assigning portions of it to indigent families, they could permanently provide for them. Several times, it appears, this had been done in the case of indigent plebeian families; and the agrarian law of Spurius Cassius was simply a proposal that—a large accession to the state lands having just taken place—the government should seize the opportunity to provide for the distressed plebeians, by apportioning them small portions of these state lands. To the plebeians this proposal was exceedingly agreeable; not so, however, to the patricians, who possessed the right of occupying and farming as much of the public territory as they chose, but who lost that right from the moment that the land was apportioned by the state. The patricians, accordingly, resisted the proposal with all their might; and Spurius Cassius having carried it notwithstanding, they caused him to be impeached and put to death as soon as his consulship had expired.
After this event, the patricians renewed their efforts to suppress the plebs, proceeding so far as to transfer the right of electing the consuls from the centuries to the purely patrician body of the curies. The plebeians, however, behaved resolutely, asserting their rights through their tribunes, and by clamors in the comitia tributa, where none but plebeians had a right to take a part. In the year of the city 271, or B. C. 483, they regained the power of choosing one of the consuls; and in the year 283, or B. C. 471, they wrung from the patricians the right of electing their tribunes in their own comitia tributa, instead of the centuries, at the same time obtaining the right to discuss in the comitia tributa affairs affecting the whole Commonwealth. Other concessions followed; and at length, in the year 292, or B. C. 462, a tribune named Caius Terentilius Harsa was so bold as to propose a complete revision of the constitution in all its parts. It was not desirable, he said, that the old distinction between populus and plebs, which had originated in war, should be longer kept up; let, therefore, a revision of the whole body of the laws be undertaken, with a view to put the plebeians on a legal equality with the patricians, and let some more limited form of supreme magistracy be substituted for the consulship. After a protracted opposition, this proposal resulted, in the year 303, or B. C. 452, in the appointment of the famous First Decemvirate; a board of ten patricians, who were to revise the entire body of the laws, as well as the political machinery of the state, superseding in the meantime all other authority. The digest of Roman law prepared by these decemvirs became the foundation of all subsequent jurisprudence among the Romans; the amendments which they effected on the old laws were favorable to the plebeians. The principal constitutional changes which they carried out were the incorporation of patricians and clients with the plebeian tribes; the investment of the centuries with the powers of an ultimate court of appeal; and the substitution of the decemviral office, of which they themselves were an example, for the consulship, five of the decemvirs to be plebeians. This last change, however, was of short duration; for the second decemvirate was brought to an end by its own depravity. Compelled, by a new secession of the commons, to abdicate, the decemvirs of 305 were succeeded by two popular consuls, under whose auspices several important privileges were obtained for the plebeians, the most important of which was a law conferring on a plebiscitum, or resolution of the tribes, the right to become law on receiving the sanction of the patricians, thus enabling the whole people to originate
