When one cheek of Antony's wife Fulvia was more swollen than the other (altera bucca inflatior erat),Footnote ¹ Sextus Clodius, a notoriously sharp-tongued rhetorician in Antony's entourage, offered a witticism that was edgy enough to prompt Suetonius’ comment that it gained rather than lost the man favour with Antony (nec eo minus, immo uel magis ob hoc Antonio gratus).Footnote ²

Wordplay was probably involved (though we shall later present another option) and no literal translation of these five words is likely to convey the quip's multiple potential meanings. In 1909 Thomas Forester, availing himself of the double meaning then current in the word ‘style’ (as both pen and composition), offered:

That undoubtedly catches one of the wordplays Clodius had in mind, though it cannot capture the polysemy of tentare. John Rolfe offered: ‘he … said: “[Fulvia] tempts the point of my pen”’;Footnote ⁵ Francesco Della Corte: ‘disse che [Fulvia] tentava l'acutezza dello stile’;Footnote ⁶ Marie-Claude Vacher: ‘il dit qu'elle tentait la pointe du stylet’;Footnote ⁷ Robert Kaster: ‘he … said that … Fulvia was “testing the point of his pen”’;Footnote ⁸ Judith Hallett: ‘he said that … Fulvia … provokes the point of a pen’;Footnote ⁹ and Gesine Manuwald: ‘he said that [Fulvia] tempted the point of the pen’.Footnote ¹⁰ Most versions will carry an embedded interpretation of one meaning and require an exegetical elaboration.Footnote ¹¹

Fulvia is clearly the subject of the auxiliary clause, though the translations of Thomson, Rolfe, Hallett and Manuwald tend to objectify her, making her role an inactive one; Kaster's is appropriately ambiguous (and the Italian and French versions allow for the same ambiguity). It is as likely that her role was active; that, in the action described in Clodius’ initial bon mot (which may be construed as: Fuluia acumen stili tentat), she was the agent. Options for interpretation and authorial intent are rehearsed by Kaster (and those interpretations, Kaster's excepted, usually assign passivity to Fulvia). Most scholars have discerned a double meaning, one of the meanings being that Clodius was tempted to pen a sharp epigram regarding Fulvia (and her condition), a project that had been virtually effected by the apophthegm's delivery. Some have suggested that Clodius’ primary professed temptation was to ‘lance’ her cheek with his stylus, a disingenuous avowal of pseudo-medical concern.Footnote ¹²

This, however, is to overlook the most likely meaning of tentare—not ‘to tempt’ but ‘to investigate in an exploratory fashion’, ‘to feel’, ‘to test’ (as Kaster has it).Footnote ¹³ If we see Fulvia as the agent of the action described, the literal meaning will probably have been caught in the explanation proffered by Kaster: ‘because of her slight deformity, Fulvia looked as though she were perpetually poised “to test a stilus’ point” by touching it against her puffed-out cheek … to make certain it was sharp enough to inscribe a clear line on a waxed writing-tablet’.Footnote ¹⁴ That is to say, Clodius’ allusion was to an everyday practice, routinely observed amongst the literate elite. For the practice of testing the edge or point of a sharp metal object in this fashion, a parallel is provided by Petronius’ Satyricon (70.3) where Trimalchio brags of his possession of a set of sharp iron knives from Noricum, inviting his guests to test them against their cheeks (ad buccam).Footnote ¹⁵ The boast is gauche; and the testing vulgar;Footnote ¹⁶ the point remains (no pun initially intended).Footnote ¹⁷

The reference to such a quotidian gesture was amusing but hardly daring. Wordplay, if wordplay was intended, would have possibly lain in the aforementioned different meanings of tentare; while Fulvia tested the acuity of the stylus, she might have tempted some action from Clodius such as, to reiterate, a sharply derisive composition (a fait accompli) or a surgical procedure. With regard to the ‘temptation’, the first option constitutes a relatively gentle exercise in irreverence; the second, at worst, signals an inappropriate forwardness on the part of the epigrammatist. This is plausible, but it also relies on a significant absence. The translations of Della Corte, Vacher, Hallett and Manuwald remove explicit tenure of the stilus in question from Clodius, tacitly underlining the obvious omission of any pronoun in the fragment as transmitted. Who owned and/or wielded the instrument? Kaster's interpretation of the action described implicitly allows that the stilus could be Fulvia's—though he does not follow through on that in his translation. But surely Clodius’ insinuation was that Fulvia looked as if she was testing the point of her own stylus.

The ‘wit’ may have lain not in wordplay but in a suggestive allusion—and one that was truly audacious. The stylus might serve as a weapon (and not exclusively in its ability to inflict the wounds of libel); the mental association with grievous (sometimes lethal) bodily harm was well established.Footnote ¹⁸ There was also, of course, a far more specific association; it was alleged in some quarters that, after Cicero's murder on December 7th, 43 b.c.e., Fulvia, who nursed her own grievances against the man, his pen and his tongue,Footnote ¹⁹ had the severed head (duly to be displayed upon the rostra) brought to her so that she might ill-treat it in a grotesque fashion. Most ancient authors do not mention this grisly action on her part,Footnote ²⁰ but Cassius Dio (47.8.4) reports it as though fact, writing that Fulvia took the severed head in her hands, abused it and spat upon it, before taking it upon her knee, opening the mouth, pulling out the tongue and piercing it. Zonaras’s Epitome (10.17) rehearses the same. The Suda (s.v. ‘Fulvia’ [1594 Adler]) also registers the item, in language which suggests that the lexicographer followed the same source. Ditto, John of Antioch.Footnote ²¹ The image is one of the most macabre of the triumviral period. If that story circulated at the time, Clodius’ apparently casual observation that Fulvia looked as if she was testing the tip of her stilus may well have drawn a sharp intake of breath from his auditors. An offhand acknowledgement of such allegations would have indeed been shocking.

Two apparent obstacles to the foregoing interpretation may be easily addressed. The allegation, as it surfaced in Dio, has Fulvia using hairpins to puncture Cicero's tongue.Footnote ²² The Suda and John of Antioch offer the same detail (a single pin sufficing); but the strikingly similar vocabulary in all versions indicates that these reiterations derive from the same source rather than from an independent tradition.Footnote ²³ They repeat rather than confirm this version of the story; they may represent the only version that survived in the literary tradition, but that need not have been the only one in circulation.Footnote ²⁴ If the story had been transmitted (if not generated) by way of public gossip-mongering (let us imagine the whispered rumores subrostranorum—the tale-telling of those who lounged around the rostra), it was vulnerable to the distorting embroideries and cumulative variations that are a hallmark of such a medium.Footnote ²⁵ The precise details were elastic. It may be suspected that the ‘urban myth’, as transmitted to us, had ‘domesticized’—with deliberate incongruity—the transgressive act.Footnote ²⁶

The second possible objection concerns chronology. Suetonius’ very brief (and sketchy) profile of Sextus Clodius indicates that the scurrilous witticism in which we are interested here preceded a large benefaction that the inappropriately amused Antony made to Clodius ‘when he was presently consul (mox consule)’: an extravagant gift of land in Sicily which Cicero denounced in the Second Philippic (42–3).Footnote ²⁷ Both the implicit placement of the dictum prior to Antony's consulship (in 44) and Cicero's excoriation of the donative would locate the episode before Fulvia's alleged mistreatment of Cicero's head in December 43. Plainly, with mox, Suetonius had attempted to introduce a relative chronology to his sequence of items (and, if we were to accept this chronology as well informed, we would need consequently to ‘explain away’ his introduction of Fulvia as the wife of the triumuir as momentarily abandoning that chronological framework for the purposes of easy identification). Is, however, the chronological indicator a reliable one? If Kaster's persuasive reconstruction of Suetonius’ research methods in the De grammaticis et rhetoribus (offered independently of the present argument) is correct,Footnote ²⁸ we shall envisage Suetonius compiling evidence from scratch from ‘primary sources’—with no pre-existing authoritative scholarly tradition upon which to rely. This resulted in the patchy presentation of anecdotes, often in the form of dicta. Many of the more general statements—the characterizations, for example, in the lemmata—may have been extrapolated from those items which may have been found by Suetonius without any precise historical context.Footnote ²⁹ More to the point, Kaster is inclined to dismiss Suetonius’ attempt to impose a chronological framework on this uneven material.Footnote ³⁰ The joke at Fulvia's expense might well, therefore, have been made after the execution of Cicero in December 43.

We suggest that Sextus Clodius, observing Fulvia's inflated cheek, remarked that she looked as if she were in the act of testing the sharpness of her stylus. Wordplay aside, the breath-taking allusion was to the allegations of Fulvia's mistreatment of Cicero's severed head. The humour was dark.