indivisible and capable of no other limitation at all than a
territorial one. There was a province of urban law and a province
of military law, in the latter of which the -provocatio- and other
regulations of urban law were not applicable; there were magistrates,
such as the proconsuls, who were empowered to discharge functions
simply in the latter; but there were, in the strict sense of law,
no magistrates with merely jurisdictional, as there were none with
merely military, -imperium-. The proconsul was in his province, just
like the consul, at once commander-in-chief and supreme judge, and was
entitled to send to trial actions not only between non-burgesses and
soldiers, but also between one burgess and another. Even when, on the
institution of the praetorship, the idea rose of apportioning special
functions to the -magistratus maiores-, this division of powers had
more of a practical than of a strictly legal force; the -praetor
urbanus- was primarily indeed the supreme judge, but he could also
convoke the centuries, at least for certain cases, and could
command an army; the consul in the city held primarily the supreme
administration and the supreme command, but he too acted as a judge
in cases of emancipation and adoption--the functional indivisibility
of the supreme magistracy was therefore, even in these instances,
very strictly adhered to on both sides. Thus the military as well as
jurisdictional authority, or, laying aside these abstractions foreign
to the Roman law of this period, the absolute magisterial power, must
have virtually pertained to the plebeian consular tribunes as well as
to the patrician. But it may well be, as Becker supposes (Handb. ii.
2, 137), that, for the same reasons, for which at a subsequent period
there was placed alongside of the consulship common to both orders
the praetorship actually reserved for a considerable time for the
patricians, even during the consular tribunate the plebeian members
of the college were -de facto- kept aloof from jurisdiction, and so