Scaurus was also the author of a sumptuary law.[787] It came appropriately from a man who had been trained in a school of poverty, and shows the willingness of the nobility to submit, at least in appearance, to the discipline which would present it to the world as a self-sacrificing administration, reaping no selfish reward for its intense labour, and submitting to that equality of life with the average citizen which is the best democratic concession that a powerful oligarchy can make. The activity of the censorship was exhibited in the same direction. Foreign and expensive dishes were prohibited by the guardians of public morals, as they were by Scaurus's sumptuary law:[788] and the censors of 115, Metellus and Domitius, undertook a scrutiny of the stage which resulted in the complete exclusion from Rome of all complex forms of the histrionic art and its reduction to the simple Latin type of music and song.[789] Their energy was also displayed in a destructive examination of the morals of their own order, and as a result of the scrutiny thirty-two senators were banished from the Curia.[790] To guard the senate-house from scandal was indeed the necessary policy of a nobility which knew that its precarious power rested on the opinion of the streets; and the efforts of the censors, directed like those of their predecessors, to a regeneration which had a national type as its goal, show that that opinion could not yet have been considered wholly cosmopolitan or corrupt. The frequent splendour of triumphal processions, such as those which celebrated the victories of Domitius and Fabius over the Allobroges, of Metellus over the Dalmatians, and of Scaurus over the Ligurians,[791] produced a comfortable impression of the efficiency of the government in extending or preserving the frontiers of the empire; the triumph itself was the symbol of success, and few could have cared to question the extent and utility of the achievement. Satisfied with the belief that they were witnessing the average type of successful administration, the electors pursued the course, from which they so seldom deflected, of giving their unreserved confidence to the ancient houses; and this epoch witnessed a striking instance of hereditary influence, if not of hereditary talent, when Metellus Macedonicus was borne to his grave by sons, of whom four had held curule office, three had possessed the consulship, and one had fulfilled in addition the lofty functions of the censor and enjoyed the honour of a triumph.[792]