colonists in the years following the establishment of the colony. There
are six inscriptions[236] which contain lists more or less fragmentary
of the magistrates of Praeneste, the duovirs, the aediles, and the
quaestors. Two of these inscriptions can be dated within a few years,
for they show the election of Germanicus and Drusus Caesar, and of Nero
and Drusus, the sons of Germanicus, to the quinquennial duovirate.[237]
Two others[81] are certainly pieces of the same fasti because of several
peculiarities,[239] and one other, a fragment, belongs to still another
calendar.[240] It will first be necessary to show that these
last-mentioned inscriptions can be referred to some time not much later
than the founding of the colony at Praeneste by Sulla, before any use
can be made of the names in the list to prove anything about the early
distribution of officers in the colony. Two of these inscriptions[238]
should be placed, I think, very early in the annals of the colony. They
show a list of municipal officers whose names, with a single exception,
which will be accounted for later, have only praenomen and nomen, a
way of writing names which was common to the earlier inhabitants of
Praeneste, and which seems to have made itself felt here in the names of
the colonists.[241] Again, from the fact that in the only place in the
inscriptions where the quinquennialship is mentioned, it is the simple
term, without the prefixed duoviri. In the later inscriptions from
imperial times,[80] both forms are found, while in the year 31 A.D. in
the municipal fasti of Nola[242] are found II vir(i) iter(um)
q(uinquennales), and in 29 B.C. in the fasti from Venusia,[243]
officials with the same title, duoviri quinquennales, which show that
the officers of the year in which the census was taken were given both
titles. Marquardt makes this a proof that the quinquennial title shows
nothing more than a function of the regular duovir.[244] It is certain
too that after the passage of the lex Iulia in 45 B.C., that the census
was taken in the Italian towns at the same time as in Rome, and the