First, there were the poor, indebted plebeians, who sought the reform of the laws relating to debtor and creditor and desired a share in the public lands. Second, the whole body of the plebeians were engaged in an attempt to open the consulate to their ranks. In 367 B.C. the Licinian laws were passed, which gave relief to the debtors by deducting the interest already accrued from the principal, and allowing the rest to be paid in three annual instalments; and a second law forbade that any one should possess more than 500 jugera of the public lands. This was to prevent the wealthy patricians from holding lands in large tracts and keeping them from the plebeians. This law also abolished the military tribuneship and insisted that one at least of the two consuls should be chosen from the plebeians--giving a possibility of two. The patricians, in order to counteract undue influence in this respect, established the praetorship, the praetor having jurisdiction and vicegerence of the consuls during their absence. There also sprang up about this time the new nobility (_optimates_), composed of the plebeians and patricians who had held office for a long time, and representing the aristocracy of the community. From this time on all the Roman citizens tended to go into two classes, the _optimates_ and, exclusive of these, the great Roman populace. In the former all the wealth and power were combined; in the latter the poverty, wretchedness, and dependence. Various other changes in the constitution succeeded, until the great wars of the Samnites and those of the Carthaginians directed the attention of the people to foreign conquest. After the close of these great wars and the firm establishment of the universal power of Rome abroad, there sprang up a great civil war, induced largely by the disturbance {257} of the Gracchi, who sought to carry out the will of the people in regard to popular democracy and the division of the public lands. Thus, step by step, the plebeians, by a peaceful civil struggle, had obtained the consulship, and, indeed, the right to all other civil offices. They had obtained a right to sit in the senate, had obtained the declaration of social equality, had settled the great land question; and yet the will of the people never prevailed. The great Roman senate, made up of the aristocracy of Rome, an aristocracy of both plebeians and patricians, ruled with unyielding sway, and the common people never obtained full possession of their rights and privileges. Civil strife continued; the gulf between the rich and the poor, the nobility and the proletariat representing a few rich political manipulators, on the one side, and the half-fed, half-mad populace, on the other, grew wider and wider, finally ending in civil war. In the midst of the strife the republic passed away, and only the coming of the imperial power of the Caesars perpetuated Roman institutions.