Clodia Metelli (born c. 97 BCE) was one of three sisters, all Clodias, born into the powerful and influential gens Claudia, identified by the addition of their husband's name (see names). She is numbered among the elite "new" women of the late Republic (notably Sempronia, Fulvia, Julia); educated, wealthy, freely in the public eye, they are portrayed in contemporary prose texts as negative exempla for their rejection of the confining role of the materfamilias. Clodia married her cousin, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer (consul 60 BCE); after his suspicious death in 59 she never remarried. Scholars question whether historic women created the template of the imperious beloved of elegiac love poetry (as Clodia is claimed to be Catullus' Lesbia) or were influenced by it (as Augustus' daughter Julia may have been by Ovid's poetry). In this passage from Cicero's oration for the defense, Pro Caelio (April 3-4, 56 BCE), Clodia's distinguished ancestor Appius Claudius Caecus reprimands her for being an unmarried widow in her 30's, living alone without male supervision and notorious for conduct that compromised the family name. After 56 BCE Clodia disappeared from the public record.
That the portrait Cicero paints of Clodia in this speech is a caricature, calculated to appeal to jurors' prejudices and win Caelius's acquittal, is evidenced by the very different Clodia he describes in his letters: see M. Skinner's article (1983); for the stereotype of Clodia as poisoner, see F. Santoro L'hoir, "The Adulteress-Poisoner in Cicero and Tacitus" in Dickison & Hallett (2000) in Bibliography.