Every five years, Rome counted itself. The census — from censere, to assess or value — was among the Republic’s foundational institutions, and its function was simultaneously administrative, fiscal, military, and moral. The censors who conducted it were among the most prestigious officials in Roman public life, elected for an eighteen-month term and charged with counting the citizen population, assessing property for taxation, maintaining the rolls of the Senate and equestrian order, overseeing public contracts, and conducting the ritual purification — the lustrum — that closed the proceedings and symbolically cleansed the community assembled before the gods. That a single process managed population counting, tax assessment, social classification, public contracting, and civic religion simultaneously tells you something about how the Romans understood the relationship between governance and community that modern bureaucratic specialization has dissolved.