They all emerged from the Sullan restoration with materially diminished rights, more especially the tribunician office, which appeared to the regent an instrument indispensable doubtless for senatorial government, but yet-- as generated by revolution and having a constant tendency to generate fresh revolutions in its turn--requiring to be rigorously and permanently shackled.

The tribunician authority had arisen out of the right to annul the official acts of the magistrates by veto, and, eventually, to fine any one who should oppose that right and to take steps for his farther punishment; this was still left to the tribunes, excepting that a heavy fine, destroying as a rule a man's civil existence, was imposed on the abuse of the right of intercession.
The further prerogative of the tribune to have dealings with the people at pleasure, partly for the purpose of bringing up accusations and especially of calling former magistrates to account at the bar of the people, partly for the purpose of submitting laws to the vote, had been the lever by which the Gracchi, Saturninus, and Sulpicius had revolutionized the state; it was not abolished, but its exercise was probably made dependent on a permission to be previously requested from the senate.( 24) Lastly it was added that the holding of the tribunate should in future disqualify for the undertaking of a higher office--an enactment which, like many other points in Sulla's restoration, once more reverted to the old patrician maxims, and, just as in the times before the admission of the plebeians to the civil magistracies, declared the tribunate and the curule offices to be mutually incompatible.

In this way the legislator of the oligarchy hoped to check tribunician demagogism and to keep all ambitious and aspiring men aloof from the tribunate, but to retain it as an instrument of the senate both for mediating between it and the burgesses, and, should circumstances require, for keeping in check the magistrates; and, as the authority of the king and afterwards of the republican magistrates over the burgesses scarcely anywhere comes to light so clearly as in the principle that they exclusively had the right of addressing the people, so the supremacy of the senate, now first legally established, is most distinctly apparent in this permission which the leader of the people had to ask from the senate for every transaction with his constituents.
Limitation of the Supreme Magistracy Regulation of the Consular and Praetorian Functions before-- The Time of Sulla The consulship and praetorship also, although viewed by the aristocratic regenerator of Rome with a more favourable eye than the tribunate liable in itself to be regarded with suspicion, by no means escaped that distrust towards its own instruments which is throughout characteristic of oligarchy.

They were restricted with more tenderness in point of form, but in a way very sensibly felt.
Sulla here began with the partition of functions.

At the beginning of this period the arrangement in that respect stood as follows.
As formerly there had devolved on the two consuls the collective functions of the supreme magistracy, so there still devolved on them all those official duties for which distinct functionaries had not been by law established.