department of their duties by the enactments existing in regard to it;
the jurisdiction, for instance, over Roman citizens had in every case
to be left to the praetor, and in the Latin and other autonomous
communities the existing treaties had to be respected. The four
quaestors who had been since 487 distributed throughout Italy did not,
formally at least, restrict the consular authority, for in Italy,
just as in Rome, they were regarded simply as auxiliary magistrates
dependent on the consuls. This mode of administration appears to have
been at first extended also to the territories taken from Carthage,
and Sicily and Sardinia to have been governed for some years by
quaestors under the superintendence of the consuls; but the Romans
must very soon have become practically convinced that it was
indispensable to have superior magistrates specially appointed for
the transmarine regions. As they had been obliged to abandon the
concentration of the Roman jurisdiction in the person of the praetor
as the community became enlarged, and to send to the more remote
districts deputy judges,(4) so now (527) the concentration of
administrative and military power in the person of the consuls had to
be abandoned. For each of the new transmarine regions--viz. Sicily,
and Sardinia with Corsica annexed to it--there was appointed a special
auxiliary consul, who was in rank and title inferior to the consul and
equal to the praetor, but otherwise was--like the consul in earlier
times before the praetorship was instituted--in his own sphere of
action at once commander-in-chief, chief magistrate, and supreme
judge. The direct administration of finance alone was withheld from
these new chief magistrates, as from the first it had been withheld
from the consuls;(5) one or more quaestors were assigned to them,
who were in every way indeed subordinate to them, and were their
assistants in the administration of justice and in command, but yet
had specially to manage the finances and to render account of their