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By Root 755 0

a senior government official. Secret mystical ceremonies in the presence of the Vestal Virgins took place which only women were permitted to attend. Little is known about them except that the most important rituals took place at night. Music was played and there was a sacrifice of some kind. The previous year it had been Cicero’s turn—or, more precisely, Terentia’s—and this time the ritual took place at the State House, Julius Caesar’s official residence as Chief Pontiff. Clodius, who had fallen for Caesar’s wife, Pompeia, decided to infiltrate the event in drag. He came dressed as a lute player but lost his way in the corridors of the house. He came across a maid who asked him his name. His masculine voice gave him away, and he ran off. The alarm was given and a search conducted until he was found hiding under a bed. Somehow he managed to escape. Most people thought he was lucky to have survived the incident without injury.

When Cicero wrote to Atticus about the affair, his excited amusement is palpable. “I imagine you have heard that P. Clodius, the son of Appius, was caught dressed up as a woman in C. Caesar’s house at the national sacrifice and that he owed his escape alive to the hands of a servant girl—a spectacular scandal. I am sure you will be deeply distressed!” It was, in fact, as Cicero knew, a serious business. Religious ritual accompanied almost every public event, and to breach it was unforgivable. Clodius would almost certainly face grave charges. Caesar himself was embarrassed and immediately divorced Pompeia, making the famous point that, whether or not she was innocent, his wife had to be above suspicion.

It is difficult to know what to make of the Good Goddess affair. AS far as one can tell, there were no political overtones. But a house crowded with visitors was hardly a convenient rendezvous point for clandestine lovers. Probably all that Clodius had in mind was a dare. It was exactly the kind of practical joke that would amuse Rome’s fashionable younger generation. These young men and women had plenty of money and were socially and sexually liberated. They turned their backs on the severe tradition of public duty. No longer defining themselves exclusively in terms of community—family, gens, patrician or noble status—and rebelling against authority, they lived for the moment.

Many of them had been sympathizers with Catilina (although for some reason Clodius had had little to do with the failed revolutionary) and, even if they had no time for politics now, they emerged later as supporters of Caesar during the civil war. Some became his key associates during his years of supreme power: able, unscrupulous and with huge debts to settle, they had no objection to aiding and abetting the death throes of the Republic, provided that Caesar paid them generously. Although most of them knew one another, they were not a coherent movement. Friendships were made and broken; cliques formed, melted away and re-formed. Respectable opinion deeply disapproved of them. The contemporary historian Sallust claimed they had a

passion for fornication, guzzling and other forms of sensuality. Men prostituted themselves like women, and women sold their chastity at every corner. To please their palates they ransacked land and sea. They went to bed before they needed sleep, and instead of waiting until they felt hungry, thirsty, cold or tired, they forestalled their bodies’ needs by self-indulgence. Such practices incited young men who had run through their property to have recourse to crime.

The great poet Caius Valerius Catullus, a member of Clodius’s circle, fell in love with the eldest of Clodius’s three sisters. After she threw him over, Catullus wrote memorably, with all the rage of discarded passion, of Clodia’s loose way of life. In a poem to Marcus Caelius Rufus, another of her lovers, he described her as loitering “at the crossroads and in the back streets / ready to toss off the ‘magnanimous’ sons of Rome.” She had a house on the fashionable Palatine Hill and gardens on the Tiber conveniently near a public bathing