mere official life; so that a Quaestor has been called a Proconsul's
son for the time, and was supposed to feel that reverence and
attachment that a son entertains for his father.

But to Cicero, and to young Quaestors in general, the great attraction
of the office consisted in the fact that the aspirant having once
become a Quaestor was a Senator for the rest of his life, unless he
should be degraded by misconduct. Gradually it had come to pass that
the Senate was replenished by the votes of the people, not directly,
but by the admission into the Senate of the popularly elected
magistrates. There were in the time of Cicero between 500 and 600
members of this body. The numbers down to the time of Sulla had been
increased or made up by direct selection by the old Kings, or by the
Censors, or by some Dictator, such as was Sulla; and the same thing
was done afterward by Julius Caesar. The years between Sulla's
Dictatorship and that of Caesar were but thirty--from 79 to 49 B.C.
These, however, were the years in which Cicero dreamed that the
Republic could be re-established by means of an honest Senate, which
Senate was then to be kept alive by the constant infusion of new
blood, accruing to it from the entrance of magistrates who had been
chosen by the people. Tacitus tells us that it was with this object
that Sulla had increased the number of Quaestors.[88]Cicero's
hopes--his futile hopes of what an honest Senate might be made to
do--still ran high, although at the very time in which he was elected
Quaestor he was aware that the judges, then elected from the Senate,
were so corrupt that their judgment could not be trusted. Of this
popular mode of filling the Senate he speaks afterward in his treatise
De Legibus. "From those who have acted as magistrates the Senate is
composed--a measure altogether in the popular interest, as no one can
now reach the highest rank"--namely, the Senate--"except by the votes