The QUAESTORS still maintained their functions as financial officials and general assistants to the magistrates. Their number had been raised by Caesar to forty, but was again reduced to twenty by Augustus.[1736] For a time two quaestors had the guardianship of the _aerarium_,[1737] and others were in the public provinces the financial and judicial assistants of the proconsuls.[1738] Four more were assigned to the consuls, two to each, as their agents and assistants;[1739] while the Princeps himself employed two, commended by himself (_quaestores Augusti_, _quaestores candidati principis_), chiefly for the purpose of reading his despatches to the Senate.[1740] During the reign of Claudius a step was taken which “put up the quaestorship for sale,”[1741] and associated it with a function that clung to it longer than any other. This was the exhibition of gladiatorial games at the cost of the exhibitor,[1742] a pecuniary burden which henceforth fell on every aspirant for higher office, until Severus Alexander ordained that only the _quaestores candidati_ should themselves defray the expenses of these spectacles, the cost of the games given by the others being defrayed from the _fiscus_.[1743] The TRIBUNES OF THE PLEBS were not colleagues of the Princeps, for the _tribunica potestas_ was not the tribunate, and the actions in virtue of it were not even theoretically subject to the tribunes’ veto. But their great negative powers were still occasionally exercised in some departments of state during the first century of the Principate. Like the office itself, however, they were but a shadow of those of the Republic.[1744] The _intercessio_ against decrees of the Senate might be attempted when unimportant matters, such as the right to scourge actors, were under discussion,[1745] or might be employed as a warning to the Senate that the Princeps should be consulted on the business in hand.[1746] In higher matters of state its exercise might mean danger or death to the tribune who mistook the fictitious for the real Republic, or who, recognising the tyranny, chose to brave the anger of the Emperor.[1747] The right of _auxilium_ was still exercised against a praetor in 56 A.D.,[1748] and appealed to by an Emperor in 69.[1749] But this, too, soon disappeared to leave no trace. In the early Principate the tribunes seem to have possessed some right of summoning civil cases from the Italian towns to Rome,[1750] probably through an exercise of the veto; and, although their criminal jurisdiction had disappeared with the _comitia_, they retained some power of inflicting fines (_multae_), which was limited during the reign of Nero.[1751] There is also evidence that they still possessed the right of veto in civil jurisdiction.[1752] Amongst positive powers their presidency of the Senate still survives, as we shall see in dealing with that body.