Hence the name of lustrum came to denote the intercensal term, or a period of five years.
The zodiac of Denderah; the Savoyards who carved their pine-forests into toys; the naked Derar, horsed on an idea, charging a troop of Roman cavalry; the long, austere Pythagorean lustrum of silence; Napoleon on the deck of the "Bellerophon," observing the drill of the English soldiers; the Egyptian doctrine that every man has two pairs of eyes; Empedocles and his shoe; the horizontal stratification of the earth; a soft mushroom pushing its way through the hard ground, - all these allusions and a thousand more are found in the same volume.
When the tablets containing the vows to be offered for the welfare of the state during the next lustrum were handed to him, he left the duty of reciting them to Tiberius, saying that he would not take vows which he was never destined to perform.