acquainted with the foreign laws would be of use in drawing up the new code of justice.  The others made up the number.  They say that also persons advanced in years were appointed by the last suffrages, in order that they might oppose with less warmth the opinions of others.  The direction of the entire government rested with Appius through the favour of the commons, and he had assumed a demeanour so different that, from being a severe and harsh persecutor of the people, he became suddenly a courter of the commons, and strove to catch every breath of popular favour.  They administered justice to the people individually every tenth day.  On that day the twelve fasces attended the administrator of justice; one officer attended each of his nine colleagues, and in the midst of the singular unanimity that existed among themselves—­a harmony that sometimes proves prejudicial to private persons—­the strictest equity was shown to others.  In proof of their moderation it will be enough to instance a single case as an example.  Though they had been appointed to govern without appeal, yet, upon a dead body being found buried in the house of Publius Sestius,[41] a man of patrician rank, and produced in the assembly, Gaius Julius, a decemvir, appointed a day of trial for Sestius, in a matter at once clear and heinous, and appeared before the people as prosecutor of the man whose lawful judge he was if accused:  and relinquished his right,[42] so that he might add what had been taken from the power of the office to the liberty of the people.

While highest and lowest alike obtained from them this prompt administration of justice, undefiled, as if from an oracle, at the same time their attention was devoted to the framing of laws; and, the ten tables being proposed amid the intense expectation of all, they summoned the people to an assembly:  and ordered them to go and read the laws that were exhibited, [43] and Heaven grant it might prove favourable, advantageous, and of happy result to the commonwealth, themselves, and their children.  That they had equalized the rights of all, both the highest and the lowest, as far as could be devised by the abilities of ten men:  that the understanding and counsels of a greater number had greater weight; let them turn over in their minds each particular among themselves, discuss it in conversation, and bring forward for public discussion whatever might be superfluous or defective under each particular:  that the Roman people should have such laws only as the general consent might appear not so much to have ratified when proposed as to have itself proposed.  When they seemed sufficiently corrected in accordance with public opinion regarding each section of the laws as it was published, the laws of the ten tables were passed at the assembly voting by centuries, which, even at the present time, amid the immense heap of laws crowded one upon the other, still remain the source of all public and private jurisprudence.