The censorship had disappeared as a Republican office, and we might have expected that its vast powers combined with its Republican traditions would have made it a valuable supplement to the authority of the Prince. But there were reasons against its assumption. In its pure form it was an occasional office, and its permanent tenure might have shocked Republican sentiment; while the fact that the assessment of the Roman people for the _comitia_ and the army soon ceased to be necessary made its absence scarcely felt. On the analogy of the _tribunicia potestas_, the powers of the office without the office itself were, in the form of a _cura legum et morum_, offered to Augustus, but declined by him.[1613] There was no constitutional difficulty about exercising some of the functions of the censorship through the _imperium_, whether consular or quasi-consular, and this was done by Augustus when he revised the list of the Senate in 29 and 18 B.C.[1614] Two of the succeeding Principes, however, Claudius and Vespasian, thought fit to assume the office in its old temporary form, and Domitian carried out the design of making it an integral part of the Principate by assuming the position of censor for life (_censor perpetuus_).[1615] His precedent was not followed because it was unnecessary. The revision of the list of the Senate and _equites_—the only meaning that the _cura morum_ now had—was established by consent as an admitted right of the Princeps,[1616] and even the power of creating Patricians came to be recognised as one inherent in his office. This power had been conferred on Caesar and Augustus by law; Claudius and Vespasian exercised it as censors;[1617] but, apparently without further enactment, this power of ennobling, extinct since the beginning of the Republic[1618] and no part of the Republican census, became an admitted imperial prerogative. It was only when the destined Princeps was himself a Plebeian that this honour, which was considered a necessary qualification for his office, was conferred on him by the Senate.[1619] (iv.) The chief of the extraordinary rights conferred on the Princeps by special enactment were those which had relation to the Senate, the right of recommendation to office (_commendatio_) and a dispensation from the operation of certain laws.