ian office, which appeared to the regent an instrument
indispensable doubtless for senatorial government, but yet--
as generated by revolution and having a constant tendency to
generate fresh revolutions in its turn--requiring to be rigorously
and permanently shackled. The tribunician authority had arisen out
of the right to annul the official acts of the magistrates by veto,
and, eventually, to fine any one who should oppose that right and to
take steps for his farther punishment; this was still left to the
tribunes, excepting that a heavy fine, destroying as a rule a man's
civil existence, was imposed on the abuse of the right of intercession.
The further prerogative of the tribune to have dealings with the
people at pleasure, partly for the purpose of bringing up accusations
and especially of calling former magistrates to account at the bar
of the people, partly for the purpose of submitting laws to the vote,
had been the lever by which the Gracchi, Saturninus, and Sulpicius
had revolutionized the state; it was not abolished, but its exercise
was probably made dependent on a permission to be previously requested
from the senate.(24) Lastly it was added that the holding of
the tribunate should in future disqualify for the undertaking of
a higher office--an enactment which, like many other points in Sulla's
restoration, once more reverted to the old patrician maxims, and,
just as in the times before the admission of the plebeians to
the civil magistracies, declared the tribunate and the curule
offices to be mutually incompatible. In this way the legislator
of the oligarchy hoped to check tribunician demagogism and to keep
all ambitious and aspiring men aloof from the tribunate, but to
retain it as an instrument of the senate both for mediating
between it and the burgesses, and, should circumstances require,
for keeping in check the magistrates; and, as the authority of the
king and afterwards of the republican magistrates over the burgesses
scarcely anywhere comes to light so clearly as in the principle
that they exclusively had the right of addressing the people,
so the supremacy of the senate, now first legally established,
is most distinctly apparent in this permission which the leader
of the people had to ask from the senate for every transaction
with his constituents.

Limitation of the Supreme Magistracy
Regulation of the Consular and Praetorian Functions before--
The Time of Sulla

The consulship and prae