Cicero Driven into Exile by Clodius
Cicero was driven out of Rome in 58 BC by a law that did not mention his name. Publius Clodius Pulcher, a patrician who had himself adopted into a plebeian family in order to hold the tribunate, passed a bill declaring that anyone who had executed a Roman citizen without trial was outlawed. Everyone knew who was meant. The grievance was personal as well as political. Cicero had destroyed Clodius's alibi in a scandal three years earlier, when Clodius had been caught disguised as a woman at a religious rite from which men were excluded, and Clodius had been acquitted by a bribed jury and had not forgotten it. Behind him were Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, who found Cicero inconvenient and declined to protect him. He left before the law passed, which saved his life and conceded the case, and spent sixteen months in Thessalonica and Dyrrhachium writing letters of extraordinary self-pity to his friend Atticus and to his wife. His house on the Palatine was demolished and a shrine to Liberty built on the site. He was recalled in August 57 BC by a vote of the assembly after Pompey turned against Clodius, and the return was a triumph — crowds along the road from Brundisium and a speech of thanks in the senate. He then spent the following years as a man who had discovered the limits of his own position, and said so in private. The exile changed his politics permanently. He came back understanding that the constitution he had defended was already gone, and the letters of the following decade are the best evidence anywhere of what it felt like to be an intelligent man watching a republic end.
- Year: 58 BCE
- Category: Political
