ant was an offence
similar to the assumption, in the present day, of the badge of a
military order of merit without due title.

7. II. III. Praetorship

8. Thus there remained excluded the military tribunate with consular
powers (II. III. Throwing Open of Marriage and of Magistracies) the
proconsulship, the quaestorship, the tribunate of the people, and
several others. As to the censorship, it does not appear,
notwithstanding the curule chair of the censors (Liv. xl. 45; comp,
xxvii. 8), to have been reckoned a curule office; for the later
period, however, when only a man of consular standing could be made
censor, the question has no practical importance. The plebeian
aedileship certainly was not reckoned originally one of the curule
magistracies (Liv. xxiii. 23); it may, however, have been subsequently
included amongst them.

9. II. I. Government of the Patriciate

10. II. III. Censorship

11. II. III. The Senate

12. The current hypothesis, according to which the six centuries of
the nobility alone amounted to 1200, and the whole equestrian force
accordingly to 3600 horse, is not tenable. The method of determining
the number of the equites by the number of duplications specified by
the annalists is mistaken: in fact, each of these statements has
originated and is to be explained by itself. But there is no evidence
either for the first number, which is only found in the passage of
Cicero, De Rep. ii. 20, acknowledged as miswritten even by the
champions of this view, or for the second, which does not appear at
all in ancient authors. In favour, on the other hand, of the
hypothesis set forth in the text, we have, first of all, the number as
indicated not by authorities, but by the institutions themselves; for
it is certain that the century numbered 100 men, and there were
originally three (I. V. Burdens of the Burgesses), then six (I. Vi.
Amalgamation of the Palatine and Quirinal Cities), and lastly after
the Servian reform eighteen (I. VI. The Five Classes), equestrian
centuries. The deviations of the authorities from this view are only
apparent. The old self-consistent tradition, which Becker has
developed (ii. i, 243), reckons not the eighteen patricio-plebeian,
but the six patrician, centuries at 1800 men; and this has been
manifestly followed by Livy, i. 36 (according to the reading which
alone has manuscript authority, and which ought not to be corrected
from Livy's particular estimates), and by Cic