red by any persons shall continue in the possession of the
owners, but that such part of it as may have been usurped by force or fraud
by any persons and built upon, shall be given to the people; those persons
being repaid the expenses of such buildings by the estimation of umpires
to be appointed for that purpose, and that all the rest of the ground
belonging to the public, be divided among the people, they paying no
consideration for the same."[21] When this was done the plebeians took
possession of the hill with solemn ceremonies. This hill did not furnish
homes for all the plebeians, as some have held; nor, indeed, did they wish
to leave their present settlements in town or country to remove to the
Aventine. Plebeians were already established in almost all parts of the
city and held, as vassals of the patricians, considerable portions of Roman
territory. This little hill could never have furnished[22] homes of any
sort to the whole plebeian population. What it did do was to furnish to
the plebeians a trysting place in time of strife with their patrician
neighbors, where they could meet, apart and secure from interruption, to
devise means for resisting the encroachments of the patricians and to
further establish their rights as Roman citizens. Thus a step toward their
complete emancipation was taken. For a moment the people were soothed
and satisfied by their success, but soon they began to clamor for more
complete, more radical, more general laws. An attempt seems to have been
made in 453 to extend the application of the _lex Icilia_ to the _ager
publicus,_[23] in general, but nothing came of it. In 440, the tribune,
Petilius, proposed an agrarian law. What its conditions were Livy has not
informed us, but has contented himself with saying that "Petilius made a
useless attempt to bring before the senate a law for the division of the
domain lands."[24] The consuls strenuously opposed him and his effort came
to naught.

In our review of the agrarian agitation we must mention the forceless and
insignificant attempt made by the son of Spurius Melius, in 434. Again, in
422, we find that other attempts were made which availed nothing. Yet the
tribunes who attempted thus to gain the good will of the people set forth
clearly the object which they had in view in bringing forward an agrarian
bill. Says Livy; "They held out the hope to the people of a division of the
public land, the establishment of colonies, the levying of a _