Abstract

It is appropriate that this speech should be full of quotations from Roman drama. These offered the jurymen some compensation for their enforced absence from the theatrical performances of the Ludi Megalenses; on the very day when Cicero demolished Clodia's reputation in court, her brother Clodius, as curule aedile, was nearby presiding at the opening of the Ludi. Brother and sister both had a strong interest in the stage; in Pro Sestio 116 Clodius is described as ‘ipse ille maxime ludius, non solum spectator sed actor et acroama, qui omnia sororis embolia novit’. In Pro Caelio 18 Cicero takes up Crassus' quotation of Ennius' Medea, ‘utinam ne in nemore Pelio …’ ends by calling Clodia ‘the Medea of the Palatine’. Clodius is made to address his sister in a trochaic septenarius, ‘quid clamorem exorsa verbis parvam rem magnam facis?’. A harsh parent is represented by a quotation from Caecilius, a gentle one by Micio from Terence's Adelphoe. Clodia herself is called ‘veteris et plurimarum fabularum poetriae’—this phrase should not be taken to mean that she had actually written plays—and in 65 the whole affair at the baths is likened to a mime with no satisfactory conclusion.