and sacred power, which may enable a third power to gain a footing; and let this body have a monopoly of the civil law—and we get unequalled possibilities of judicial tyranny. For two hundred years (509-304) the knowledge of the forms of procedure, the _legis actiones_, which formed the whole content of the civil law, was open to the patrician pontiffs alone.[343] We are told that, even after the outlined codification and publication of the law in the Twelve Tables, the formularies could only be repeated correctly under the guidance of the college, which for this purpose annually appointed one of its members to “preside over private suits.” It is true that the theory of civil procedure was the same as it had been in the time of the monarchy; the magistrate decided what special rule of process was applicable, and then the case was settled by an arbitrator chosen by the litigants.[344] But the magistrate must often have been unskilled, one of the college must always have stood by his side, and the pontiff so officiating was not merely an adviser to the parties but a witness to the performance. The pontiffs, however, were more than interpreters. They had, as the guardians of _fas_, their own sphere of law, relics of which survived into the late Republic, and within this sphere they were judges. They had a graduated scale of expiations for sins (_piacula_); they were the police who protected the sanctity of festal days (_feriae_), and inflicted spiritual penalties on the magistrate himself who dared to exercise jurisdiction on a day which they had declared holy; they issued and enforced commands which protected sacred places (_loci sacri_) and burial-grounds.[345] Vows (_vota_), to be effective, must be prescribed by them, and peculiarly efficacious were those fixed forms of prayer (_certae precationes_) which they had dictated word for word (_de scripto praeire_). Against this phalanx of patrician power what forces could the Plebeians boast?