Our final task in connexion with the people and its powers will be to describe the preliminaries to the meetings of the _comitia_ and the _concilium_, and the mode in which business was transacted at these gatherings. The legal days of meeting (_comitiales dies_) were those which were neither holy (_nefasti_) nor dedicated to the work of justice (_fasti_). The 194 days thus left clear were further broken into by the _nundinae_, the first days of the eight-day week, on which not even a _contio_ could be held,[1267] and by the movable festivals (_feriae conceptivae_) which were fixed by the magistrates. These rules of time were binding on all meetings of Populus and Plebs; those of place differed for the various assemblies. The assembly of the _curiae_ met within the _pomerium_, usually in the Comitium on the north-west of the Forum.[1268] The centuries, on the other hand, must meet without the walls, and their place of assembly was usually the Campus Martius, but meetings are sometimes found in other places such as “the Peteline grove outside the river-gate,” and an unknown site called the Aesculetum.[1269] The two assemblies of the tribes were originally bound to no locality, except for the fact that the plebeian, as purely city, magistrates could not easily find their way outside the walls. But the eliciting of a _rogatio_ from the tribes by the consul in his camp at Sutrium in 357 B.C. led, through the fear of military influence, to the rule that no resolution should be elicited from the people in the military domain,[1270] and since that date the two assemblies of the tribes were held within the first milestone. The open space of the Capitol (_area Capitolii_) was at one time their usual resort both for elections and for laws, but in the later period of the Republic it was found convenient to conduct the elections both of the lower and plebeian magistrates in the Campus Martius, while the Rostra in the Forum, the usual centre of demagogic strife and the ordinary gathering place for _contiones_, was chosen as the site for the legislation of the tribes.[1271]