Self-indulgence did not have to be a stigma of defeat. What to great noblemen were the honeyed venoms of retirement might well to others promise opportunity.

A few short miles down the coast from Lucullus’ villa at Naples stood the fabled beach resort of Baiae. Here, out into the glittering blue of the bay, stretched gilded pier after gilded pier, cramping the fish, as the humorists put it. To the Romans, Baiae was synonymous with luxury and wickedness. A holiday there was always a source of guilty pleasure. No statesman would ever willingly admit to spending time in a town so notorious, yet every season Rome would empty of the upper classes as they headed south to its temptations. It was this that made Baiae such a hot spot for the upwardly mobile. Whether at its celebrated sulphur baths or over a dish of the local speciality, purple-shelled oysters, the resort offered precious entrées into high society. Baiae was a party town, and the strains of music and laughter were forever drifting through the warm midnight air, borne from villas, or the beach, or yachts out in the bay. No wonder that the place drove moralists apoplectic. Wherever wine flowed and clothes began to be loosened, traditional proprieties might start to slip too. A handsome social climber who had barely come of age might find himself talking on familiar terms to a consul. Deals might be struck, patronage secured. Charm and good looks might secure pernicious advantages. Baiae was a place ripe with scandal, dazzling in its aspect but forever shadowed by rumours of corruption: wine-drenched, perfume-soused, a playground for every kind of ambition and perversion, and – perhaps most shockingly of all – for the intrigues of powerful women.

The queen of Baiae, and the embodiment of its exclusive, if faintly sleazy, allure, was the eldest of the three Claudian sisters, Clodia Metelli. Her eyes, dark and glittering, had the ox-like appearance that invariably made Roman men go weak at the knees, while her slang set trends for an entire generation. The very name she adopted, a vulgar contraction of the aristocratic ‘Claudia’, reflected a taste for the plebeian that would influence her youngest brother to spectacular effect. To affect a lower-class accent had long been a mark of the popularis politician – Sulla’s enemy Sulpicius, for instance, had been notorious for it – but now, with Clodia, plebeian vowels became the height of fashion.

Naturally, in a society as aristocratic as that of the Republic, it required blue blood to make a trend out of slumming – Clodia, by virtue of marriage as well as breeding, stood at the heart of the Roman establishment. Her husband, Metellus Celer, came from the only family capable of rivalling the prestige and arrogance of the Claudii themselves. Fabulously fecund, the Metelli cropped up everywhere, often on opposing sides. So it was, for instance, that while one of the Metelli loathed Pompey so passionately that he had come within a whisker of attacking the proconsul with a full war fleet, Clodia’s husband spent much of the sixties BC on active service as one of Pompey’s legates. The great lady herself no doubt endured this separation with equanimity. Her primary loyalty was to her own clan. The Claudii, in contrast to the Metelli, had always been famously close; in the case of Clodius and his three sisters, notoriously so.

It was Lucullus, embittered and determined on the ruin of his in-laws, who had first made the rumours of incest public. On his return from the East he had openly accused his wife of sleeping with her brother and divorced her. Clodius’ eldest and dearest sister, who had let him into her bed when he had been a small boy, nervous of night-time fears, inevitably found her own name blackened by such a charge as well. In Rome censoriousness was the mirror-image of a drooling appetite for lurid fantasy. Just as it endlessly thrilled Caesar’s contemporaries to think of him as the bed partner of the King of of Bithynia, so the pleasure that Clodius’ enemies took in the accusations of incest against him never staled. No smoke without fire – and there must have been something unusual about Clodius’ relations with his three sisters to have set tongues wagging. Throughout his career, he was to display a taste for pushing experience to the edge, and so it is perfectly possible that the gossip-mongers knew what they were talking about. Just as plausibly, however, the rumours could have been fuelled by the uses to which Clodia put her status as a society beauty. ‘In the dining room a cock-teaser, in the bedroom an iceblock’:this gallant description of her by a former lover suggests the care with which she exploited her sexual appeal. For any woman, even one of Clodia’s rank, dabbling in politics was a high-wire act. Roman morality did not look kindly on female forwardness. Frigidity was the ultimate marital ideal. It was taken for granted, for instance, that ‘a matron has no need of lascivious squirmings’ – anything more than a rigid, dignified immobility was regarded as the mark of a prostitute. Likewise, a woman whose conversation was witty and free laid herself open to an identical charge. If she then compounded her offences by engaging in political intrigue, she could hardly be regarded as anything other than a monster of depravity. Seen in such a light, the charges of incest against Clodia were hardly surprising. Indeed, they marked her out as a player in the political game.

Misogyny alone, however, savage and unrelenting though it was, does not entirely explain the vehemence of the abuse that society hostesses such as Clodia provoked. Women had no choice but to exert their influence behind the scenes, by stealth, teasing and seducing those they wished to influence, luring them into what moralists were quick to denounce as a feminine world of gossip and sensuality. To the already ferociously nuanced world of male ambition, this added a perilous new complication. The qualities required to take advantage of it were precisely those that had always been most scorned in the Republic. Cicero, not one of life’s natural party animals, listed them in salacious detail: an aptitude for ‘debauchery’, ‘love affairs’, ‘staying up all night to the din of loud music’, ‘sleeping around’ and ‘spending cash to the point of ruin’. The final, clinching disgrace, and the ultimate mark of a dangerous reprobate, was to be a good dancer. In the eyes of traditionalists nothing could be more scandalous. A city that indulged a dance culture was one on the point of catastrophe. Cicero could even claim, with a perfectly straight face, that it had been the ruin of Greece. ‘Back in the old days,’ he thundered, ‘the Greeks used to stamp down on that kind of thing. They recognised the potentialdeadliness of the plague, how it would gradually rot the minds of its citizens with pernicious manias and ideas, and then, all at once, bring about a city’s total collapse.’12 By the standards of that diagnosis, Rome was in peril indeed. To the party set, the mark of a good night out, and the city’s cutting-edge craze, was to become ecstatically drunk and then, to the accompaniment of ‘shouts and screams, the whooping of girls and deafening music’, to strip naked and dance wildly on tables.

Roman politicians had always been divided more by style than by issues of policy. The increasing extravagance of Rome’s party scene served to polarise them even further. Clearly, it was an excruciating embarrassment for traditionalists that so many of their standard-bearers had themselves succumbed to the temptations of luxury: men such as Lucullus and Hortensius were ill-placed to wag the finger at anyone. Even so, the ancient frugalities of the Republic still endured. Indeed, for a new generation of senators, the backdrop of modish excess made them appear more, not less, inspiring. Even as it wallowed in gold, the Senate remained an instinctively conservative body, reluctant to glimpse a true reflection of itself, preferring to imagine itself a model of rectitude still. Politicians able to convince their fellow senators that this was more than just a fantasy might accrue considerable prestige. Sternness and austerity continued to play well.