The senate was able through the
consuls, Marcus Fabius and Valerius, the ancient colleague of Cassius, to
invent a means of avoiding this difficulty. The authority of the tribunes
by the old Roman law,[3] did not reach without the walls of the city, while
that of the consuls was everywhere equal and only bounded by the limits of
the Roman world. They moved their curule chairs and other insignia of their
authority without the city walls and proceeded with the enrolments. All who
refused to enroll were treated as enemies[4] of the republic. Those who
were proprietors had their property confiscated, their trees cut down, and
their houses burned. Those who were merely farmers saw themselves bereft
of their farm-implements, their oxen and all things necessary for the
cultivation of the soil. The resistance of the tribunes was powerless
against this systematic oppression on the part of the patricians; the
agrarian[5] law failed and the enrolment progressed.
There is some difficulty in determining the facts of the law proposed by
Spurius Licinius[6] of which Livy speaks. Dionysius calls this tribune, not
Licinius but [Greek: Spurios Sikilios].
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