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Sunday, August 08, 2010 - 1:25 PM
The emperor's speech was followed by a decree of the Senate, and
the Aedui were the first to obtain the right of becoming senators at Rome.
This compliment was paid to their ancient alliance, and to the fact that
they alone of the Gauls cling to the name of brothers of the Roman
people.
About the same time the emperor enrolled in the ranks of the patricians
such senators as were of the oldest families, and such as had had distinguished
ancestors. There were now but scanty relics of the Greater Houses of Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
and of the Lesser Houses of Lucius Brutus, as they had been called, and
those too were exhausted which the Dictator Caesar by the Cassian and the
emperor Augustus by the Saenian law had chosen into their place. These
acts, as being welcome to the State, were undertaken with hearty gladness
by the imperial censor. Anxiously considering how he was to rid the Senate
of men of notorious infamy, he preferred a gentle method, recently devised,
to one which accorded with the sternness of antiquity, and advised each
to examine his own case and seek the privilege of laying aside his rank.
Permission, he said, would be readily obtained. He would publish in the
same list those who had been expelled and those who had been allowed to
retire, that by this confounding together of the decision of the censors
and the modesty of voluntary resignation the disgrace might be
softened.
For this, the consul Vipstanus moved that Claudius should be called
"Father of the Senate." The title of "Father of the Country" had, he argued,
been indiscriminately bestowed; new services ought to be recognized by
unusual titles. The emperor, however, himself stopped the consul's flattery,
as extravagant. He closed the lustrum, the census for which gave a total
of 5,984,072 citizens. Then too ended his blindness as to his domestic
affairs. He was soon compelled to notice and punish his wife's infamies,
till he afterwards craved passionately for an unhallowed
union.
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