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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. ==Augur, scholar, author, orator== 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.〔Cicero ''de Divinatione II'' 75, ''de Legibus II'' 32〕 His typically Claudian arrogance, so evident from Cicero's correspondence with him and with Marcus Caelius Rufus,〔Books III and VIII of the ''ad Familiares'' corpus〕 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:〔''ad Fam.V'' 10A, from Narona in Illyricum (winter 45-44 BC).〕
It was also characteristic of him that he was fascinated by Athenian antiquities, but not what attracted many prominent Romans to Athens at the time: its fame as the greatest university city in the Greek-inhabited world (the ''oikoumene'') where all the chief philosophical schools were based. He was busy in Greece in 62-1 BC when his wild youngest brother Publius Clodius Pulcher got himself into trouble for violating the rites of the Bona Dea and was prosecuted for ''incestus'', but it is not known in what capacity.〔Schol.Bobiens.p.91 (ed.Stangl): ''Appius Claudius who was brother of this same Clodius and was conducting (matters) in Greece at the time''.〕 Cicero wrote to Marcus Brutus as follows in his treatise on the history of Roman rhetoric and orators (''Brutus'' 267):
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