Note 49 — Below is a copy of the deeds of the divine Augustus, by which he subjected the whole world to the dominion of the Roman people, and of the amounts which he expended upon the commonwealth and the Roman people, as engraved upon two brazen columns which are set up at Rome.1

During most of the republican history the senate numbered, ideally, three hundred. In Cicero’s time it had over four hundred members. Julius Cæsar raised it to about nine hundred. Suet. Aug., 35, says: “By two separate scrutinies he (Augustus) reduced to their former number and splendor the senate, which had been swamped by a disorderly crowd; for they were now more than a thousand, and some of them very mean persons, who, after Cæsar’s death, had been chosen by dint of interest and bribery, so that they had the name of Orcini among the people.” They were also called Charonites, because they owed their elevation to the last will of Cæsar, who had gone into Orcus to Charon. Dio, XL, 48, 63, tells of freedmen in the senate and, XLIII, 22, of a private soldier; Gell., XV, 4, of a muleteer, cf. Juvenal, Sat. VII, 199.

Dio, LII, 42, cf. LIII, 1, tells of the first scrutiny, in 725-6. A hint from Augustus was enough to cause the withdrawal first of sixty, then of one hundred and forty senators. He also tells, LIV, 13, 14, of a further revision in 736, by which the number was brought down to six hundred. He assigns a third sifting to 743 (LIV, 35), and a fourth to 757 (LV, 13). Mommsen, however, is inclined to connect the three revisions of Augustus with the censuses of 726, 746 and 767, and to regard those of 736 and 757 as extraordinary, and therefore not named by Augustus, in his desire to appear entirely within constitutional lines. Cf. Mommsen, R. G., p. 35.