unity in War and Administration

21. IV. VII. Legislation of Sulla

22. II. III. Restrictions As to the Accumulation and the Reoccupation
of Offices

23. IV. II. Attempts at Reform

24. To this the words of Lepidus in Sallust (Hist. i. 41, 11
Dietsch) refer: -populus Romanus excitus... iure agitandi-, to
which Tacitus (Ann. iii. 27) alludes: -statim turbidis Lepidi
rogationibus neque multo post tribunis reddita licentia quoquo
vellent populum agitandi-. That the tribunes did not altogether
lose the right of discussing matters with the people is shown by
Cic. De Leg. iii. 4, 10 and more clearly by the -plebiscitum de
Thermensibus-, which however in the opening formula also designates
itself as issued -de senatus sententia-. That the consuls on the
other hand could under the Sullan arrangements submit proposals to
the people without a previous resolution of the senate, is shown
not only by the silence of the authorities, but also by the course
of the revolutions of 667 and 676, whose leaders for this very
reason were not tribunes but consuls. Accordingly we find at this
period consular laws upon secondary questions of administration,
such as the corn law of 681, for which at other times we should
have certainly found -plebiscita-.

25. II. III. Influence of the Elections

26. IV. II. Vote by Ballot

27. For this hypothesis there is no other proof, except that
the Italian Celt-land was as decidedly not a province--in the sense
in which the word signifies a definite district administered by a
governor annually changed--in the earlier times, as it certainly was
one in the time of Caesar (comp. Licin. p. 39; -data erat et Sullae
provincia Gallia Cisalpina-).

The case is much the same with the advancement of the frontier;
we know that formerly the Aesis, and in Caesar's time the Rubico,
separated the Celtic land from Italy, but we do not know when the
boundary was shifted. From the circumstance indeed, that Marcus
Terentius Varro Lucullus as propraetor undertook a regulation of
the frontier in the district between the Aesis and Rubico (Orelli,
Inscr. 570), it has been inferred that that must still have been
provincial land at least in the year after Lucullus' praetorship 679,
since the propraetor had nothing to do on Italian soil. But it was
only within the -pomerium- that every prolonged -imperium- ceased of
itself; in Italy, on the other hand, such a prolonged -imperium- was
even under Sulla's arrang