After providing in the frumentarian act an expedient which, we may believe, he looked upon as temporary, he resumed the work of construction[2303] by reviving his brother’s agrarian law.[2304] The continuance of the assignations as long as there remained any public land that could be distributed was a most essential element of his plan. Among the articles retained were those which subjected the holders of assigned lots to a tax[2305] and exempted from distribution the Campanian territory not set apart for his colony at Capua,[2306] as well as various other lands excepted both by the agrarian law of Tiberius and by that of 111.[2307] Doubtless it also reinvested the three commissioners with judicial power, without which they could accomplish nothing. Through this agrarian law, or possibly through a subsequent lex viaria, the triumviri were empowered to build roads for the accommodation of the new peasantry.[2308] Though introducing no new principle,[2309] his lex agraria was not a simple reaffirmation of his brother’s law with amendments and additions; but “a comprehensive statute, so completely covering the ground of the earlier Sempronian law that later legislation cites the law of Gaius, not that of Tiberius Gracchus, as the authority for the regulations which had revolutionized the tenure of the public land.”[2310] These measures were passed before the tribunician elections of the year,[2311] which took place as usual in midsummer.[2312] It was his frumentarian law, together with the hope aroused by the long array of promulgated measures, which secured his reëlection. Soon afterward, though still in 123, he brought before the comitia a rogation concerning the qualification of iudices. As the quaestiones extraordinariae from the earliest times were made up of senators, it was natural that the standing courts also from the time of their institution should be similarly composed.[2313] Under such conditions the judicial authority afforded no efficient check upon maladministration; and this immunity from the law, together with the temptations to the misuse of power especially in provincial commands, tended in the course of generations to make of the senate, with individual exceptions, a class of grand criminals. To remedy this evil and at the same time to remove from the senate the strongest foundation of its political power,[2314] Ti. Sempronius Gracchus had proposed his rogatio iudiciaria either for transferring the courts entirely to the knights, or more probably for making up the juries of an equal number of senators and knights.[2315] It failed to become a law; but Gaius now took up the matter, and after experimenting unsuccessfully with one or two projects,[2316] he finally, 122, carried a plebiscite which substituted knights for senators in the alba iudicum,[2317] from which not only standing courts but also special commissions were to be filled.[2318] It is uncertain whether mention was made of equites