The quaestors also conducted sales on behalf of the treasury—not of those large portions of the public domain which were alienated by the censors, but of current acquisitions, such as those of slaves and booty captured in war,[1000] and of that portion of conquered land which was brought immediately under the hammer (_ager quaestorius_).[1001] This threefold function of guardianship, collection, and sale gave the urban quaestors an unequalled grasp of the state of the public revenues, and as they were annual, while the censors—the budget-makers—were merely occasional officials, we are not surprised to find them making financial statements in the Senate.[1002]
(ii.) The general assistance which the quaestors were meant to render to the consuls was extended, as we saw,[1003] in the year 421 B.C. to their activity in the field. Each consul or praetor who assumed a military command was given a particular quaestor (the dictator being exempted from what was regarded as a limitation on the discretionary powers of the magistrate), and, after the custom had grown up of extending the _imperium_, these assistants accompanied the proconsuls and propraetors to their provinces. The term of the quaestorship was prolonged with that of the office with which it was associated,[1004] for the connexion between the superior and inferior was regarded as being of almost as personal a character as that between father and son.[1005] We shall examine the relation more minutely when we come to deal with provincial organisation. It is sufficient to remark here that, though the quaestors’ functions were mainly financial, they were in all other respects true administrative delegates of the magistrates with _imperium_,[1006] and were constantly employed on judicial and military business.
(iii.) The quaestors of Italy were probably identical with those of the fleet (_classici_), and were a result of the organisation of Italy which followed the war with Pyrrhus (267 B.C.). For the purposes of the Pyrrhine war twelve quaestors were created, whose number, when they were given permanent stations, was reduced to four.[1007] Three of these stations can be approximately determined. One was Ostia, and the tenure of this post was burdened with the duty of the supply of corn to Rome.[1008] The second appears to have been the woods and forests (_calles_) of Italy.[1009] The third was in Cispadane Gaul,[1010] perhaps at Ravenna or Ariminum. The fourth is unknown, but was perhaps the quaestorship at Lilybaeum in Sicily, which, after the creation of the first Sicilian praetor in 227 B.C., would have become a provincial post. The other three survived the Republic as spheres of Italian administration.[1011] The functions of these quaestors were chiefly the levying of contingents from the allies in ships and men,[1012] the protection of the coasts, and at Ostia, as we have seen, the supply of corn for the capital.