Appius Claudius Pulcher (consul 54 BC)

Appius Claudius Pulcher (97 BC – 49 BC) was a consul of the Roman Republic in 54 BC. He was an expert in Roman law and antiquities, especially the esoteric lore of the augural college of which he was a controversial member. He was head of the senior line of the most powerful family of the patrician Claudii. The Claudii were one of the five leading families (gentes maiores or "Greater Clans") which had dominated Roman social and political life from the earliest years of the republic. He is best known as the recipient of 13 of the extant letters in Cicero's ad Familiares corpus (the whole of book III), which date from winter 53-52 to summer 50 BC. Regrettably they do not include any of Appius' replies to Cicero as extant texts of any sort by members of Rome's ruling aristocracy are quite few and rare, apart from those of Julius Caesar.

The date of his co-option into the augural college is not known, but more likely early in life than later owing to his acknowledged expertise in augural lore, upon which he published. Most likely he succeeded his father (if the latter was one of Sulla's new augurs created in 81 BC), but in any case since the augural college remained organized on a curiate (antique clan-based) system, he must have succeeded to a vacated patrician augurate.

As an augur he engaged in heated debate with his senior colleague C. Claudius Marcellus (praetor 80 BC), who maintained that augury was established from a belief in divination but perpetuated through political expediency, while Appius strongly advocated an extreme traditionalist view upholding the authenticity of the craft and eventually published a noted Liber auguralis which included a good deal of polemic directed against "Marcelline" modernity.

His typically Claudian arrogance, so evident from Cicero's correspondence with him and with Marcus Caelius Rufus, is also mentioned in a letter to Cicero from Publius Vatinius (consul 47 BC), who was Caesar's nominee to take Appius' place in the augural college after the latter's death:

...
Wikipedia