Douglas Boin is the author of the new biography Clodia of Rome: Champion of the Republic. His other books include Alaric the Goth. He is a professor of history at Saint Louis University, and he lives in Austin, Texas.
Q: What inspired you to write a biography of Clodia of Rome, a figure from the late Roman Republic?
A: For many years when I was working as a Latin teacher, I assigned my students a courtroom speech of Cicero’s, called the “Defense of Caelius Rufus,” which was about an infamous murder trial in Ancient Rome and about the supposed schemes of a mysterious woman—named Clodia—that lay behind the crimes.
Students soon realize that Rome’s preeminent defense attorney has used the name and character of an outspoken activist as a smokescreen to deflect the jury’s attention from his own client’s guilt. The whole speech becomes a gross masterclass in misogyny.
As a historian and member of the gay community, I’ve always been sensitive to describing the experiences of marginalized individuals and questioning how accurately they are represented. This book was my attempt to address those injustices, knock Cicero off his pedestal, and rewrite his truly unjust version of the past, where women in antiquity were rarely seen as the heroes of their own stories.
Q: The author Mike Duncan said of the book, “Douglas Boin valiantly recovers, reconstructs, and restores the reputation of a strong and independent woman who flouted social norms, attacked the prevailing system of inequality and injustice, and was punished by the powerful men she challenged.” What do you think of that description?
A: Clodia was an icon. If she had lived slightly later, Romans would have called her a diva, the Latin word for a mortal-turned-god. So Mike’s description, in addition to being quite generous, is a really wonderful testament to her character, and Clodia’s life itself offers us a welcome chance to re-frame our relationship with a pretty dusty period of history.
The men of the Roman republic have been praised for thousands of years as noble spokesmen for their government, which influenced the U.S. constitution, for example. Cicero himself is often presented as the defender of its supposedly democratic ideals.
But he was also an opportunistic, patriarchal misogynist whose court cases—which remain standard textbooks in high-school and college classrooms—have taught generations of students to internalize and sometimes even repeat the worst features of antiquity.
Every semester I have taught his texts, it bothers me to think how often pundits, politicians, and other public figures still bring Cicero’s more despicable rhetorical techniques to our own public square.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that particularly surprised you?
A: Clodia was the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of politicians. Hundreds of years before she was born, her family built an aqueduct for the city that she and her friends still regularly used, and her family’s motto was, and perhaps still is to a modern ear, quite empowering: “Everyone crafts their own future.”
All these details we know because of the wealth that was passed down through Clodia’s family tree. In Rome, generational wealth meant that families were able to preserve their own histories and archives.
So, recovering the singularity of Clodia’s life meant working in two ancient languages, Latin and Greek, and three modern ones, just to be sure that I had access to the best contemporary scholarship.
What really saddened me, though, was that Clodia’s life turned out not to be story about progress at all. Modern readers, I think, might assume that Clodia’s story might end on a slightly better note than when it begins. But history didn’t happen that way.
Clodia’s own daughter would grow up in a world where women held fewer liberties than her mother had, largely because of men’s desire to prevent women from ever repeating Clodia’s example of power and influence. It’s shocking and certainly unsettling, but Clodia’s age is one in which women’s history went backwards.
Q: What do you see as Clodia's legacy today?
A: Clodia lived at a time when women were denied the vote and were unable to stand for office, but her legacy of activism and political engagement still resonates, I think, because of how unapologetic she was about her radicalism.
She was wealthy, sophisticated, well-educated, well-read, amorous, well-connected, and influential—but she channeled all her charisma and energy into improving the fortunes of working Romans and ensuring fairness at the ballot box for new voters.
(The Roman establishment in her day consistently found new constitutional ways to disenfranchise freed slaves and to limit the collective voting power of new citizens, whose politics were thought to be too progressive for the republic.)
Yet in the four decades of Clodia’s life, she fought for those who didn’t have access to power and wealth. And even when she was not in the room, the strength of her personality meant that she dominated conversations, as happened famously when she became a 12-month source of gossip between two pen pals.
To me, she’s the quintessential trailblazer whom we all might recognize from our own worlds—the outspoken person we respect and admire and whom we secretly wish we knew, whose activism pushes us to be a little more daring in our own choices.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: To be honest, right now, I’m just trying to figure out how to continue to bring classical history to American audiences, who might not have been taught to consider it or appreciate it as a touchstone for some of our own civic conversations.
I was lucky to first study in Italy and Greece when I was 16, largely thanks to my grandparents’ encouragement and support. That trip launched me on my path to becoming a professor and I return regularly to Italy for work, where, when I’m not teaching, I direct an excavation in Umbria, just northeast of Rome.
But the craft of writing and storytelling remain my passion. The lessons I’ve learned about the people of the ancient past—stories of outsiders, of social and political exclusion—seem too relevant not to share. New research, new stories, can help replace the staler ones.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Clodia’s life unfolds at a time when an as-yet-unknown teenage girl from Egypt—the young Cleopatra—was staying in Rome with her exiled father.
What I hope readers of Clodia’s life will walk away with, in the end, is that this is a story about the passing of the torch of history, how the sum of one woman’s experiences can be passed down to the next generation, sometimes in surprising encounters or conversations. Every pioneer stands on the shoulders of those who came before.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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