Gaius Sempronius Tuditanus - Works

Works

Tuditanus was also an author but only a few fragments of his works have been preserved. Cicero emphasized his elegant style. In the internal Roman power struggles Tuditanus belonged to the Optimates and wrote a tendentious treatise on Roman constitutional law (libri magistratuum) in at least 13 books for the political support of his party. On the other side Marcus Junius Congus Gracchanus was the author of a similar work De postetatibus in at least seven books that served for the purposes of the party of the Gracchi. These both works were the earliest of their kind in the Roman literature. The libri magistratuum dealt with the intercalation, the appointment of the Plebeian Tribunes, the nundinae (market and feast days of the old Roman calendar) etc.

Because some quotations (e. g. about the original inhabitants of Latium called Aborigines, about the discovery of books, that allegedly belonged to the legendary Roman king Numa Pompilius, etc.) do not seem to fit into a work about constitutional law, some scholars attribute to Tuditanus another work dealing with the Roman history from the beginnings to the 2nd century BC.

It was probably the Roman universal scholar Marcus Terentius Varro who found out that Tuditanus used the annalists Cato the Elder and Lucius Cassius Hemina as sources for his works and besides that his account corresponded with that given by his contemporary Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi, but differed (because of the above-mentioned) from that by Junius Gracchanus. And it was again Varro who delivered the most preserved quotations of Tuditanus by later authors (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Pliny the Elder, Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius). But two quotations by Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights 7.4.1 and 13.15.4) go back to the historian Quintus Aelius Tubero (whose son of the same name was consul in 11 BC) and the augur Messalla respectively.