In accordance with the Icilian plebiscite a capital charge is said to have been brought by a tribune of the plebs against Kaeso Quinctius on the ground that he had repeatedly driven the tribunes from the Forum and had dispersed their assembly.[1613] After providing sureties the accused went into exile,[1614] and the sentence of banishment was passed—in Cicero’s opinion by the comitia centuriata, in Livy’s by the tribal comitia of plebs, 461.[1615] Another case prior to the decemvirate is recorded for the year 455. Representatives of three illustrious patrician families were charged with having disturbed an assembly under tribunician presidency. Their estates were forfeited to Ceres.[1616] Naturally under this arrangement between the plebs and the government there was room for much misunderstanding: the leaders of the plebs stretched their claims to the uttermost; and the patricians, after granting the radical concession, endeavored to recall as much of it as possible. They plausibly urged that while the sacrosanctitas, so far as it existed,[1617] might protect the person of the tribune, it gave him no authority over a patrician;[1618] and their position as the sole holders of political power and the sole repositories of law and usage enabled them before the decemviral legislation by stubborn, skilful perseverance in the details of political warfare almost to throw the tribunician sanctity into oblivion.[1619] Livy tells us that in the assembly appointed for the trial of the past consuls L. Furius and C. Manlius, the accusing tribune failed to appear, and was found murdered in his home; and the historian gives us to understand that the crime was the result of a private conference among the patricians.[1620] Dio Cassius[1621] states that they secretly slew a number of the boldest spirits among the plebeians. Though these stories are mythical, they reflect at least the opinion of the historians that in this early period the sanctity of the tribune counted for little. If it failed to protect his person, it could have given him no great degree of recognized judicial competence. Under these circumstances we should not expect to find the tribunes often bringing the power of their questioned sanctity into actual use in the early years of their existence; but that before the decemvirate they exercised jurisdiction to some extent even in capital cases, which were appealed to the assembly under their presidency, is proved by a law of the Twelve Tables, which, to remedy what the legislators must have considered an abuse, provided that accusations affecting the caput of a citizen should be brought only before the comitiatus maximus—evidently the comitia centuriata.[1622]