and the praetors was an administrative reform. The significance of the law on the consulship of 367 BC, according to Cornell, lies elsewhere. He suggests that before this law, the plebeian tribunes were excluded from high office and that the plebeians who served prior to this were clients of the patricians who had nothing to do with the plebeian movement and its agitations or the Plebeian Council and did not hold plebeian offices (they were neither plebeian tribunes nor aediles, their assistants). Cornell argues "[t]hat the aim of Licinius and Sextius was to abolish all forms of discrimination against the plebeians as such", and their law was a victory for the plebeians who were attracted to the plebeian movement and chose to join this, rather than becoming clients of patricians, which offered nominal prestige, but no independent power. Many leading plebeians were "wealthy, socially aspiring and politically ambitious". It was a small group of "rich men who made common cause with the poor and [ ] used the institutions of the plebeian movement to gain entry into the ranks of the ruling class", which necessitated a struggle against the exclusiveness of the patricians. Some of these men were wealthy landowners who, thus, shared the same interests as the patricians, as the case of Gaius Licinius, who was fined for breaking his own agrarian law by exceeding the 500 iugera limit, shows. The outcome of the Leges Liciniae Sextiae was the facilitation of the emergence of a patrician-plebeian aristocracy and once the leading plebeians had entered the ruling class on an equal footing with the patricians, they turned their back on the poor plebeians, who "gained some temporary economic relief, but lost control of their organisation." The plebeian council passed the agrarian and the debt laws, which were in tune with the interests of the poor plebeians, but rejected the law on the consulship. Those who opposed the latter had good reason to be suspicious because "[s]uch a measure, they knew, would destroy the plebeian movement." It lost its identity and ceased to exist as a separate organisation. Its institutions were incorporated into the structures of the state. The tribunate and the aedilship were increasingly occupied by young nobles who treated them as stepping stones for the consulship; "the men who held them did not consider themselves in any way bound to promote the interests of the mass of the plebs."