Πλῆθος, on the other hand, ordinarily denotes the masses, multitude, rabble,[2534] including the crowd gathered not only in a tribunician assembly[2535] but also in the ἐκκλησία (here meaning contio) under the presidency of a patrician magistrate.[2536] But πλῆθος is never technically or officially used to denote any assembly either of the populus or of the plebs. In the passage under discussion Appian’s statement of the Cornelian-Pompeian law is εἰσηγοῦντό τε μηδὲν ἔτι ἀπροβούλευτον ἐς τὸν δῆμον ἐσφέρεσθαι, in which he uses δῆμος according to his custom to designate the popular assembly without specifying whether it is of the populus or of the plebs. In commenting on it he substitutes πλῆθος for δῆμος for the purpose, not of defining the assembly as tribunician, but of contrasting the masses in the assembly with the nobles in the senate: ἐσ τὸ πλῆθος is substantially equivalent to ἐν τοῖς πένησι καὶ θρασυτάτοις used just below; Sulla wished nothing to be submitted to the masses in the comitia centuriata before it had been considered by the senate. Appian[2537] attributes to Sulla for this early date an attempt to increase the number of senators. “They (the consuls) enrolled three hundred nobles in the senate, which had been reduced in numbers and for that reason had come to be despised.” He does not state, however, by what authority the consuls made this extraordinary adlectio; and it is in fact improbable that the senate had so dwindled. However that may be, the increase did not take permanent effect at this time.[2538] Two other laws of these consuls are briefly mentioned: (1) for planting colonies,[2539] of which nothing is known; (2) a lex unciaria.[2540] The latter may have been a reduction of existing debts by one-twelfth of the principle, or a lowering of the maximal rate of interest to 8⅓ per cent;[2541] or it may have been a general insolvency law, providing for the payment of debts in instalments.[2542] The chief value of these measures, even if we knew them in detail, would be to reveal the idea of their authors; for they were all repealed in the following year on the initiative of the consul L. Cornelius Cinna, probably by a comitial vote.[2543]