had surrendered itself to the perilous pleasure of listening to carefully woven sentences, the “paint pots” of Cicero[1322] were still in all probability the exception and not the rule. The voice of the majority of the Senate was embodied in a resolution (_senatus consultum_). Considered as the mere advice of the magistrates’ council it had no legal validity whatever; its binding character sprang from the fact that it was a decree of the magistrate applying to a sphere in which he was himself competent to issue such injunctions. Hence, as we have seen,[1323] the veto pronounced on a decree of the Senate by the colleague or superior of the magistrate who has elicited it, is no exception to the rule that the acts of corporations or of private individuals were not subject to this form of invalidation. So little was this the case that, when the decree had been vetoed, the advice of the Senate still remained unimpaired. The annulled resolution was still drawn up, but it had become an _auctoritas_ merely.[1324] It was still of sufficient potency to bind constitutionally-minded magistrates, but it no longer imposed the duty of obeying it on the community. The _consultum_ or _auctoritas_ was drawn up at the place of meeting soon after the resolution which it embodied had been passed. As there were no permanent officials of a responsible character to see to its redaction, a small committee was appointed by the president to attest the genuineness of the document;[1325] this consisted usually of the author of the resolution and of some of his supporters. (iii.) The Senate exerted its developed authority under two different aspects. It was the body which exercised the power of previous deliberation on matters which must be submitted to the judgment of a nominally higher authority, the people, and it was a council which professed to give final directions to the magistrates on the conduct of their administrative duties. It possessed no sphere of its own in which it could act unassisted by magistrates and people, and thus its formal independence is far less than that possessed by such a body as the Athenian _Boulê_. The only department of state in which it seems to have independent authority—the power of perpetuating the very life of the _civitas_ by the appointment of an interrex—belongs strictly not to the Senate but to its patrician members; and even for the exercise of this right during the Republic the motive power had to spring ultimately from a magistrate of the Plebs.[1326]