applied to elicit a meaning from the passage. Karlowa (Röm. Rechtsgesch. i. p. 530) suggests that the tribunes had allowed accused persons to escape summonses in criminal trials which were to take place before the Senate—the initiation of such trials belonging properly only to the consuls and praetors. He does not seem to feel the obstacles that beset the path to this conclusion. He has to take lege agere in the unusual sense of the legal fulfilment of a penal law; he does not show why Tacitus should have written "vocare ex Italia" in place of the more natural "vocare a senatu"; he fails to remember that the tribunician intercession in a criminal trial before the Senate was, even in the reign of Tiberius, becoming a power of pardon vested in the Princeps, and that its use by an ordinary tribune might bring death to the rash interceder (Tac. Ann. vi. 47; cf. xvi 26).
To discover the true sense of the passage we must seek for some sphere in which the tribunician veto continued unimpaired during the Principate; but, before doing this, we must ask whether the words used by Tacitus offer any suggestions of such a sphere. It is possible to translate the words "vocare ex Italia" as meaning "to summon from any part of Italy," "to summon, i.e., from Rome and Italy"; but I venture to think that ex Italia excludes the idea of Rome, and that the meaning of the words is "to summon from a municipal town of Italy to Rome." On what grounds such a summons might be made is shown by the words "cum quibus lege agi posset." The sphere of the summons is civil jurisdiction in the municipia as divided between the Roman and the local authorities by statute on the settlement which gradually followed the close of the social war—a settlement known to us chiefly through the lex Rubria. The whole sentence, if literally though somewhat clumsily translated, would state that "the tribunes were prohibited from summoning litigants from an Italian town in cases where a civil action at law would have been possible in that town."
On this hypothesis, the sphere of the tribune's power referred to is the very familiar one of the veto on appeal in civil jurisdiction. How frequent the appellatio to the tribunes in matters of civil jurisdiction was during the later Republic is shown by the fact that, out of the four private orations of Cicero, two—those for Quinctius and for Tullius—record the use of this appeal (Cic. pro Quinct. 7, 29; pro Tullio 16, 38, 39); and that this appellate cognisance continued during the Principate is shown by the obvious interpretation of the well-known lines of Juvenal (vii. 228)—
Rara tamen merces quae cognitione tribuni
Non egeat—
words which almost certainly mean "it is seldom that such merces does not lead to a court of appeal."
