I'm John Batchel 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 the 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 encountered 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 Caterline,

and then has Cicero exiled under this law retroactively, and then

...