These were the two original functions from which the vast powers of the later tribunes gradually developed. As strictly plebeian officials they had no authority to summon patricians, to exclude them from the place of assembly,[1592] or to condemn them judicially.[1593] It follows that their alleged prosecutions of past consuls for maladministration[1594] are fictions[1595]—an anticipation of their jurisdiction at a later age. Directly they possessed no power of judgment or of coercion;[1596] but for the enforcement of the auxilium and of the ius agendi cum plebe their persons were made sacred—sacro sancti—by an oath which the plebs swore at the time they instituted the office,[1597] namely that any one who killed a tribune or aedile of the plebs or did him bodily harm, or who commanded another to inflict harm or death upon him might as a person devoted to Jupiter be killed with impunity, and his property be confiscated.[1598] The avenger was necessarily either a private plebeian or an official of the plebs.[1599] The formal act which rendered the tribunes sacred was termed a lex sacrata. The essence of such a law is (1) that it was sworn to by the community—in this instance by the community of plebs, (2) that the offender against it became a homo sacer and could be put to death with impunity.[1600] This idea of sanctity the plebeians may have derived partly from the Greek asylum;[1601] but it seems also to have been influenced by the condition of ambassadors, hence the later, ill-founded conception of the plebs as a state, and of the plebeian officials and other institutions as based on a treaty ratified with fetial ceremonies between the patrician government and the seceding plebs.[1602] Though termed lex sacrata because it was passed and sworn to in the community, as it were, of the plebs, like any plebiscite of this period the resolution had no legal validity for the state or for the patricians. Under compulsion, however, the government yielded to the demands of the plebeians without formally acknowledging the sanctity of their officials; so that the patricians, by asserting that Roman law did not recognize an inviolability founded purely on religion,[1603] could afterward deny that the tribunes were really sacrosanct. Till the enactment of the Valerian-Horatian laws of 449,[1604] accordingly, the inviolability of the tribunes existed in so far only as the plebeians were in a position to maintain it by holding over their opponents and over the government the threat of violence and revolution. That under the circumstances domestic peace was on the whole preserved should be credited to the orderly character of the great mass of citizens.