ch. 441.44The 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. [Note] 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.
[Note] To 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.
