The plebeian legions, infuriated by the story of the outrage, as related by Virginius, advanced on the city and invested the Aventine. Icilius in concert with the liberal patricians, L. Valerius Potitus and M. Horatius Barbatus, had already organised a party in Rome; and as the decemvirs, supported by a contingent of the old citizens, persisted in their refusal to relinquish their office, the plebeians, on the advice of M. Duilius, again withdrew in a body to the Sacred Mount on the Anio. This new secession forced the decemvirs to resign; and by means of negotiations with the senate carried on by Valerius and Horatius in the summer of 449, important concessions were gained, which assured--the old order of things having meanwhile been resumed--the future position of the plebs in the Roman state. As before there were appointed two magistrates (Valerius and Horatius being the first to fill this office) elected by the free choice of the citizens, to whom the name consul was now for the first time properly applied, and the plebs were again represented by their tribunes. The only legacy of the decemvirs to be taken up was the new system of laws, the complete revision and codification of all the legal forms and processes that had hitherto been current in Rome. In the “Twelve Tables” the whole Roman people had now a just and uniform code of marriage, property, civil, and criminal laws.[28] Apparently an attempt was made to mitigate their severity in certain respects; but the law of debtor and creditor still remained extremely harsh, and the maintenance of the prohibition against marriage between patricians and plebeians, with the denial of all legal rights to the issue of such marriages, kept alive the most intense phase of the animosity felt toward each other by the divided classes. On the other hand the new statutes sought to overthrow the former evil practices in consequence of which patricians and plebeians accused of capital political crimes were certain to receive severe sentence, the first from the tribal assembly, the second from the curiata. Hereafter the centuriate assembly was to be the sole organ of the people’s will in the trial and judgment of criminal offences. It was apparently at this epoch also that the Romans first caused their raw supplies of copper ore to be minted in copper coins.