aggrieved and lodged a complaint, through their protest timeously
and personally interposed, and likewise of hindering or cancelling
at discretion any proposal made by a magistrate to the burgesses,
in other words, the right of intercession or the so-called
tribunician veto.

Intercession

The power of the tribunes, therefore, primarily involved the right
of putting a stop to administration and to judicial action at their
pleasure, of enabling a person bound to military service to withhold
himself from the levy with impunity, of preventing or cancelling the
raising of an action and legal execution against the debtor, the
initiation of a criminal process and the arrest of the accused while
the investigation was pending, and other powers of the same sort.
That this legal help might not be frustrated by the absence of the
helpers, it was further ordained that the tribune should not spend
a night out of the city, and that his door must stand open day and
night. Moreover, it lay in the power of the tribunate of the people
through a single word of a single tribune to restrain the adoption
of a resolution by the community, which otherwise by virtue of its
sovereign right might have without ceremony recalled the privileges
conferred by it on the plebs.

But these rights would have been ineffective, if there had not
belonged to the tribune of the people an instantaneously operative
and irresistible power of enforcing them against him who did not
regard them, and especially against the magistrate contravening them.
This was conferred in such a form that the acting in opposition to
the tribune when making use of his right, above all things the laying