The Law known as Aternia Tarpeia (451 B.C.) dealt with questions of penalties; certain notices of it fortunately preserve for us some valuable material. Cicero[185] says, “Likewise popular was the measure brought forward at the Comitia Centuriata in the fifty-fourth year after the first consuls (451 B.C.) by the consuls Sp. Tarpeius and A. Aternius concerning the amount of the penalty.” To the same law Dionysius of Halicarnassus refers[186]: “They ratified a law in the Centuriate Assembly in order that all the magistrates might have the power of inflicting punishment on those who were disorderly or acted illegally in reference to their own jurisdiction. For till then not all the magistrates had the power, but only the Consuls. But they did not leave the penalty in their own hands to fix as much as they pleased, but they themselves defined the amount, having appointed as a maximum limit of penalty two oxen and thirty sheep. And this law continued to be kept in force by the Romans for a long time.” Festus (_s.v._ _Peculatus_ p. 237 ed. Müller) says: “Peculation (_peculatus_), as a name for public theft, was derived from _pecus_ ‘cattle,’ because that was the earliest kind of fraud, and before the coining of copper or silver the heaviest penalty for crimes was one of two sheep and thirty oxen. That law was enacted by the Consuls T. Menenius Lanatus and P. Sestius Capitolinus. As regards which cattle, after the Roman people began to use coined money, it was provided by the Tarpeian Law that an ox should be reckoned at 100 asses, a sheep at 10 asses.” Again Aulus Gellius[187] has a curious notice, too long to quote in full, which ends “on that account afterwards by the Aternian Law ten asses were appointed for each sheep, one hundred for each ox.” Cicero and Dionysius are probably right (as Niebuhr thinks) in saying that Tarpeius and Aternius fixed the number of animals. C. Julius and P. Papinius, who were Consuls in 429 B.C., to whose reckoning of fines (_aestimatio multarum_) Livy refers (IV. 30), probably changed the penalties in cattle into money equivalents. Festus and Gellius have evidently muddled their authorities, having interchanged the words _sheep_ (_ovium_) and _cows_ (_bovum_). But the important thing is that both are agreed in giving the value of the cow at 100 asses.