In a recent note in Historia Léonie Hayne has written the following:
‘In his study of the censorship, Suolahti has drawn the conclusion that election to the censorship for patricians after 218 normally happened at the earliest opportunity after their consulship.’
Partly on the basis of this she suggests that Cn. Servilius Caepio, cos. 141 and eventually censor in 125, may have suffered a repulse in the censorial elections of 131, having stood in tandem with Q. Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus. Those elections, of course, produced the first all-plebeian censorial college.
Hayne, therefore, has used data on censors arranged in an extensive chronological framework in the middle of which stand the elections in question. My own attempts to present patterned data which may help to elucidate the phenomena of Roman politics have made me particularly aware of the necessity to arrange such data in compartments of defensible significance. So here I must object to the use of ‘after 218’ as a proper time reference for the evidence. The plebeian college of 131 would seem to present one significant point of division. This was in fact realized by Suolahti, who uses two periods, not one, namely 218-133 and 133-30, and who is much more cautious and much less specific about patricians. Yet, even so, one must be careful about assembling or describing the data in convenient periods. Perhaps this is especially so with the censorship, a position only filled once every five years in normal circumstances, so that to have a reasonable number of censors on which to base statistical conclusions, one must necessarily encompass a considerable span of time.