The persons of the tribunes, and the uninterrupted maintenance of
the college at its full number, were once more secured by the most
sacred oaths and by every element of reverence that religion could
present, and not less by the most formal laws. No attempt to abolish
this magistracy was ever from this time forward made in Rome.

Notes for Book II Chapter II

1. II. I. Right of Appeal

2. I. XIII. Landed proprietors

3. I. VI. Character of the Roman Law

4. II. I. Collegiate Arrangement

5. I. XI. Property

6. I. XI. Punishment of Offenses against Order

7. That the plebeian aediles were formed after the model of the
patrician quaestors in the same way as the plebeian tribunes after
the model of the patrician consuls, is evident both as regards their
criminal functions (in which the distinction between the two
magistracies seems to have lain in their tendencies only, not in their
powers) and as regards their charge of the archives. The temple of
Ceres was to the aediles what the temple of Saturn was to the
quaestors, and from the former they derived their name. Significant
in this respect is the enactment of the law of 305 (Liv. iii. 55),
that the decrees of the senate should be delivered over to the aediles
there (p. 369), whereas, as is well known, according to the ancient
--and subsequently after the settlement of the struggles between the
orders, again preponderant--practice those decrees were committed to
the quaestors for preservation in the temple of Saturn.

8. I. VI. Levy Districts

9. I. III. Clan-Villages

10. II. II. Secession to the Sacred mount

11. II. II. Intercession

12. II. II. Legislation

CHAPTER III

The Equalization of the Orders, and the New Aristocracy

Union of the Plebians

The tribunician movements appear to have mainly originated in social
rather than political discontent, and there is good reason to suppose
that some of the wealthy plebeians admitted to the senate were no
less opposed to these movements than the patricians. For they too
benefited by the privileges against which the agitation was mainly
directed; and although in other respects they found themselves treated
as inferior, it probably seemed to them by no means an appropriate
time for asserting their claim to participate in the magistracies,
when the exclusive financial power of the whole senate was assailed.
This explains why during the first fifty years of the republic no