In his proper year Cicero became Quæstor, and had assigned to him by lot the duty of looking after the Western Division of Sicily. For Sicily, though but one province as regarded general condition, being under one governor with proconsular authority, retained separate modes of government, or, rather, varied forms of subjection to Rome, especially in matters of taxation, according as it had or had not been conquered from the Carthaginians.[87] Cicero was quartered at Lilybæum, on the west, whereas the other Quæstor was placed at Syracuse, in the east. There were at that time twenty Quæstors elected annually, some of whom remained in Rome; but most of the number were stationed about the Empire, there being always one as assistant to each Proconsul. When a Consul took the field with an army, he always had a Quæstor with him. This had become the case so generally that the Quæstor became, as it were, something between a private secretary and a senior lieutenant to a governor. The arrangement came to have a certain sanctity attached to it, as though there was something in the connection warmer and closer than that of mere official life; so that a Quæstor has been called a Proconsul's son for the time, and was supposed to feel that reverence and attachment that a son entertains for his father. But to Cicero, and to young Quæstors in general, the great attraction of the office consisted in the fact that the aspirant having once become a Quæstor was a Senator for the rest of his life, unless he should be degraded by misconduct. Gradually it had come to pass that the Senate was replenished by the votes of the people, not directly, but by the admission into the Senate of the popularly elected magistrates. There were in the time of Cicero between 500 and 600 members of this body. The numbers down to the time of Sulla had been increased or made up by direct selection by the old Kings, or by the Censors, or by some Dictator, such as was Sulla; and the same thing was done afterward by Julius Cæsar. The years between Sulla's Dictatorship and that of Cæsar were but thirty--from 79 to 49 B.C. These, however, were the years in which Cicero dreamed that the Republic could be re-established by means of an honest Senate, which Senate was then to be kept alive by the constant infusion of new blood, accruing to it from the entrance of magistrates who had been chosen by the people. Tacitus tells us that it was with this object that Sulla had increased the number of Quæstors.[88] Cicero's hopes--his futile hopes of what an honest Senate might be made to do--still ran high, although at the very time in which he was elected Quæstor he was aware that the judges, then elected from the Senate, were so corrupt that their judgment could not be trusted. Of this popular mode of filling the Senate he speaks afterward in his treatise De Legibus. "From those who have acted as magistrates the Senate is composed--a measure altogether in the popular interest, as no