Among his notable contributions to the study of the lex Aquilia Professor Beinart has included a study on its origins which takes up the statements of Byzantine jurists - in particular Theophilus and the scholiast “Anonymous” on the Basilica - connecting the lex with a secession of the plebs. This secession is in turn taken to be the so-called Third Secession which was followed by the lex Hortensia of 287 bc which made plebiscites binding on both patricians and plebeians. His conclusion that these statements were quite plausible and help to explain some features of the statute, including the retrospective valuation of the res prescribed in the first chapter, has not found general acceptance and so the debate on the dating of the lex remains open. A more recent contributor, Professor Honoré, rejects the connection with a plebeian secession, preferring a connection with the inflation resulting from the Second Punic War and there is indeed a possible Aquilius, tribune of the plebs, in or around 211 BC, but it is not our intention to enter into all the arguments which have been deployed to establish a date. We are concerned rather with one aspect of the debate, namely, the reliability of the Byzantine statements. If, after all, the Byzantine jurists were better informed than we are then their statements are preferable to arguments which are in large part conjectural, however plausible that conjecture may be.