Ab urbe condita

Perhaps you will he satisfied with an additional day or an additional month?

“No,” he says, “I shall hold my censorship for three years and a half beyond the period fixed by the Aemilian Law and I shall hold it alone.”

This sounds very much like an absolute monarch. Or will you co-opt a colleague, a pro- ceeding forbidden by divine laws even where one has been lost by death?” “There is a sacred function going back to the very earliest times, the only one actually initiated by the deity in whose honour it is performed, which has always been discharged by men of the highest rank and most blameless character.

You, conscientious censor that you are, have transferred this ministry to servants, and a House older than this City, hallowed by the hospitality they showed to immortal gods, has become extinct in one short year owing to you and your censorship.

But this is not enough for you, you will not rest till you have involved the whole commonwealth in a sacrilege the consequences of which I dare not contemplate.

The capture of this City occurred in that lustrum in which the censor, L. Papirius Cursor, after the death of his colleague, C. Julius, co-opted as his colleague M. Cornelius Maluginensis sooner than abdicate his office. And yet how much more moderation did he show even then than you Appius; he did not continue to hold his censorship alone nor beyond the legal term.