Excesses of the former kind were punished by the censor, and for the latter the constitution gave no scope.

The Rome of this period belonged to no individual; it was necessary for all the burgesses to be alike, that each of them might be like a king.
Appius Claudius No doubt, even now Hellenic individual development asserted its claims by the side of that levelling system; and the genius and force which it exhibited bear, no less than the tendency to which it opposed itself, the full stamp of that great age.

We can name but a single man in connection with it; but he was, as it were, the incarnation of the idea of progress.

Appius Claudius (censor 442; consul 447, 458), the great-great-grandson of the decemvir, was a man of the old nobility and proud of the long line of his ancestors; but yet it was he who set aside the restriction which confined the full franchise of the state to the freeholders,( 50) and who broke up the old system of finance.( 51) From Appius Claudius date not only the Roman aqueducts and highways, but also Roman jurisprudence, eloquence, poetry, and grammar.

The publication of a table of the -legis actiones-, speeches committed to writing and Pythagorean sentences, and even innovations in orthography, are attributed to him.