Clodia (born Claudia, c. 95 or 94 BC),^[1] nicknamed Quadrantaria ("Quarter", from quadrantarius, the price of a visit to the public baths), Nola ("The Unwilling", from the verb nolo, in sarcastic reference to her alleged wantonness), Medea Palatina ("Medea of the Palatine") by Cicero (see below), and occasionally referred to in scholarship as Clodia Metelli^[2][3][4] ("Metellus's Clodia"),^{[lower-roman 1]} was one of three known daughters of the ancient Roman patrician Appius Claudius Pulcher.

Like many other women of the Roman elite, Clodia was very well educated in Greek and philosophy, with a special talent for writing poetry.^[2] Her life, which was characterized by perpetual scandal, is immortalized in the writings of Marcus Tullius Cicero and, it is generally believed, in the poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus.^[5]

The poet Catullus wrote several love poems about a frequently unfaithful woman he called Lesbia, identified in the mid-second century AD by the writer Apuleius (Apologia 10) as a "Clodia". This practice of replacing actual names with ones of identical metrical value was frequent in Latin poetry of that era. In modern times, the resulting identification of Lesbia with Clodia Metelli, based largely on her portrayal by Cicero, is usually treated as accepted fact, despite occasional challenges.^[12]

The predominant view, however, identifies Clodia with Lesbia primarily on the basis of Catullus 79.1-2:^[13]

Lesbius is beautiful. Why not? And Lesbia prefers him
to you and your whole tribe, Catullus.
But let this beautiful man sell Catullus along with his tribe
if he finds three kisses from people he knows.

"Pulcher", the Latin word for "beautiful" (see line 1 above), is also the cognomen of Clodia's brother, Publius Clodius Pulcher. This is the only one of Catullus' poems in which a character named "Lesbius", the masculine form of the name, appears and Lesbia is present in close proximity. Accusations of incest (as here) against the brother and sister also appear in Cicero.^[14] Reading Publius Clodius Pulcher for "Lesbius" makes one element of the poem a pun on his name and another a reminder of one of the political attacks Cicero aimed at P. Clodius Pulcher.

• Clodia makes several appearances in the Roma Sub Rosa series of historical mystery novels by the American author Steven Saylor.
• Clodia plays a significant role in several books of the SPQR series by John Maddox Roberts.
• Clodia also plays a significant role in the novel Lustrum (Conspirata in the US) by Robert Harris, the second book in a trilogy about the life of Cicero. She makes a final appearance in the third book, Dictator, where Cicero shames her into obscurity as retribution for her actions against his wife, Terentia.
• Clodia is a central character in the novel Clodia by Robert DeMaria.
• Clodia plays a role in the Ides of March, an epistolary novel by Thornton Wilder covering the events leading to the assassination of Julius Caesar. The author describes Clodia's relationship with Catullus and suggests that Clodia's scandalous lifestyle is inspired by anger at the perceived hypocrisy of her upbringing and by being abused as a child.
• Historical Consultant Jonathan Stamp of the HBO/BBC series Rome identifies Clodia as the primary basis for the character of Atia of the Julii as little detail is known of the historical Atia.^[15]
• Clodia and Catullus are the main characters in Counting the Stars, a novel by Helen Dunmore.

• Women in ancient Rome