On the 4th April 56 BCE, the lawyer, orator and politician Cicero stood up to make his speech in defence of a friend, Caelius Rufus. The speech figures on many an A-level set text and is huge fun to teach, for Cicero is at his best, witty, dramatic and brimming with energy. His focus is on one charge – that of Caelius’ alleged attempt to poison an ex-girlfriend, and he had good reasons for concentrating on this. It would satisfy his own desire for revenge on an enemy, and just like any audience at any time in history, the Romans loved a bit of scandal. Sex and poison? Yes please!
The first recorded poison trial in Rome was in the year 331 BCE, when, according to the historian Livy, there was a terrible pestilence sweeping through Rome. Many of the leading men of the state fell ill and died, but when a slave girl approached the authorities with an explanation other than illness, she was believed. She led them to a place where twenty respectable high-class ladies were busy making potions that they claimed were medicines. When asked to drink their own medicines, they did so – after a pause to consult with one another – and all died. The subsequent enquiries led to a further 170 women being found guilty of concocting poison. It was decided that such conduct must arise out of madness rather than evil and a Dictator was appointed to oversee a special ceremony of expiation, namely hammering a nail into the wall of the Temple of Jupiter.
It is interesting that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation of so many deaths – the pestilence Livy mentions. But the Roman authorities seem keen to attribute the cause of at least some of the deaths to a group of nearly two hundred upper class women poisoning their menfolk. Maybe the pestilence just killed the lower classes and the noblewomen saw their chance to get away with a mass extermination of husbands? Women poisoners do figure prominently in Roman history, but in the case of Caelius, poison features three times in the story and in two out of the three occasions the alleged poisoner is a man.
We begin with aconite. Pliny the Elder knew of aconite’s deadly quality. “Everyone knows that aconite is the deadliest of the poisons, bringing death within a day if applied to the sexual organs of female animals. It was this poison that killed the wives of Calpurnius Bestia while they slept, according to the accusation made by Marcus Caelius – hence the notorious speech Caelius made about the finger.”
The trial in which Caelius made this scandalous accusation took place in February 56 BCE, and he was unsuccessful. Caelius immediately launched proceedings against Bestia once more, and in an attempt to put an end to this persecution, Bestia brought multiple charges against Caelius. This is where Cicero’s speech came in.
Cicero had a history of enmity with the family of Caelius’ ex-lover, the noblewoman Clodia, who appeared to be funding the prosecution. In particular, he loathed her brother Clodius. Rome’s greatest speaker lost no opportunity of attacking them both. He criticised their lifestyle, shaking his head over “talk of hook-ups, love affairs, adultery, trips to Baiae, beach-parties, feasts, drinking-parties, singing, music, boating trips….”, he laid into Clodia herself calling her “the Medea of the Palatine Hill”, and “not just a whore but a shameless and pushy whore” and pretended to make a muddle of her relationship with her brother, calling Clodius “her husband – oh sorry, I meant her brother, I always make that mistake”. But Cicero’s set piece, the fireworks of his speech, lay in his account of the bungled meeting at the Senian Baths.
The prosecution – and we only have Cicero’s version of what the prosecution said – had claimed that some of Clodia’s slaves had been approached by Caelius. He was hoping he could persuade them to poison Clodia and he promised to send a friend called Licinius with the poison. The slaves of course told Clodia, who instructed them to set up a meeting at the Senian Baths. There Licinius would hand over the poison, and some of Clodia’s friends, hidden around the baths, would catch him in the act. Unfortunately, the friends in their enthusiasm sprung the trap before Licinius could make the handover: he got away taking the poison with him. Cicero enjoyed pointing out the flaws:
Let us examine the courage and attention to detail of these men. “They concealed themselves in the baths” – what outstanding witnesses! “They leapt out by accident” – what restraint!
For the story goes that when Licinius had arrived and was holding the box of poison in his hand, was trying to hand it over but had not actually handed it over – then these unimpeachable but nameless witnesses flew out! Licinius, who had already stretched out his hand to deliver the box, at this sudden rush of men drew back his hand and fled.
Cicero tore the thin story to pieces, pointing out that fully-clothed men would find it hard to hide in the baths, turning the description of the intended trap into a farce.
But not all the speech in defence of Caelius is a comedy, and in a more serious part of the speech he hints that that Clodia had previously poisoned her husband. “He was in the prime of life when he was snatched from us, in excellent health, at full strength…. And does this woman, from such a house, dare to talk of how swiftly a poison works?”
Cicero took the theme of poison and went on the rampage with it: Clodia, now painted as a murdering wife, had to watch as her claim of being threatened with poison herself was laughed out of the court.
The after-effects of this speech are hard to assess. More than ten years later Cicero wrote in a letter to a friend that he was hoping to buy a villa from Clodia, so maybe they had reached some sort of truce, although it is hard to see why any woman would forgive Cicero for such a character assassination – and the veiled accusation of murdering her husband!
It is often overlooked that Calpurnius Bestia failed to get his revenge for Caelius’ jab about the aconite finger, and the story has gone on being repeated, thanks to Pliny. If this accusation was unfounded, then Bestia has gone down in history most unfairly as a gruesome lady-killer. I wonder if he ever married again….