the Populus, through an intermediary channel, consuls or Senate.[1] The wording of the law (hardly so remote from its original as has been supposed) scarcely gives a warrant for this view; it speaks only of giving a "binding character" to such resolutions. It must be remembered that at this time the plebeian community was not really bound by the resolutions of its own concilium, for this was not a legally recognised corporation. The Valerio-Horatian law may have made it such, a corporate body passing resolutions binding on all its members. But a law which is valid for a corporation is valid for those outside the corporation. The ordinances, it is true, which have this binding force must refer immediately only to the affairs of the community which dictates them. This was the case with plebiscita now. All self-regarding ordinances of the Plebs bound the Plebeians in the first degree, the Patricians, if it infringed existing rights, in the second degree. All plebiscita of a wider scope must still have been mere petitions to the consuls.[2] We can hardly conceive that the law discriminated accurately between what was possible to the Plebs and what was not; it was sufficient to recognise the already established maxim that corporations could frame their own rules dum ne quid ex publica lege corrumpant.[3] From this time onwards, down to 287, whenever we find plebiscita affecting matters of national interest or creating changes in the constitution,[4] we must assume that they were brought by the magistrates before the people to be ratified as laws; although doubtless the undefined limits of plebeian prerogative were often exceeded.
The first great utterance of the Plebs, which followed the Valerio-Horatian law, was one of this character, for it attached a criminal (and therefore a public) penalty to a derogation of duty to the Plebeians. On the proposal of M. Duilius, the tribune, the Plebs resolved that "any one who left the Plebs without tribunes or created a (plebeian) magistrate without appeal should be scourged and executed."[5] It was a mode by which the Plebs
- ↑ Mr. Strachan-Davidson in Smith Dict. of Antiq. s.v. plebiscitum, and English Historical Review Nos. 2 and 19.
- ↑ p. 97.
- ↑ p. 107.
- ↑ Types of such laws between 449 and 287 B.C. are the lex Terentilia (462), Canuleia (445), Licinia (367), Ogulnia (300).
- ↑ Liv. iii. 55 "M. Duilius deinde tribunus plebis plebem rogavit, plebesque scivit: 'qui plebem sine tribunis reliquisset, quique magistratum sine provocatione creasset, tergo ac capita puniretur.'"
