Although such a prohibitive order suspended the whole administration of justice both civil and criminal, was accompanied by the closing of the _aerarium_,[755] and even by the cessation of the sittings of the Senate, it necessarily did not interrupt all the business of the state, for it might be declared for the purpose of directing exclusive attention to some special sphere of administration. Thus in time of danger the military levy went on,[756] and during the social war, while all other judicial business was suspended, the Varian commission still sat to perform its vindictive work on the friends of the allies.[757] Such was the constitutional employment of this exceptional power. But its value as a political weapon was too obvious for it to fail to be part of the armoury of the tribunes. We have seen the use to which it was put by the tribune Licinius;[758] and his example was followed in the last century of the Republic by his great successor in agrarian agitation, Ti. Gracchus. In 133 he published an edict “prohibiting all other magistrates from transacting business until the voting on his law was finished; he put his own seals on the temple of Saturn, that the quaestors might not draw money out or pay money in; he announced a fine that he would inflict on praetors who ventured to disobey, so that each in terror abandoned the administration which had been confided to him.”[759] The higher patrician magistrates, the consul and praetor, could employ no such direct weapon. They could, however, indirectly check the passing of a _plebiscitum_ by assigning to a comitial day one of those movable feasts, the date of which was fixed by their authority,[760] and thus making it a _dies fastus_. _Intercessio_, though sometimes employed to describe the power of prohibition which we have just discussed,[761] is more properly applied to the power possessed, not only by higher magistrates, but by those of equal authority, of vetoing acts already performed by magistrates of equal or lower authority. It was an outcome, therefore, not only of _major_ but of _par potestas_, and its invariable consequence was the invalidity of the act against which it was levelled. The intercession accompanied the _par potestas_ of the consuls; with the creation of lower magistrates the conception of _major potestas_ as giving this power arose, and the culminating point in the history of the intercession was the creation of the tribunate. It was the great safeguard against illegal or inequitable acts performed by magistrates, who were irresponsible during their year of office, and the tribune’s _major potestas_ over every magistrate made him the guardian of the interests, originally of the Plebs and later of the whole community.