I'm John Batchell with Emma Southern, her witty and extremely helpful new book,

A Rome of One's Own, the Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire.

Just when you thought Rome was 2,000 years ago, here comes Claudia and Cicero.

Cicero is a talker. He is a gifted man from outside of Rome. He's a climber. He is not one of the hundred families, or however many there are now

claiming to be patricians, the founders of Rome. And yet he has a golden tongue. He also has enemies. And one of them

is Claudia's brother. Emma, this is the best version of Cicero I've ever can encounter. Because I've

always seen him as a victim of the ambitions of men such as Caesar and Catalina and all of the

pretenders who wanted to be the boss, the king, the leader. But his dispute with Claudia's brother,

what is it based on? Why does he fall out with that family?

They are friends to begin with, but they fall out because

Claudius commits a crime where he breaks into Julius Caesar's house while his wife is holding a religious festival just as a woman.

His defence, when he is caught doing this, is that he can't possibly have done it because he was

out of the country at the time. He was not in Rome. And Cicero comes forward and says,

yes, you were in Rome because I saw you on that day. And this starts a

feud between the two of them. Eventually, in order to get revenge, Claudius has himself,

he changes his name to Claudius, has himself adopted by a plebeian family so he can take a

position that he's not really allowed to have within the government and passes a law which is

specifically aimed at Cicero, which makes it illegal to execute people without a trial for a

consul to do that, which is something that Cicero had done during his consulship to Cataline,

and then has Cicero exiled under this law retroactively, and then burns his house down.

And so Claudius' sister is Claudia. These names can't run together. There were three daughters named Claudia,

and we have to remind ourselves,

...