the occupation of each individual annually registered, nominally to aid
the official supervision of morals by discouraging disreputable means of
subsistence; and this ordinance, according to Herodotus, was introduced
by Solon into the Athenian scheme of administration, where it developed
later into an electoral record.

It was in Rome, however, that the system from which the name of the
inquiry is derived was first established upon a regular footing. The
original census was ascribed to Servius Tullius, and in the constitution
which goes by his name it was decreed that every fifth year the
population should be enumerated along with the property of each
family--land, live-stock, slaves and freedmen. The main object was to
ensure the accurate division of the people into the six main classes and
their respective centuries, which were based upon considerations of
combined numbers and wealth. With the increase of the city the operation
grew in importance, and was followed by an official _lustrum_, or
purificatory sacrifice, offered on behalf of the people by the censors
or functionaries in charge of the classification. Hence the name of
lustrum came to denote the intercensal term, or a period of five years.
The word census, too, came to mean the property qualification of the
class, as well as the process of registering the resources of the
individual. Later, it was used in the sense of the imposition itself, in
which it has survived in the contracted form of _cess_. Unfortunately
the statistics of population thus collected were subordinated to the
fiscal interests of the inquiry, and no record has been handed down
relating to the population of the city and its neighbourhood. In the
time of Augustus the census was extended to the whole empire. In the
words of the Gospel of St Luke, he ordered "the whole world to be
_taxed_," or, according to the revised version, to be _enrolled_. The
compilation of the results of this the most comprehensive enumeration
till then attempted was engaging the attention of the emperor, it is
said, just before his death, but was never completed. The various
inquiries instituted during the middle ages, such as the Domesday Book
and the Breviary of Charlemagne, were so far on the Roman model that
they took little or no account of the population, the feudal system
probably rendering information regarding it unnecessary for the purposes
of taxation or military service.

The foundations of the census