Ab urbe condita

The work of the census was accelerated by an enactment in which Servius denounced imprisonment and even capital punishment against those who evaded assessment. On its completion he issued an order that all the citizens of Rome, knights and infantry alike, should appear in the Campus Martius, each in their centuries.

After the whole army had been drawn up there, he purified it by the triple sacrifice of a swine, a sheep, and an ox.[*](As in the case of Tullus Hostilius (see note 9). This sacrifice was afterwards regularly offered on the completion of each five-year period (lustrum).) This was called “a closed lustrum,” because with it the census was completed. Eighty thousand citizens are said to have been included in that census. Fabius Pictor, the oldest of our historians states that this was the number of those who could bear arms.

To[*](Enlargement of the City.) contain that population it was obvious that the City would have to be enlarged. He added to it the two hills —the Quirinal and the Viminal —and then made a further addition by including the Esquiline, and to give it more importance he lived there himself. He surrounded the City with a mound and moats and wall; in this way he extended the “ pomoerium.”

Looking only to the etymology of the word, they explain “ pomoerium ” as “ postmoerium;” but it is rather a “ circamoerium.” For the space which the Etruscans of old, when founding their cities, consecrated in accordance with auguries and marked off by boundary stones at intervals on each side, as the part where the wall was to be carried, was to be kept vacant so that no buildings might connect with the wall on the inside (whilst now they generally touch), and on the outside some ground might remain virgin soil untouched by cultivation.

This space, which it was forbidden either to build upon or to plough, and which could not be said to be behind the wall any more than the wall could be said to be behind it, the Romans called the “ pomoerium.” As the City grew, these sacred boundary stones were always moved forward as far as the walls were advanced.