Reorganization of the Senate
Its Complement Filled Up by Extraordinary Election
Admission to the Senate through the Quaestorship
Abolition of the Censorial Supervision of the Senate

For this purpose the governing board had, first of all, to have its ranks filled up and to be itself placed on a footing of independence.  The numbers of the senators had been fearfully reduced by the recent crises.  Sulla no doubt now gave to those who were exiled by the equestrian courts liberty to return, for instance to the consular Publius Rutilius Rufus,(12) who however made no use of the permission, and to Gaius Cotta the friend of Drusus;(13) but this made only slight amends for the gaps which the revolutionary and reactionary reigns of terror had created in the ranks of the senate.  Accordingly by Sulla’s directions the senate had its complement extraordinarily made up by about 300 new senators, whom the assembly of the tribes had to nominate from among men of equestrian census, and whom they selected, as may be conceived, chiefly from the younger men of the senatorial houses on the one hand, and from Sullan officers and others brought into prominence by the last revolution on the other.  For the future also the mode of admission to the senate was regulated anew and placed on an essentially different basis.  As the constitution had hitherto stood, men entered the senate either through the summons of the censors, which was the proper and ordinary way, or through the holding of one of the three curule magistracies—­the consulship, the praetorship, or the aedileship—­ to which since the passing of the Ovinian law a seat and vote in the senate had been de jure attached.(14) The holding of an inferior magistracy, of the tribunate or the quaestorship, gave doubtless a claim de facto to a place in the senate—­inasmuch as the censorial selection especially turned towards the men who had held such offices—­but by no means a reversion de jure.  Of these two modes of admission, Sulla abolished the former by setting aside—­at least practically—­the censorship, and altered the latter to the effect that the right of admission to the senate was attached to the quaestorship instead of the aedileship, and at the same time the number of quaestors to be annually nominated was raised to twenty.(15) The prerogative hitherto legally pertaining to the censors, although practically no longer exercised in its original serious sense—­of deleting any senator from the roll, with a statement of the reasons for doing so, at the revisals which took place every five years (16)—­likewise fell into abeyance for the future; the irremoveable character which had hitherto de facto belonged to the senators was thus finally fixed by Sulla.  The total number of senators, which hitherto had presumably not much exceeded the old normal number of 300 and often perhaps had not even reached it, was by these means considerably augmented, perhaps on an average doubled(17)—­an augmentation which was rendered