Page:Roman public life (IA romanpubliclife00greeiala).pdf/238

 decrees of the Senate, the list of judices, the public accounts (tabulae publicae), which included the statements of moneys voted to magistrates and the reckoning of provincial governors with the aerarium in respect to direct tribute paid them by the provincials. Connected with this financial custody were the quaestors' duties of collection. To them the publicani usually paid the sums which they had guaranteed for the leasing of the public revenues. The collection of fines imposed by the judicia populi, and exacted by the quaestiones for peculation and extortion, was also in their hands.

The quaestors also conducted sales on behalf of the treasury—not of those large portions of the public domain which were alienated by the censors, but of current acquisitions, such as those of slaves and booty captured in war, and of that portion of conquered land which was brought immediately under the hammer (ager quaestorius). This threefold function of guardianship, collection, and sale gave the urban quaestors an unequalled grasp of the state of the public revenues, and as they were annual, while the censors—the budget-makers—were merely occasional officials, we are not surprised to find them making financial statements in the Senate.

(ii.) The general assistance which the quaestors were meant to render to the consuls was extended, as we saw, in the year 421 to their activity in the field. Each consul or praetor who assumed a military command was given a particular quaestor (the dictator being exempted from what was regarded as a limitation on the discretionary powers of the magistrate), and,