For some time after their institution the tribunes of the plebs, having no viatores or at least none that were recognized as public officials,[1755] depended upon the two plebeian aediles as bailiffs for making arrests and for executing sentences.[1756] The latter functionaries seem to have stood in some such relation to the tribunes as the quaestors toward the consuls. It was accordingly as deputies of the tribunes that they acquired jurisdiction.[1757] The earliest mentioned case, 454, is the trial and condemnation of a retired consul in a finable action for official misconduct.[1758] It should be placed in the same mythical category with the numerous tribunician prosecutions of the period.[1759] After the institution of curule aediles, 367, the aediles of the plebs continued indeed to serve occasionally as bailiffs of the tribunes,[1760] but acquired in addition, along with those of curule rank, an independent jurisdiction. In 357 C. Licinius Stolo was prosecuted by M. Popillius Laenas on the charge of having circumvented his own law by emancipating his son in order that he and his son might each possess five hundred iugera of the public land. He was fined 10,000 asses.[1761] From the cases to be mentioned below the inference may be drawn that the accuser was an aedile. In 298 several persons were prosecuted by the aediles, whether curule or plebeian is not stated, for violation of the same law, and hardly one was acquitted.[1762] In 295 the plebeian aediles made considerable money by fining those who had trespassed against the article of the Licinian-Sextian statute which related to pasturage;[1763] and two years afterward violators of the same provision were again fined, on this occasion by the curule aediles.[1764] Actions against usurers were brought by aediles in 344,[1765] 304,[1766] and 295.[1767] Shortly before 328, M. Flavius was prosecuted before the people by the aediles for the crimen stupratae matris familiae, and acquitted.[1768] In 295 Q. Fabius Gurges, a curule aedile,[1769] accused several matrons before the people, also of stuprum, and fined them. In the period between the Licinian-Sextian and the Hortensian legislation, accordingly, the jurisdiction of the aediles, so far as is known, was limited to usury, stuprum, and the violation of laws regarding the occupation and pasturage of the public land. They had nothing to do with perduellio or related offences, or with the accountability of magistrates, or with any capital actions whatsoever. All their trials were finable, and in case the fine exceeded thirty cattle and two sheep, or the equivalent, 3020 heavy asses,[1770] an appeal could be made to the tribes. The plebeian aediles equally with the tribunes[1771] lacked the power to summon patricians, whereas the curule aediles as patrician magistrates[1772] possessed the right; but no distinction in the composition of these tribal assemblies, corresponding to the form of presidency, is suggested by the sources.[1773]