be refused--the most important and
most lucrative places in the state were filled up no longer by the
burgesses, but by the senate out of a list of competitors formed by
the burgess-elections. Since among these positions the transmarine
commands were especially sought after as being the most lucrative,
it was usual to entrust a transmarine command on the expiry of
their official year to those magistrates whom their office confined
either in law or at any rate in fact to the capital, that is, to the
two praetors administering justice in the city and frequently also
to the consuls; a course which was compatible with the nature of
prorogation, since the official authority of supreme magistrates
acting in Rome and in the provinces respectively, although differently
entered on, was not in strict state-law different in kind.

Regulation of Their Functions by Sulla
Separation of the Political and Military Authority
Cisalpine Gaul Erected into a Province

Such was the state of things which Sulla found existing, and which
formed the basis of his new arrangement. Its main principles were,
a complete separation between the political authority which governed
in the burgess-districts and the military authority which governed in
the non-burgess-districts, and an uniform extension of the duration of
the supreme magistracy from one year to two, the first of which was
devoted to civil, and the second to military affairs. Locally the
civil and the military authority had certainly been long separated
by the constitution, and the former ended at the -pomerium-, where
the latter began; but still the same man held the supreme political
and the supreme military power united in his hand. In future the
consul and praetor were to deal with the senate and burgesses, the
proconsul and propraetor were to command the army; but all military
power was cut off by law from the former, and all political action
from the latter. This primarily led to the political separation of
the region of Northern Italy from Italy proper. Hitherto they had
stood doubtless in a national antagonism, inasmuch as Northern Italy
was inhabited chiefly by Ligurians and Celts, Central and Southern
Italy by Italians; but, in a political and administrative point of
view, the whole continental territory of the Roman state from the
Straits to the Alps including the Illyrian possessions--burgess,
Latin, and non-Italian communities without exception--was in the
ordinary cour