[-13-] When he had done this he next investigated the senatorial body.  The members seemed to him even now to be numerous and he saw danger in so large a throng, while he felt a hatred for not only such as were notorious for some baseness, but also those who were distinguished for their flattery.  And when no one, as previously, would resign willingly nor wished alone to incur accusation, he himself selected the thirty best men (a point which he confirmed by oath) and bade them after first taking the same oath to choose and write down groups of five, outside of their relatives, on tablets.  After this he subjected the groups of five to a casting of lots, with the arrangement that the one man in each who drew a lot should himself be a senator, and enroll five others on the same conditions.

There would, of course, properly be thirty of those chosen by others and by those who drew a lot.  And since some of them were out of town others drew as substitutes and attended to what should have been their duties.  At first this went on so for several days; but when some abuses crept in, he no longer put the documents in the charge of the quaestors nor submitted the groups of five to lot, but he himself read whatever remained and he himself chose the members that were lacking:  and thus six hundred in all were appointed. [-14-]It had been his plan to make them three hundred as in old times, and he thought he ought to be well satisfied if he found so many of them worthy of the senate.  But he finally chose a list of six hundred because of the universal displeasure; for it came out, by reason of the fact that those whose names would be cancelled would be many more than those who remained in the body, that greater fear of becoming private citizens prevailed among its members than expectation of being senators.  Not even here did the matter rest, since some unsuitable persons were still enrolled.  A certain Licinius Regulus after this, indignant because his name had been erased whereas his son and several others to whom he thought himself superior had been counted in, rent his clothing in the very senate, laid bare his body, enumerated his campaigns, and showed them his scars.  And Articuleius Paetus, one of the senators in posse, besought earnestly that he might retire from his seat in the senate in place of his father, who had been rejected.  Augustus then made a new organization, getting rid of some and choosing others in their place.  Since even so the names of many had been stricken out and some of them, as usually happens in such a case, charged that they had been driven out unjustly, he immediately accorded them the right to behold spectacles and join in festivals in common with the senators, wearing the same garb, and he permitted them for the future to stand for offices.  Most of them came back in the course of time into the senate:  some few were left in an intermediate position, regarded as belonging neither to the senate nor to the people.