Similar exaggerations will be found scattered throughout the poems of Propertius (ii. 7, 3; iii. 1, 13; iii. 23, 5; iv. 3, 4; iv. 4, 48; iv. 11, 3). Still more exaggerated language was used afterwards on the restoration of the standards (B.C. 20).
[222] A good deal of confusion in our authorities has arisen by a failure to distinguish between a censoria potestas granted like the tribunicia by special vote and the censoria potestas inherent in the consulship, from which it had been devolved in B.C. 444. In the Monumentum, ch. 8, Augustus himself says nothing about the censoria potestas, but in the Venusian fasti (C. I. L. ix. 422) we find imp. Cæsar vi. M. Agrippa II. Cos. idem censoria potestate lustrum fecerunt. Suetonius (c. 27) knew that he was not Censor, but supposed him to have acted under a decree granting him morum legumque regimen perpetuum, an office, however, which Augustus expressly says that he declined (Mon., ch. 6). Dio (52, 42) describes him as τιμητεύσας σὺν τῷ Ἀγρίππᾳ, a direct confusion between the censorial power possessed by a Consul and that bestowed independently. He, however, apparently did receive censoria potestas (never the censorship) in B.C. 19 for five years.
[223] Rex sacrorum, the greater flamens, the Salii had still to be patricians. An interrex also must be a patrician, but that office was now practically at an end. The last case of an interrex was in B.C. 52.
[224] A jest that was reproduced in London when country peers came up to vote against the Home Rule Bill and were said by gossips to be obliged to ask their way to the House of Lords. A popular ballad also was sung about the streets—
“Cæsar leads the Gauls in triumph and guides them to the Senate house;
Gauls have doffed their native brogues and donned the Senate’s laticlave!”
Sueton., Cæs. 72, 80. See also Cicero, 9 Phil. § 12; 13 Phil. § 27; ad Fam. vi. 18; Bell. Afr. 28; Dio, 42, 51; 43, 27. Compare the career of P. Ventidius Bassus, brought a prisoner from Asculum to adorn the triumph of Pompey after the Social war, then a mule contractor to Cæsar, and afterwards going through all the offices to the consulship in B.C. 43.
[225] On the analogy of slaves enfranchised by will. Suet., Aug. 35; Plutarch, Ant. 15.
[226] Cicero calls such a man a voluntarius Senator, 13 Phil. § 28.
[227] Dio, 48, 34.