to the auspicia publica, with which alone the consul was concerned. However this may be, the patrician claim was indignantly repudiated by the plebeians, and the historian can say no more than that it was “perhaps true.” Another passage from Livy usually interpreted in support of the theory that the patricians alone had private auspices represents them, before the opening of the offices to the commons, as saying, “So peculiar to us are the auspices that not only the patrician magistrates whom the people choose are elected under the auspices, but we ourselves under the sanction of the same rite without a vote of the people appoint the interrex, and we as private persons hold auspices, which they do not hold even as magistrates.”[589] This passage is perfectly intelligible to one who bears in mind that in the late republic private auspices had disappeared,[590] and that therefore when the word auspicia is used without qualification by a late republican or imperial writer, it always has reference to the public ceremonies.[591] In the quotation just given, accordingly, nothing more is meant than that the patricians, who have the exclusive right to the offices, are alone competent to perform the public religious ceremonies which belong to the magistrates. Reference in the quotation to the auspices of private persons signifies that when there was no magistrate competent to hold the election of consuls, the public auspices returned to the senate, the patrician members of which proceeded under auspication to appoint an interrex for holding the elections. In this case the senatorial patricians, it was asserted, attended to the ceremony not as magistrates but as private persons, though the rites were themselves public. As distinguished from magistrates, the senators were privati. It was not, then, as mere citizens but as patrician members of the senate that they performed the rite. Further light is thrown on this subject by the fact that in the agitation for the opening of the augural and pontifical colleges to the plebeians in 300, the patricians repeated the assertion that with them alone were auspices, they alone had family (gens), they alone possessed true imperium and auspicium in peace and war.[592] This claim they had the effrontery to make despite the fact that plebeian consuls had been taking public auspices for more than sixty years. In the pride of their blood they claimed that theirs alone were strictly legal (iustum). Notwithstanding such partisan assertions the facts thus far adduced lead unmistakably to the conclusion that the plebeians equally with the patricians enjoyed the right to private auspices.[593] II. _Auspicia Publica Impetrativa_