Pompeia and religious scandal · 庞培娅与宗教丑闻
reported-in-source
Suetonius reports that Caesar married Pompeia and later divorced her amid the Clodius scandal.
Evidence limit: The report of suspicion does not establish the alleged sexual act as fact.
suet 6
Suetonius. The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. Thomson, Alexander, M.D, translator; Reed, J.E., editor. Philadelphia: Gebbie, 1883.
urn:cts:latinLit:phi1348.abo011.perseus-eng2:6
During his quaestorship he pronounced funeral orations from the rostra, according to custom, in praise of his aunt Julia, and his wife Cornelia. In the panegyric on his aunt, he gives the following account of her own and his father's genealogy, on both sides: My aunt Julia derived her descent, by the mother, from a race of kings, and by her father, from the Immortal Gods. For the Marcii Reges, her mother's family, deduce their pedigree from Ancus Marcius, and the Julii, her father's, from Venus; of which stock we are a branch. We therefore unite in our descent the sacred majesty of kings, the chiefest among men, and the divine majesty of Gods, to whom kings themselves are subject. To supply the place of Cornelia, he married Pompeia, the daughter of Quintus Pompeius, and grand-daughter of Lucius Sylla; but he afterwards divorced her, upon suspicion of her having been debauched by Publius Clodius. For so current was the report, that Clodius had found access to her disguised as a woman, during the celebration of a religious solemnity, that the senate instituted an inquiry respecting the profanation of the sacred rites.
Edition note
Rex, it will be easily understood, was not a title of dignity in a Roman family, but the surname of the Marcii.
Edition note
The rites of the Bona Dea, called also Fauna, which were performed in the night, and by women only.
Context before
urn:cts:latinLit:phi1348.abo011.perseus-eng2:5
Having been elected military tribune, the first honour he received from the suffrages of the people after his return to Rome, he zealously assisted those who took measures for restoring the tribunitian authority, which had been greatly diminished during the usurpation of Sylla. He likewise, by an act, which Plotius at his suggestion propounded to the people, obtained the recall of Lucius Cinna, his wife's brother, and others with him, who having been the adherents of Lepidus in the civil disturbances, had after that consul's death fled to Sertorius; which law he supported by a speech.
Context after
urn:cts:latinLit:phi1348.abo011.perseus-eng2:7
Farther-Spain fell to his lot as quaestor; when there, as he was going the circuit of the province, by commission from the praetor, for the administration of justice, and had reached Gades, seeing a statue of Alexander the Great in the temple of Hercules, he sighed deeply, as if weary of his sluggish life, for having performed no memorable actions at an age at which Alexander had already conquered the world. He, therefore, immediately sued for his discharge, with the view of embracing the first opportunity, which might present itself in The City, of entering upon a more exalted career. In the stillness of the night following, he dreamt that he lay with his own mother; but his confusion was relieved, and his hopes were raised to the highest pitch, by the interpreters of his dream, who expounded it as an omen that he should possess universal empire; for that the mother who in his sleep he had found submissive to his embraces, was no other than the earth, the common parent of all mankind.