The original and specific powers of the censors, various as they seem, form a perfect unity. Their work is briefly that of numbering and purifying the people. The accompaniments of this _census_ are (i.) registration, i.e. the assignment of individuals to their proper state-divisions; (ii.) the decision of the incidence of financial burdens, based on an estimate of the property of individuals; (iii.) the consideration of the moral worth of individuals with reference to their fitness to exercise various functions of state, known generally as the _regimen morum_; (iv.) the purification (_lustrum_), perhaps to avert the anger of the gods from the iniquity of numbering the people, perhaps merely a regularly recurring atonement for involuntary sin, the voluntary sinners being first removed by the exclusion effected by the _cura morum_. To this aggregate two functions were added: first, the _lectio senatus_, which, although no part of the _census_, is an outcome of the same activity and forms an integral part of the _regimen morum_; secondly, financial duties, such as the leasing of taxes and _opera publica_—functions that any of the supreme magistrates could perform. They are not an integral part of the _census_, and this portion of the censors’ business is conducted under senatorial supervision.[1032] I. The _lectio senatus_, although in the eyes of the censors and of the world the first of their charges, was but a late attachment to their office. Even in the year 311 B.C. the consuls could still venture to set aside a censorian list and return to the practice of selecting their own _consilium_,[1033] and later still (216 B.C.) a dictator could be chosen for the purpose of filling up gaps in the order.[1034] A _lex Ovinia_, a _plebiscitum_ of uncertain date, may have made the censors mainly responsible for the _lectio_, but the fragmentary paraphrase of its contents, which has been preserved, merely limits their discretionary power in the exercise of their choice. The censors are to choose “the best men,” a direction which, interpreted by our knowledge of later methods of selection, implies at the least that ex-curule magistrates must be chosen,[1035] at the most that the whole list of magistrates (including the plebeian aediles and the quaestors) should be scrutinised before censorian nominees were appointed.[1036] The framing of the Senate’s list was, in accordance with the estimate of its importance, the first work of the censors after their entrance on office. It was accomplished rapidly, for there was no summoning of the Senate as a corporation, or even of individuals, as at the _census_. Facilities may have been offered to a senator of clearing himself of charges,[1037] but formal procedure was dispensed with, and nowhere was the arbitrary power of the censors more manifest than in the execution of this the gravest of their duties.