As if it were an hereditary obligation to protect the freedom of the citizen, the consul M. Valerius renewed in more careful terms in the year 446 (452) the law of his ancestor, which secured an appeal to the people in cases where the highest magistrates had sentenced a person to corporal punishment, but still without affixing a definite punishment for the offender. The different degrees of the crime and of the excuses that might be made for it, were of too various a kind, not to leave it entirely to the discretion of the tribunes in those times, which feared to endanger the power of those who were called to the government, whether they should bring forward an accusation for a heavier or a lighter punishment when the time came, in case they should not be able, which can seldom have happened, to prevent the outrage.

I assign to about this period the Lex Furia respecting wills, which is evidently very much older than the Voconian law, and the author of which may probably be supposed to be the same L. Furius, who wrote laws for the conventus at Capua in 430 (436). This law, which, as is well known, forbade with a few exceptions, of which the particulars are not stated, any single person to bequeath by will more than a thousand ases, and which condemned him who received more in violation of the law, to a fourfold punishment like a usurer, is of importance on acocunt of the causes which gave rise to it.