Abstract

Between about 1500 and 1620, the Roman censors were repeatedly invoked as a useful political model. Besides being discussed by antiquarians and political theorists, they were actually imitated in early sixteenth-century Venice, and figured in polemics over office-holding in early seventeenth-century France. This episode throws an interesting light on civic humanism. The censors were generally seen not as a means of creating the virtuous citizen body of classical republicanism, but as a supplement to the modern legal system, capable of creating a capable and honest class of magistrates. A few theorists even suggested that they might be adapted to promote purely economic efficiency