The connexion of the Claudian clan with Rome was referred by the Roman historians to the very beginnings of her history; they had no doubt of the antiquity of the event; it was only debated whether this Sabine stock was received into the community on the Tiber at the suggestion of Titus Tatius, the consort of Romulus, or four years after the expulsion of the Kings. The headquarters of the Claudians were the region round Tusculum, in which town its chiefs had a fortress; their domain gave its name to one of the later electoral divisions of the Roman territory. From the beginning the Claudian stock was credited with an unusual measure of aristocratic pride and public spirit; the legends said that one Claudius caused by his intemperance the secession of the plebs to the Mons Sacer, and that the unbridled lust of another brought about the downfall of the Decemvirate; we are on firmer ground in attributing to the Appius Claudius who was Censor in B.C. 312 the inception, if not the completion, of two works of great public utility, the Appian Aqueduct, and the even more famous Appian Way, the great South Road, the first link in the chain of highways which bound the Empire together. Appius Claudius the Censor had two sons, who took the additional names of the Handsome and the Strong; the descendants of both were to do good service to their country; a Claudius Pulcher fought the Carthaginians in Sicily, a Claudius Nero defeated Hasdrubal at the battle of the Metaurus. The Censor is further credited with having been the earliest Roman writer in prose and verse. Intellectual and administrative eminence was thus ascribed to the Claudians, also a touch of arrogance extending to relations in which arrogance was out of place; for it was Appius Claudius Pulcher the Admiral who, when the unwonted abstemiousness of the Sacred Chickens portended disaster, threw them into the sea, and was deservedly rewarded by a defeat. Both the leading Claudian families were united in the person of the Emperor; his father was a Nero, his mother was a Pulcher, for though her father belonged legally to the Livian Gens, he had been adopted from the Claudian. The family enumerated among its distinctions thirty-three consulships, five dictatorships, seven censorships, six triumphs, and two ovations.