Definition of "prætor"

“Regard not that, my brother,” answered Magdalen Græme; “the first successors of Saint Peter himself, were elected not in sunshine but in tempests—not in the halls of the Vatican, but in the subterranean vaults and dungeons of Heathen Rome—they were not gratulated with shouts and salvos of cannon-shot and of musquetry, and the display of artificial fire—no, my brother—but by the hoarse summons of Lictors and Prætors, who came to drag the Fathers of the Church to martyrdom. […]”

1820, [Walter Scott], chapter XIII, in The Abbot. […], volume I, Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne & Co.] for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […]; and for Archibald Constable and Company, and John Ballantyne, […], page 276

Further, this Italia was reduced in size by Sulla (in 81), if not earlier. All the northern districts had at first been administered directly by the magistrates of the city of Rome, but now we find prætores or proprætores of Cisalpine Gaul, which had come to rank as a province, separated from the rest of the country by the Arno on the side of the Tyrrhenian sea by the little stream of the Rubicon which flows into the Adriatic between Ravenna and Rimini.

1997, Victor Chapot, E. A. Parker, The Roman World, page 89