[3] Tacitus wrote of him:[4][5] "Surely I am not making speeches to incite the people to civil war, as though Brutus and Cassius were armed and on the fields at Philippi?
Suetonius unequivocally asserts that the works of Cremutius Cordus were put back into circulation during the reign of Gaius [Caligula].
When Seneca wrote Ad Marciam he mentioned that Metilius had died three years previously and Marcia was unable to seek solace even from her "beloved literature".
He also brings to attention the fact that "Seneca avoids any direct allusion to Cordus's alleged Republican sympathies, whatever their true character may have been.
In his essay "Bookburning and Censorship in Ancient Rome", Frederick H. Cramer talks about the "...spineless schoolmaster Quintilian [who] grudgingly admitted that 'the bold utterances of Cremutius also have their admirers and deserve their fame, but he went on to assure readers that 'the passages that brought him to his ruin have been expurgated.
'"[8] Cramer also suggests that it was not unlikely for one of Quintilian's students to have been Tacitus, who later said: The Fathers ordered his books to be burned...but some copies survived, hidden at the time, but afterwards published.
According to Martin Butler, "Jonson gives Cordus an eloquent defence of the historian's objectivity, but we never learn what his ultimate fate is.