An occasional attempt was made by a magistrate to usurp for the comitia centuriata a share in the administration. The first which is worthy of notice,[1430] even though it may be mythical, is the agrarian proposal of Sp. Cassius, 486. According to the sources it was opposed by the senate and the colleague of the mover. Far from enacting it into a law, the author, on the expiration of his consulship, was himself accused of attempting to usurp the royal power, and was, in one version of the story, condemned to death by the assembly to which he had offered the bill.[1431] The senate must have taken very seriously this first attempt of a magistrate to transfer some of its administrative power to the comitia. The law for the division of the Aventine Hill among the people, 456, was actually passed, most probably by the centuries.[1432] It was forced upon the government by the plebeians, and did not serve as a precedent for the future. The Valerian law of 342,[1433] which abolished debts, was an extraordinary administrative measure similar in character, but far more sweeping, to the clause for the relief of debtors in the Licinian-Sextian plebiscite. If then the centuriate assembly was excluded from the field of administration, it must certainly in pre-decemviral times have had no part in religious legislation. The law which regulated the intercalary month inscribed on a bronze column by Pinarius and Furius, consuls in 472,[1434] and the ancient law composed in archaic letters, mentioned in connection with the year 363,[1435] requiring the praetor maximus to drive the nail on the ides of September, must accordingly have been acts, not of the centuriate assembly, but of the pontifical college. By the ratification of the Twelve Tables, composed chiefly of private laws and of closely connected religious regulations, an example was set for the invasion of both of these legal spheres by the centuriate assembly. But the precedent remained unproductive; for at this time the tribal assembly under plebeian or patrician magistrates was recognized as competent for legislation, and naturally took to itself the function of enacting the less weighty, for a time generally the non-constitutional, laws.[1436] We are not to imagine the field of legislation clearly divided into constitutional, private, religious, and other departments; aside from the question of declaring an offensive war, which remained strictly the province of the comitia centuriata, the distinction in legislation was simply between the more and the less important; the dignified assembly of centuries, organized on an aristocratic-timocratic basis, was entrusted with the weightier business, whereas the simpler tribal assembly, which was easier to summon and more expeditious in action, served well enough for the despatch of lighter business. The question of the assembly to be employed was largely one of inertia; it required a far greater force