By the law _de provinciis ordinandis_, he sought to regulate the provinces and ameliorate their administration. The two consuls and the eight prætors were retained at Rome during their year of office by the administration of civil affairs. They took afterwards, in quality of proconsuls or proprætors, the command of one of the ten provinces, which they exercised during a year; after which a new curiate law became necessary to renew the _imperium_; they preserved it until their return to Rome. Thirty days were allowed to them for quitting the province after the arrival of their successors.[735] The number of prætors, questors, pontiffs, and augurs was augmented.[736] Every year twenty questors were to be named, which would ensure the recruitment of the Senate, since this office gave entrance to it. Sylla multiplied the commissions of justice. He took measures for putting a stop to the murders which desolated Italy (_lex de sicariis_), and to protect the citizens against outrages (_lex de injuriis_). The _lex magistratis_ completed, so to say, the preceding.[737] In the number of _crimes of high treason_, punished capitally, are the excesses of magistrates charged with the administration of the provinces; quitting their government without leave of the Senate; conducting an army beyond the limits of his province; undertaking a war unauthorised; treating with foreign chiefs: such were the principal acts denounced as crimes against the Republic. There was not one of them of which Sylla himself had not been guilty. Sylla abdicated in 675, the only extraordinary act which remained for him to accomplish. He who had carried mourning into so many families returned into his own house alone, through a respectful and submissive crowd. Such was the ascendency of his old power, supported, moreover, by the ten thousand Cornelians present in Rome and devoted to his person,[738] that, though he had resumed his position of simple citizen, he was still allowed to act as absolute master, and even on the eve of his death, which occurred in 676, he made himself the executioner of pitiless justice, in daring to cause to be slaughtered before his eyes the prætor Granius, guilty of exaction.[739] Unexampled magnificence was displayed at his funeral; his body was carried to the Campus Martius, where previously none but the kings had been inhumed.[740] He left Italy tamed, but not subdued; the great nobles in power, but without moral authority; his partisans enriched, but trembling for their riches; the numerous victims of tyranny held down, but growling under the oppression; lastly, Rome taught that henceforth she is without protection against the boldness of any fortunate soldier.[741] [Sidenote: Effects of Sylla’s Dictatorship.]