Ab urbe condita

He made his Dictatorship popular by delivering incriminatory harangues against the senate and also by carrying three measures [*](These measures practically annihilated the Assembly of Curies as a political power. The first appears to have been a more stringent reenactment of the Valerian and Horatian Law (see Vol. I. p. 201). The second “abolished the right of the patrician senate to reject a decree of the community as unconstitutional...in so far that it had to bring forward its constitutional objections, if it had any such, when the list of candidates was exhibited or the project of law brought in; which practically amounted to a regular announcement of its consent beforehand” (Mommsen, I. 297). The third deprived the patricians of the chance of misusing the uncontrolled powers of the censorship as in the case of Mamercus (Vol. I. pp. 247-8). ) which were directed against the nobility and were most advantageous to the

plebs. One was that the decisions of the plebs should be binding on all the Quirites; the second, that measures which were brought before the Assembly of centuries should be sanctioned by the patricians before being finally put to the