The members of the assembly that deposed Octavius may have been the spectators and authors of a new precedent in Roman history, one that was often followed in the closing years of the Republic, but one that may have received no direct sanction from the records of the past. The abrogation of the imperium of a proconsul had indeed been known,[373] but the deposition of a city magistrate during his year of office seems to have been a hitherto untried experiment. We cannot on this ground alone pronounce it to have been illegal; for an act never attempted before may have perfect legal validity, as the first occasion on which a legitimate deduction has been made from admitted principles of the constitution. It had always been allowed that under certain circumstances (chiefly the neglect of the proper formalities of election) a magistrate might be invited to abdicate his office; but the fact of this invitation is itself an evidence for the absence of any legal power of suspension. Tradition, however, often supplemented the defects of historical evidence, and one, perhaps the older, tale of the removal of the first consul Collatinus stated that it was effected by a popular measure introduced by his colleague.[374] This story was a fragment of that tradition of popular sovereignty which animated the historical literature of the age of the Gracchi: and one deduction from that theory may well have seemed to be that the sovereign people could change its ministers as it pleased. It was a deduction, however, that was not drawn even in the best period of democratic Athens; it ran wholly counter to the Roman conception of the magistracy as an authority co-ordinate with the people and one that, if not divinely appointed, received at least something of a sacred character from the fact of investiture with office. Even the prosecution of a magistrate for the gravest crime, although technically permissible during his year of office, had as a rule been relegated to the time when he again became a private citizen; the tribunician college, in particular, had generally thrown its protecting shield around its offending members, and had thus sustained its own dignity and that of the people. But, even if it be supposed that the sovereign could, at any moment and without any of the due formalities, proclaim itself a competent court of justice, and even though removal from office might be improperly represented as a punishment, there was the question of the offence to be considered. No crime known to the law had been charged against Octavius. In the exercise of his admitted right, or, as he might have expressed it, of his sacred duty, he had offended against the will of a majority. The analogy of the criminal law was from this point of view hopeless, and was therefore not pressed on this occasion. From another point of view it was not quite so remote. The tumultuous popular assemblages that had, on the bidding of a prosecuting tribune, often condemned commanders for