The youth and inexperience of the quaestors, who entered on that important office in their twenty-fifth year (Lips. Excurs. ad Tacit. l. iii. D.), engaged Augustus to remove them from the management of the treasury; and though they were restored by Claudius, they seem to have been finally dismissed by Nero. (Tacitus, The Annals, xiii. 29. Suetonius in Augustus c. 36, in Claud. c. 24. Dion, p. 696 [1. liii. c. 2], 961 [1. lx. c. 24], etc. Plin. Epistol. x. 20, et alibi.) In the provinces of the Imperial division the place of the quaestors was more ably supplied by the procurators (Dion Cas. p. 707 [1. liii. c. 15]; Tacit. in Vit. Agricol. c. 15); or, as they were afterwards called, rationales. (Hist. August. p.130 [Lamprid. Alex. Sever. cc. 45, 46]). But in the provinces of the senate we may still discover a series of quaestors till the reign of Marcus Antoninus. (See the Inscriptions of Gruter, the Epistles of Pliny, and a decisive fact in the Augustan History, p. 64 [Spartian. Sever. c. 2].) From Ulpian we may learn (Pandect. 1. i. tit. 13) that, under the government of the House of Severus, their provincial administration was abolished; and in the subsequent troubles the annual or triennial elections of quaestors must have naturally ceased.