His duties must have certainly embraced the management of the militia
and the maintenance of the doge's peace within the always widening pale
of the ducal abode. He was next in rank to the crown or throne.
Thus we perceive that, after a series of trials, the Venetians
eventually reverted to the form of government which appeared to be most
agreeable, on the whole, to their conditions and genius.
The consular _triumviri_, not perhaps quite independent of external
influences, were originally adopted as a temporary expedient. The
tribunes, who next succeeded, had a duration of two hundred and fifty
years. Their common _fasti_ are scanty and obscure; and we gain only
occasional glimpses of a barbarous federal administration, which barely
sufficed to fulfil the most elementary wants of a rising society of
traders. They were alike, more or less, a machinery of primitive type,
deficient in central force, and without any safeguards against the abuse
of authority, without any definite theory of legislation and police. The
century and a half which intervened between the abrogation of monarchy
in the person of a tribune, and its revival in the person of a doge
(574-697), beheld the republic laboring under the feeble and enervating
sway of rival aristocratic houses, on which the sole check was the urban
body subsequently to emerge into importance and value as the militia of
the six wards, and its commandant, the _master of the soldiers_.
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