Soon after the strike, or secession, the plebeians were authorised to elect magistrates, or more strictly officers, of their own, to protect them from any arbitrary use of the _imperium_; these were called Tribunes, because the assembly that chose them was arranged according to tribes, local divisions in which both patricians and plebeians were registered for taxpaying purposes. The good-will of the patricians in making this concession is seen in the fact that the tribunes of the plebs (as they were henceforward called), were placed under the protection of the gods (_sacrosancti_), so that any one violating them was made liable to divine anger. As the plebeians grew more numerous and indispensable, their assembly and officers became steadily more powerful, and eventually won the right to pass laws binding the whole State. Again, it was not long before their ignorance of the customary law and its methods of procedure found a remedy. A code of law was drawn up in twelve tables, containing partly old customs now for the first time written down, partly new rules, some of them perhaps imported from Athens. Of this code we still possess many fragments, which show plainly that it was meant for all citizens, whatever their social standing. “The idea of legislating for a class ... is strikingly absent. The code is thoroughly Roman in its caution and good sense, its respect for the past, which it disregards only when old customs violate the rules of common sense, and its judicious disregard of symmetry.”[4] As the historian Tacitus said of it long afterwards, it was “the consummation of equal right.” And it was the source of the whole mighty river of Roman law, ever increasing in volume, which still serves to irrigate the field of modern European civilisation.