If the tribunes presumed to condemn men to death, they certainly would not hesitate to fine them for lighter offences. For checking the power of the magistrates to levy unlimited fines the consuls of 454, A. Aternius and Sp. Tarpeius, passed through the comitia centuriata a law which set the maximum fine to be levied by a magistrate on an individual in any one day at thirty cattle and two sheep, the minimum being a single sheep. In case he exceeded the former amount, an appeal could be made to the assembly.[1623] In the opinion of Dionysius[1624] this law was interpreted to apply to all magistrates, including those of the plebs, and was made accordingly the basis of the tribunician jurisdiction in finable offences. These consequences seem to have been drawn from the statute, although the proposers may not have so intended it.[1625] Sufficient evidence has now been offered that before the decemviral legislation the plebeian tribunes exercised, on the basis of their sanctity, a vague jurisdiction in both finable and capital cases, occasionally submitted to by the patrician government though probably not recognized by it as just or constitutional. For the same period their method of agitation by the obstruction of the levy,[1626] by haranguing the people in contiones,[1627] and occasionally by sedition, proves clearly the lack of legislative power through the assembly over which they presided, as well as their lack of veto on the acts of the government. With reference to legislation the course of the discussion in the present and following chapters will make it evident that only by a provision of the Hortensian statute did plebiscites become unconditionally binding on the whole people. Although from the beginning a tribune, as a member of a collegial office, could intercede against the act of a colleague, he had in this period no legal right of the kind against the government; for had he now possessed it, as he did at a later age, he would have felt no need of obstructing the levy—a relatively slow, clumsy method of political warfare. It is to be noticed further that the power of veto of the tribunes, after it had been acquired, rested upon their jurisdiction. If a magistrate persisted in ignoring their prohibition, his act remained valid but he rendered himself liable to tribunician prosecution.[1628] Necessarily, then, as long as the tribunes lacked judicial competence (till the Valerian-Horatian legislation, 449) they lacked the veto against governmental action; as long as their judicial competence depended upon the will of the government (probably till the Hortensian legislation, 287), their veto on the government must have been correspondingly limited. Finally it was not till tribunician obstruction of the levy, sedition, and secession disappear (that is, with the enactment of the Hortensian statute) that we have a right to assume the existence of an unrestricted tribunician