Cicero
For Marcus Caelius — the trial that became a character assassination
Pro M. Caelio · Delivered in April 56 BCE, at the Ludi Megalenses, before a court sitting through a public holiday.
A young man is on trial for political violence and attempted poisoning. Cicero barely addresses the charges. Instead he goes after the prosecution's chief witness — Clodia, a widow of the highest family — and spends the speech making her the defendant: her parties, her gardens on the Tiber, her lovers, her brother. He won.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Charles Duke Yonge (1812-1891) translated the whole of Cicero for Bohn's Classical Library, and his subtitle — 'literally translated' — is a fair warning. The English follows the Latin closely, which preserves the structure of the argument and loses much of the speed: Cicero's short devastating clauses become fuller English sentences, and the jokes tend to arrive explained rather than delivered. It is reliable rather than lively, and the ratio shows it, with the English running about twice the Latin. Yonge is also a Victorian handling a speech about a woman's sexual reputation, and he softens: where the Latin is coarse or direct about Clodia the English goes decorous, so the reader should assume the original is harsher than what they are reading.