Family law underwent some modification. A plebiscite of Q. Voconius Saxa, 169,[2161] provided that no citizen assessed at a hundred thousand asses or more should will his property to a woman.[2162] Another article limited to a half of the estate the amount which any legatee, male or female, could receive.[2163] Dowries were regulated by a lex Maenia, which seems to belong to 186.[2164] In the bestowal of the citizenship the people were unhampered. Doubtless for some time after the Hortensian legislation comitial acts for this purpose were commonly authorized by senatus consulta; but in the year 188 we first hear the enunciation of the principle that the people without the authority of the senate had the power to bestow the ius suffragii on whomsoever they pleased.[2165] The principle was carried into immediate effect by the tribunician statute of C. Valerius Tappo, which without a senatus consultum conferred the right of suffrage on the Formiani, Fundani, and Arpinates, who hitherto had been cives sine suffragio. The determination of the tribe to which new citizens should belong was also provided for by the legislative act of admission.[2166] The citizenship granted in this period continued occasionally to be limited. The Campanians, excluded forever from the rights of the state in 210,[2167] were in 188 placed under the census by a senatus consultum of the preceding year and were given intermarriage probably by a similar act.[2168] In early time, at least before 184, the custom arose of granting to the founders of a colony the right to enroll as citizens a specified number of aliens. The first recorded instance belongs to the year mentioned, in which the poet Ennius received the citizenship in accordance with such a law.[2169] It was by the pretorian comitia tributa that the priestesses of Ceres, who were Greeks from Naples, Velia, or Sicily, were admitted to the citizenship.[2170] Perhaps by the same assembly, at all events by an act of the people, a slave who deserved well of the state was given his liberty, which involved citizenship.[2171] Such grants to single individuals by the people, however, must have been rare.[2172] A Roman taken captive in war, recovered all his rights simply by returning home (postliminium).[2173] But even when an entire community was brought into the state by a single vote, the wording of the law indicates that the inhabitants received the honor as individuals and not in mass.[2174] It was permissible for independent communities and individuals to reject the offer of the franchise,[2175] whereas subjects and partial citizens were compelled to accept it.[2176] From the facts here stated it will immediately appear that after the people had acquired an unconditioned right to extend the Roman franchise, they made little use of the opportunity. The senate could well afford to concede to them a power which they cherished a growing disinclination to use. The expansion of the empire