rgesses exclusively by the non-noble,
and which was the more oppressive that neither the crime nor its
punishment was formally defined by law. In reality through the
co-ordinate jurisdiction of the plebs and the community the estates,
limbs, and lives of the burgesses were abandoned to the arbitrary
pleasure of the party assemblies.

In civil jurisdiction the plebeian institutions interfered only so
far, that in the processes affecting freedom, which were so important
for the plebs, the nomination of jurymen was withdrawn from the
consuls, and the decisions in such cases were pronounced by the
"ten-men-judges" destined specially for that purpose (-iudices-,
-decemviri-, afterwards -decemviri litibus iudicandis-).

Legislation

With this co-ordinate jurisdiction there was further associated a
co-ordinate initiative in legislation. The right of assembling the
members and of procuring decrees on their part already pertained to
the tribunes, in so far as no association at all can be conceived
without such a right. But it was conferred upon them, in a marked
way, by legally securing that the autonomous right of the plebs to
assemble and pass resolutions should not be interfered with on the
part of the magistrates of the community or, in fact, of the community
itself. At all events it was the necessary preliminary to the legal
recognition of the plebs generally, that the tribunes could not be
hindered from having their successors elected by the assembly of the
plebs and from procuring the confirmation of their criminal sentences
by the same body; and this right accordingly was further specially
guaranteed to them by the Icilian law (262), which threatened with
severe punishment any one who should interrupt the tribune while
speaking, or should bid the assembly disperse. It is evident that
under such circumstances the tribune could not well be prevented from
taking a vote on other proposals than the choice of his successor and
the confirmation of his sentences. Such "resolves of the multitude"
(-plebi scita-) were not indeed strictly valid decrees of the
people; on the contrary, they were at first little more than are
the resolutions of our modern public meetings; but, as the distinction
between the comitia of the people and the councils of the multitude
was of a formal nature rather than aught else, the validity of these
resolves as autonomous determinations of the community was at once
claimed at least on the part