1Then, through an interrex, Lucius Valerius and Marcus Horatius were elected consuls, and they entered office at once. 1Their consulship was popular, without any injury to the fathers, yet not without offending them; 2for whatever safeguard was provided for the liberty of the plebs, they believed was taken away from their own power. 3First of all, since it was a disputed point of law, as it were, whether the fathers were bound by plebiscites, they carried a law in the centuriate assembly that what the plebs had ordered by tribes should bind the people; 3by this law a very sharp weapon was given to tribunician proposals. 4Then another consular law, on appeal, the sole protection of liberty, which had been overthrown by the decemviral power, they not only restore but also fortify for the future by sanctioning a new law, that no one should create any magistrate without appeal; 5whoever did so might be killed rightly and lawfully, and such a killing should not be held a capital offence.
6And when they had sufficiently strengthened the plebs on one side by appeal and on the other by the tribunes' help, for the tribunes themselves too, so that they might be regarded as sacrosanct — a matter whose memory had by now almost faded — they renewed that status by reviving certain ceremonies after a long interval, and they made them inviolable not only by religion but also by law, enacting that whoever harmed the tribunes of the plebs, the aediles, or the ten judges, his life should be forfeit to Jupiter and his household property should be sold at the temple of Ceres, Liber and Libera. 8Legal experts say that by this law no one is sacrosanct, but that the man who harms any of them is declared forfeit to Jupiter; 9and so an aedile may be arrested and taken off by higher magistrates, which, though it is not done lawfully — for harm is being done to one whom this law forbids to be harmed — is nevertheless proof that an aedile is not regarded as sacrosanct; 10the tribunes are sacrosanct by the ancient oath of the plebs, sworn when it first created that office.
11There were some who interpreted that by this same Horatian law provision was made for the consuls too and the praetors, because they were elected under the same auspices as the consuls; 11for a consul was called 'judge'. 12This interpretation is refuted because in those times it was not yet the custom for the consul to be called 'judge', but 'praetor'. 13These were the consular laws. 13It was also established by the same consuls that decrees of the senate should be delivered to the aediles of the plebs at the temple of Ceres; previously they used to be suppressed and falsified at the consuls' whim. 14Then Marcus Duillius, tribune of the plebs, proposed to the plebs, and the plebs resolved, that whoever left the plebs without tribunes, and whoever created a magistrate without appeal, should be punished by scourging and beheading.
15All this was carried through against the will of the patricians but without their opposition, because no single man was yet being savagely attacked.