Claudius Quadrigarius: Annales (Fragments)

Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius wrote annals of Rome in at least twenty-three books, beginning not with Aeneas or Romulus but with the Gallic sack of Rome and coming down to the wars of his own day under Sulla. Livy used him, and Aulus Gellius admired the plain, old-fashioned purity of his Latin and quoted him often. The work is lost. This collection gathers the passages that preserve his words, mostly from Gellius and Nonius, as edited by Hermann Peter.

Several fragments are long enough to read as narrative. They include the duel in which Titus Manlius killed a giant Gaul and took his torque, the raven that helped Valerius Corvinus, the consuls’ letter warning King Pyrrhus of a plot to poison him, the son who as consul made his father dismount, and Sulla’s failure to burn a tower treated with alum at Piraeus. Peter’s attribution of the Corvinus story to Quadrigarius is a conjecture. Only fragments that preserve the historian’s own words are included; reports in indirect speech or in Greek by later writers are left out.