laws handed down from Tullius and Romulus the people were judges of the elections, and of the laws pertaining thereto they could set aside or confirm whichever they pleased.[2231] Finally one of the tribunes of the people declared that he would take from the consuls the power of holding an election unless they yielded to the people in this matter. Then the senate allowed the tribunes to repeal this law and after one year they reënacted it.”[2232] From this event it can be seen that when the tribunes and people were unitedly determined upon a measure, they were irresistible. It is evident, too, that in popular theory no laws could prevent the citizens from having the magistrates whom they chose to elect. Again in 135 a plebiscite, authorized by a senatus consultum, granted more speedily on this occasion though doubtless with as great regret, exempted him from the law which absolutely forbade reëlection to the consulship.[2233] It was equally ominous that in the preceding year the proconsulship of M. Aemilius Lepidus was abrogated, probably by an act of the comitia.[2234] Another premonition of the revolution was the renewal of agrarian agitation, with which in a varying degree some of the more enlightened nobles sympathized. It began slowly to dawn upon them that the economic ruin of the peasant class was endangering the state—a feeling which found expression in the agrarian rogation of C. Laelius, praetor in 145.[2235] The measure must have been similar to the Licinian-Sextian law as it threatened the interests of the rich.[2236] When he saw that their opposition would be such as to disturb the public peace, he dropped the proposal. If he was in truth called Sapiens because of this speedy retreat, the epithet was too easily earned. Reform, while there was yet time, was blocked as much by the cowardice of the well-minded as by the enormous selfishness of the majority of nobles. It was in this time of extraordinary imperial prosperity that, in the opinion of Polybius, the constitution was successfully put to its severest test. “When these external alarms are past, and the people are enjoying their good fortune and the fruits of their victories, and, as usually happens, growing corrupted by flattery and sloth, show a tendency to violence and arrogance—it is in these circumstances more than ever that the constitution is seen to possess within itself the power of correcting abuses. For when any one of the three classes becomes puffed up, and manifests an inclination to be contentious and unduly encroaching, the mutual interdependence of all the three, and the possibility of the pretensions of any one’s being curbed and thwarted by the others, must plainly check this tendency; and so the proper equilibrium is maintained by the impulsiveness of the one part’s being checked by its fear of the other.”[2237] These words, which we may suppose to have been written after the tribunate of Ti. Gracchus,[2238] accurately describe