Quintus Lutatius Catulus, better known as an accomplished orator than a historian, was Consul along with Marius in the year 651, and shared with him in his distinguished triumph over the Cimbrians. Though once united in the strictest friendship, these old colleagues quarrelled at last, during the civil war with Sylla; and Catulus, it is said, in order to avoid the emissaries despatched by the unrelenting Marius, to put him to death, shut himself up in a room newly plastered, and having kindled a fire, was suffocated by the noxious vapours. He wrote the history of his own consulship, and the various public transactions in which he had been engaged, particularly the war with the Cimbrians. Cicero(163), who has spoken so disadvantageously of the style of the older annalists, admits that Catulus wrote very pure Latin, and that his language had some resemblance to the sweetness of Xenophon. Q. Claudius Quadrigarius composed Annals of Rome in twenty-four books, which, though now almost entirely lost, were in existence as late as the end of the 12th century, being referred to by John of Salisbury in his book _De Nugis Curialibus_. Some passages, however, are still preserved, particularly the account of the defiance by the gigantic Gaul, adorned with a chain, to the whole Roman army, and his combat with Titus Manlius, afterwards sirnamed Torquatus, from this chain which he took from his antagonist. “Who the enemy was,” says Au. Gellius, “of how great and formidable stature, how audacious the challenge, and in what kind of battle they fought, Q. Claudius has told with much purity and elegance, and in the simple unadorned sweetness of ancient language(164).”