Piso conducted the Thracian, Gabinius the Egyptian, Crassus the Parthian war, without consulting the senate, and without even reporting, as was usual, to that body; in like manner triumphs and other marks of honour were accorded and carried out, without the senate being asked about them.
Obviously this did not arise from a mere neglect of forms, which would be the less intelligible, seeing that in the great majority of cases no opposition from the senate was to be expected.

On the contrary, it was a well-calculated design to dislodge the senate from the domain of military arrangements and of higher politics, and to restrict its share of administration to financial questions and internal affairs; and even opponents plainly discerned this and protested, so far as they could, against this conduct of the regents by means of senatorial decrees and criminal actions.

While the regents thus in the main set aside the senate, they still made some use of the less dangerous popular assemblies--care was taken that in these the lords of the street should put no farther difficulty in the way of the lords of the state; in many cases however they dispensed even with this empty shadow, and employed without disguise autocratic forms.
The Senate under the Monarchy Cicero and the Majority The humbled senate had to submit to its position whether it would or not.

The leader of the compliant majority continued to be Marcus Cicero.

He was useful on account of his lawyer's talent of finding reasons, or at any rate words, for everything; and there was a genuine Caesarian irony in employing the man, by means of whom mainly the aristocracy had conducted their demonstrations against the regents, as the mouthpiece of servility.