their year of
office were bound to transmit their power to successors; and these
successors whom they nominated were obliged to seek the suffrages of the
people. The only body known to us as electing the consuls during the
republican period was the _comitia centuriata_ (see Comitia). The
consulate was originally confined to patricians. During the struggle for
higher office that was waged between the orders the office was suspended
on fifty-one occasions between the years 444 and 367 B.C. and replaced
by the military tribunate with consular power, to which plebeians were
eligible. The struggle was brought to an end by the Licinio-Sextian laws
of 367 B.C., which enacted that one consul must be a plebeian (see
Patricians).

Most of the internal history of Rome down to the beginning of the third
century B.C. consists in a series of attacks, whether intentional or
accidental, on the power of the executive. As the consuls are the sole
representatives of higher executive authority in early times, this
history is one of a progressive decline in the originally wide and
arbitrary powers of the office. Their right of summary criminal
jurisdiction was weakened by the successive laws of appeal
(_provocatio_); their capacity for interpreting the civil law at their
pleasure by the publication of the Twelve Tables and the Forms of
Action. The growth of the tribunate of the plebs hampered their activity
both as legislators and as judges. They surrendered the duties of
registration to the censors in 443 B.C., and the rights of civil
jurisdiction and control over the market and police to the praetor and
the curule aediles in 367 B.C.

The result of these limitations and of this specialization of functions
in the community was to leave the consuls with less specific duties at
home than any magistrates in the state. But the absence of specific
functions may be of itself a sign of a general duty of supervision. The
consuls were in a very real sense the heads of the state. Polybius
describes them as controlling the whole administration (Polyb. vi. 12
[Greek: pason eisi kurioi ton demosion praxeon]). This control they
exercised in concert with the senate, whose chief servants they were. It
was they who were the most regular consultants of this council, who
formulated its decrees as edicts, and who brought before the people
legislative measures which the senate had approved. It was they also who
represented the state to the outer world and i