The consuls settled the distribution of _provinciae_ by agreement or by lot,[908] the _sortitio_ becoming in time the more usual practice. Occasionally the Senate ventured to suggest that one of the consuls was better qualified for a special department, and in this case the inevitable consent of his colleague enabled him to assume it _extra sortem_.[909] But, as Rome’s activity extended, and the available magistrates with _imperium_ increased, the important question came to be, not who should have one of two departments, but which should be the consular provinces. This power to nominate the provinces (_nominare provincias_) had, by the close of the Hannibalic war, become the undisputed prerogative of the Senate,[910] and one of its surest modes of controlling the consuls. This _de facto_ power was formally recognised by a law of the tribune C. Gracchus in 123 B.C., although it scarcely required legal recognition, and the purport of the _lex Sempronia_ was to weaken the discretionary power of the Senate by enacting that the consular provinces should be fixed before the election of the consuls who were to hold them.[911] At this period the consular departments were almost invariably foreign commands; but, after the close of the social war and the reforms of Sulla, they were held by their recipients as proconsuls after their year of office at Rome had expired. We do not know the exact tenor of the _lex Cornelia de provinciis ordinandis_. Sulla did nothing to infringe the military _imperium_ of the consuls; after as before his law it was legal for them to “approach any province”;[912] but he devised some means of separating home from foreign commands, which, by crystallising the established custom, restricted the consuls and praetors to the civil government of Rome and Italy, and sent them out after their year of office as proconsuls and propraetors to the provinces. The powers conferred by the military _imperium_[913] were thenceforth lost, and the consul at the close of the Republic had less specific functions than any magistrate; even his criminal jurisdiction had vanished before the establishment of the permanent courts. Yet still the consul, who observed constitutional forms, was the chief interpreter of the Senate’s will; while one who, like Caesar in 59 B.C., violated all these forms, might exercise an almost monarchical power. The possession of the consulship was the great annual prize, contested and almost equally secured by the conservative and the reform parties from the time of the Gracchi to the close of the Republic,[914] and the competition was not wholly directed to secure the military _imperium_ which lay beyond it. The civil office might still make a capable man, supported by a powerful following, the guide of the destinies of the state.[915] _The Praetors_