Publius Clodius Pulcher
Roman politician and street agitator (93–52 BC)
Publius Clodius Pulcher (c. 92 – 18 January 52 BC) was a Roman politician and demagogue. A noted opponent of Cicero, he was responsible during his plebeian tribunate in 58 BC for a massive expansion of the Roman grain dole as well as Cicero's exile from the city. Leader of one of the political mobs in the 50s, his political tactics – combining connections throughout the oligarchy with mass support from the poor plebs – made him a central player in the politics of the era.
Born to the influential patrician gens Claudia, he was embroiled early in his political career in a religious scandal which saw him develop a rivalry with the orator Cicero and become a plebeian in order to be eligible for the plebeian tribunate. He successfully stood as tribune of the plebs for 58 BC and passed six laws to restore Rome's collegia (private guilds and fraternities), expand the grain dole (making it free rather than subsidised while also using those collegia as means for distribution), annex Cyprus to pay for the dole, clarify augural law on religious obstruction, make it more difficult for the censors to expel senators from the senate, and exile Cicero for the unlawful execution of conspirators during the Catilinarian conspiracy.
When curule aedile in 56 BC, he feuded with and attempted to prosecute his political enemy, Titus Annius Milo, who controlled a rival set of urban mobs. Starting the year an opponent of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, he and his family reconciled with them to form a political alliance. A few years later in 52 BC, amid renewed political violence and a campaign for the praetorship, Milo and Clodius encountered each other on the via Appia outside Rome, where Clodius was killed. His body, brought back to Rome, was brought to the forum and then cremated in the senate house, causing its destruction by fire.
His politics were advanced largely by his cultivation of urban mobs in Rome which, by exercising violent control of the places where the republic operated, furthered his political objectives.
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