Such is the scant list of legislative acts of the half century following the dictatorship of Hortensius (287-232), none of them as innovating as, for instance, the reform of the comitia centuriata brought about in approximately the same period by the power of the censors alone.[2023] The nobles had a certain degree of reason for feeling secure in their control of the administration. But in this respect they miscalculated. The long war with Carthage, which had diverted the attention of all the citizens from politics, ended without bringing in the wake of victory the usual rewards to the masses. No lands in Sicily were assigned to the citizens, while on their northeastern border the Picene district and the territory recently taken from the Gauls in the neighborhood of Ariminum were reserved by the nobles for their own occupation. Popular discontent at these short-sighted, selfish proceedings found expression in the rogation of C. Flaminius, tribune of the plebs in 232, for the assignment of the lands here mentioned to the citizens who were willing to settle on the frontier.[2024] It was vehemently opposed by the nobility,[2025] and was finally passed without the authorization of a senatus consultum.[2026] From a statement of Cicero[2027] that as long afterward as 228 Q. Fabius Maximus, then consul a second time, was hindering Flaminius from dividing the land, we may infer that the author of the law was elected among the tresviri charged with its administration.[2028] Most of the settlers in that region were assigned to the tribe Velina, probably in pursuance of an article of the Flaminian statute.[2029] The enactment came as a disagreeable interruption to the quiet happiness of the nobles—as a sign that the political battle fought out between comitia and senate in the period ending with the Hortensian legislation was to be renewed with perhaps even greater bitterness. Hence Polybius, echoing the complaints of the nobles, denounces the measure as the first step toward the demoralization of the people.[2030] The lasting hatred felt by the senators for this new and powerful enemy is seen in their refusal to grant him a triumph for military successes he had won as consul in 223. A plebiscite without their authorization gave the desired privilege to the champion of popular rights.[2031] It was probably in this connection—at least we are soon to hear of it for the first time—that an act of the people was made essential to a triumph within the city. Henceforth even when the senate was willing to allow a triumph or an ovation, the person thus honored could not hold imperium in the city on the day of such festival excepting by a comitial lex. Usually in cases of the kind the senate, after voting the privilege, instructed a praetor to request one of the tribunes to bring a rogatio de imperio before the tribes.[2032] The earliest known act of the kind is the plebiscite of 211 which granted the imperium to M.