ength of the period of service there
existed under the ancient law no other limit, except that no citizen
was liable to ordinary service in the field before completing his
seventeenth or after completing his forty-sixth year. When, in
consequence of the occupation of Spain, the service began to become
permanent,(13) it seems to have been first legally enacted that any
one who had been in the field for six successive years acquired thereby
a right to discharge, although this discharge did not protect him from
being called out again afterwards. At a later period, perhaps about
the beginning of this century, the rule arose, that a service of
twenty years in the infantry or ten years in the cavalry gave exemption
from further military service.(14) Gracchus renewed the rule--which
presumably was often violently infringed--that no burgess should be
enlisted in the army before the commencement of his eighteenth year;
and also, apparently, restricted the number of campaigns requisite
for full exemption from military duty. Besides, the clothing of the
soldiers, the value of which had hitherto been deducted from their pay,
was henceforward furnished gratuitously by the state.

To this head belongs, moreover, the tendency which is on various
occasions apparent in the Gracchan legislation, if not to abolish
capital punishment, at any rate to restrict it still further than had
been done before--a tendency, which to some extent made itself felt even
in military jurisdiction. From the very introduction of the republic
the magistrate had lost the right of inflicting capital punishment on
the burgess without consulting the community, except under martial
law;(15) if this right of appeal by the burgess appears soon after
the period of the Gracchi available even in the camp, and the right
of the general to inflict capital punishments appears restricted to
allies and subjects, the source of the change is probably to be sought
in the law of Gaius Gracchus -de provocatione- But the right of the
community to inflict or rather to confirm sentence of death was
indirectly yet essentially limited by the fact, that Gracchus withdrew
the cognizance of those public crimes which most frequently gave
occasion to capital sentences--poisoning and murder generally--
from the burgesses, and entrusted it to permanent judicial commissions.
These could not, like the tribunals of the people, be broken up by
the intercession of a tribune, and there not onl