Sexuality and Imperium: Female Transgression at the End of the Republican Age

Abstract

This paper analyses the figures of Clodia and Fulvia. Their representation is antithetical, in almost all of the literary sources, to the traditional model of the ideal matrona, which dates back to the origins of the Roman Republic. Clodia, sister of the tribune of the plebs Publius Clodius Pulcher, is loved by the poet Catullus and is accused of being a prostitute by the lawyer Cicero. Fulvia, Publius Clodius Pulcher and Mark Antony’s wife, is criticised by her opponents for having unduly occupied a political space, from which Roman women were traditionally banned. There is no doubt that these two aristocratic women were able to take advantage of the spaces granted women by the political and social context of the second half of the first century BC granted women, but their portrayal is always conditioned by the male figures of reference, without whom they would have been deprived of an autonomous historiographic representation.