The Ancients - Clodius: Best Villain of the Roman Republic?

Episode Date: September 19, 2021

Historian and author Dr. Emma Southon returns to the Ancients to shine a light on the life - and murder - of Publius Claudius Pulcher (aka Clodius), and why this horrible, colourful figure was so significant in the demise of the Roman Republic.Emma's Twitter - https://twitter.com/NuclearTeethTristan's Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ancientstristan/

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, well, it is a great story.

We're following the case of a specific murder from ancient Rome, from late Republican Rome. The murder of a man called Clodius. To tell the story of this infamous event in late Republican Roman history, and also to tell the story of Clodius, this quite horrible figure, I was delighted to get back on the show, the one and only Dr Emma Southern. Emma is hilarious. She's been on the podcast once before to talk all about the Ides of March. This was a really fun chat. You're going to absolutely love it. So without further ado, to talk through the hilarious, gruesome, horrible, bizarre, extraordinary story of Clodius. Here's Emma.

Emma, it is wonderful to have you back on the podcast. It is wonderful to be back. It's always a joy to be here and be horrible about some very rich and well-respected people from the past. This is what we do on The Ancients is exactly it and this story i love this story when looking at the research i mean it focuses at its heart it's a two completely horrible people from ancient rome but they're arguably are they also some of them are the most colorful people from ancient rome too they are they're all anecdote machines you put anything into them and they just pull out an anecdote and every minute of particularly

clodius's life is just a lesson in how to be the most horrible person in any situation and somehow get away with it this is what we want to hear but before we delve into the story of clodius in particular just quickly a bit of background for the time that we're talking about the mid-first century bc right at the heart of republican rome Rome in Italy what's the situation what's the context for this whole time in ancient history so this particular period this kind of 10 year period ish is the period of the first triumvirate which is the unofficial agreement that Julius Caesar Pompey and Crass, who is the richest man in Rome, have made that they are going to kind of divide up power basically between themselves and that they are not going to really compete with one another for primacy but Julius Caesar will have the west and Crassus will have

Rome and also his ill-advised trip to Parthia and Pompey will be able to have the East and that they will be working with each other rather than working against each other. That agreement lasts maybe a minute and a half because that's not how Rome works like nobody really works with one another when there is potential to be the top dog but that's the general sense of what they have agreed which is that they will carve up everything between themselves and so everybody else in Rome is either a supporter of Pompey a supporter of Caesar or a supporter of Crassus and is in their sphere of influence and trying to hurt the other guy and so that is the situation but it is a very very tentative one almost all of the time Pompey or Caesar are off conquering somewhere and you know

trying to crush Mithridates or trying to crush the Spanish and so there are people in Rome doing their work for them and it is a very delicate balance of trying to stop it from collapsing into civil war again, because we have just come out of the civil wars between Sulla and Marius, which is maybe, you know, less than a generation beforehand. forehand. Everybody still remembers it. Everybody thought in it. Nobody wants it to happen again, but everybody knows that it probably is going to happen again. So it's a very delicate balance. And at the same time, everybody kind of sees that Pompey and Caesar and Crassus have managed to gain so much power that everybody is either for them or against them. They are ruling Rome and ruling the empire. And everybody has to agree with what they have said and what they see is a potential for them to be the next guy who does that they could be the next Pompey they could be the next up-and-coming Julius Caesar they could be the next Sulla the dictator and so everybody is

also working for the potential that they could be the next guy who rules everything so you have all these people and as you say it does feel as if this inter-Roman conflict once again this revival of it is almost on a knife edge and with all that in mind then the figure of Clodius who is this figure and how does he fit into this situation where does he fit into it? Clodius is simultaneously the most horrible Roman and my absolute favourite one. So he is Publius Claudius Pulcher is his official name, which is the same name as every male member of his family. And he is the youngest child of a very, very rich, very, very ancient, very patrician family. So they are like the highest of the high class. And he has very much what I consider to be youngest child syndrome, which is from the beginning of his life, he just wants all the attention on him. And the first time

that we see him appear in the sources is when his sister's husband and his brother go off to the east to try and fight Armenia. And they take Pompey with them, who's 18, and this is kind of his first military experience, like to gain a little bit of experience so that maybe one day he will lead armies of his own, which is what he's supposed to do. He goes over and causes so much trouble while he's there because he can't hack not being the most important person in a room.

He manages to stir up his brother-in-law's troops in a mutiny against him, completely undermines the entire mission, allows Mithridates to get away and does it essentially because he can. There's theories that his pride was hurt by the fact that he wasn't being given enough rewards while he was out there. And there's other theories that he was working on Pompey's

behalf and that Pompey had asked him to do this so that Pompey could then go out and damage Mithridates rather than letting Lucullus have it. Either way, it ends with Lucullus coming back to Rome and being so furious about the matter that he divorces Clodius's sister, Clodia, accuses her of banging her brother and then retires from public service completely, just goes off to be a rich guy in the countryside. And that is Pompey's first public outing, which is to cause a mutiny, drive someone very important out of politics and get accused of banging his own sister. Okay okay it's quite something for a start isn't it for the start of your career it is a hell of a first album a hell of a first album

indeed in your 20s i mean but it sounds as if like clodius at this time where you say they still remember the time of marius and sulla and this roman civil war trying to avoid it things were on a knife edge clodius this may be a symbol of things to come, but already he sounds like this complete wrecking ball. Yeah, I feel like Clodius looked at a knife edge and thought, wouldn't it be fun if we jumped off of this knife edge? And everything he does is kind of very impulsive and completely drastically radical in some way, but he is hugely popular for it. The split in the ruling class at this time is between the populares who are courting the love and the support of the kind of general masses outside of the senate so your plebeian mass and then you have the optimates which i love that

they called themselves this because it just means the best ones and that immediately puts them in a box of people I wouldn't support but the optimates are courting kind of traditional Roman class values where they want the support of their patricians and this the other senators basically and who think that the plebeians and the people of rome should have absolutely no say in how rome is run and he is a popular a to the core he is great at getting people to support him in public meetings and getting people out to eventually beat other people up and stab them in the street well not too many spoilers too soon okay we're building up clodius for that but you mentioned popular is and of course that will set him in line in confrontation with the next okay we're building up clodius for that but you mentioned popularis and of course that will set him in line in confrontation with the next figure we're going to be talking about in a second which is cicero but just before that going on a bit of a tangent because it seems quite

impetuous this figure and clodius it seems like his prestigious family his family's got a background for sometimes doing impulsive actions that result in huge catastrophic losses. And you've got to talk to us about the chickens now, Emma. What is the story of the chickens? Okay, my favourite sacred chickens. So his great, great, great grandfather, who is also called, you'll never guess, Publius Claudius. No way. I know, right? He was elected as a general of the brand new Roman navy during the first Punic Wars. It's in the 240s BCE. This is the first time that they are fighting Carthage and they've developed a navy for the first time.

And he is sent out to fight the Carthaginians at war, kind of in the Maltary region. at war kind of in the Maltary region and because it's a brand new navy they're still working out how to deal with omens and auguries when you are at war and very very important to the Romans that when you're doing anything that the auguries agree with you you know and when you're going into battle you have sacred chickens and you put some grain on the ground for the sacred chickens and you say should we go into war and if the eat properly, then you go into war because that means the gods are favouring you. And they've decided to transfer this onto boats. And unsurprisingly, chickens chucked onto a Roman boat and then taken out quite far were not keen on eating. And so Claudius is sitting on the boat and he gets the sacred chickens out and everyone very seriously looks at the chickens as they absolutely refuse to eat the grain. They have got no interest in

eating the grain right now, either because they're on a boat and that's not an ideal place for a chicken or because the gods do not think that it is a good idea. So Claudius, being very keen on going to war, however, he's got 123 brand new boats and he is keen on beating up for carthaginians grabs the chickens throws them over the board just wangs them into the sea screaming if they won't eat let them drink and then marches headfirst into a catastrophic defeat losing 93 of his 123 he then has to go home where he is prosecuted for treason basically because he had defied everybody so badly and goes down in history as a sacrilegious and impulsive terrible general quite a history for clodius to live up to you know several centuries later

it is i feel like clodius thought that this might be actually a great example. But they're certainly a family with a temper. Absolutely. Certainly a family with a temper. And let's focus on the object of this temper, which will happen with Clodius. And this is the figure of Cicero. Cicero, of course, very different to the popularis. He considers himself one of the best. But interestingly, Clodius and Cicero at the start they're like maybe not best buddies but they're on good terms they're on good terms they kind of go back and forth but at one point they are friends we know for a fact that they were going to dinner together and Clodius was a big supporter of Cicero during what he considers to be the greatest thing he ever

did which is the extrajudicial killing of Catiline in the middle of the night. And other people considered to be the extrajudicial murder of somebody without a trial. But Catiline was a kind of constant troublemaker for a while who tried to foment a rebellion within the Senate. And Cicero was consul at the time, and he had Catiline executed without a trial, which was a hugely contentious thing which he did and Clodius was one of the people who supported Cicero during this time although he had been a supporter of Catiline previously because he has absolutely no morals and doesn't stand by anyone for more than a minute and a half at the time he decided it was a good idea to stand by Cicero so he supported him and they became quite friendly for a little while and then

literally a few months later they have a catastrophic falling out of epic proportions what happens so what occurs is that clodius showing his extraordinary impulsiveness and lack of respect for anything attempted to break into a women's only sacred festival. So it's the Bonadere Festival, which is held by the Pontifex Maximus's wife and is a very secret women's only event that is very important and sacred and men stay away and everybody has to go out.

He dresses up as a woman in what I suspect was not a very convincing outfit and then breaks into the Pontifex Maximus's house. Pontifex Maximus at the time is Julius Caesar and breaking into Julius Caesar's house is not a great plan. He also is not hugely smart because he immediately gets lost inside the house and is found by a maid kind of trying to get out of a cupboard, basically, dressed in a woman's dress. And I imagine with some makeup on, maid kind of starts screaming that there is a man in the house. It's all a big panic.

And he is then taken to court for sacrilege and for attempted adultery because people believe that he was attempting to shag Caesar's wife. Caesar divorces his wife over this because he declares very famously that Caesar's wife has to be above suspicion and the rumour is swirling that she was somehow involved in this. So Clodius, because he is just brilliant, basically goes full shaggy on the situation. And his entire defense is, it wasn't me. They take him to court. He says, it wasn't me.

I don't know what you're talking about. Gosh, I can't believe that someone who looks like me broke into this house. And he claims that he was out of town. He was off in a holiday villa. So it can't possibly have been him. And it was a great surprise for him to come back to all of this fuss at which point cicero steps forward and says well you definitely weren't not like outside of row because you had dinner with me that day so stab in the back a stab in the back because cicero does take the rule of law very seriously he has a great many faults as a person, but he does wish to protect the Republic very seriously.

Clodius absolutely does not. So he is found innocent eventually, largely because he bribes the hell out of everybody. Everyone involved or anywhere near the situation is given a huge amount of money and so they find him innocent. But it causes a rift between Cicero and Clodius and Clodius will never forgive him

never absolutely never ever forgive him he's a marked man so clodius he survived this trial what does he do next what's the next big step for him his next big step is to become as popular as he possibly can and he decides that he wants to become tribune of the plebs which is a hugely powerful position because you can introduce law you can talk directly to the legislative assemblies and you can veto things that the senate decide on so you can veto the consul's actions which is very important also it means you get to be sacrosanct so no one's allowed to touch you unfortunately it is tribune of the plebs because it was position invented during the social wars the fight for their classes in order to

protect the plebeians from the patricians and clodius is very much a patrician so he decides that he is going to give up his patrician status. He is going to have himself adopted by a different family. And he is going to become a plebeian so that he can be elected Tribune of the Plebs. And everybody tries to stop this because it is a wildly radical and strange thing to do. And it would mean that he is a patrician with all of the patrician connections and all of the money and all of the ancient prestige that comes with being part of a patrician family. And taking that into the tribunation position would be dangerous. Julius Caesar, however, who is consul at the time, thinks that's fine because he's a populares as well. And he would quite like to have another populares as a tribune so he agrees and oversees the adoption and he becomes

a plebeian and then is elected eventually after a lot of fighting and battles he becomes tribune at which point he immediately turns around and introduces a couple of laws. His first law is to introduce a corn dole. So everybody now in Rome gets a certain amount of corn a day, which means that everybody will love him forever. The second one introduces that anyone who has executed a Roman citizen without trial while they are a magistrate is immediately exiled. Anyone. Yes, right. Anyone, the one person who's done that. And so Cicero is exiled anyone yes right anyone the one person who's done that and so cicero is exiled

oh my god wow you can just imagine it's like the culmination of a grand plot that he's been planning like the great baddie of an action movie or something like that it's like come to fruition now it's like he's now seeing it through and cicero is walking through the door he must have felt great at that time he must have felt brilliant because he had basically managed to skirt around all of the laws that prevent him from doing this and then invented a law and persuaded I say persuaded I mean kind of threatened and bribed because he is horrible like he's not doing this on force of sheer brilliant personality he is doing this by having a huge amount of money which he uses to pay off everybody that he can and he develops gangs basically of paid and enslaved and volunteer people who are willing to show up at any given moment and hit someone with a stick

wow yeah but it's a great moment for him to have achieved all of this and then to watch cicero walk out of and be like that'll teach you to tell the truth about me exactly it's a huge revenge plot but of course it's not over yet i've got to ask though you mentioned caesar earlier and you mentioned of course the big three at the moment do we know how the likes of Caesar Pompey and Crassus are reacting to seeing Clodius complete and then radically change almost the political layout of Rome at that time? Well Caesar thinks that it's largely quite great because at the time as soon as he becomes tribune he kind of gets in with Caesar and turns against Pompey and starts introducing things like he introduces this law which basically allows any magistrate to shut down business for the day if the auguries say that things are bad and normally you would have to get in a priest to

do that so you'd have to get in a trained professional but now anyone can shut down senate for the day which Caesar uses to his advantage several times and he also starts kind of very much agitating for the populares cause so caesar thinks this is brilliant because he sees in clodius a fellow rabble rouser a fellow populares and a person who also has no respect for tradition and how things are supposed to be done, but who will just do what needs to be done in order to push through their own agenda. Pompey, less keen. He has been on Pompey's side. He has supported Pompey. He was close enough to Pompey when he was younger that people thought that he was deliberately fomenting rebellions amongst the troops. And he has done various things in the past

to help out Pompey. But right now he's on Caesar's side so and Caesar hates Cicero. It's really interesting considering how like the big three above are kind of watching these actions play out but as you say Clodius this rabble rouser so even during his year as tribune of the Plebs, he is gathering this, shall we say, a personal militia around him to kind of coerce others into doing his bidding? Yeah, basically. He's not the only one. At this time, virtually everyone who is a magistrate or who wants to be a magistrate has their own personal bodyguard. Cicero, for example, has his own personal body bodyguard but pretends that he doesn't and we only really know about it from kind of examples that other people when other people are talking about him or every so often he'll let slip that he also has a hundred men that follow him everywhere

and a lot of other people are gathering this as well and they are basically groups of mostly equestrians people who are kind of dependents so in the client patron relationship they are their clients and so they will turn up when called upon but also enslaved members of their household who are like stop doing the washing could you just grab a stick and come with me grab a table loki exactly and also people that they pay so famously milo and clodius start getting gladiators involved so they will hire gladiators to be part of their personal retinue and they will distribute money so if you turn up at this time then you will be given you know 10 sersities by clodius and everybody knows that if you turn up and then you will get given some cash at the

end of the day and you just might have to do some shouting or get involved in a small riot. But also there are people who genuinely support them. Artisans and tradespeople are considered to be part of, particularly Clodius's fans because he does good stuff for them occasionally. And also they just really hate Cicero. Seems to be this common thread which is emerging throughout, this hatred towards Cicero. Poor man, poor man.

Imagine a millennium that laid the foundations for the modern world as we know it today, when kingdoms were forged, languages shaped, cultures created. I'm Dr Kat Jarman, and on Gone Medieval, my co-host Matt Lewis and I will tell you just why the so-called Dark Ages really weren't that dark after all. Subscribe to Gone Medieval by History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. There's this amazing bit in Dio where it goes on for a paragraph about how Cicero was a horrible person and even the people who he benefited so even the people that he got off or he would support or he would do good things for even they didn't really want to hang out with him because he was boastful and mean to people and condescending to

everybody and just an unfun party guest basically basically. So even those who technically liked him didn't really like him. And those who were against him, who didn't agree with his political or career trajectory were absolutely despised him. Yeah, the person who says I too much. If we keep going on that then, like it sounds to say,

if all of these figures are now gathering their own paramilitaries, personal paramilitaries of tens or hundreds i'm guessing this doesn't lead to everyone saying okay we're now going to throw down all our arms we're going to do a mutual disarmament it must get violent it does get violent it gets violent very regularly so over a kind of six or seven year period things get more and more violent and these gangs which start off as personal political meetings so like you might have a political meeting with an MP or whatever they start off as that like unofficial political meeting and then they get bigger and bigger and bigger until you can send out a message and say

at any time of the day and say there's a on, come on down and everybody will bring a weapon because quite often it's a meeting next to another meeting. Or there is some kind of bill being passed by the Senate that somebody doesn't want to be passed. So they'll get out 300 men with sticks and knives who will come down and scream until everybody is too afraid for their lives to pass the bill because they have to leave the senate house at some point and it kind of escalates and

until it starts bleeding into the elections and elections are things that people do in person in this period until they are kind of cancelled eventually so everybody who is eligible to vote and wants to vote has to go down line up in their 12 Roman tribes and then walk up to a man and say, I vote for X to be consul, X to be praetor. And it is very possible to intimidate the hell out of people and they start collapsing into riots very, very regularly. So one person will just say something or it's deliberately set off. And it all comes to a kind of peak in 51 or 52 in the January of that year when they're trying to elect a consul. And the two people who want to be consul are Clodius and a guy called Titus Milo, who has been known primarily for being rich and optimate and Clodius's personal enemy. for being rich and optimate and clodius's personal enemy and they have had a very personal dispute for a long time where they have a gang fight where they set each other's gangs on one another

and then one or the other of them will then take the other to court and try to prosecute them for using violence in the political arena which will be unsuccessful because so if clodius takes milo to court and says he used violence against me in the political arena and which will be unsuccessful because... So if Clodius takes Milo to court and says, he used violence against me in the political arena, then Milo will bribe everybody involved and get off, and then they do it again, and they go and have another gang fight a few months later, and then this time Milo takes Clodius to court and says he's using political violence against me,

and then Clodius bribes everybody involved. So nobody is ever prosecuted, but it's really annoying for everybody involved. And they spend a lot of time in court or in the Senate or just in the forum shouting abuse at each other. And it comes down to this election where one of them is going to be consul and they have to call off the election two or three times

because they are descending into all out brawls where people are dying left, right and centre. And there is just a wild amount of violence that is stopping the political process from happening again. And we're well into January without a council because they are too violent to allow an election to go forward. And Milo and Claudius, are they kind of, let's say, like, you know, hanging back, you know, ordering their minions minions forward causing all of this bloodshed all of this death and

destruction like among their followers but they're just kind of watching on and they're kind of orchestrating all of this chaos pretty much yeah they are oh what a shame my followers have all spontaneously appeared and started hitting each other and they sit back and the generals you know at the back of the crowd or standing above it because they would be watching the election take place but they're being fed back information so what will be like the election will be happening and then somebody will run up and say oh Milo has a thousand more votes than Clodius and so Clodius would be like all right somebody kick off because we need to stop this so they are very much orchestrating everything from a safe space I know you're a big fan of HBO Rome and obviously one of the most famous scenes is that street brawl that you have there

is that a good visual perception of what we could imagine might have happened between these two factions at that time yeah pretty much you know it's a lot of guys hitting each other a lot and just screaming abuse and cicero who pretends that he's not involved in this virtually everything we know about cicero comes from his own self-presentation because so much of it comes from his speeches and his presentation of himself is as a guy who is above the rabble who is above everybody else's sordid politics and who is not involved in these things he presents it as being slaves which he uses in the most derogatory way like he presents it as being slaves and foreigners and the poorest of people who have therefore no morality whatsoever

and people that clodius has paid to be there who are therefore venal and uninterested in the politics of the situation but are only interested in the cash. But when you look at what in letters and other speeches and things who is actually there, it is largely equestrians and tradespeople and people who are not of the kind of low class that Cicero would like you to believe they are. That is a slur on Clodius that he only attracts kind of low class people. Whereas he, Cicero, attracts only the best class of people. There's that boasting again.

Yeah. So I suspected it's probably a bit less kind of brawly than is often presented, because these are people who will have some kind of military training of some kind because it's part of boys education and they are not people who are just punching randomly but at the same time it is the streets and the public spaces of Rome in which this is largely happening so and much to Clodius's anger disappointment disappointment at this time as well, 5251 BC, Cicero, he's back. He is back in Rome. He is. And a large part of that is because of Milo. Milo is a big supporter of Cicero and in his position has managed to get Cicero recalled.

And so Cicero is back and also furious at Clodius. And so Cicero is back and also furious at Clodius. And Cicero becomes kind of a proxy for the Milo-Cladius animosity. And you can attack Cicero in order to attack one another or support Cicero in order to support the other. And he's kind of stuck in the middle. All right. We've been bigging up to it. all right we've been bigging up to it but the 18th of january 52 b c e the events of this day this is the big climax talk us through it it is the big climax so it is the middle of day plodius has been off out of town addressing a town council outside of rome which i just think

is delightful, as a part of something that you just don't really talk about, like their trips to provincial towns in order to talk to Curians out there. And he is coming back to Rome down the Via Appia with his little gang. Numbers are a bit dodgy always in Roman history, but we have this one source, which is from a guy called Asconius,

who wrote commentaries on Cicero's speeches for his sons, which is both very sweet and a tedious gift. But he claims that he only has 26 men with him and that they are all enslaved men. On the way out of Rome is Milo and his wife and a collection of their supporters. And they are on their way to celebrate a festival by the sea. a collection of their supporters and they are on their way to celebrate a festival by the sea. In a nice note that I think kind of belies everything about Asconius's allegiances, he describes Clodius as riding on a horse with his men while Milo is being carried in a litter with his wife and a friend. So being very heavy. But he claims he has 300 men with him but at the very least he has some men and he has two gladiators who are in his employ and the two cross paths on the road outside of a place

called Beauvillais and naturally there is some flinging of words between the two gangs and there is some scuffles towards the back of the two kind of retinues and the story goes that Clodius looked back with a scornful look on his face and he gave a dirty look to one of the gladiators called Birra and Birra lost his temper and stabbed him in the arm and now we have someone who's running for consul, someone who was tribune, technically patrician, man who has been stabbed by a gladiator. The second that he is stabbed, the entire thing collapses into a proper battle. Everybody is now leaping to the defence of Clodius and then leaping back to the defence of their people. And it collapses into a full all-out war on the Via Appia. There's a great story that some other guys

kind of are passing by while this happens and are watching this occur. And so Milo just kidnaps them so that they can't tell anybody what has been happening. And he takes them and keeps them in one of his villas for like three months. And eventually they get but clodius is taken to a local wine shop where he is bleeding and everybody is kind of panicking about what to do meanwhile milo has found out what has happened and is wondering about

what to do and then what actually happens becomes a source of dispute depending on who you are friends with or who you wish to be guilty. Either Clodius is accidentally stabbed or in Cicero's version of events, he very deliberately and rudely throws himself on Milo's sword as a way of incriminating Milo and basically kills himself. and basically kills himself or Milo orders him to be killed because he reckons that he will be more likely to get off a charge of murder than he will a charge of assault because if Plagueis is still around to talk about him in court then there's not a chance that he's going to get away with it but if he's dead then he could possibly be the most important person in the room and he might be able to get away with it. Either way, Milo is stabbed many more times and then most of his retinue are also killed

and they are left on the side of the road and Milo continues on his way. Milo continues on his way. Clodius is left dead. Milo's also got these passes by. Whatever's happened to them taking prisoner? But Clodius's body, it doesn't stay there for long does it it doesn't another senator coming by sees it and is more friendly with clodius and he collects the body and takes it back to his house where his wife fulvia because he's also married to a lot of great women. Fulvia goes on to marry Mark Antony. He takes the body back

where Fulvia immediately gathers all of his supporters in order to point at the body and say, look what has happened to your great tribune, the person who gave you the corn dough, your supporter, the person who stood up for the general, the kind of regular person in Rome. And the crowd of supporters that have arrived take his body take it naked so that you can see all of the stab wounds and place it inside the

curia in the senate house and then build him a funeral pyre out of the benches and the tables in the curia and set fire to it and thus give him a funeral and burn down the curia which was built by the third king of Rome and has stood for 500 odd years they burn it down and hold a funeral party outside of the burning building that's astonishing in its own right. This figure, who just seems to be this horrible, terrible, very corrupt figure, is still immensely popular even following his death to such an extent that this 500 year old building that predates the birth of the Roman Republic is burned down almost as his funeral games. as his funeral games it is as symbolism goes for the end of the republic it's quite something but yeah so much of what we know about him comes from what cicero writes about him because cicero wrote a speech against his sister clodia with whom he was considered to be far too close and it was very widely believed that he was sleeping with clodia and so he writes a speech against clodia and he also writes this speech defending Milo later.

Not the one he gives in court, incidentally, but he writes a really good one that he sends out later in which he portrays Clodius as being venal, corrupt, low class, moral free and makes it, because he is looking at it from the Optimate perspective, that Clodius is against everything he stands for. But from the popular perspective, he is somebody who instituted the corndoll, which means, from a very basic level, that nobody will ever have to go hungry in Rome again.

If you live in Rome and you are poor, you will never have to go a day without a meal because you will always have some bread. And, you know, that is transformational to people's lives universal basic bread distribution and he has also been instrumental in distributing huge amounts of money to communities and tribes in Rome and another of his acts when he was tribune which is kind of never really mentioned because it doesn't affect the optimates very much, is that he brings back collegia who had been banned. So professional unions,

professional groups, he re-allows them to occur. And that is a way for tradespeople, artisans, people who have a profession to have community again. And so for those reasons alone he has made really dramatic changes to the general person in Rome's life that are very tangible and mean that people you know no matter what he does he gave us the corn dog no matter what he does we could go to the collegia again no matter what he does he did give me a grand once so the fact that Cicero thinks that he is venal and gross doesn't mean that your average shopkeeper thinks that he is venal and gross. He was venal and gross and he had no morals. But as an impact that he had on life for your average person, he was pretty successful.

And as a result, what they see is a guy who did good things for them being stabbed to death on the street. As Cicero is going to find out in the trial that follows. Yes. So Milo is taken to court for killing a man in the street. This incident is really, really important in the kind of falling of the Republic because the response afterwards is that the Senate institute a state of emergency, make Pompey the sole consul without an election, and basically make him kind of pseudo single leader of Rome. He is solely in charge of the armies, he is solely in charge of the Senate, he is de facto dictator. And so he is the first person to rule Rome outside of the legal office of dictator by himself, basically.

And Pompey has a great interest in this case, as he obviously does. And he would quite like Milo to be found guilty. And so he oversees the court case. All of Clodius's supporters who have just burnt down the Curia and are very threatening, show up. His friends, his family, they're all there in court shouting a lot. Like this isn't a place where a judge could bang a gavel and everybody is quiet. They are surrounding the courts. Pompey has to surround the courts with the army.

So there are soldiers around watching everybody. And it's kind of clear what Pompey wants and what Pompey wants Pompey is going to get. So Cicero is the one person who speaks for the defence. We don't know how many people speak for the prosecution, but it's more than one. Cicero gets up and struggles. He gives a kind of wobbly speech in a half-broken voice because he's terrified for his life. He then later writes out a very good speech and sends it to Milo. Milo is found guilty but escapes execution, as is said,

exiled to Myrcella, which is Marseille, and he sends it to Milo and Milo says, well, thank you very much. It would have been good if you'd given that in court. It's a very good speech. Is there a reason that you didn't do this at the time but the speech he writes later basically says that yes Milo did kill him but he was a bad man and therefore Milo was basically acting in self-defense of the republic he was protecting the republic and killing an attempted tyrant essentially and that

also clodius brought it on himself by existing in the world essentially he says that he ambushed milo which nobody else seems to agree on but he basically says that clodius was a danger to the republic and he was therefore a danger to milo and therefore it was okay that milo killed him because he was acting in defense of himself and he compares clodius to a thief in the night and says you could stab a thief in the night can't you and there's nobody says anything you can stab a thief anytime so therefore he should be allowed to stab clodius whenever he wants okay interesting one sister there i mean is this the end of the story for milo then he goes off to marseille and do we know anything more about him does he go you know lives happily ever after he enjoys the

mackerel there apparently he writes some letters but he largely lives a relatively quiet life in Marseille he's retired from politics and writing sarcastic letters to Cicero fair enough I mean definitely not the worst punishment of ancient Rome at that time, particularly for one person who's been convicted of murdering a former tribune of the plebs. I mean, Emma, as we wrap up, obviously this period in ancient history is sometimes dominated by the likes of Caesar, Pompey, Crassus. Pompey, Crassus. The story of Clodius and Milo, is it fair to say it's sometimes overshadowed by these figures, but it's still, as you've hinted at, as you've said during this podcast, incredibly important, significant in this end stage of the Republic? Yeah, it really is. You know, they keep trying to say that the Republic is continuing and that politics is as usual but it has fully collapsed into outright anarchy basically there is no politics able to happen largely because of the actions of

milo and clodius and their supporters because they really drive violence and popular violence as a method of political action, basically, as a fairly legitimate method of political action. They are constantly prosecuting one another, but nobody else really seems to be interested in prosecuting them. They're just tucked in the background. But it has completely destroyed the way that politics is happening and it has done that largely by involving people who were not really involved in politics which is the mass of people in Rome so for a very long time the republic was run by senators and some equestrians and good men like by any kind of high members of the plebeian society who would turn up and vote and most people were not engaged in politics particularly but what clodius and milo and the people like them do is kind of encourage largely with cash other people to get involved in politics

by being members of their supporter gangs and it really pulls the focus away from the optimates and really changes the face of what politics looks like. And this is what Caesar is doing as well by appealing to his army as a personal person and then appealing to the people of Rome by putting on games. This is another thing that Clodius does loads. He puts on games and then gives out prizes at those games and makes everybody think that he's a very generous lovely man and it pulls in a lot more people into politics than were previously engaged and that's what the optimates really hate and this is why eventually through Augustus you know they win because Augustus is able to balance that popular support with pretending that the optimates still have some

kind of power. But it is a real shift in how the Republic is working, and therefore really important in what happens next. Well, there you go. Who'd have thought it? Clodius the man, he's shaken off this sacred chicken's dismal legacy to be this important figure in the future direction of Rome of what was the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire in this late first century BC the story of Clodius and Milo. Emma this has been such a fun chat I'm delighted we could get you on the podcast and talk about your favourite Roman of all times last thing there your book on this subject is called? It's called A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It's just out in paperback last week,

so you can get it in all reputable bookshops. Absolutely. And Clodius, he's just one story of many, many stories, isn't he? He is. It is a story of all kinds of murders in Rome, from killing your politicians to killing your emperors

to killing members of your family. Bloody good read. Emma, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are.

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