all their superior influence in both lawful and unlawful ways to block a popular measure, the tribunes, naturally wishing then to exclude them, attempted to establish the principle that tribunician assemblies were exclusively plebeian. This question was settled by the law of Publilius Philo, 339.[1680] This article of the Valerian-Horatian statute was a concession extorted from the patrician government by the strongest pressure, perhaps by a plebeian secession. The actual advantage which it brought to the plebs was minimized, however, by the provision that the previous consent of the senate was essential to the validity of bills brought before the tribunician assembly.[1681] The patricians could urge in support of this arrangement that as their magistrates according to long established custom always obtained the previous consent of the senate (senatus consultum) to measures brought before any assembly, and were absolutely required to obtain senatorial sanction (patrum auctoritas) for curiate and centuriate laws and elections,[1682] the tribunes, who were free from the trammels of the sanction, should be legally compelled to consult the senate before bringing a measure into their assemblies, especially as their legislation was in a field hitherto monopolized by the patrician magistrates and the senate. Although the tribunes of the plebs would have preferred to understand by the term plebiscite all that it had meant before—the unconditioned resolution of the tribal assembly under their presidency—they must have felt satisfied for the time being with the great gain they had made, however strenuous they afterward became to relieve themselves of senatorial control. This condition on the validity of the plebiscite is not expressly mentioned by Livy in connection with the Valerian-Horatian legislation, but is assumed by the sources for the following period.[1683] The same thing is clearly implied, too, in the long series of political struggles which came after the enactment of the Valerian-Horatian statute.[1684] Had the tribunes been free to legislate without interference on the part of the senate, they would have been in a position easily to complete the social and political equalization of the orders, and by one sweeping reform law to place themselves and their constituents in the condition reached by an almost uninterrupted conflict of a hundred and sixty years (449-287).[1685] It was in accordance with this regulation that another article of the Valerian-Horatian statute directed the aediles of the plebs to preserve the senatus consulta in the temple of Ceres.[1686] We cannot look upon these officials as keepers of the senatorial archives of that time,[1687] and hence must conclude that the documents in their charge were those decrees which authorized the presentation of tribunician bills, for with those alone the plebeians were directly concerned.