_Plebes_ took upon itself the authority for an independent and inherent legislation. The consuls now took the field against the Æquians and Sabines, and returned after splendid victories, having also probably concluded a lasting peace with the Sabines. The patricians had in the meanwhile again taken courage, and those men of their order, who in the general confusion had sincerely wished for the best, were now the object of their hatred; and therefore the senate refused them a triumph on their return. Now for the first time the paramount power of the tribunes was displayed. They stepped in, and granted the triumph on their own responsibility: their legal authority for doing so may fairly be called in question. The consuls accepted the triumph; if they had been disturbed in it the tribunes would have assisted them. This incident shows what exasperation then filled men’s minds. In the following year, it rose to such a height that, as we are told by Livy, the heads of the patricians assembled and discussed the proposal to rid themselves of their antagonists by a massacre: but this mad design was not carried out. The events which now take place are shrouded in darkness; the piety of posterity has thrown a veil over them. People had emerged from the irksome tranquillity of the decemvirate; but the constitution had not yet recovered its equilibrium, and there was still a contest for the possession of the government. The plebeians either wished the consulship to be divided between the two orders, or the form of the decemviral rule to be restored. The next year, the patricians showed themselves somewhat more yielding. The criminal judges, until then a patrician magistracy, were for the first time elected by the centuries; the choice fell upon the two consuls of the last year, Valerius and Horatius, which was certainly not accidental. Many of the ancients are mistaken with regard to this point; for instance, Tacitus, Plutarch, even Ulpian, but not so Gaius. There were in fact two kinds of quæstors, the public accusers (_Quæstores parricidii_), who impeached political offenders before the curies, and the six _Quæstores Classici_, who in works on antiquities are all along confounded with the former: Tacitus refers to the latter what ought to be referred to the former. He says that the quæstors had formerly been chosen by the kings, and then by the consuls, as was evident from a _lex curiata_ of Brutus. But this law Tacitus cannot possibly have seen; for the _Quæstores parricidii_ are synonymous with the _Duumviri perduellionis_, and it is these who were always elected by the curies, or rather by the Ramnes and Tities whom they represented. That Poplicola caused also the _Treasurers_ to be elected, is possible; but the two, who were formerly elected by the curies, and now, as Tacitus says, sixty-three years after the expulsion of the kings, and consequently in the second year after the abolition of the decemvirate,