whom the State cannot be governed; no kind of public business can be transacted without him, or without the magistrates below him in rank; yet it is not his hand that is on the helm. Nothing can be done without his initiation, yet he is not the guiding spirit of the State. It is the great Council over which he presides, and whose advice an almost unbroken tradition enjoins him not only to ask, but to take, in whose hands are really the destinies of Rome, her empire, and the world.[1] What, then, was this Council? in what manner selected, and entrusted with what duties? Do we find here, as in the executive, the characteristic marks of an oligarchy?
Let us see in the first place how the Senate was filled up, and who were the persons who sat in it. Every five years the list of its members, three hundred in number, was revised; and the revision, once the duty of the consul, as of the king before him, was now entrusted to two censors. These censors must have previously held the consulship; they were therefore men of experience, advanced in life, and members of the hereditary nobility.[2] The principles on which they were to select the senators were clearly understood, and even defined by statute
- ↑ The following chapters of Livy may be selected as examples to illustrate the statements in the text: — xxxi. 6; xxxiv. 55 and 56; xxxv. 20 (where the consul is forbidden to leave the city); xxxvi. 40 (where a tribunician veto is overcome by the Senate; cf., however, xxxiii. 25); xlv. 21. An excellent example of senatorial authority in combination with tact will be found in xxxix. 39.
- ↑ Cato the elder is again a signal exception: read Livy, xxxix. 40, and Plutarch, Cato 16. He was in actual antagonism to the nobilitas; but he had still the support of Valerius Flaccus, who was elected as his colleague.
