edence over the earlier, and that no decree
of the people should be issued against a single burgess. The most
remarkable feature was the exclusion of appeal to the -comitia
tributa- in capital causes, while the privilege of appeal to the
centuries was guaranteed; which admits of explanation from the
circumstance that the penal jurisdiction was in fact usurped by the
plebs and its presidents,(11) and with the tribunate there necessarily
fell the tribunician capital process, while it was perhaps the
intention to retain the aedilician process of fine (-multa-).
The essential political significance of the measure resided far less
in the contents of the legislation than in the formal obligation now
laid upon the consuls to administer justice according to these forms
of process and these rules of law, and in the public exhibition of
the code, by which the administration of justice was subjected to the
control of publicity and the consul was compelled to dispense equal
and truly common justice to all.

Fall of the Decemvirs

The end of the decemvirate is involved in much obscurity. It only
remained--so runs the story--for the decemvirs to publish the last
two tables, and then to give place to the ordinary magistracy. But
they delayed to do so: under the pretext that the laws were not yet
ready, they themselves prolonged their magistracy after the expiry
of their official year--which was so far possible, as under Roman
constitutional law the magistracy called in an extraordinary way to
the revision of the constitution could not become legally bound by
the term set for its ending. The moderate section of the aristocracy,
with the Valerii and Horatii at their head, are said to have attempted
in the senate to compel the abdication of the decemvirate; but the
head of the decemvirs Appius Claudius, originally a rigid aristocrat,
but now changing into a demagogue and a tyrant, gained the ascendancy
in the senate, and the people submitted. The levy of two armies
was accomplished without opposition, and war was begun against the
Volscians as well as against the Sabines. Thereupon the former
tribune of the people, Lucius Siccius Dentatus, the bravest man in
Rome, who had fought in a hundred and twenty battles and had forty-five
honourable scars to show, was found dead in front of the camp,
foully murdered, as it was said, at the instigation of the decemvirs.
A revolution was fermenting in men's minds; and its outbreak was
haste