No statesman, however opposed to popular government, could think of abolishing the comitia or even of putting an end to their legislative function. But the democracy could be effectually checked by reducing the legislative power of the assemblies to the harmless function of ratifying decrees of the senate. This result Sulla and Pompeius aimed to reach by renewing an ancient law[2523] that no measure should ever again be brought before the people which had not been previously considered and agreed to by the senate.[2524] A closely related law of the same consuls ordered that “the voting should not be by tribes but by centuries, as King Tullius had ordained.”[2525] This statement has often been interpreted to signify the restoration of the earlier form of comitia centuriata. But it seems most improbable that, on the point of setting out for a long, distant war, Sulla should think of restoring an organization which had been obsolete for more than a century and a half, and which could have been known to none but antiquarians. With his clear, practical intelligence he could not have failed to see the insuperable difficulty of restoring the ancient definitions of the classes in terms of iugera or even on the later basis of the libral _as_.[2526] Furthermore no censors were then at hand to undertake the work, and it was altogether unlikely that during his absence any could be elected who would be willing to apply themselves to the revitalization of the antique mummy. Such a measure, too, as Meyer[2527] has pointed out, would place the control of the assembly in the hands, not of the senate, but of the knights, his mortal enemies. It is far more reasonable to suppose that this act transferred the function of ratifying laws from the tribal to the centuriate comitia, to restore the arrangement supposed to have been introduced by Servius Tullius.[2528] If this reasoning is correct, the act under consideration totally abolished the legislative initiative of the tribunes.[2529] The other Cornelian-Pompeian law mentioned by Appian must have applied, accordingly, not to the tribunate but to the other magistracies.[2530] The current interpretation, which involves the theory of a return to the original centuriate system, requires further examination. Its chief basis is the statement of Appian that no law should be brought before the πλῆθος which had not been previously considered in the senate. It is commonly assumed that he uses δῆμος to designate the whole citizen body, and πλῆθος the exclusively plebeian assembly under tribunician presidency. A study of his usage, however, proves that he makes no such discrimination. Δῆμος is ordinarily the people in general, especially as distinguished from the βουλή,[2531] parallel to Livy’s common distinction between plebs and senatus. It is the technical term for the plebs in their tribal comitia under tribunician presidency.[2532] Rarely it signifies the state[2533] with reference to the interest of the people.