The Patrician Tribune

Publius Clodius Pulcher

W. Jeffrey Tatum

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780807872062, 9780807824801
• eBook ISBN: 9781469620657
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Publius Clodius Pulcher was a prominent political figure during the last years of the Roman Republic. Born into an illustrious patrician family, his early career was sullied by military failures and especially by the scandal that resulted from his allegedly disguising himself as a woman in order to sneak into a forbidden religious ceremony in the hope of seducing Caesar’s wife. Clodius survived this disgrace, however, and emerged as a major political force. He renounced his patrician status and was elected tribune of the people. As tribune, he pursued an ambitious legislative agenda, winning the loyalties of the common people of Rome to such a degree that he was soon able to summon forceful, even violent, demonstrations on his own behalf.

The first modern, comprehensive biography of Clodius, The Patrician Tribune traces his career from its earliest stages until its end in 52 B.C., when he was murdered by a political rival. Jeffrey Tatum explores Clodius’s political successes, as well as the limitations of his popular strategies, within the broader context of Roman political practices. In the process, Tatum illuminates the relationship between the political contests of Rome’s elite and the daily struggles of Rome’s urban poor.

Chapter One
Politics and Popularity in the Late Roman Republic

1

Sallust insists that the res publica was ultimately torn apart when the dignity of the nobility and the liberty of the people were corrupted into rapacity and predaciousness.¹ Rabble-rousing tribunes inveighed against the senate, whose members found specious pretexts for defending their own privileged position. During the late republic, Sallust laments, “all those who disturbed the commonwealth put forward worthy motives, some claiming to protect the rights of the people, others that they were strengthening the senate’s authority. But it was all pretense. Every man was fighting for his own power” (Cat. 38). Libertas populi and senatus auctoritas were traditional principles of political authority whose inevitable tension reverberated through the history of the republic. For a time, when Hannibal’s menace taught the senate and people of Rome the value of harmony and so long as the Romans’ conquests could sustain the lesson, the unnatural chord of popular liberty and senatorial authority remained unbroken.² But the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus, in the opinion of Cicero’s Laelius, split a single people into two parts (Rep. 1.31), thereby initiating the much discussed conflict between populares and optimates.³

Our own treatment of this conflict must begin with the apparently straightforward question: who were the populares—or, perhaps better, what was a popularis, the singular form being the commoner?⁴ The locus classicus for this inquiry is Cicero’s Pro Sestio, in which speech the orator responds to the prosecution’s emphatic designation of Sestius’s associates—who, of course, included Cicero—as natio optimatium (“a race of superior men,” Sest. 96): “There have always been two categories of men in this city who have endeavored to participate in public affairs and in doing so to distinguish themselves. Of these two categories, one desired to be deemed—and actually to be—populares; the other, optimates. Those who wished their words and deeds to be agreeable to the masses were considered populares; however, those who conducted themselves so that their policies might win the approval of the best citizens were considered optimates.” Cicero’s transparently biased formulation reveals the basic opposition: populares appeal to the masses, optimates to the “best men,” a division of the citizenry that, by a bold twist, Cicero makes out to be wider in its embrace than even the multitudo: “Who, you may ask, is ‘the best citizen’? They are uncountable in number (for otherwise the state could not exist). They are the principal men of the senate, and those who follow their lead; they are the men of the grandest orders, to whom a senatorial career is open; they are Romans living in municipalities and in the countryside; they are businessmen. Even freedmen are among the optimates. The numbers of the optimates are spread far and wide—and at various levels of society. To avoid misunderstanding, the whole category can be characterized and defined in brief: all are optimates who are neither criminal nor evil by nature, nor mad nor weighed down by private debt.” The optimates, Cicero then concludes, are the healthy, the wealthy, and the wise (et integri et sani et bene de rebus domesticis).

Cicero’s comments are obviously partisan; the Pro Sestio is not an analytical treatise. Nonetheless, it demonstrates the difficulty of recovering the true nature of popularis politics: Cicero, our principal informant, nearly always casts the popularis in the role of demagogue, while the optimate opponent stands for all that is best for the res publica.⁵ Yet, because he hoped to be convincing, certain general truths had to be respected. As Cicero must concede, the popularis was not a recent phenomenon. However late it was before the term actually entered political discourse, such politicians had in a sense always been in Rome, which means that they hardly represented a radical departure from mos maiorum.⁶ What, then, rendered the popularis objectionable? The good man and the bad alike, Sallust declaims, seek glory, office, and power; what distinguishes them are their approaches: one is honest, the other, lacking in bonae artes, must rely on duplicity (Cat. 11.2). Cicero’s censure of the popularis is not dissimilar: Cicero detests his attachment to the mob—and his opposition to the senatorial elite. Such behavior the worldly consular could explain only as deriving from a flaw in character.⁷

The optimates, according to Cicero, sought otium cum dignitate, honorable and dignified peace, a blessed state that relied upon venerable foundations: “religious scruple, the auspices, the powers of the magistrates, the authority of the senate, the law, tradition, the courts, the rule of law, good faith and credit, the provinces, the allies, the glory of the empire, the army, the treasury” (religiones, auspicia, potestates magistratuum, senatus auctoritas, leges, mos maiorum, iudicia, iuris dictio, fides, provinciae, socii, imperi laus, res militaris, aerarium, Sest. 98). Now of course no Roman could object to Cicero’s reverence for religion, tradition, or fides; these laudable elements are present in Cicero’s catalog primarily in order to create the appropriate climate for Cicero’s exaltation of senatus auctoritas and aerarium, terms whose significance is more sharply felt once one perceives the absence from the list of libertas or populi iura.⁸ P. A. Brunt has rightly emphasized that whatever decency is implied or indicated by Cicero’s description of the optimates, it is solvency that makes for the genuine good man. The popularis, however, in his appeal to the masses linked himself to the very stratum that posed the most serious threat to men of means. The urban poor were “wretched, half-starved, ready to drain the treasury dry” (Phil. 13.16); the rural poor “have never appreciated this state nor wished to see it stable” (Cat. 4.19). In short, Cicero would have agreed wholeheartedly with Sallust’s assertion that “men without means of their own are always envious of the good and raise up the bad. In their hatred of their own circumstances they are eager to turn everything upside down” (Cat. 37). For Cicero, the popularis was inevitably a threat to the senate’s authority and to the state’s stability.⁹

Because the various techniques of the popularis politician and the issues he typically espoused have been collected and studied in detail, a fuller picture than the one offered by Cicero can be provided.¹⁰ With one notable exception, it is senators who are designated populares, most of them tribunes of the plebs.¹¹ The basis for the designation, in Meier’s oft-repeated view, is a certain political style—one that enacts an opposition between people and senate and seeks to employ the legislative authority of the people rather than the prestige of the senate to meet its ends.¹² But what ends? The Gracchi sought agrarian reforms, at least initially, as well as certain material benefits for the urban plebs, such as grain subsidies. Legislation that curbed the arbitrary power of the senate and magistrates earned the popularis label, as did any bill that explicitly promoted popular sovereignty. Finally, and most intriguingly, there was a fair amount of popularis legislation that, while demanded in the people’s name, was clearly a matter of importance only to a very limited and privileged portion of the populus; this was especially the case with legislation that promoted the interests of the equestrian order at the expense of the senate, the most obvious example being the various attempts at jury reform.¹³ Consequently, the historian must take great care to shun the natural temptation to treat the populares exclusively or even primarily as champions of the poor and oppressed.

What emerges is an image of optimates, itself a collective that resists neat definition,¹⁴ defending the status quo against the attacks of reformists, each side persuaded of its own correctness. That there was a need for reform, especially social reform, in the late republic is undeniable. The decay of the peasantry that sparked the Gracchan reforms is a familiar if vexing problem.¹⁵ Equally well recognized are the misery and squalor that plagued the lives of the urban poor, who lived cramped, uncomfortable, and undernourished—ravaged by diseases born of Rome’s grossly unhygienic conditions—in appalling tenement houses owned by insensitive landlords.¹⁶ Nor can one ignore the discontents of the equites in Rome or of the Italian aristocracy, who after the Social War constituted a small but powerful portion of the populus Romanus.¹⁷ The armies, and to be sure their generals, represented a threat to the republic of a completely different order.¹⁸ And finally, and perhaps most importantly, Rome required reform at the institutional level; that most successful of citystates, so we are told, stood in need of reconceptualizing its political order, its constitution, in response to its international empire.¹⁹ No popularis, however, ever sought to reform the political system in any genuinely radical sense.²⁰ Each reform proposal, insofar as it embodied an honest attempt to resolve a crisis, sought in its own way to maintain the integrity of the pristine res publica, which was nostalgically remembered with fondness, however faint or distorted the actual recollection. In other words, there was a conservative dimension to the innovations of the populares that renders epithets like “progressive” not merely anachronistic but inaccurate.²¹ Similarly with Fürsorgegesetze: although many popularis proposals addressed the needs of the lower orders, it would be inaccurate to characterize the body of known popularis legislation as primarily oriented toward either welfare measures or social reform in general. And one hastens to point out that, whencesoever the original impulse for most social reforms, proposals were often successfully passed into law only through the influence of politicians who are not easily classified as populares.²²

This is why it is misleading to attempt to define the populares as reformists devoted to particular ends. At least two further impediments arise. For one, the political concerns of populares varied over time. Crude divisions can be—and have been—made: the Gracchan reforms seem aimed at preventing the erosion of the peasantry and at the preservation of the traditional citizenry; in the aftermath of the Gracchi, popularis legislation focused on the requirements of the equites; in the post-Sullan period a significant quantity of popularis legislation directed itself toward enhancing the careers of political grandees, like Pompey or Caesar.²³ That this diverse body of proposals and legislation was popularis is vouchsafed by Cicero and other sources; its very variety, however, defies neat definition.

A second obstacle to describing a popularis in terms of his specific political program is the brief extension of the typical popularis career. Notwithstanding the qualification our limited sources inevitably impose on such observations, it remains the case that most populares were tribunes and that their popularis activity terminated with their office. Only Caesar and Clodius succeeded in maintaining themselves in lengthy and constant popularis careers.²⁴ Now there exists a natural and obvious relationship between the functi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Patrician Tribune
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One Politics and Popularity in the Late Roman Republic
• Chapter Two handsome Arrogance
• Chapter Three The Bona Dea Scandal
• Chapter Four From Patrician to Plebeian
• Chapter Five Popular Tribune
• Chapter Six Demagogue
• Chapter Seven Formidable Adversary
• Chapter Eight The Appian Way
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index