The first article has substantially the same form as the corresponding provision of the Valerian-Horatian statute, 449, and of the Hortensian, 287.[1825] All manner of conjectures as to the relation of these three laws to one another has been offered, the readiest theory being that the Valerian-Horatian statute had become obsolete, and required reënactment.[1826] The explanation is proved impossible by the circumstance that important plebi scita were passed under the Valerian-Horatian provision, the last being the Genucian. The Valerian-Horatian law could not have become obsolete in three years. The true explanation is to be found in the fact, now well known to historians, that the political ideas and political struggles assigned by our sources to the fifth century B.C. belong mostly to the fourth. The setting of the law of Publilius Volero, 471, was inaccurately transferred to it from the law of Publilius Philo, 339. The very existence of the latter statute is proof that the patricians were at that time declaring plebi scita invalid on the ground that they were passed by only a part of the people—a complaint recorded against neither the Canuleian nor the Licinian plebiscite. Hence, as the sources indicate, the patricians were in the assembly which passed these two measures. We may legitimately apply to the period from 449 to 339 the story of the long but finally successful struggle on the part of the tribunes to expel the patricians from the comitia tributa under plebeian chairmanship—a story which the sources assign to the period ending in 367. The struggle must be accepted as historical, for there was in later time no motive for creating it; and as it must have been a matter of tradition rather than of record, it could not well be placed earlier than the fourth century B.C. We may suppose that the patricians yielded the more readily because they at last recognized their inability simply by their votes to control the tribunician assembly, and because from the beginning they disliked to submit to the authority of a plebeian president. Hence their withdrawal from that form of comitia was in the first instance voluntary. The assembly, therefore, which adopted the Genucian plebiscite was de facto, though not de jure, exclusively plebeian. When accordingly the patricians objected to its validity on the ground that it was passed by but a part of the people, Publilius Philo, the most eminent plebeian statesman of his age, carried through the centuriate assembly the law above mentioned, that the resolutions of the tribunician assembly as then constituted, of plebs only, should be valid for all the people. This interpretation throws light on the otherwise inexplicable circumstance that the Genucian plebiscite was so indifferently enforced. The exclusion of the patricians was in line, too, with the general policy followed by the plebeians against them in the fourth century: the plebeians shut the patricians