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Dio's Rome, Volume 4 - An Historical Narrative Originally Composed in Greek During the - Reigns of Septimius Severus, Geta and Caracalla, Macrinus, - Elagabalus and Alexander Severus: and Now Presented in English Form by Cassius Dio
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right to make enrollments, to collect moneys, declare wars make peace,
rule foreign and native territory alike everywhere and always, even to
the extent of putting to death both knights and senators within the
pomerium, and all the other privileges once granted to the consuls and
other officials with full powers. By virtue of the office of censor they
investigate our lives and characters and take the census. Some they list
in the equestrian and senatorial class and others they erase from
the roll, as pleases them. By virtue of being consecrated in all the
priesthoods and furthermore having the right to give the majority of them
to others and from the fact that _one_ of the high priests (if there be
two or three holding office at once) is chosen from their number, they
are themselves also masters of holy and sacred things. The so-called
tribunician authority which the men of very greatest attainment used to
hold gives them the right to stop any measure brought up by some one
else, in case they do not join in approving it, and to be free from
personal abuse. Moreover if they are thought to be wronged in even the
slightest degree not merely by action but even by conversation they may
destroy the guilty party without a trial as one polluted. They do not
think it lawful to be tribune, because they belong altogether to the
patrician class, but they assume all the power of the tribuneship
undiminished from the period of its greatest extent; and thereby the
enumeration of the years they have held the office in question goes
forward on the assumption that they receive it year by year along with
the others who are successively tribunes. Thus by these names they have
secured these privileges in accordance with all the various usages of the
democracy, in order that they may appear to possess nothing that has not
been given them.

[-18-] They have gained also another prerogative which was given to none
of the ancient Romans outright to apply to all cases, and it is through
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