of that vow.  The Carthaginians were routed and put to flight; above four thousand armed men were slain, a little under three hundred taken alive, with forty horses and eleven military standards.  Hannibal, dispirited by this adverse battle, led his troops away to Croton.  At the same time, in another part of Italy, Etruria, almost the whole of which had espoused the interest of Mago, and had conceived hopes of effecting a revolution through his means, was kept in subjection by the consul Marcus Cornelius, not so much by the force of his arms as the terror of his judicial proceedings.  In the trials he had instituted there, in conformity with the decree of the senate, he had shown the utmost impartiality; and many of the Tuscan nobles, who had either themselves gone, or had sent others to Mago respecting the revolt of their states, at first standing their trials, were condemned; but afterwards others, who, from a consciousness of guilt, had gone into voluntary exile, were condemned in their absence, and by thus withdrawing left their effects only, which were liable to confiscation, as a pledge for their punishment.

37.  While the consuls were thus engaged in different quarters, in the mean time, at Rome, the censors, Marcus Livius and Caius Claudius, called over the senate roll.  Quintus Fabius was again chosen chief of the senate; seven were stigmatized, of whom there was not one who had sat in the curule chair.  They inquired into the business relating to the repair of public edifices with diligence and the most scrupulous exactness.  They set by contract the making of a road out of the ox market to the temple of Venus, with public seats on each side of it, and a temple to be built in the palatium for the great mother.  They established also a new tax out of the price of salt.  Salt, both at Rome, and throughout all Italy, was sold at the sixth part of an as.  They contracted for the supply of it at Rome at the same price, at a higher price in the country towns and markets, and at different prices in different places.  They felt well convinced that this tax was invented by one of the censors, out of resentment to the people because he had formerly been condemned by an unjust sentence, and that in fixing the price of salt, those tribes had been most burdened by whose means he had been condemned.  Hence Livius derived the surname of Salinator.  The closing of the lustrum was later than usual, because the censors sent persons through the provinces, that a report might be made of the number of Roman citizens in each of the armies.  Including these, the number of persons returned in the census was two hundred and fourteen thousand.  Caius Claudius Nero closed the lustrum.  They then received a census of the twelve colonies, which had never been done before, the censors of the colonies themselves presenting it, in order that there might appear registers among the public records, stating the extent of their resources, both in respect of furnishing