as they
had previously been from one of the consulships. It was to no purpose
that once more a patrician augur detected secret flaws, hidden from
the eyes of the uninitiated, in the election of a plebeian dictator
(427), and that the patrician censor did not up to the close of our
present period (474) permit his colleague to present the solemn
sacrifice with which the census closed; such chicanery served merely
to show the ill humour of patricianism. Of as little avail were the
complaints which the patrician presidents of the senate would not fail
to raise regarding the participation of the plebeians in its debates;
it became a settled rule that no longer the patrician members,
but those who had attained to one of the three supreme ordinary
magistracies--the consulship, praetorship, and curule aedileship
--should be summoned to give their opinion in this order and without
distinction of class, while the senators who had held none of these
offices still even now took part merely in the division. The right,
in fine, of the patrician senate to reject a decree of the community
as unconstitutional--a right, however, which in all probability it
rarely ventured to exercise--was withdrawn from it by the Publilian
law of 415 and by the Maenian law which was not passed before the
middle of the fifth century, in so far that it had to bring forward
its constitutional objections, if it had any such, when the list
of candidates was exhibited or the project of law was brought in;
which practically amounted to a regular announcement of its consent
beforehand. In this character, as a purely formal right, the
confirmation of the decrees of the people still continued in
the hands of the nobility down to the last age of the republic.

The clans retained, as may naturally be conceived, their religious
privileges longer. Indeed, several of these, which were destitute
of political importance, were never interfered with, such as their
exclusive eligibility to the offices of the three supreme -flamines-
and that of -rex sacrorum- as well as to the membership of the
colleges of Salii. On the other hand the two colleges of Pontifices
and of augurs, with which a considerable influence over the courts
and the comitia were associated, were too important to remain in the
exclusive possession of the patricians. The Ogulnian law of 454
accordingly threw these also open to plebeians, by increasing the
number both of the pontifices and of the au