It sounds exceedingly strange, that, at a season when the vanquisht party cannot possibly have ventured on usurping any power, the chief pontiff, a patrician, chosen by the curies, and the president of their assembly, should have been called to superintend the election of tribunes on the restoration of their office; more especially as this was not the course at its first institution. The circumstances of the two cases however were not the same: in the earlier one the tribes of the commonalty formed a separate body, and the two first tribunes of the people, who presided at the election of three additional ones, were already the decurion among the old regularly elected tribunes of the Servian constitution. But those among whom M. Oppius and Sex. Manilius occupied the same place, were chosen during the insurrection: for on the abolition of the plebs as a distinct order its local tribunes ceast to exist: and if the national tribes had phylarchs of their own, there must at the least have been a good many patricians among them. Moreover the original tribunes were confirmed by the curies: and this sanction, which had long since been abolisht, was now supplied once for all by the presence and assent of the head of the pontifical college, which no doubt even at this period was competent to give validity to a merely formal proceeding of the patrician order: and such a proceeding was requisite to repeal the law which had been passed by the curies under the auspices of the pontiffs abolishing the tribuneship: for the restoration of freedom brookt no delay.