Where Pompeius, therefore, might have simply kept by the law, he had preferred first to make a spontaneous concession, then to recall it, and lastly to cloak this recall in a manner most disloyal.
Attempt to Shorten Caesar's Governorship While in this way the shortening of Caesar's governorship was only aimed at indirectly, the regulations issued at the same time as to the governorships sought the same object directly.
The ten years for which the governorship had been secured to Caesar, in the last instance through the law proposed by Pompeius himself in concert with Crassus, ran according to the usual mode of reckoning from 1 March 695 to the last day of February 705.

As, however, according to the earlier practice, the proconsul or propraetor had the right of entering on his provincial magistracy immediately after the termination of his consulship or praetorship, the successor of Caesar was to be nominated, not from the urban magistrates of 704, but from those of 705, and could not therefore enter before 1st Jan.

706.
So far Caesar had still during the last ten months of the year 705 a right to the command, not on the ground of the Pompeio-Licinian law, but on the ground of the old rule that a command with a set term still continued after the expiry of the term up to the arrival of the successor.

But now, since the new regulation of 702 called to the governorships not the consuls and praetors going out, but those who had gone out five years ago or more, and thus prescribed an interval between the civil magistracy and the command instead of the previous immediate sequence, there was no longer any difficulty in straightway filling up from another quarter every legally vacant governorship, and so, in the case in question, bringing about for the Gallic provinces the change of command on the 1st March 705, instead of the 1st Jan.

706.
The pitiful dissimulation and procrastinating artifice of Pompeius are after a remarkable manner mixed up, in these arrangements, with the wily formalism and the constitutional erudition of the republican party.