It was in keeping with the oligarchic tendency of the age that a consular law of M’. Acilius Glabrio, 191, gave the pontiffs the function of determining which years should be intercalary and of how many days such years should consist. Thus these functionaries secured the means of bringing the solar and civil years into accord; but they used their new power mostly in the interests of their party, with the result that the confusion in the calendar increased rather than lessened.[2221] The nobles made their greatest gain in the control of legislation and of elections about the middle of the century through the statutes of Aelius and Fufius, probably tribunes of the plebs. By granting the patrician magistrates the obnuntiatio against the tribunes, or perhaps by confirming the former in a usurped power of the kind, it enabled the nobles to exercise a practical veto on tribunician legislation, and may for that reason be looked upon as the firmest support of the plutocracy.[2222] An article of the statute forbade the bringing of a rogation before the people in the interval between the announcement and the holding of elective comitia.[2223] Toward the close of the period a democratic movement preliminary to the revolution began with the enactment of two important ballot laws. The first was the plebiscite of Q. Gabinius, 139, whom the optimates took pleasure in representing as ignoble and mean.[2224] It introduced the ballot in elections with a view to freeing the voter from the influence of the nobility; for many of the poor were at this time falling into economic, and hence political, dependence on the rich.[2225] The other was the plebiscite of L. Cassius Longinus Ravilla, 137, for extending the use of the ballot to all trials before the people with the exception of perduellio.[2226] Cases coming under the law were those which involved fines imposed by the tribes under aedilician or tribunician presidency. Probably in the opinion of the author, a conscientious noble,[2227] cases of perduellio were too rare to need the change or too solemn to admit of a disturbance of traditional usage. These measures had little immediate effect, for the nobles were as clever as the commons at exploiting the secret ballot for partisan objects[2228]; yet the principle, when carried to completion by the supplementary laws on the subject in the years immediately following, contributed greatly to the success of the revolution.[2229] Not without significance for the general trend of affairs is the circumstance that in these latter years of the completed plutocracy two dispensations were granted P. Scipio Aemilianus from laws which had been designed to secure it against the rise of great personalities. In 148 when he offered himself for the aedileship, being still too young for the consulship,[2230] the people insisted on electing him to the latter office. “When the consuls showed them the law they became more importunate and urged all the more, exclaiming that by the