Page:Roman Constitutional History, 753-44 B.C..djvu/155

Rh For this purpose in part it admitted some freedmen to the country districts (tribus) and also some of the poor people. They were more dependent on, hence more easily controlled by, the nobility, and could be employed to work against the middle classes in the assemblies.

Another safeguard was intended to check tribunician opposition and indirectly to control the acts of the plebeian assembly. The Aelian and Fufian laws, passed about 155, enacted that electoral assemblies of the whole people (comitia) should, on being announced, take precedence of all legislative assemblies; and they regulated the ancient right of reporting unfavorable auspices, especially lightning (obnuntiatio). All the patrician magistrates and the tribunes seem to have obtained the right to report unfavorable omens to a consul while he was presiding over an assembly; and any other tribune, probably also a consul or praetor, could make a similar report to a presiding tribune. Augurs, too, possessed this right. The usual consequence of such a report was that the assembly was dismissed for that day, and any action taken by it was defective and was therefore canceled. Other official actions might be postponed or practically annulled in the same way. A part of the state religion was thus by law proclaimed to be a mere instrument of politics; and the magistrates were known to be so ready to lie, that the statement of a magistrate that he would look for lightning (servare de caelo) on a certain day was sufficient, and a meeting of an assembly announced for that day was postponed.

By these measures the oligarchy seemed to have established itself in an unassailable position; but the nobles forgot that the lowest classes might become the tools of a revolutionary opposition, and that mere forms, political frauds in religious guise, would never stem the tide of any earnest popular movement.