It is not unlikely that the Flaminian age saw the earliest comitial legislation governing judicial procedure in private cases.[2067] Some changes were wrought, too, in family law by popular vote. In early time intermarriage between persons of the sixth degree of kinship was forbidden by usage;[2068] but in the period between the first and second Punic wars the right was extended to relatives of the fifth and sixth degrees,[2069] and shortly afterward to those of the fourth degree (consobrini).[2070] Another law, the lex Atilia, enacted between 242 and 186,[2071] probably in the second Punic war,[2072] directed the urban praetor to appoint a tutor for a woman or child who was left without a natural protector.[2073] It now became possible, too, for a magistrate under justifying circumstances to place a young man under twenty-five in the care of a curator, in accordance with the Plaetorian law,[2074] which was enacted before 192,[2075] and which belongs therefore to the Flaminian age.[2076] In the same period we find the comitia active in other fields. In 215 a tribal law of an unknown author granted the citizenship to three hundred Campanian knights who had remained faithful to Rome, and assigned them to the municipium of Cumae.[2077] Following a precedent set by the Antistian plebiscite of 319,[2078] L. Atilius, tribune of the plebs in 210, carried a law, in pursuance of a senatus consultum, for granting the senate absolute power over the Campanians who had revolted;[2079] and the senate accordingly not only punished them with loss of citizenship but reduced them to miserable subjection.[2080] The right of the comitia to ratify a vow of a sacred spring was recognized in 217 by an opinion rendered by the pontiffs,[2081] and was first exercised through a plebiscite of that year.[2082] The appointment of commissioners for the dedication of temples also belonged to the assembly,[2083] as well as the regulation of religious festivals.[2084] The greatest gain made by the people within the province of religious legislation in the third century B.C. was the provision for electing the pontifex maximus by seventeen tribes drawn by lot from the whole number thirty-five and presided over by a pontiff. This innovation probably belongs to the Flaminian era and certainly to the time before 212, when the first instance of such an election is given.[2085] The act was followed by another, before 209, which authorized the election of the chief curio in the same way.[2086] The object was to take the control of these places from the nobles, who looked upon the great sacerdotal collegia as a main support of their political power.[2087] It was but the beginning of a movement for transferring the appointment of all members of these collegia to the comitia sacerdotum, made up as above described. In the peculiar composition of assemblies of this character we see an attempt to make the gods in some degree coadjutors of the populace in filling the sacred places.[2088]