The great importance of the Publilian law is this, that the tribunes now obtain the initiative. Hitherto it had entirely depended upon the senate and the patricians whether a law should be discussed or not. The consul first made a motion in the senate; the latter decided on it, and then it came to the curies, or to the curies and centuries. But if the tribunes were now free to propose a matter for debate in their own community, they could by this means generally bring any subject to discussion which needed it. There were points, many of them of the highest importance, which urgently required change, and, but for the Publilian rogation, never could have been mooted in a legal manner. The Publilian laws were therefore beneficial, and yet I do not at all blame the then holders of power for not acknowledging this: the fury only with which they opposed them, was as blameable as it was ruinous. By the manner of their resistance, the charge of illegality in point of form, under which indeed the proposals of Publilius lay, was thrown on the opposite side. The senate needed not have deliberated at all in such a _plebiscitum_; yet when the tribunes requested the _Populus_ to leave the Forum, the patricians refused to withdraw, and, spreading with their clients over the whole of the forum, so that the plebeians could not come to give their votes, they drove away the beadles who carried the urns, threw out the voting tablets, and did many other things of the same kind. When this had been tried more than once, there was at last a fight, in which the patricians and their consul Appius Claudius were driven from the market-place. The consequence of this was a general panic among the patricians. Yet matters did not stop there, but the _Plebes_ put themselves in possession of the Capitol, though without abusing their victory; for, the oppressed party frequently restrains itself after having conquered: they only needed their victory that they might carry their resolutions. Although Appius even now exerted all his influence to make the senate withhold its sanction, yet the senators saw the danger too well, and assented to the law. Livy refers this law merely to the election of the tribunes; Dionysius and Dio Cassius in Zonaras contain the more correct view. Livy, however, at the conclusion of his narrative, in touching upon some points, presupposes all the rest.