Elisabeth Begemann presents a working paper on ‚The Dancing Deity: Diminishing the Goddess Libertas on the Palatine‘

In the Speech for His House (de domo sua), Cicero needs to persuade his audience that the shrine erected by his adversary, Clodius, was not a public cult site or any cult site at all, in order for it to be removed and his house returned to him. One of the means in which he attempts to do this is by suggesting that no cult beyond a personal Clodian cult ever took place here. As focus of this cult, he suggests the image of courtesan stolen from a gravesite in Tanagra. The allusion is suggestive: Tanagra became famous in the 19th century when small clay figurines of women and goddesses were unearthed from Hellenistic graves. These figures showed richly dressed and painted women in a variety of poses, their dress clinging to their bodies, seated or dancing. As Maik Patzelt demonstrated, Clodius dedicated the shrine to Libertas by employing a three-step dancing figure, known from other cultic contexts. By connecting Clodius’ dancing dedication with the figure of a dancing deity, he connects the two in the minds of his listeners. Moreover, by suggesting that Clodius’ Libertas was not only “just” a personal deity, but her statue stolen from the grave of a prostitute, he diminishes the supposed deity in the mind of his listeners by making her unacceptable on multiple levels: social (as a prostitute), legal (as a stolen item) and religious (as coming from a grave, thus tainted with death).