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In his speech On the Response of the Haruspices, Cicero refers to Clodius as “such intractable villainy, such monstrous effrontery from a young madman, a wounded nobleman”. The dishonour suffered by Clodius during the Bona Dea affair, presented as a wound, thus became the motive for his political action. By naming it, Cicero’s discourse, by virtue of its performative dimension, reinforces, even creates from scratch, his opponent’s supposed aristocratic wound. This paper will therefore examine the attacks on Clodius’ honour in Cicero’s invectives, focusing on the role of the context of enunciation. Presented in this way, the survey would be too broad, and our discussion will focus on two aspects. The first concerns the very idea of aristocratic injury, re-examined on the basis of this case study. This raises the question of the specific nature of these aristocratic injuries, which may be due to the greater vulnerability of aristocrats to dishonour, to the singularity of the forms of attack on their honour and to the particular nature of the strategies they mobilised to restore their prestige. These questions lead us to examine a second theme in greater depth: the role of attacks on the body of Clodius, whose effeminacy and excessive sensitivity to pleasures Cicero never ceased to denounce.