Clodia Metelli has gone down in history as one of the great femmes fatales of ancient Rome. Cicero shuddered at her ‘confident airs’ and intense ‘oxen eyes’ and jibed at her fondness for holidaying in Baiae. For thousands of years, writers have found her in ‘Lesbia’, the deliciously cosmopolitan lover of Catullus. ‘Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred/Then another thousand,’ the poet demanded of his mistress, before decrying her low tastes in (other) men. It was to Catullus that she supposedly philosophised, ‘What a lady says to a lover in the moment/Ought to be written on the wind and running water.’

It comes as a surprise, therefore, that Catullus barely figures in this biography of the matriarch. Douglas Boin, an academic at Saint Louis University, does not only doubt that Clodia Metelli lies behind the pseudonymous Lesbia, but goes so far as to dismiss the association in the space of two paragraphs. 

The established facts of Clodia’s life could fill the circumference of a coaster. She was born in or around 95 BC into a patrician family, the Claudii, that had lent its name to major artillery roads and an aqueduct in Rome. She had three brothers – Appius, Gaius and Publius