History in the Making
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Cicero’s attack on Clodia Metelli in Pro Caelio was not a personal animus but a carefully wrought composition of rhetoric that rendered her an ideological emblem of late-Republican instability, reaffirming male authority through the reprobation of a wealthy, autonomous woman. This is supported by demonstrating that Cicero deployed similar characterizations of women across his career; against Sassia in Pro Cluentio and through Chelidon in the In Verrem, establishing it as a structural technique rather than a one-off tactic, and that Roman anxieties about women’s independent wealth provided the cultural conditions that made such rhetoric persuasive. This study engages in close readings of three Ciceronian speeches interpreted through an intersectional feminist perspective. Chong, Kenty and Langlands helped shape the argument. Leen’s analysis of the domus provided the spatial framework which the Chelidon parallel builds on. Steel and Webb’s edited collection established the economic-historical foundation. Xinyue supported the literary parallel to Virgil’s Camilla.
Recommended Citation
Guichard, Samantha
(2026)
"An “Ill-Regulated Woman”: The Rhetoric of Gendered Power in the Late Republic,"
History in the Making: Vol. 19, Article 5.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/history-in-the-making/vol19/iss1/5