically feminine attire Clodius added a kithara [a version of the lyre] to pass himself off as a female musician. To sacrilege was added shame, dishonor, and disgrace; not only had Clodius forced his way into Caesar’s house, not only had he taken part in a ritual forbidden to men, but he had also cross-dressed as a woman, transformed his body, and made up his face.”³

The emphasis on yellow here is notable—in Roman society, yellow was a color exclusively worn by women. Any man wearing it would be emasculating himself and transgressing moral and social rules; he could only be, as Pastoureau writes, “a debauchee or homosexual.”⁴ Moreover, I think about this excerpt all the time because I am obsessed with the elegantly-worded assertion that Clodius must have had huge tits.

Mosaic from a Roman villa near Piazza Armerina, Sicily, depicting Roman women wearing breastbands and loincloths

Evidence differs on whether it was Clodius’s voice or his appearance that gave him away, so there’s a world out there in which he was actually pretty good at dressing in drag—but regardless of where the error was made, the damage had been done. He had been seen and he had been recognized. The fact that he had been present in the house during a women-exclusive event was bad enough; worse, he had laid his eyes upon the goddess’s sacred ritual objects. He had besmirched the honor of the Vestal Virgins, disgraced his political office, and—by extension—insulted the Roman people as a whole. The Romans, both during the Republic and during the later Empire, did not practice separation of religion and state: the two were intricately intertwined, to the extent that religious observance “was a component of decorum and morality—in short, a civic duty.”⁵ With such a flagrant disregard for religious propriety, Clodius had spat upon civic duty. The Romans were also real sticklers about religious ceremonies being carried out correctly, and a single mistake in speech or proceedings could merit the entire ritual being started over from the beginning. Such was the case with the Bona Dea festival after Clodius fled back out through the window.

A relevant question at this point is why he wanted to get into the house to begin with. Unsatisfyingly, the answer has been somewhat lost to time and, moreover, muddied by the types of often-baseless accusations that always flew in Roman courts. Rumors spread that Clodius was having an affair with Caesar’s wife, Pompeia, and he was aiming for a tryst, but there is no real evidence for this. The more likely possibility is that Clodius, with the still-recognizable ego and hubristic attitude of the young and wealthy, was just curious and planned a fun, offensive night out for kicks. The poet Juvenal, writing more than a hundred years later, speculated that any rituals closed to men, like those for Bona Dea, obviously must be really salacious and really sexy; if similar speculations were being made in Clodius’s time, it’s not difficult to imagine why he might have wanted in. The more remarkable thing is that he seems to have carried out his plan with zero forethought or consideration for social rules, religious guidelines, or political fallout.⁶

Interestingly, though, there needn’t have been any further fallout at all. It’s clear that the intrusion was morally offensive and shocking to Roman sensibilities, and the news quickly spread among the upper echelons of society—in a letter, Cicero passed along the gossip to his friend Atticus, who was away from Rome at the time, and concluded, “The affair is a signal scandal. I am sure that it distresses you”—but from a religious standpoint, the offense had been neutralized. After Clodius disappeared into the night, the ritual was restarted and then completed correctly, which meant that the pax deorum—the “peace of the gods,” or the central Roman religious tenet that a peaceful relationship with the gods was necessary for state prosperity—had been maintained. In other words, there was no clear pathway for prosecution. Caesar, whose house had been the scene of the crime, held the most power to drag Clodius into court, but he chose to do nothing, not so much as a foreshadowing of his famous clementia policy but probably in an effort to avoid public embarrassment and to avoid creating a tense relationship with the Claudian family, too. In the end it was nothing more than good, old-fashioned politics that decided the course of events: Clodius had powerful enemies in the senate, and they banded together in an effort to ruin him. The senators leading this attack apparently felt that the criminal charge had to be religious in nature in order to fit the circumstances and hold water, but legally speaking only two avenues were open: the religious crime sacrilegium covered the theft of sacred objects, and incestum covered the violation of a Vestal Virgin’s chastity. Clodius’s situation didn’t really fit either of those. It was eventually argued, in a roundabout way, that his presence at the festival fell under the umbrella of incestum because he had violated the Vestals symbolically if not physically.

Marble statue of Bona Dea. The inscription at the base reads “Ex visu iussu Bonae Deae sacr(um) Callistus Rufinae N(ostrae) Act(or)” — in translation, “Statue dedicated to Bona Dea by Callistus, agent of Rufina, because of a vision, by order (of the goddess).”

When Clodius was finally brought to court, it was a full six months after the Bona Dea festival had taken place. Roman trials were extremely public affairs, observable by anyone in the city who wanted to attend and watch the proceedings. On one hand, this made trials an incredible spectator sport, and it’s clear from extant prosecution and defense speeches that lawyers would intentionally design their orations not only to win their case but to get reactions out of the crowd.⁷ On the other hand, some politicians—such as Clodius—used this facet of trials to their advantage, cultivating what can only be described as occasionally armed gangs of supporters who would make themselves visible and try to intimidate prosecutors with their presence. He also had friends in high places, which meant that the trial was rife with corruption: first with the selection of jurors (a process that involved multiple bills, mobs, and pre-filled ballots being distributed in voting stalls) and then with the actual proceedings. Clodius himself tried to obstruct his prosecution by selling off his slaves or moving them north to Gaul, meaning that they couldn’t be called to give evidence against him. He also tried to slither out of trouble by claiming that he had been away from Rome on the day of the festival, and so there was no way it had been him in Caesar’s house: they had gotten the wrong guy. This “alibi” broke down almost immediately when Cicero testified that Clodius had definitely been in Rome that day because he had spent part of it in Cicero’s house. There were a number of other witnesses, including Caesar’s mother and sister, and the evidence seems to have been pointing towards a guilty verdict—but somehow, with the winning combination of intimidation and classic bribery,⁸ Clodius managed to get himself acquitted, declared innocent of all charges.⁹

Cicero later reported that Clodius had practically bankrupted himself paying out the bribes (“he emerged from that trial completely naked, as if from a shipwreck!”). As with many Ciceronian testimonies, we don’t know to what extent this may have been true, but regardless of the financial burden, Clodius had gotten what he wanted. Aside from the public humiliation of being put through a trial, he had escaped from the scandal relatively scot-free—he was wealthy, popular, and able to reap the benefits that wealth and popularity could buy. His political standing was certainly damaged, but it would recover in time, albeit in an unconventional way.¹⁰ The biggest casualty of the whole affair was probably his relationship with Cicero: they had been friendly, even occasional allies; but Cicero’s role in Clodius’s trial kickstarted a deep, bitter rift between them that would, in many ways, define the landscape of late Republican politics and last until Clodius’s death ten years later.¹¹ But among the sea of Clodius-induced chaos that was still to follow, the Bona Dea scandal stands out as a shining island of particularly spectacular stupidity, “a remarkable specimen of ineptitude and pointless, unprofitable rashness.”¹²

Contrary to what De Haruspicum Responso led us to believe, though, Clodius was never blinded as punishment for trespassing. Maybe that ought to count for something.

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Thank you for letting me into your inbox! Double newsletters this month, so you can expect another essay (personal crisis included) in a couple of weeks.

1. There are no surviving images of Clodius, but Cicero regularly referred to him (albeit rather disparagingly) as “pretty boy” in his letters. I think this means he was babygirl material.

2. This is probably the topic of a future newsletter. For now, it’s enough to say that our main sources for this are the poet Catullus (who was having an affair with Clodia and was jealous of the brother-sister bond) and Cicero (who was involved in an intense, publicized, mutual hatred-rivalry with Clodius). The rumor appears to have been widespread, but our sources are clearly biased and Cicero probably had a role in its origin story. He also fucking loved bringing it up: speaking of Clodia during his defense speech Pro Caelio, he said, “If I didn’t have a quarrel with that woman’s husband—brother, I meant to say, her brother! I am always making that mistake.”

3. "The Clodius Affair" in Yellow: The History of a Color, 58-63.

4. Which was, generally speaking, fine if the man took on the dominant role and if he limited his sexual activities to slaves and prostitutes—but it was meant to be an implied, closed-door type of thing, and not something to be flaunted.

5. W. Jeffrey Tatum, “The Bona Dea Scandal” in Publius Clodius Pulcher: The Patrician Tribune, 62-86.

6. Although, as Tatum points out, scathing personal judgement from his peers and fellow politicians was “a prospect Clodius seems hitherto rarely to have feared.”

7. The Latin noun corona, meaning “crown,” can also mean “a circle of people,” and was often used to refer to the group of spectators at trials. There was a practical and linguistical expectation that trials would be heavily attended events.

8. Bribery was rampant in Roman politics generally, and Clodius certainly wouldn’t have been the first Claudian to leverage it.

9. Someone who didn’t get away unscathed was Caesar’s wife, Pompeia, who had been caught up in the rumors about an affair with Clodius. Following the scandal, Caesar divorced her. This was not an admission of her guilt, he said—it was only that “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.”

10. Two years later, he went through with his adoption and patrician/plebeian switch.

11. Technically speaking, it lasted beyond Clodius’s death, because Clodius was murdered and Cicero was the murderer’s defense lawyer.

12. Tatum again. If you want a more in-depth survey of this incident, he’s your guy.