The right which the senate had hitherto possessed of assigning the provinces to the magistrates and promagistrates according to its pleasure gave a great opportunity for favoritism and partisanship; it could thwart the will of the people by assigning a popular consul to an insignificant province. To deprive the senate of a power which could be so easily perverted to wrong use, C. Gracchus proposed and carried an act which ordered the senate before the election to name the provinces that were to be consular.[2351] An article forbade tribunician intercession against such action of the senate.[2352] Far from improving the administration, however, this statute tended to foster that routine which was one of the most marked defects of oligarchic rule.[2353] As under the government of the nobility military affairs were in the hands of the magistrates and senate, this field was closed to comitial legislation.[2354] One of the most notable indications of growing democracy was the project of Ti. Gracchus, 133, for shortening the period of service. It was not brought to vote;[2355] but his brother Gaius succeeded in passing a plebiscite, 123, which ordered that the state should bear the cost of clothing soldiers, and forbade the enlistment of boys before the close of their seventeenth year.[2356] The pay of the soldiers, which since the war with Hannibal had remained five and a third asses a day, had under new conditions become wholly inadequate; and certainly insistence on the legal age limitation was prudent as well as humane. There is no ground, then, for imagining with Diodorus[2357] that in this salutary measure Gaius was catering for the support of the soldiers by inciting them to disobedience and lawlessness.