Publius Clodius Pulcher

Roman citizens had been executed without trial, a breach of the rights of the Roman people.

In 58 BCE, following the maneuverings of his political enemy Clodius, Cicero was unceremoniously exiled.

He languished far from Rome for sixteen months, often fearing for his life, separated from family and friends, but also from access to the public arena where he'd held his own for so long.

His letters home are full of lamentation.

Such sexual passivity in an elite male, taking what was seen as a feminine, receptive sexual role, was deeply shocking for Romans.

It is notable that in his swansong, Cicero does his utmost to paint Antony as a man of unmanly sexual habits, addicted to pleasure, and with no sense of masculine moderation.

Cicero, ever the rhetorician out to win the argument, was quite prepared to exploit his audience's masculinist prejudices to demean an enemy.

With these speeches, Cicero managed to rally his fellow senators, at least for a time.

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While tossed hither and thither by Catiline and Clodius, Pompeius and Crassus, by some open enemies and some doubtful friends, while he struggled with the struggling republic and kept it from going to ruin, when at last he was banished, being neither able to keep silence in prosperity nor to endure adversity with patience, how often must Marcus Cicero have cursed that consulship of his, which he never ceased to praise, and which nevertheless deserved it! What piteous expressions he uses in a letter to Atticus when Pompeius the father had been defeated and his son was recruiting his shattered forces in Spain.

"Do you ask," writes he, "what I am doing here? I am living in my Tusculan villa almost as a prisoner." He adds more afterwards, wherein he laments his former life, complains of the present, and despairs of the future.

Cicero called himself half a prisoner; but, by Hercules, the wise man never would have come under so lowly a title.

In 62 BC, Caesar was praetor, one step below the consulship, and that year's scandal landed in his own household.

It centered on a women's religious rite called the Bona Dea, and a young aristocrat named Clodius, who's going to matter a great deal in a later episode.

Caesar divorced his second wife Pompeia over it, and Plutarch has him explaining that Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.

Just so nobody gets tangled up later, Pompeia was no close relation to Pompey, despite the names, and that one trips up a lot of people reading these sources for the first time.

We have such a second series coming up for you.

Much of it is already recorded and in the can, so I can exclusively reveal that in the coming months you can look forward to episodes, in no particular order, on Clodius, the Battle of Marathon, food and dining in ancient Greece, the Emperor Tiberius, the Athenian Empire, Arminius, the Catiline Conspiracy, the Emperor Julian, Mark Antony, the building blocks of epic poetry, Augustan monuments of the city of Rome, the Battle of Actium.

There'll be an episode on Hadrian and another one on Antinous.

We will learn how exactly Athenian democracy functioned.

Pompey aligned himself with the optimates, with Cato and the traditionalists, the same men who blocked him for years and who now needed him against Caesar.

In 52 BC, after the street gangs of Clodius and Milo had left Rome burning and in chaos, they made Pompey's sole consul alone, with no colleague at all.

Even Cato backed it, and it was extra constitutional.

The man who'd once refused kingship now accepted an office that was kingship in all but name.