The plain white toga (toga Pura) was the ordinary dress of the citizen, but the toga praetexta, which had a border of purple, was worn by boys till the age of sixteen, when they assumed the plain toga virilis, and also by curule magistrates and some priests.
The trabea, which in historical times was worn by the consuls when opening the temple of Janus, by the equites at their yearly inspection and on some other occasions, and by the Salii at their ritual dances, and had (according to tradition) formed the original costume of the augurs and flamens (who afterwards adopted the toga praetexta), was apparently a toga smaller in size than the ordinary civil dress, decorated with scarlet stripes (trabes).
Although not sacrosanct, they had the right of sitting in a curule chair and wore the distinctive toga praetexta.
Claudius Marcellus in 222 over the Gauls in a play called Clastidium, he gave the first specimen of the fabula praetexta in his Alimonium Romuli et Remi, based on the most national of all Roman traditions.
He was less productive as a poet than either Ennius or Accius; and we hear of only about twelve of his plays, founded on Greek subjects (among them the Antiope, Teucer, Armorum Judicium, Dulorestes, Chryses, Niptra, &c., most of them on subjects connected with the Trojan cycle), and one praetexta (Paulus) written in connexion with the victory of Lucius Aemilius Paulus at Pydna (168), as the Clastidium of Naevius and the Ambracia of Ennius were written in commemoration of great military successes.