Pro milone

Abstract

One of Cicero’s most famous cases, the defence of T. Annius Milo, allows us to study a very interesting situation where Cicero wrote a model speech after he lost the actual case. Milo was accused of murdering his political arch-enemy, P. Clodius Pulcher, in what seemed to be an accidental meeting of their travelling parties on a road outside Rome. The death of Clodius led to a crisis in the capital with public unrest, so Cicero’s argument had to take into account evidence highly damaging to the defendant, several volatile circumstances and the generally hostile atmosphere in which the delivery took place. The first part of Cicero’s strategy creates a framework which provides reasons for acquittal based on legal self-defence, a pre-emptive move to secure a positive outcome of the trial in case the refutation of counter-evidence failed. The second part of the strategy makes an elaborate, yet manipulative contrast of the facts and probabilities on both sides to show that it was originally Clodius who intended to lay a trap for Milo.