Jayne, Gail, Tim, and all who might be interested,
you can get a running start by looking at the Wikipedia article [
here] on Publius Clodius Pulcher, which at least as of 28 April 2012, exhibits the strong hand of Professor T P Wiseman at Exeter University, especially so in the sections following the heading entitled "Beginnings and Rise." Regardless of whether Publius Clodius was an "innovative urban politician" or not, almost everything we know about his actions (even the totally free wheat giveaway) indicates that he was at best a borderline madman who was consumed by jealousy and vicious besides. At times, Publius seems to have been completely nuts, retaining the one anchor to reality of keeping his corner of Roman mob democracy (that's what it was) attached to him by any method he could contrive. The gold standard for demagogue and thugmeister, and possibly poisoner. Of course, he was a protégé of the much smoother and far smarter and more stable demagogue Julius Caesar, who (along with Caesar's friends) used Publius like a throw-away attack dog. Eventually, Publius wound up as road-kill, and his muscle boys caused several days of serious rioting and general destruction across Rome after their capo, Publius, got whacked by another capo, Milo.
The Roman Republic lasted a long, long, long time, but at the end, overpopulation, a creaky legislature, the incredibly slow communication they had in those days, and a lack of historical perspective that could have been gained from studying how other more or less democratic oligarchies ruptured into dictatorships, these things led to urban mob wars (forget about the civil wars) like those of Germany in the twenties and early thirties, and Rome eventually got Octavian and his crew of Livia's descendants.
But that's largely beside the point here. Publius had a strange walk-on part to play in the history of the Catullus manuscripts, only one of which survived the Middle Ages intact.