balance rendered in three equal annual instalments—a repetition of the Licinian-Sextian provision regarding debts. At first the debtors were willing to grant this concession through fear of failing to obtain any degree of relief; but the creditors, now hoping to recover everything, refused to be conciliated. After a time both parties shifted their attitude; the creditors expressed themselves as satisfied to recover the principal merely, while the debtors would no longer accept either alternative of the compromise. The sedition, for such the conflict became, continued interminably; and although the creditors yielded, little by little, far more than they had intended in the beginning, the debtors made each concession the basis of a new demand. They brought the long, serious struggle to a climax by seceding to the Janiculum, at the very time when the Tarentines were completing the organization of a coalition of Etruscans, Gauls, Samnites, and several other peoples against Rome.[1916] Q. Hortensius, appointed dictator to meet this crisis, carried through the comitia centuriata a group of provisions for satisfying the demands of the seceders: (1) Doubtless a clause for the relief of debtors, of which no mention is made in our scant sources. (2) A provision that without the consent either of the senate or of the patrician portion of it a resolution of the plebs should be valid for all the citizens.[1917] At the time when the Valerian-Horatian statute provided that with the consent of the senate resolutions of the tribunician comitia tributa should have the force of law, the senate was still composed exclusively of patricians; and the phrase senatus consultum in this law was therefore considered a full equivalent of the patrum auctoritas, the only difference being that the consultum was given in advance of a popular vote and the auctoritas subsequently to it. But when with the appearance of plebeians in the senate the two acts began to drift more widely apart, the patricians successfully claimed an exclusive right to the auctoritas, which, as we have seen,[1918] was reduced to a formality, so far as centuriate legislation was concerned, by an article of the Publilian law. So long as the patricians voted in the tribunician comitia tributa, however, and constituted a majority in the senate, they were willing to abide by the specific declaration of the Valerian-Horatian statute which conditioned the validity of the plebiscite on the senatus consultum. But from 339 they were legally excluded from the tribunician comitia tributa, and they foresaw, moreover, the end of their majority in the senate. In the period between 339 and 287, accordingly, they set up a new claim, based doubtless on the practical intention of the Valerian-Horatian law, to be free from plebi scita because the latter were passed