It is true that now also there was no want of opposition, and it was
even to a certain extent effectual. The administration of justice
was improved. The administrative jurisdiction, which the senate
exercised either of itself or, on occasion, by extraordinary commissions,
over the provincial magistrates, was confessedly inadequate. It was
an innovation with a momentous bearing on the whole public life of the
Roman community, when in 605, on the proposal of Lucius Calpurnius Piso,
a standing senatorial commission (-quaestio ordinaria-) was instituted to
try in judicial form the complaints of the provincials against the Roman
magistrates placed over them on the score of extortion. An effort
was made to emancipate the comitia from the predominant influence
of the aristocracy. The panacea of Roman democracy was secret voting
in the assemblies of the burgesses, which was introduced first for
the elections of magistrates by the Gabinian law (615), then for
the public tribunals by the Cassian law (617), lastly for the voting
on legislative proposals by the Papirian law (623). In a similar
way soon afterwards (about 625) the senators were by decree of the
people enjoined on admission to the senate to surrender their public
horse, and thereby to renounce their privileged place in the voting
of the eighteen equestrian centuries.(2) These measures, directed to
the emancipation of the electors from the ruling aristocratic order,
may perhaps have seemed to the party which suggested them the first
step towards a regeneration of the state; in fact they made not the
slightest change in the nullity and want of freedom of the legally
supreme organ of the Roman community; that nullity indeed was only
the more palpably evinced to all whom it did or did not concern.
Equally ostentatious and equally empty was the formal recognition
accorded to the independence and sovereignty of the burgesses by
the transference of their place of assembly from the old Comitium below
the senate-house to the Forum (about 609). But this hostility between