interval of ten years had elapsed, as
well as in the subsequent regulation that the office which practically
was the highest, the censorship, should not be held a second time
at all (489). But the government was still strong enough not to be
afraid of its instruments or to desist purposely on that account
from employing those who were the most serviceable. Brave officers
were very frequently released from these rules,(16) and cases still
occurred like those of Quintus Fabius Rullianus, who was five times
consul in twenty-eight years, and of Marcus Valerius Corvus (384-483)
who, after he had filled six consulships, the first in his twenty-third,
the last in his seventy-second year, and had been throughout three
generations the protector of his countrymen and the terror
of the foe, descended to the grave at the age of a hundred.

The Tribunate of the People as an Instrument of Government

While the Roman magistrate was thus more and more completely and
definitely transformed from the absolute lord into the limited
commissioner and administrator of the community, the old
counter-magistracy, the tribunate of the people, was undergoing at
the same time a similar transformation internal rather than external.
It served a double purpose in the commonwealth. It had been from
the beginning intended to protect the humble and the weak by a
somewhat revolutionary assistance (-auxilium-) against the overbearing
violence of the magistrates; it had subsequently been employed to get
rid of the legal disabilities of the commons and the privileges of the
gentile nobility. The latter end was attained. The original object
was not only in itself a democratic ideal rather than a political
possibility, but it was also quite as obnoxious to the plebeian
aristocracy into whose hands the tribunate necessarily fell, and
quite as incompatible with the new organization which originated
in the equalization of the orders and had if possible a still more
decided aristocratic hue than that which preceded it, as it was
obnoxious to the gentile nobility and incompatible with the patrician
consular constitution. But instead of abolishing the tribunate, they
preferred to convert it from a weapon of opposition into an instrument
of government, and now introduced the tribunes of the people, who were
originally excluded from all share in administration and were neither
magistrates nor members of the senate, into the class of governing
authorities.