The Patrician Tribune by W. Jeffrey Tatum

Author:W. Jeffrey Tatum [Tatum, W. Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical
ISBN: 9781469620657
Google: z1huAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2014-02-25T02:41:29+00:00

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He responded with what Cicero describes as unbridled fury. On 3 November armed men disrupted the rebuilding of Cicero’s domus as well as the porticus Catuli. They then set themselves to attacking the house of Cicero’s brother. On the eleventh, Clodius and his gangs actually ambushed the orator on the Via Sacra. Cicero retreated into the house of Tettius Damio, and his companions held off the Clodian onslaught. The next day, Clodius launched a daylight raid against Milo’s house in the Cermalus. He met with fierce resistance, however, in the shape of Q. Flaccus (an adherent of Milo), whose forces killed many of the Clodiani (so Cicero) and hotly desired to kill Clodius himself. He, alleges Cicero, had fled the scene to hide in the basements of P. Sulla.109

The violence with which Clodius prosecuted his grudge against Cicero and Milo offended many. Two of his better-connected associates, Decimus and Gellius, became estranged.110 Yet Clodius, however unwilling to pursue a subtler tack against his enemies, continued to rely on popularis propaganda to justify his actions. Cicero describes the ex-tribune in the following hostile terms: “he campaigns in every district, he openly holds out the expectation of freedom to the slaves” (Att. 4.3.2). Now Cicero’s proclivity for describing the plebs in servile terms whenever it failed to toe the proper line has been remarked upon. Clodius, of course, had no intention of freeing the city’s slaves—at this time or at any other in his career. Rather, the former tribune was mustering the support of the collegia with appeals to the popular ideology of libertas—the protection of which could be represented (as we have seen) as requiring assaults on Cicero’s house or even on his person, not that such actions were necessarily unwelcome to those whom Cicero regularly described as scum.

Such posturing aside, escalating the level of violence had not helped Clodius to intimidate Milo or Sestius—or anyone else for that matter—and his impotence made his actions appear unduly obstinate and so offensive rather than menacing. None of which should lead us to overlook the magnitude of effort that had been required in order to defeat Clodius in the matter of Cicero’s homecoming and restoration. Yet Pompey could hardly sustain his coalition indefinitely. Clodius’s popularitas remained intact and although many leaders in the senate had turned their back on him at this most recent juncture, his connections were hardly severed. What Clodius required was a political stratagem that, from the senate’s perspective, transcended personal animosity. For in the fall of 57 it was clear that, whatever the faults or crimes of his enemies, the senate was for the moment inclined to blame Clodius for his excessive reliance on the violence of the mob. It was incumbent upon Clodius to revive his support, a far from hopeless assignment. The urban plebs, after all, was not Clodius’s sole support even in this time of relative isolation.111 While many younger men of the elite classes recoiled from Clodian violence, the past patrician found a friend in the wealthy P.

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