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 that a magistrate might impose. The infliction of a fine larger than this multa suprema subjected the official who pronounced it to an appeal to the people. The provocatio against multae went before the comitia or the concilium of the tribes according as the fines were imposed by patrician or plebeian magistrates, and we shall see how this appeal brought the aediles into contact with these two assemblies. Certain laws continued to fix an absolute limit even to fines submitted to the judgment of the people. They were generally limited to less than half of the property of the accused.

But the tribunes' power of imposing money penalties extended far beyond the limits of that of the other magistrates. The power of confiscating all the goods of an individual by consecrating them to a god (consecratio bonorum), a relic, like the execution from the Tarpeian rock, of the old religious jurisdiction and as little subject to the appeal, had been occasionally put in force by them in extreme cases, and like other vanished relics of antiquity was revived during the party struggles of the close of the Republic.

Another mode of coercion, specially used against magistrates and the official class, was the seizing of articles of their property as pledges (pignoris capio). It was possessed by all the magistrates who had the coercitio, and was employed rather as apartus familias taxsat, liceto."]