There were, then, great difficulties in the way of a law for relieving debtors. These were increased, as has been seen, by circumstances, and we must now add the selfishness and dishonesty of the rich patricians and plebeians, who held the bulk of the public land in their own hands, and contrived to evade the Licinian law in the following way. If a man held more than five hundred jugera, he emancipated his son and made over a portion of the land nominally to him, or, if he had no son, to some other trusty person. With sorrow we hear of these practices, and with still greater sorrow we learn that in the year 354 B.C. C. Licinius himself was indicted by the curule ædile, M. Popilius Lænas, for fraudulently making over five hundred jugera to his son, while he held another five hundred in his own name. Thus this remedy for pauperism was set aside and neglected, till the Gracchi arose, and vainly endeavoured, after more than two centuries of abuse, to correct that which at first might have been prevented. The law for equalising political power was more effective. For eleven years after the Licinian law one consul was always a plebeian. Then the patricians made one last struggle to recover their exclusive privilege; and in the year 355 B.C. we have a Sulpicius and a Valerius as consuls, both of them patricians; and in the course of the next dozen years we find the law violated in like manner no less than seven times. After that it is regularly observed, one consul being patrician and the other plebeian, till at length in the year 172 B.C., when the patrician families had greatly decreased, both consulships were opened to the plebeians, and from that time forth the offices were held by men of either order without distinction. These violations of the law above mentioned were effected by the power by which the senate ordered the patrician consul to name a dictator. At least in the space twenty-five years after the Licinian laws we have no fewer than fifteen dictators. Now several of these were appointed for sudden emergencies of war, such as the Gallic invasions of 361 and 350. But often we find dictators when there is no mention of foreign war. In the year 360 we find that both the consuls enjoyed a triumph, and not the dictator. These and other reasons have led to the belief that these dictators were appointed to hold the consular comitia, and brought the overbearing weight of their political power to secure the election of two patrician consuls. [Illustration: ETRUSCAN WOMAN OF QUALITY]