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passed a law which defined and confirmed the right of appeal to the people against a capital sentence; the judicial and coercive powers of the magistrates in the city were checked. At the same time two tribunes, Cn. and Q. Ogulnius, despite the opposition of Appius Claudius, carried a law to enlarge the priestly colleges and throw them open to plebeians. The number of pontiffs was raised from five (probably) to nine by the inclusion of four plebeians; and the four patrician augurs received five plebeian colleagues. Thus the plebeians won a majority in the lesser of thecolleges, and later even in the college of pontiffs, where they were assigned another post some time between 292 and 218. Thus the plebs had won their way into the very heart of the camp of the patricians, who retained the monopoly only of the offices of interrex , rex sacrorum and flamen . Some time after 293 a Lex Maenia extended the clause of the Publilian law of 339 which decreed that the sanction of the patres must be given beforehand to legislative enactments; such preliminary sanction was now made necessary in elections, so that the privileges of the patrician members of the Senate were reduced to pure formality.
    About 287, at the end of the Samnite wars, the final scene of the drama was enacted. Unfortunately our knowledge of it is small in comparison with its importance. Troubles arising from debt provoked the last secession of the plebs, who withdrew over the Tiber to the Janiculum. A plebeian, Q. Hortensius, was appointed dictator and carried a law that the resolutions of the plebeian assembly ( plebiscita ) should have the force of law and be binding on the whole community. Thus the right first claimed by Valerius and Horatius more than a hundred and fifty years earlier was at last conceded. The Lex Hortensia has been called the final triumph of democracy at Rome. The people were sovereign. At the time when the Romans were completing the unification of Italy, the struggle of the orders was ended.
    4. THE MAGISTRATES AND SENATE
    The Republican constitution was now unified. The plebs had constructed a state of their own within the patrician state, and without a revolution the two had been fused into one. There was naturally much overlapping of function: for instance, there were four assemblies, the aedileship was duplicated and the tribunes of the plebs did not fit easily into the magisterial picture, but thanks to the Roman genius for adaptation, tempered by traditionalism, the constitution was co-ordinated. When setting up new institutions the Romans preferred to modify rather than to abolish the old, which had religious as well as secular sanctions; practices which were at first adopted for emergencies were then tacitly assumed to be authoritative. Guided less by political theory than by the need to overcome everyday difficulties, the Romans had built an edifice which could always be modified; it was not a cast-iron structure like some of the written constitutions of the Greeks that could only be changed by revolution. Previous enactments could be repealed by subsequent legislation, as they can in England in contrast with the United States of America, where certain fundamental rules cannot be abrogated. (There were, however, certain restrictions, e.g. the Twelve Tables established that laws should lay down general principles, by forbidding a law to be passed against an individual: privilegia ne inroganto . Forbidden privilegia would cover an English Act ofAttainder, as that by which Henry VIII disposed of Thomas Cromwell.) The Roman constitution endured because it was internally flexible and adapted the substance while retaining the form. This flexibility can be traced, for example, in the fundamental changes in the nature of the tribunate or quaestorship or in the growth of the power of the Senate with its theoretical inability to legislate. ‘The reason for the superiority of the constitution of our city to that of other states’, Cato is