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By this time the trial was in its second day. The prosecution had already laid out its case, Rufus and Crassus had responded, and only Cicero’s address remained to be heard. He had sat through the other speeches with barely concealed impatience; the details of the case were irrelevant to him and the advocates bored him. Atratinus, in his disconcertingly piping voice, had portrayed Rufus as a libertine, addicted to pleasure, sunk in debt, ‘a pretty-boy Jason in perpetual search of a golden fleece’ who had been paid by Ptolemy to intimidate the Alexandrian envoys and arrange the murder of Dio. Clodius had spoken next and described how his sister, ‘this chaste and distinguished widow’, had been tricked by Rufus into giving him gold out of the goodness of her heart – money she had thought was to finance public entertainment but which he had used to bribe Dio’s assassins – and how Rufus had then provided poison to her slaves to kill her and so cover his traces. Crassus, in his plodding way, and Rufus, with typical verve, had rebutted each of the charges. But the balance of opinion was that the prosecution had made its case and that the young reprobate was likely to be found guilty. This was the state of play when Cicero arrived in the Forum.

I conducted Terentia to her seat while he made his way through the thousands of spectators and went up the steps of the temple to the court. Seventy-five jurors had been empanelled. Beside them sat the praetor Domitius Calvinus with his lictors and scribes. To the left was the prosecution, with their witnesses arrayed behind them. And there in the front row, modestly attired but very much the centre of attention, was Clodia. She was almost forty but still beautiful, a grande dame with those famous huge dark eyes of hers that could invite intimacy one moment and threaten murder the next. She was known to be excessively close to Clodius – so much so that they had often been accused of incest. I saw her head turn very slightly to follow Cicero as he walked across to his place. Her expression was one of disdainful indifference. But she must have wondered what was coming.

Cicero adjusted the folds of his toga. He had no notes. A hush fell over the vast throng. He glanced across to where Terentia was sitting. Then he turned to the jury. ‘Gentlemen, anyone who doesn’t know our laws and customs might wonder why we are here, during a public festival, when all the other courts are suspended, to judge a young man of hard work and brilliant intellect – especially when it turns out he is being attacked by a person he once prosecuted, and by the wealth of a courtesan.’

At that, a great roar went rolling around the Forum, like the sound the crowd makes at the start of the games when a famous gladiator makes his first thrust. This was what they had come to see! Clodia stared straight ahead as if she had been turned to marble. I am sure that she and Clodius would never have brought their prosecution if they had thought there was a chance of Cicero being against them; but there was no escape now.

Having laid down a marker of what was to come, Cicero then proceeded to build his case. He conjured a picture of Rufus that was unrecognisable to those of us who knew him – of a sober, hard-working servant of the commonwealth whose main misfortune was to be ‘born not unhandsome’, and thus to have come to the attention of Clodia, ‘the Medea of the Palatine’, into whose neighbourhood he had moved. He stood behind the seated Rufus and clasped his hand on his shoulder. ‘His change of residence has been for this young man the cause of all his misfortunes and of all the gossip, for Clodia is a woman not only of noble birth but of notoriety, of whom I will say no more than what is necessary to refute the charges.’

He paused to allow the sense of anticipation to build. ‘Now, as many of you will know, I am on terms of great personal enmity with this woman’s husband …’ He stopped and snapped his fingers in exasperation. ‘I meant to say brother: I always make that mistake.’

His timing was perfect, and to this day even people who otherwise know nothing of Cicero still quote that joke. Almost everyone in Rome had felt the arrogance of the Claudii at some point down the years; to see them ridiculed was irresistible. Its effect not just on the audience but on the jury and even the praetor was wonderful to behold.

Terentia turned to me in puzzlement. ‘Why is everyone laughing?’

I did not know what to reply.

When order was restored, Cicero continued, with menacing friendliness: ‘Well, I am truly sorry to have to make this woman an enemy, especially as she is every other man’s friend. So let me first ask her whether she prefers me to deal with her severely, in the old-fashioned manner, or mildly, in the modern way?’