We find another sign of popular recovery in the assembly’s resumption of the appointment of special judiciary commissions.[2415] One of the most remarkable courts of the kind was that created in 113 for the trial of three Vestal virgins on a charge of incest. The pontifex maximus, who possessed absolute authority over the Vestals, had already pronounced judgment, condemning one and acquitting the other two, when a plebiscite of Sex. Peducaeus, taking the case out of his hands, transferred it to a quaestio extraordinaria.[2416] To such an extent did the tribune apply the theory of popular sovereignty.[2417] The plebiscite of C. Mamilius, 109, ordered the appointment of a court for the detection and punishment of those who had accepted money from Jugurtha for aid rendered him against the decrees of the senate and the interests of Rome. As it was a blow aimed at the nobility, the people in the hatred they then cherished against the governing class voted it with great spirit.[2418] In 105 the tribal comitia abrogated the proconsular imperium of Q. Servilius Caepio,[2419] and in the following year, they not only appointed a special court to try him for embezzlement of the gold found at Tolosa,[2420] but through the plebiscite of L. Cassius Longinus, they disqualified for membership of the senate any person whom the people had judicially condemned or whose imperium they had abrogated.[2421] These acts confirmed and applied the principles underlying the deposition of Octavius and the rogation of C. Gracchus concerning persons deposed from office (abacti). In theory the people indirectly chose the senators through their function of electing magistrates; and they were only claiming this right when they insisted that he should be prohibited from membership whom they had condemned in either of the two ways described by the statute. It must have seemed to the people, on the other hand, that the tribunes, who were once more their true representatives, had as good a right as any other magistrates to seats in the senate. This feeling found expression in the Atinian plebiscite, enacted between 122 and 102,[2422] which gave the tribunes the ius sententiae dicendae in the senate with the same right to censorial enrolment as that enjoyed by the curule magistrates.[2423]