office
censor
Two senior magistrates elected normally every five years to revise the lists of citizens, knights, and senators, and to let the public contracts; the highest office an ex-consul could hold.
Reading notes
- Ad Atticum 6.9 §4 the censors
The two censors of 50 BC, App. Claudius Pulcher and L. Calpurnius Piso, conducted the census and revised the Senate roll; Cicero is anxious about their high-handed measures, including a proposed sumptuary crackdown on luxury art.
- Ad Familiares 3.10 §3 you so conduct the censorship
The censorship was the most prestigious Roman magistracy, held every five years: the censors enrolled citizens, let public contracts, and policed senatorial morals (the regimen morum). Appius was standing for it and was elected censor for 50 BC.
- Ad Familiares 3.13 §2 as addressed to a master of public manners
The censor exercised the regimen morum, official oversight of public and private conduct; Cicero jokes that he keeps the letter short and restrained because he is now writing to a censor.
- Cato the Elder, On Old Age §42 It was against my will that I expelled Lucius Flamininus
As censor (184 BC) Cato exercised the regimen morum, the power to strike a senator from the roll for moral cause (nota censoria). Lucius Flamininus was expelled for executing a condemned man at a banquet.
- On the Agrarian Law, First Speech §7 Censors are not allowed to let out the revenues anywhere except in the sight of the Roman people
The censors traditionally auctioned the public revenues (the contracts for collecting them) only at Rome, in public; Cicero contrasts this with the decemvirs' licence to sell anywhere, in any darkness they chose.
- On the Laws §3.7 Let the censors take the census
The censors, two men elected for a five-year term but holding power for only eighteen months, registered citizens by wealth and class, let public contracts, and policed morals, expelling the unworthy from the Senate. Cicero makes their morals-jurisdiction the guardian of his ``model order.''
- On Duties §1.40 kept all of those who had broken their oath
The censors, who policed Roman morals, demoted the perjured prisoners after Cannae by leaving them among the aerarii, citizens stripped of voting rank. The story illustrates Rome's severity about oaths even toward an enemy.
- Laelius, On Friendship §39 colleagues in the censorship
The censorship, the senior magistracy held by two colleagues every five years, charged with the census, public morals, and revising the Senate roll. Fabricius Luscinus and Aemilius Papus held it together, the model of an old-Roman friendship.