The Domus, the Garden, and Cicero’s Expression of Iustitia
- Sophie Yang
- Nov 19, 2025
- 15 min read
In three years, Cicero fell from grace and found himself ridiculed and rejected by the Roman aristocracy he had toiled strenuously to become part of. When Clodius burned down his house on the Palatine Hill in 58 BC, the destruction of the symbolic marker of his political reputation dealt a great blow to Cicero’s ego. The following year, he returned from exile and fought to get his house back at public expense, detailed in De Domo Sua. He managed to regain favor in his speeches against Clodius and Clodia through the Pro Caelio in 56 BC, in which he made his infamous invective about Clodia’s misconduct of promiscuous activity in Clodius’s own house. Then, in 55 BC, Cicero retreated to his rustic countryside villa and garden in Tusculum. For Cicero, the shift in setting of De Oratore marked a significant rebrand in the style of his rhetoric. The garden was a symbolic feature of Latin poetry, as outlined by Virgil’s Georgics, and was perceived as an utopic realm of peace and iustitia. He turned to Hellenic philosophy, claiming to have withdrawn from the tumultuous and dubious lifestyle of the Roman politician, and would maintain the persona of the great, freedom-seeking philosopher for the next 20 years of his career. By contrasting his use of the domus setting in these works, it appears to the reader that Cicero seemingly left politics behind in Rome with his symbolic ‘escape’ to Tusculanum. Yet Cicero’s villa on the Palatine, his Tusculanum, and even his use of the domus motif in his invectives against Clodius are grounded in the malleable value of decorum, which Cicero consistently leverages to fashion himself as a hero of old justice—albeit hypocritically.
Decorum in the Upper Class House
The late Republic and early Empire saw the rise of decorative programs which emphasized the conscious integration of decorum and utilitas—the former to a more prominent extent—in “art and architecture” (Leen 241). Decorum, the Roman notion of propriety, was originally applied to aesthetic creations like sculptures and frescoes. Factors such as the work’s patron, the event that instigated its creation, its location, the materials used, and, most importantly, the intent of its creator determined how the work would be perceived (Popkin 289). A defilement or neglect of any factor would be grounds for public scrutiny. By Cicero’s time, decorum had evolved into an indispensable influence in the construction of villas, gardens, statehouses, and more. In the Georgics, Virgil alluded to the domus as a defender of children’s innocence, and it was truly decorous for the domus to be symbolically closed off from the cacophony of worldly matters in politics, business trades, negotium, and war (Vir. Georgics. 2.523-4). Amongst Roman elites, the domus made more than a public statement about the social and political status of its current owner; it also contained and sanctified the memoria of his ancestors. For Cicero, the domus epitomized his performative rhetoric: to “protect” and “immortalize” the iustitia of his Hellenic ancestors while writing himself into alike greatness.
When Clodius drove Cicero to exile in 58 BC, he destroyed Cicero’s home and divided his lot into three parts (See Appendix 1). He used one section to expand the Porticus Catuli in the west, another portion to expand his own house on the east, and in the remaining part he erected a statue of libertas, as if to say to the exiled Cicero, “you are a tyrant” (Allen 2). In exposing and rampaging the private domus, he ceremoniously strips Cicero of decorum. According to Shelly Hales, it was “effectively damnatio of the memoria which Cicero had stored up of his achievements in Rome,” without which he has nothing to prove himself (Hales 46). All these defamations culminated in Cicero’s decision to take Clodius to court upon his return to Rome to regain superiority over his lot and, by extension, his decorum under the watchful eyes of the Roman aristocracy.
In De Domo Sua, Cicero accuses Clodius on several accounts of familial, sexual, and religious impiety. He first brings up Clodius’s scandal at the Bona Dea festival in a letter to Atticus. The celebration prohibited the presence of men, but Clodius snuck into the venue of the ritual by dressing himself in women’s garb, narrowly avoiding capture. Cicero capitalizes on Clodius’s charge of sacrilege (de incesto) and condemns him for feigning piety in destroying Cicero’s house while trespassing another house’s sacred quarters himself. He then attacks Clodius's libertas, which he dramatically ‘reveals’ as a statue of a meretrix, a prostitute, buried in a tomb excavated by Clodius’s brother Appius. To further capitalize Clodius’s fallacy in using the statue to drive Cicero from his house, Cicero points out his sacrilegious violation of deam, the goddess of liberty, with the likeness of a prostitute (Cic. Dom. 112). Therefore, not only does Clodius’s perverted idea of iustitia stain Cicero’s pristine domus with corrupted morals, but Clodius himself has failed to honor the decorum of the house of the dead. Most damningly, in seizing Cicero’s home, Clodius has violated the unspoken code of decorum, for nothing is sanctius, more sacred, or munitius, more protected, quam domus unius cuiusque ciuium, than the home of each citizen (Cic. Dom. 109). Cicero molded the domus into a vessel for his expression iustitia. A breach against the domus’s decorum amounted to a gross overstep of the fundamental elements of iustitia—private, sacred, and embedded in memory. Most notably, iustitia was exclusive. Undoubtedly, Cicero delivered De Domo Sua in a desperate stratagem to save his reputation in Rome, but by basing the crux of his argument on the upper class house, Cicero had constructed a decorum that was both inaccessible and unrelatable to the lower class majority of the Roman public. In accusing Clodius of promiscuous sacrilege, Cicero had neglected to take advantage of the mnemonic quality of his own architecture to make himself a formidable opponent to Clodius, and he failed to preserve his memoria in the heart of the empire.
Despite Cicero’s successful defense of his domus, he still failed to reinvent himself as a hero of justice in the eyes of the aristocracy. Granted, they never viewed him as an equal completely, but despite Cicero’s repeated attempts to brand himself as one of their kind, he could not embed his image among their great monuments. Hales suggests that Cicero himself became aware of this after the events of De Domo Sua, explaining his decision to direct his focus toward permanently etching his image into the Italian countryside. Because Cicero had no ancestral ties and could not sustain his memoria in Rome, he turned to Tusculum, marking his transformation into the freedom-seeking philosopher he aimed to be remembered as (Hales 52). This shift in setting might also allow him to redefine his rhetoric of decorum to appeal to the broad Roman public rather than the specific elite.
Escape to the Gardens
The garden was an utopic space—or so, it claimed. Annette Lucia Giescke writes, “[the] garden has from time immemorial been a part of utopia and the creation of utopian spaces. Raw nature may threaten or it may beckon; it may terrify us or draw us in” (Giescke 13). Unlike the house, which excluded the public, the enclosed garden created a window into the inner workings of the elite that the public could peer into (Jones 794). Retaining the house’s mnemonic quality, a well-decorated garden possessed the ability to call its residents back to the past and color antiquity with an elevated rose tint. It also linked the private world of the owner to the public while maintaining the owner’s dominance over the artificial nature within. Despite this, as Virgil mentions in the Georgics, it remained decorous for the garden to exclude mention of public matters, and even the presence of political actors could corrupt the garden’s reflection of its owner. Just as the garden’s appearance could be cultivated, so could Cicero use it to impersonate the illustrious, freedom-loving Greek philosophers which far preceded his time (Leen 241).
In 56 BC, political tensions began to churn in Rome, providing Cicero with a perfect excuse to pack his bags and shift his focus to the Italian countryside. Unlike his house on the Palatine, Cicero’s Tusculanum was not only more personal but more strategically contrived. I believe that he learned from his failures in Rome to use the domus as an active character in his work rather than just a simple setting, as all the items he selected for his Tusculanum are specific and predetermined (see Appendix 2). His ‘neighborhood’ in Tusculum had two houses which he could mimic: Lucullus’s villa and Crassus’s park, which included a gymnasium and open seating areas reminiscent of the philosophical gardens of Ancient Greece. Under their shadow, Cicero cites his own gymnasium, palaestra (the Academy), and library as the inspiration for what would become one of his greatest philosophical performances to date: De Oratore.
In De Orat.1.28, Cicero fashions his characters’ dialogue in the setting of Plato’s Phaedrus. In Cicero’s fictional recollection, he promenades through the artificial garden, in which Cicero has erected several marble statues of Greek philosophers. In utopic Athenian fashion, the philosophers stand barefoot in the grass. The Romans wear expensive sandals and sit on marble chairs beneath a wide plane tree, listening to the fresh stream and enjoying the noon heat. Scaevola says to Crassus,
“cur non imitamur, Crasse, Socratem illum, qui est in Phaedro Platonis? Nam me haec tua platanus admonuit, quae non minus ad opacandum hunc locum patulis est diffusa ramis, quam illa, cuius umbram secutus est Socrates, quae mihi videtur non tam ipsa acula, quae describitur, quam Platonis oratione crevisse, et quod ille durissimis pedibus fecit, ut se abiceret in herba atque ita [illa], quae philosophi divinitus ferunt esse dicta, loqueretur, id meis pedibus certe concedi est aequius” (Cic. De Orat. 1.28).
“Why should not we, Crassus, imitate Socrates in the Phaedrus of Plato? For this plane-tree of yours has put me in mind of it, which diffuses its spreading boughs to overshade this place, not less widely than that did whose cover Socrates sought, and which seems to me to have grown not so much from the rivulet which is described, as from the language of Plato: and what Socrates, with the hardest of feet, used to do, that is, to throw himself on the grass, while he delivered those sentiments which philosophers say were uttered divinely, may surely, with more justice, be allowed to my feet.”
By crafting a stage that empowers him to “communicate” with Hellenic cultures, Cicero’s new model of iustitia uses the touchstone of mos maiorum, the way of the ancestors to “deny that [Rome’s] laws and statutes are necessarily just” and, in doing so, fashion himself an entity above the state’s constitution—ironically, the same moral crime he convicted Clodius of (Smethurst 117). He describes Greek art with Greek terms, looks for Greek aesthetics, surrounds himself with Greek literature, and leaves the “real world” behind. He not only walks among the great philosophers of the past—he literally writes himself into the antiquity which he presents to his contemporary audience as the pinnacle of philosophical enlightenment. According to Woldemar Gorler, the intentional positioning of the plane-tree beckons the reader to remember the same scene from Plato’s Phaedrus. The tree was an important feature of the garden; it was thought to have similar mnemonic abilities as the rest of the domus, and more robust trees equated to loftier social, religious, and political authority (van der Blom 384). On one hand, the Platonian plane-tree exemplified the expansive philosophical definition of justice which Cicero hoped to epitomize; on the other, he could use it to propel himself back into the scene of politics, having ceremoniously “regained” his stolen political authority from Clodius (see Appendix 3).
However, Cicero’s display of bringing Crassus and Catulus into his Tusculanum seems counterintuitive to the purpose of the garden, which was to create an utopic pocket abolishing the buzz of aristocratic politics (see Appendix 4). In De Orat. 2.12, Cicero makes Crassus and Catulus engage in a piece of socratic dialogue over the morality of Crassus’s habit of hoarding Greek artifacts in his garden. Catulus suggests that they should continue their formal debates in Crassus’s garden, to which Crassus fervently opposes. He believes that his artificial gardens should be used for a higher level of intellectualism, one which concerns itself with the divine and godlike maiores rather than one which concerns itself with earthly disputations. In his spiel about the pursuit of true knowledge, Cicero spins Crassus into a Socratic hero. Because Crassus is only a character in Cicero’s play, everything that he says can be read as Cicero’s own words as well. Thus, Cicero indirectly fashions himself into a Socratic hero superior to the codes of law, furthering his metaphysical narrative of iustitia.
Cicero was intentional in choosing to copy Plato and Socrates. Plato’s philosophy emphasized the pursuit of “ideal forms,” and Socrates stressed commitment to virtue. In writing himself in the image of Platonian and Socratic heroes, Cicero maintains this message for his audience in Rome: he is virtuous, wise, and the ideal man. Certainly, the laws of politics and business were far beneath his domain of consideration. Yet, although he displays himself as a philosopher by trade and not an orator, the reality is opposite.
Despite his critiques of Clodius, Cicero himself violated decorum by inviting guests into his garden for politically-driven motivations. As Anne Leen writes, “Like all Roman politicians, he always had one foot in the forum. Therefore, in the search for the private world in antiquity, here as elsewhere one is led ineluctably to conclude that while the country villa may have been a refuge for the weary orator and politician, it was not meant to provide a purely private existence” (Leen 244). The man who chose to lead a career in the public matters of ancient Rome "forfeited his right to privacy or, to put it more accurately, may never have felt he had a claim to any” (244). Leen corroborates my critique of Cicero’s hypocrisy: the romanticization of the artificial garden as an apolitical utopia of justice is at best the aristocracy’s way of turning a deaf ear to the struggles of the majority.
Let us take a look at one of the most decorated rustic poems of Cicero’s time: Virgil’s Georgics. The word iustitia appears once in book 2 of the Georgics, only to promptly leave (Vir. Georgics. 2.474). Iustitia is never brought up again, though the concept of it haunts the remainder of the poem. Andrew J. Horne argues that Virgil’s Georgics should be read as a poem about absent justice where the farmer attempts to create a semblance of justice through his daily labor (Horne 106). Virgil implicitly references iustitia in 2.505-513:
hic petit excidiis urbem miserosque penatis,
ut gemma bibat et Sarrano dormiat ostro;
condit opes alius defossoque incubat auro;
…gaudent perfusi sanguine fratrum,
exsilioque domos et dulcia limina mutant
atque alio patriam quaerunt sub sole iacentem.
agricola incuruo terram dimouit aratro.
hic anni labor, hinc patriam paruosque nepotes
sustinet, hinc armenta boum meritosque iuuencos (Vir. Geo. 2.505-13).
This man seeks the city and its wretched houses to ruins, with the result that he might drink from a golden cup and sleep on Tyrian purple; another heaps up riches and broods on buried gold...they, spilling over, are pleased by the blood of their brothers, and change their domus and sweet doorways for exile and seek a country lying under a foreign sun. The farmer split his land with a crooked plough: this is his labor of the year, here, he sustains his country and his little grandchildren, here he sustains his herds of bulls and their deserving youth.
Virgil juxtaposes the inequalities of wealth, the slaughtering of cattle, political corruption, and warfare with the labor of the farmer. At first glance, he implicitly establishes the farmer’s land as an exceptional mnemonic space within a wholly unjust land—an idyllic illusion that Cicero attempts to reconstruct in De Oratore. Then, Virgil immediately displaces this fairy-tale, as the people who constitute the displaced Romans in the countryside are bloodthirsty politicians seeking to flee the consequences of their corruption. They place themselves in voluntary exile to venture into a new domus and begin the patriotic cycle of destruction again under a foreign sun. The motivation for the cityman’s self-inflicted exile parallels Cicero’s retreat to Tusculanum; they each seek refuge in new land to further their own political and social ambitions. Beyond book 2, the farmer’s sickles melt into swords (for not even farming is exempt from war), the iustissima tellus, most just earth, is undermined six times, a river is unjust to the soil, the air is unjust to the birds, the earth is “unconsenting,” and the farmer is brought off balance because of the weight of his tools (1.221-24). The earth itself, the symbolic origin of Cicero’s heralded natural laws and ideal forms, refutes his attempts to till and control. Indeed, there exists one instance in 4.116-448 in which Virgil explicitly makes the point that injustice exists, regardless of the farmer’s efforts, through the imagery of a garden (see Appendix 5). The garden, representing the ideal world for which the farmer strives to cultivate, is written as a fleeting memory. The ideal of old justice that the farmer strives for is fair only to himself, and if it were to be forced upon the masses, it would become an injustice upon the broader world. Cicero’s world is already unjust, and no amount of self-cultivation can overturn this absolute truth.
Conclusion
Reconsidering De Oratore with this sentiment, Cicero’s down-to-earth facade as a freedom-seeking philosopher is undermined. For all his critiques of Clodius’s violation of decorum, Cicero himself has failed to comply with decorum in bringing corrupt public matters into his artificial garden of iustitia—a iustitia which exists not for the public good but for his personal gain. His hypocrisy was no less justified than that which he condemned Clodius of. In De Domo Sua, Cicero insisted on an ideal Rome where politics stayed out of the sacred privacy of the domus. Unfortunately, he failed to paint a persuasive picture of his home—the essence of his political identity in Rome—and could not sustain his presence in the Republic’s urban center. Yet, even after engineering a false utopia in the Italian countryside, Cicero’s expression of decorum and iustitia never fully veered toward promoting the greater good. Although Cicero’s private world had a Greek aesthetic, it was not to resurrect lost Athenian ideals but to foster Roman reality and his political identity. As Anne Leen wrote, Cicero truly did have “one foot in the forum” at all times (Leen 241). Politics never left his pen.
Appendix
If one were to look up from the Forum, one would be forced to directly gaze upon the emblem of Cicero's material success; in turn, Cicero would look down upon his “children” in the forum. Cicero had gone into debt buying this house from Crassus at the end of his consulship, under the hopeful assumption that it would solidify his social and political initiation into the aristocracy. Despite embedding himself into the “heart of old-guard Rome,” his new neighbors nevertheless viewed him with skepticism, thinking that he made a pretentious show of buying his house. In expanding Cicero’s house to the Porticus Catuli, Clodius places Cicero in the same position as M. Flavus Flaccus, who had once owned a house on the same site and was executed as a traitor to the Republic (Allen 2).
Tusculum was essentially the Newport or Cape Cod of Italy. It was a vacation hotspot for many of Rome’s big name politicians during their temporary escapades from the political scene. Paradoxically, by escaping politics just to end up in the same countryside neighborhood as the same guys who would’ve surrounded him in Rome, the symbolic act of moving to the countryside loses its significance. But, I digress.
van der Blom elaborates more on the significance of trees in Roman literary gardens. Cicero recognizes the significance of trees in De Domo Sua 62, in which he writes, “[even] in your judgement I was a citizen untainted, when my house on the Palatine and my villa at Tusculum were being made over one to each of the two consuls, when the marble columns were being taken down from my apartments and handed over to the consul’s mother-in-law, while to the consul’s estate adjoining were transferred not merely the furniture or ornaments of the villa, but even the very trees, while the villa itself was razed to the foundations as a sacrifice not to the greed of booty—for what did it amount to as booty?---but to merciless hatred. My house on the Palatine was ablaze, by no mere accident, but by deliberate arson.” In mentioning his trees among his most treasured possessions being taken, Cicero’s greater narrative about his enemies forcing him and the res publica into exile so that they could destroy everything left behind is fulfilled. The pilfering of his trees was in itself a conquest and overthrow of Cicero the tyrant, as much as Pompey’s conquest of the ebony trees in his garden was a statement of Pompey’s political character. Furthermore, the trees could help Gabinius build up a luxurious or intellectual atmosphere in his villa. His trees were captive; thus, Clodius and Gabinius had control over Cicero.
In my opinion, one of the more pretentious things a self-proclaimed ‘philosopher’ can do.
The passage is an excursus on gardens (Vir. Geo. 4.116–448), in which Virgil recalls a gardener he once knew at Tarentum. The gardener who keeps bees and cultivates his own food represents the ideal towards which all farmers strive. He has achieved a reliable form of justice for himself, for the “riches of his mind…equaled the riches of kings (4.132). The term aequabat (equals) reminds us of fairness, and Virgil reinforces this implication by presenting the scene as memini (4.125). He frames the passage as a formal exception to the reality of the situation. What the gardener has achieved is only a memory of justice—“a special exception within the unjust order.” Still, the gardener’s justice has no effect on anyone but himself, and Virgil emphasizes how unsatisfactory a justice like that is. Verum haec ipse equidem spatiis exclusus iniquis / praetereo atque aliis post me memoranda relinquo, ‘but I pass over these things,” he says, “prevented by unfair space, and I leave them to others to tell after me” (4.147-148).
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