Cicero, Pro Milone
Cicero, On Behalf of Milo
Brief Introduction
In 52 BC, a man named Clodius was murdered by a gang loyal to Titus Annius Milo, after a chance encounter on the Appian Way. In the ensuing trial, Cicero defended Milo, who was a close friend and ally; unusually, he lost, and Milo was sent into exile. Later, Cicero wrote and published an improved version of his speech in defence of Milo, and it is this adaptation which survives.
The re-edited Pro Milone is Cicero’s last surviving forensic speech and is considered his masterpiece. Dio (a Greek writer of the 3rd century AD) tells us that Cicero sent a copy of his polished version to Milo, who was in exile; Milo reportedly wrote back saying that it was lucky for him that this version of the speech had not been delivered in court, since he would not now be enjoying the excellent mullets in Massalia (Marseilles).
The Pro Milone is especially valuable to us because an independent account of the case survives, written by Quintus Asconius Pedianus (AD 3-88). Asconius was the author of several published works, including one on Virgil. He also wrote several commentaries on Cicero for his two sons, who were preparing for a senatorial career. Asconius’ commentary on the Pro Milone explains the political background, the precise facts of the case, and what happened at the trial. It is through Asconius that we know the result of the vote; in addition, Asconius explains how the speech published by Cicero relates to what he said during the trial itself. From Asconius’ account we can appreciate just how misleading Cicero’s published account is.
The background to the case: Cicero’s involvement with Clodius and Milo
Between 63 and 62 BC, Cicero discovered and suppressed a conspiracy led by the aristocrat Catiline to overthrow the senate. As consul, Cicero managed to secure the execution of Catiline and the other chief conspirators without a proper trial. As a result he incurred the enmity of one Publius Clodius Pulcher, who was an ally of Catiline.
The enmity grew worse in 61 BC, when Clodius was tried for sacreligiously infiltrating the females-only rites of the Bona Dea. The alibi he endeavoured to establish was overthrown by Cicero and he was found guilty.
In 60 BC the ambitious politician Pompey became estranged from the senate and he formed the coalition known as the First Triumvirate with the equally ambitious Caesar and Crassus. Glad of any opportunity to humiliate the senate and its republican supporters, the Triumvirs lent their aid to Clodius in his schemes of vengeance on Cicero.
As the first step towards this, Clodius was adopted into a Plebeian family and thus qualified for the powerful position of tribune of the people (Tribunus Plebis). As tribune in 58 BC, Clodius brought in a bill aimed directly against Cicero: the bill inflicted banishment on anyone who had executed a citizen without trial. Pompey left Cicero to his fate, and Cicero was sent into exile.
By 57 BC, Clodius’ bands of men were ruling the streets. Pompey, finding that Clodius was becoming too powerful, began to promote the recall of Cicero from exile, but Clodius used his mobs to block the move. Another tribune by the name of Milo, who was a staunch supporter of Cicero, arrested some of the hired thugs. He was punished with violence by those who remained on the loose. Having tried and failed to prosecute Clodius for these revenge-attacks, Milo recruited gangs of his own, probably with the encouragement of Cicero’s friends. From this point on, the gangs clashed regularly with each other on the streets of Rome, and the battles continued even after Pompey secured Cicero’s return on September 4. Milo brought a further prosecution for violence against Clodius at the end of the year, but Clodius managed to get himself elected aedile – senior magistrates were immune from prosecution.
In 56 BC Clodius attempted to prosecute Milo (who was no longer tribune and therefore open to prosecution), but Milo had the support of both Pompey and Cicero. Eventually the trial was broken up with violence and never resumed. Milo and Cicero then defended Publius Sestius, a co-tribune of Milo and (with Pompey’s support) had him acquitted of violent behaviour. During the trial, Cicero issued a rallying call to all patriots, men such as Sestius and Milo, to defend the state by whatever means necessary from traitors like Clodius. Shortly after the trial, Milo provided Cicero with guards for his house: Clodius had demolished it during Cicero’s exile, and had been using his gangs to attack the workmen who were now rebuilding it.
In April of 56, the Conference at Luca took place and the alliance between Pompey, Caesar and Crassus was renewed. This resulted in a political re-shuffle at Rome: Clodius became reconciled with Pompey – but not with Milo, or Cicero. The vendetta between Milo and Clodius therefore continued. In 53 BC Milo and Clodius were both standing for high office: Milo for the consulship and Clodius for the praetorship. Cicero was strongly supporting Milo’s campaign for the consulship against two men nominated by Pompey – for if Milo became consul, he would be in a position to control Clodius as praetor. Every attempt to hold the elections, however, was thwarted by violence, and the year of 53 opened with no curule magistrates in place. Matters came to a head at around 1.30pm on 18 January AD 52, when Clodius was murdered by Milo’s gang near Bovillae, 12 miles south of Rome along the Appian Way.
Asconius relates what happened – Cicero’s account is greatly distorted. On the day of the murder, Milo left Rome and set off in a coach down the Appian Way towards Lanuvium, where he was due to install a priest the next day. His wife was travelling with him, and he also had a bodyguard of more than 300 armed slaves, including a number of gladiators. When he had passed Bovillae, he met Clodius coming the other way, returning to Rome from Aricia, where he had been addressing the town council. Asconius believes that the meeting occurred by chance. Clodius was on horseback and had a much smaller bodyguard, a mere 26 armed slaves. According to Asconius, once the parties had passed each other, Clodius looked back and happened to catch the attention of one of Milo’s gladiators, who threw a spear at him and wounded him in the shoulder. A full-scale fight then broke out in which Clodius’ slaves were all either killed or seriously wounded. Clodius himself was carried to a nearby inn. The story goes that when Milo heard that Clodius was wounded, he decided that it would be safer to kill him than to leave him alive; so he had him taken out of the inn, killed, and left lying in the road. All this was done under the direction of Milo’s gang leader, Marcus Saufeius.
Clodius’ body was discovered by a senator, Sextus Teidius, who had it conveyed to Rome. It arrived there at dusk, was taken to Clodius’ house, and was displayed to the crowd by his widow Fulvia. On the next day it was carried into the forum on the suggestion of two tribunes loyal to Clodius, who held a public meeting at which they stirred up popular feeling against Milo. Then Clodius’ gang-leader, Sextus Cloelius, persuaded the people to carry the body into the senate house and cremate it there. This they did, using senate house furniture and records to make a pyre – and burning down the senate house in the process. Asconius says that the burning of the senate house caused far greater indignation among the public than the murder of Clodius. Encouraged by this, Milo returned to Rome and continued his campaign for the consulship.
A few days later, a public meeting was held by a tribune called Marcus Caelius Rufus, whom Cicero had defended against a charge of violence and who was a supporter of Milo. Caelius and Milo both claimed that the encounter on the Appian Way had not arisen by chance: that Clodius had set a trap for Milo, who had then killed him in self defence. This account formed the basis of Cicero’s defence of Milo when he came to trial. The evidence given for this version was the fact that three days before the incident, a senator named Marcus Favonius had reported to Marcus Porcius Cato that Clodius had said that Milo would be dead within three days. The story is referred to twice in the course of our speech (§§ 26 and 44).
During January, because of the lack of consuls, a series of interreges held office for five days each. In early February the emergency decree senatus consultus ultimum was passed, together with a further decree directing Pompey as proconsul to levy troops. Soon afterwards the Clodians began legal proceedings against Milo. Two of Clodius’ nephews, both called Appius Claudius Pulcher, made a preliminary summons of Milo’s slaves. The defence was undertaken by Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, Cicero, Cato, and other prominent conservatives. They argued immediately that Milo’s slaves could not be summoned since they were no longer slaves: Milo had freed them in gratitude for saving his life! This reflects the version of events put about by Milo’s supporters, that Clodius had set a trap for Milo, and that only Milo’s spirited resistance had allowed him to escape with his life. The slaves of Clodius were summoned by Marcus Caelius Rufus. As the preliminary proceedings continued over the next month, Quintus Metellus Scipio (one of Milo’s rivals for the consulship) addressed the senate claiming that it was Milo who had set the trap for Clodius. Only in Asconius’ account is the likely truth preserved – that the violent skirmish was as a result of a chance encounter, not a deliberate ambush.
Meanwhile, a movement was growing to appoint Pompey dictator to restore order. But the office of dictator had unpleasant associations, evoking memories of Sulla and the proscriptions, and so the senate instead made Pompey sole consul. After just three days in office, Pompey proposed two new laws: a violence law relating specifically to the incident on the Appian Way and subsequent events, and a law on electoral malpractice. These laws laid down special procedures designed to reduce the possibility of corruption, and imposed heavier penalties should such corruption take place. Witnesses were to be produced first (in contrast to normal practice), and all speeches were then to take place within a single day, two hours being allowed for the prosecution and three for the defence. Character references were to be disallowed. 81 jurors would sit on the case, but just before the vote, both prosecution and defence were to reject 15, leaving a total of 51 to decide the verdict. These new laws were vigorously resisted by Caelius on the grounds that they represented a personal attack on Milo; he argued that there already existed suitable laws under which Milo could be tried. But the laws were passed.
Legal proceedings against Milo began immediately, instituted by Clodius’ nephews. Three actions were lodged at this point, a fourth being added later. First, Milo was accused of the murder of Clodius under Pompey’s new violence law (lex Pompeia de vi). Second, he was accused of bribery in his campaign for the consulship, under Pompey’s law on electoral malpractice (lex Pompeia de ambitu). Thirdly, he was accused of malpractice in his campaign, under a previous law on illegal association (lex Licinia de sodaliciis). If Milo was found guilty on just one charge, he would retire into exile and lose the subsequent cases by default.
So Milo’s trial finally went ahead, under the lex Pompeia de vi, on 4-7 April. The evidence was taken on the first three days and the speeches given on the fourth day. On the first day, a prosecution witness named Gaius Causinius Schola gave evidence designed to whip up feeling against Milo. Marcus Claudius Marcellus, who was working with Cicero for the defence, tried to cross-examine him but was shouted down by the Clodians. Marcellus and Milo therefore asked that an armed guard attend the remainder of the trial (cf. §§ 1-3). On the second and third days, evidence was taken from various parties such as the inhabitants of Bovillae, some maidens (probably priestesses) from Alba, and members of Clodius’ family.
All the shops in the city were closed for the fourth day, during which the speeches were made. Troops were posted in the forum, and Pompey waited in front of the treasury (in the north west corner of the forum) with a military guard. The prosecution spoke first – the elder Appius Claudius Pulcher, the young Mark Antony and Publius Valerius Neops – within the two hours allotted to them. They claimed that the incident on the Appian Way had not occurred by chance: Milo had deliberately set out to kill Clodius. For the defence, Cicero spoke alone, within his three hours. According to Asconius, some people felt that his best line of defence would be that Clodius’ murder was in the public interest. Cicero, however, felt at the time that if Clodius’ removal had been in the public interest, then prosecution via the courts, not murder, would have been the proper response. Instead, therefore, he based his entire speech upon the argument that Clodius had set a trap for Milo, and had then been killed by him in self-defence. A pirate version of this trial speech was still surviving in Asconius’ day, and indeed for some centuries afterwards, but it has long since been lost. In our surviving re-write, Cicero has added a lengthy section using the argument that Clodius’ murder was in the public interest.
The ancient sources disagree about how well Cicero performed on the day. Asconius says that his speech was delivered amid shouting from the Clodians, and that this made him speak “without his customary resolution.” According to Plutarch (a Greek writer of the 1st-2nd centuries AD), Milo arranged for Cicero to be taken to the court early in a litter, so that he would not be intimidated by the sight of the soldiers. However, when he emerged from the litter and saw the soldiers, “he was utterly confused and hardly began his speech, his body shook and his voice choked.” Dio (a Greek writer of the 3rd century AD) tells a similar tale: “when Cicero saw the soldiers, he was stunned and filled with alarm, and so said nothing of what he had prepared, but after uttering a with difficulty a few words that died on his lips, was glad to retire.” Both these accounts no doubt exaggerate Cicero’s discomfiture, especially that of Dio who was concerned to portray Cicero in the worst possible light. The statement of both writers that Cicero uttered just a few words simply cannot be accepted in view of Asconius’ evidence that pirate versions of the trial speech survived. But there seems little doubt that Cicero’s performance fell short of his usual standards.
After the speeches were concluded, each side rejected 15 jurors, and Milo was convicted by a majority of 38 to 13. The jury concluded that neither Milo nor Clodius had plotted to kill the other; but they found that after Clodius had been wounded he was then killed on Milo’s orders. Milo went immediately into exile at Massalia (Marseilles), and his property was confiscated and sold. The remaining convictions against Milo went ahead in his absence. On April 8 Milo was found guilty of bribery under the lex Pompeia de ambitu and on April 11 he was convicted of malpractice under the law on illegal association (lex Plautia de vi). Milo remained in exile until the Civil War. Although now an enemy of Pompey’s, he was also opposed to Caesar, and when Caesar arrived in Rome in 49 all the exiles were recalled except him. In 48 Milo went to Campania to join his friend Caelius, taking with him some gladiators; together, Milo and Caelius hoped to raise southern Italy in revolt against Caesar. The attempt failed, and at Compsa Milo met his end, killed by a stone thrown from the city walls. Caeilius was killed by Caesar’s troops shortly afterwards.
This was not, however, the end of the story. In the courts the battle between Milo’s and Clodius’ supporters continued unabated. Milo’s gang leader Marcus Saufeius, who had supervised the attack on the inn and Clodius’ actual murder, was prosecuted under the lex Pompeia de vi. Cicero and Caelius defended him, and he was acquitted by one vote. He was then charged again, this time under the lex Plautia; Cicero defended him, and he was acquitted by a larger majority. Clodius’ gang leader Sextus Cloelius was prosecuted under the lex Pompeia for taking Clodius’ body into the senate house, and was convicted by a near-unanimous verdict. A number of others were also convicted, the majority of them Clodians. Clearly public opinion, previously hostile to Milo, had turned around. Milo had been punished enough, and now the Clodians had to pay for their part in the breakdown of law and order.