justified by the horror excited in the public mind by the blackest crimes masquerading under the guise of religion. We still possess a fragmentary copy of the decree by which this “conspiracy” was repressed; in it the Senate thinks that “capital punishment should be inflicted,”[1344] but the decree does not by its wording suspend the ordinary laws of appeal. This guardianship of the state against conspiracies (_conjurationes_) may have been the precedent for a power, the legality of which, as exercised by the Senate during the last century of the Republic, was hotly contested. This was the power of declaring the existence of a condition of things which the Greeks would have denominated στάσις, of singling out a party in the state and its leaders as enemies (_hostes_) to the Republic, the latter being professedly represented by the Senate itself and the magistrates who happened to be friendly to it, and of advising the magistrates who were its presidents, above all the magistrates with _imperium_, and sometimes even the pro-magistrates,[1345] to employ every means of summary coercion to ward off the impending danger. The formula for thus entrusting the guardianship of the community to a clique of friendly magistrates was expressed in the words “that the consuls, praetors, and tribunes of the Plebs (with the addition at times of other officials with the _imperium_) should see that the state took no harm.”[1346] After the passing of this decree the responsibility of the Senate ceases; the magistrates act at their own peril and cannot again devolve any responsibility for a judicial murder they may have committed in the execution of their instructions by again consulting the Senate on the guilt of their victims or on the method of execution to be employed.[1347] There were obvious reasons which rendered it impossible for this power to be based on any distant precedent; like the power last discussed it was a substitute for the vanished dictatorship, which was an integral part of the constitution, and subsequently to the decline of this office there was no revolution in Rome antecedent to that which was held by conservatives to have been inaugurated by the legislation of the Gracchi. But, even apart from the question of precedent, the absurdity of the Senate’s claim to be guardian of the Republic is manifested by the fact that the opposite party in the _stasis_ might more truly represent the theory of the constitution, as the Gracchan party did, than the Senate’s government itself; a broad line separates political opposition, even with the utmost force to back it, from criminal conspiracy against society, and by the passing of this “ultimate decree” the Senate declared itself the _author_ of a revolution. The controversy as to right is here insoluble: the insolubility depends on the fact that there was no permanent government at Rome except that of convention and of force.