both commissions.[2490] After his murder the Livian and Saufeian statutes were both considered null and void.[2491] The lex Remmia de calumniatoribus, which was enacted before 80, may belong to the year of the Livian attempt at reform, 91;[2492] and in that case it would be most natural to regard it as a piece of counter legislation to offset the proposal for establishing a court for the trial of jurors accused of bribery. The complainant who was proved malicious it rendered liable to trial and punishment with the loss of citizenship and the branding of his forehead with the letter K (for Kalumniator).[2493] This we may believe was the defiance offered by the knights to those who were attempting to bring them to account for their conduct as judges. Exulting in their victory over Drusus, they expressed their antipathy to the Italian movement in a lex de maiestate of Q. Varius, tribune of the plebs in 90. They stood round the Rostra with drawn daggers and forced it through the comitia in spite of tribunician intercession. It supplanted the Appuleian law on the subject by a severe provision against those who encouraged the Italians to demand the citizenship or in any way to conspire or to revolt against the Roman people. It must have contained an article, too, concerning seditions.[2494] The court which it established was to sit on all ordinary dies fasti, undisturbed by iustitia,[2495] and was to be a quaestio perpetua.[2496] Now that two attempts, the Appuleian and the Livian, to substitute more popular measures for the Sempronian frumentarian law had failed, the optimates found themselves strong enough to supersede the Sempronian act by one less popular. This was the Octavian law,[2497] the contents of which are unknown, but which received the praise of Cicero for its moderation.[2498]