Note 805 — Chapter VIII · EVENTS OF THE YEAR 703.

In our opinion, Professor A.W. Zumpt (Studia Romana, Berlin, 1859) is the only one who has cleared up this question; and we shall borrow of him the greatest part of his arguments. As to M. Th. Mommsen, in a special dissertation, entitled The Question of Right between Cæsar and the Senate, he proves that we must distinguish in the proconsulship between the provincia and the imperium. According to him, the provincia being given at the same time with the consulship, it could be taken possession of, according to the law Sempronia, only on the Calends of the month of January of the following year; the imperium, or military command, was added to it two months later, on the Calends of March. The provincia was given by a senatus-consultus, and counted from January to January; the imperium was given by a curiate law, and went from March to March: the imperium followed the rules of the military service; a year commenced was reputed finished, as for the campaigns of the soldiers, and thus the two first months of 705 might count for a complete year. The learned professor concludes that, if the Senate had the right to deprive Cæsar of his imperium, it could not take from him the command of the province before the end of the year 705, and that then Cæsar would find himself in the same position as all the proconsuls who, during the interval between the 1st of January, the commencement of their proconsulship, and the 1st of March, the time when they received the imperium, had the potestas, and not the military command. This system, we see, rests upon hypotheses which it is difficult to admit.