of corn; dealt with the domains, by sending out colonies not as hitherto by decree of the senate and people, but by decree of the people alone; and dealt with the provincial administration, by overturning through a law of the people the financial constitution given by the senate to the province of Asia and substituting for it one altogether different.  One of the most important of the current duties of the senate—­that of fixing at its pleasure the functions for the time being of the two consuls—­was not withdrawn from it; but the indirect pressure hitherto exercised in this way over the supreme magistrates was limited by directing the senate to fix these functions before the consuls concerned were elected.  With unrivalled activity, lastly, Gaius concentrated the most varied and most complicated functions of government in his own person.  He himself watched over the distribution of grain, selected the jurymen, founded the colonies in person notwithstanding that his magistracy legally chained him to the city, regulated the highways and concluded building-contracts, led the discussions of the senate, settled the consular elections—­in short, he accustomed the people to the fact that one man was foremost in all things, and threw the lax and lame administration of the senatorial college into the shade by the vigour and versatility of his personal rule.  Gracchus interfered with the judicial omnipotence, still more energetically than with the administration, of the senate.  We have already mentioned that he set aside the senators as jurymen; the same course was taken with the jurisdiction which the senate as the supreme administrative board allowed to itself in exceptional cases.  Under severe penalties he prohibited—­ apparently in his renewal of the law -de provocatione-(24)—­the appointment of extraordinary commissions of high treason by decree of the senate, such as that which after his brother’s murder had sat in judgment on his adherents.  The aggregate effect of these measures was, that the senate wholly lost the power of control, and retained only so much of administration as the head of the state thought fit to leave to it.  But these constitutive measures were not enough; the governing aristocracy for the time being was also directly assailed.  It was a mere act of revenge, which assigned retrospective effect to the last-mentioned law and thereby compelled Publius Popillius—­the aristocrat who after the death of Nasica, which had occurred in the interval, was chiefly obnoxious to the democrats—­to go into exile.  It is remarkable that this proposal was only carried by 18 to 17 votes in the assembly of the tribes—­a sign how much the influence of the aristocracy still availed with the multitude, at least in questions of a personal interest.  A similar but far less justifiable decree—­the proposal, directed against Marcus Octavius, that whoever had been deprived of his office by decree of the people should be for ever incapable of filling a public post—­was