Gracchus, 123, “a certain law had already been enacted,” as Appian[2283] obscurely informs us, “that if a tribune should be wanting on the announcement (of the votes), the people might elect one from the whole body of citizens.” The statute, which Appian has evidently failed to understand clearly, seems to have provided that if the returns showed the election of only nine tribunes from the candidates proposed, the people could proceed to elect a tenth from the whole body of citizens, including the existing tribunician college; or equivalently, if for the tenth place the tribes cast a majority of votes for one who was not a candidate, he would be considered legally elected.[2284] The object was to enable the people to continue in office an especially popular tribune, and was therefore a notable stride in the direction of monarchy. Papirius was more successful with his lex tabellaria, which extended the ballot to legislation, 131.[2285] Trials of perduellio alone retained the oral vote. Doubtless this improvement greatly strengthened the rising popular party. A plebiscite passed about 129, requiring a knight on entering the senate to sell his public horse, deprived the senators of their votes in the eighteen centuries, and completed the separation of the governing aristocracy from the commercial class begun by the Claudian statute of 219.[2286] At some unknown time before the tribunate of C. Gracchus a plebiscite of M. Junius modified the lex Calpurnia concerning extortion,[2287] in what way we are not informed. The act is with a high degree of probability attributed to M. Junius Pennus, tribune of the plebs in 126.[2288] If the Junian lex repetundarum was indeed his work, it could have been dictated by no sympathy with the unprivileged classes, for it was this Junius whose plebiscite ordered the expulsion of all aliens from Rome—a measure which Cicero condemns as inhuman.[2289] The act last mentioned was the response of the senate and rabble to the effort of the more enlightened Romans to grant the citizenship to the Latins and Italians. The new idea was embodied in a rogation of M. Fulvius Flaccus, consul in 125, which offered the citizenship, or as an alternative the right of appeal, to the Italians, with the purpose of buying off their opposition to the Sempronian agrarian law; but the measure was so vehemently opposed in the senate that the author withdrew it.[2290] The idea however lived in the minds of the reformers till it was finally realized.