naturally consist for the most part of peasant proprietors, and would, therefore, be a better organ for plebeian sentiment than the curiae, throughout which the landless plebeian clients might still be the representatives of their patrician lords.
This change soon produced an unexpected consequence. At some period between the passing of the Publilian law and the enactment of the Twelve Tables, the new plebeian practice was adopted as a basis for gatherings of the whole people. The Populus began to meet by tribes, and to form a comitia tributa. The Twelve Tables prove that this body early gained judicial competence;[1] but the history of the great change which placed a democratic assembly of the Populus by the side of the timocratic comitia centuriata is wholly unknown to us. It is probable that the original power of this new parliament was not extensive, and it may have been confined originally to the hearing of minor judicial appeals from the magistrates. About twenty years later it was found convenient to entrust the election of quaestors to the new assembly. Its attractiveness lay in the ease and rapidity with which the people might be summoned to meet by tribes within the walls, as compared with the stately formalities of the gathering of the army in the Campus.
The second great movement of the tribunate was an attempt to secure an equal administration of the law.
In the year 462 the tribune C. Terentilius Arsa made a proposal to the concilium of the Plebs that a commission of five should be appointed to clear up the forms of legal procedure, and by this means to fix limits to the judicial caprice of the consuls;[2] and in the next year a resolution of the whole college of tribunes was framed to this effect. It was obviously a measure which demanded the sanction of the Populus, and this it was for many years impossible to obtain. Even apart from the fact that the tribunes apparently intended their commission to consist wholly of Plebeians, it was felt to be a proposal that was revolutionary in
- ↑ See Appendix.
- ↑ Livy (iii. 9) says, "ut vviri creentur legibus de imperio consulari scribendis." Even if this expression is due to a misunderstanding of the title of the decemvirs, "consulari imperio legibus scribendis" (Momms. Staatsr. ii. p. 702), it no doubt expresses a fact. For the nature and object of the decemvirate see Pompon. in Dig. 1, 2, 2, 4 (of the appointment of the decemvirs) "datumque est eis jus eo anno in civitate summum, uti leges et corrigerent, si opus esset, et interpretarentur neque provocatio ab eis sicut a reliquis magistratibus fieret"; ib. (of the publication of the laws) "quas in tabulas eboreas perscriptas pro rostris composuerunt, ut possint leges apertius percipi." Cf. Dionys. x. 1, 60.
