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 census required, though it varied from time to time during the reign of Augustus, was finally fixed at a million sesterces. Ingenuitas was required—Claudius even demanded free birth through three generations —and it was counted one of the abuses of tyrannical rule when the favour of Emperors admitted freedmen into the Senate. For a time the council maintained its mainly Roman character, but "new men" from Italy and the provinces crept in with the censorships of Claudius and Vespasian, and the former Emperor even granted admission to the Gallic Aedui, perhaps by an employment of his right of adlectio. The reception of provincials finally became so frequent that, to give them an Italian interest, it was decreed by Trajan that one-third of their property must be invested in land in Italy, a quota that was changed by Marcus Aurelius to one-fourth.

Removal from the Senate belonged to the Emperor either as censor, when he exercised the discretionary moral judgment which had been associated with the Republican lectio, or in virtue of that power of revision which, as we have seen, became associated with the Principate. The chief grounds of exclusion were lack of the requisite census, refusal to take the oath ''in acta Caesaris'' which was demanded of senators as of magistrates,[10] or condemnation for crime. The Senate itself, in the exercise of its judicial power, could add to the sentence which it inflicted on a senator the penalty of expulsion from the house;[11] it might even make this expulsion a punishment for calumnious accusation.[12] The revised list of the Senate (album senatorium) was