The _concilium plebis_, practically the sovereign body of the state, differed from this last assembly in two respects. It could be summoned only by plebeian magistrates and it never included the Patricians.[1257] Besides issuing universally valid decrees (_plebiscita_), it elected the magistrates of the Plebs, and in its judicial capacity was the body which considered the penalties which they had formulated. By the strict letter of the Twelve Tables this jurisdiction should have been limited to the imposition of fines,[1258] but, besides instances of its capital jurisdiction at an early period of its history, it continued to possess the unquestioned right of pronouncing outlawry (_aquae et ignis interdictio_) against any one already in exile,[1259] and after the time of Caius Gracchus there are traces of an independent capital jurisdiction which it exercised against magistrates who had violated the _provocatio_.[1260] The freedom of this plebeian assembly was for a time limited by Sulla’s ordinance (88 B.C.) directing that no measure should be brought before it which had not received the previous sanction of the Senate;[1261] but the old powers of unimpeded legislation were restored in 70 B.C. If Sulla also took the right of prosecution from the tribune,[1262] the higher jurisdiction of the Plebs was restored by the enactment which gave it back its legislative power, for tribunician prosecutions continue to the end of the Republic. An anomalous use of the popular suffrage was made in the case of elections to the priestly colleges. Formerly they had been kept distinct from the secular life of the state, and even when the reforming spirit dictated that they should be submitted to the voice of the people, a religious scruple forbade the intervention of the _comitia_. The electoral body was composed of seventeen tribes selected by lot from the thirty-five, and this body, which was _not_ the Populus,[1263] was presided over by a pontiff.[1264] This organisation was probably first applied about the middle of the third century B.C. to the creation of the _pontifex maximus_: it received a great extension at the close of the second century. A Domitian law, a _plebiscitum_ of 104 B.C., applied election in a modified form to the religious _collegia_—probably to the four great guilds of pontiffs, augurs, quindecemvirs, and epulones. The college in question presented, the people elected and gave to the college again a _congé d’élire_, whereupon the chosen candidate was solemnly coopted by the members of his guild.[1265] Sulla abolished this mode of appointment, and perhaps with it the popular election of the chief pontiff, restoring the aristocratic mode of cooptation; but appointment by the seventeen tribes was restored again in 63 B.C., through a plebiscite of the tribune Labienus.[1266]