Roman Public Life

by A. H. J. Greenidge

(2) The limitation of tenure to eighteen months caused a break in the continuity of the magistracy, and was a symbol that the office was merely occasional. The censorial ordinances were valid for the whole quinquennial period of the lustrum, but, whatever may have been the original intention of the limitation of tenure, it was continued as an effective guarantee against such enormous powers being exercised for a continuous period of four or five years.[1027]

(3) Re-election to the censorship was forbidden, for a continuous moral control exercised by the same men would have been intolerable.[1028]

(4) The collegiate principle operated here as in other offices, but nowhere was the check of the veto more necessary and more healthy than in its influence on the arbitrary moral judgments of the censors. Without it the Senate might have been packed by a single man, and degradation from the highest positions and on the scantiest evidence might have been due to caprice, and followed by the unpopularity which divided responsibility renders less intense.[1029] The collegiate relation was, indeed, closer in this than in any other magistracy. Its holders must be elected together, the name of the singly-appointed censor not being returned;[1030] and, whether from grounds of convenience or from a religious scruple, it was enacted that, if one post was vacated by abdication or death, the holder of the other should resign.[1031]

The original and specific powers of the censors, various as they seem, form a perfect unity. Their work is briefly that of numbering and purifying the people. The accompaniments of this census are (i.) registration, i.e. the assignment of individuals to their proper state-divisions; (ii.) the decision of the incidence of financial burdens, based on an estimate of the property of individuals; (iii.) the consideration of the moral worth of individuals with reference to their fitness to exercise various functions of state, known generally as the regimen morum; (iv.) the purification (lustrum), perhaps to avert the anger of the gods from the iniquity of numbering the people, perhaps merely a regularly recurring atonement for involuntary sin, the voluntary sinners being first removed by the exclusion effected by the cura morum.

To this aggregate two functions were added: first, the lectio senatus, which, although no part of the census, is an outcome of the same activity and forms an integral part of the regimen morum; secondly, financial duties, such as the leasing of taxes and opera publica—functions that any of the supreme magistrates could perform. They are not an integral part of the census, and this portion of the censors’ business is conducted under senatorial supervision.[1032]

I. The lectio senatus, although in the eyes of the censors and of the world the first of their charges, was but a late attachment to their office. Even in the year 311 B.C. the consuls could still venture to set aside a censorian list and return to the practice of selecting their own consilium,[1033] and later still (216 B.C.) a dictator could be chosen for the purpose of filling up gaps in the order.[1034] A lex Ovinia, a plebiscitum of uncertain date, may have made the censors mainly responsible for the lectio, but the fragmentary paraphrase of its contents, which has been preserved, merely limits their discretionary power in the exercise of their choice. The censors are to choose “the best men,” a direction which, interpreted by our knowledge of later methods of selection, implies at the least that ex-curule magistrates must be chosen,[1035] at the most that the whole list of magistrates (including the plebeian aediles and the quaestors) should be scrutinised before censorian nominees were appointed.[1036]

The framing of the Senate’s list was, in accordance with the estimate of its importance, the first work of the censors after their entrance on office. It was accomplished rapidly, for there was no summoning of the Senate as a corporation, or even of individuals, as at the census. Facilities may have been offered to a senator of clearing himself of charges,[1037] but formal procedure was dispensed with, and nowhere was the arbitrary power of the censors more manifest than in the execution of this the gravest of their duties.

Rejection took the form of affixing marks (notae) against names in the register; these names were omitted in the revised list. Then took place the sublectio of new names, and here the censure was pronounced by omitting those who had a claim to a seat in the house.[1038] The veto, which operated in its constantly negative manner, which enabled one censor to retain a name omitted by the other,[1039] or even perhaps to hinder the election of a new member selected by his colleague, and the written grounds for censure appended to the rejected name (subscriptio censoria),[1040] were some guarantees against capricious exclusion.

The automatic method of recruiting the Senate introduced by Sulla produced a modification in the censorian selection. The magistrates seem to have lost the power of rejecting applicants, their right of exclusion being confined to names already on the list. It is not known whether the censors at a subsequent lustrum still retained the power of reversing an infamia once pronounced; but the usual mode in which a seat was regained by an ejected senator was to seek popular election and to enter the Senate through a magistracy.[1041]

II. The census opened with a summons to the people to meet the censors in the Campus Martius. It was the army as exhibited in the centuriate list that the censors wished primarily to examine, and, consequently, it was the members of this body that they summoned to appear in person; the capite censi, with their votes in the tribes and their taxable capital, might be represented only by the curatores tribuum,[1042] although the censor could summon any member of the burgess community whom he pleased.[1043]