This is John Batchzer, conversation with Douglas Boyne, his new book, Clodia, about the richest woman in

Caesar's time in Rome, who was persecuted, prosecuted, humiliated, attacked by the most famous

lawyer of Caesar's time, Cicero, in the Roman Senate, and why? And when did it happen? And what did it mean

about the end of the Republic and the beginning of the empire? The people from Shakespeare's plays

about Julius Caesar and Cleopatra and the Roman Empire are all in this drama, but this is the

history of it.

Cicero was obsessed with Claudia.

Who was she?

Why was he obsessed?

Who was Cicero?

To carry a grudge into a prosecution of a woman who was very, very wealthy.

Douglas gives us the story of what we know and mentions the pieces we don't have.

Claudia, richest woman in Rome, the time of Caesar and the revolution and the civil war and the rise of the empire. Much more of this tonight. We really don't. And it's hard to, it's hard to admit that we really don't.

Plutarch, who was writing much later and, you know, always has the colorful vignettes that we

expect to find in a Shakespearean play, says that, you know, he was obsessed with her in a kind of romantic way.

And there's just no, no, nothing we can use to document that.

But he does seem to have taken quite an interest in her, even at the, her husband's inauguration.

We get the first inclination.

We get the first real hint from Cicero's letters that she's gotten under his skin. He says, I can't stand the confident heirs of that woman.

And he won't even say her name. And this is how she enters the history books as a third person,

an unnamed third person that one of her peers

can't even, whose name a peer can't even say out loud. So something about her antagonized

...