But even the form of the law was unimportant in comparison with the question of the method by which the new opposition was to be met. The veto, if persisted in by Octavius, would suspend the agrarian measure during the whole of Tiberius's year of office. It could only be countered by a device which would make government so impossible that the opposition would be forced to come to terms. The means were to be found in the prohibitive power of the tribunes, that right, which flowed from their _major potestas_, of forbidding under threat of penalties the action of all other magistrates. It was now rarely used except at the bidding of the senate and for certain specified purposes. It had become, in fact, little more than the means of enforcing obedience to a temporary suspension of business life decreed by the government. But recent events suggested a train of associations that brought back to mind the great political struggles of the past, and recalled the mode in which Licinius and Sextius had for five years sustained their anarchical edict for the purpose of the emancipation of the Plebs. The difference between the conditions of life in primitive Rome and in the cosmopolitan capital of to-day did not appeal to Tiberius. The Justitium was as legitimate a method of political warfare as the Intercessio. He issued an edict which forbade all the other magistracies to perform their official functions until the voting on the agrarian law should be carried through; he placed his own seals on the doors of the temple of Saturn to prevent the quaestors from making payments to the treasury or withdrawing money from it; he forbade the praetors to sit in the courts of justice and announced that he would exact a fine from those who disobeyed. The magistrates obeyed the edict, and most of the active life of the State was in suspense.[360] The fact of their obedience showed the overwhelming power which Tiberius now had behind him; for an ill-supported tribune, who adopted such an obsolete method of warfare, would have been unable to enforce his decrees and would merely have appeared ridiculous. The opponents of the law were now genuinely alarmed. Those who would be the chief sufferers put on garments of mourning, and paced the silent Forum with gloom and despair written on their faces, as though they were the innocent victims of a great wrong. But, while they took this overt means of stirring the commiseration of the crowd, it was whispered that the last treacherous device for averting the danger was being tried. The cause would perish with the demagogue, and Tiberius might be secretly removed. Confidence in this view was strengthened when it was known that the tribune carried a dagger concealed about his person.[361]