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Meanwhile the consulship had been modified in yet another way—one which was detrimental to the power of the office, but was meant to preserve influence to the Patriciate. In the institution of the censorship we find at work the same double motive which had influenced the government in creating the consular tribunate—the sense that two men could not manage all the business of a growing state, and the desire not to share with the Plebeians the unimpaired powers of the supreme office.

It had been the custom for the king, and subsequently for the consuls, to make an estimate, at certain intervals of time, of the effective military strength of the state. This was originally a registration of all the patrician burgesses; but, after the Servian reforms, it became a numbering of all the citizens, for the purpose of discovering those liable to military service, the class in which they should be enrolled, and, in case of tribute being imposed, the liability of each household to the property-tax (tributum). For these purposes it was sufficient for the heads of families (patres familiarum) to be summoned and questioned. Their answers formed the record, in accordance with which military and financial burdens were imposed, and political influence in the comitia centuriata was determined. The recognition of citizenship itself was dependent on this enrolment, for it is probable that from the earliest times membership of a tribe was the symbol of the possession of civic rights; while now the fact that the tribe was the basis of the concilium plebis and the comitia tributa gave a vote to every one enrolled in one of the tribus. The importance which the census had assumed was not compatible with the consular performance of its duties. The judicial and military functions of the annual magistrates interfered both with its regularity and its completeness, and the temporary suspension of the consulship offered a chance of vesting these duties in other magistrates. In the year 443 B.C. two new officials, called censores, were created,[446] who were to be elected by the comitia of the centuries. The office was to be confined to the Patriciate, possibly because it was felt that the solemn ceremony of purification (lustratio) which closed the census could not adequately be performed by plebeian hands. No one as yet dreamed of the future greatness of the office; its beginnings were small,[447] and the tribunes offered no opposition to the law which established an office which was to become the greatest of political prizes.