<P> Barbette Stanley Spaeth asserts that Ceres' roles as (a) patron and protector of plebeian laws, rights and Tribunes and (b) "normative / liminal" crimes, continued throughout the Republican era . These roles were "exploited for the purposes of political propaganda during the Gracchan crisis ..." </P> <P> Ceres' Aventine Temple served the plebeians as cult centre, legal archive, treasury, and court of law, founded contemporaneously with the passage of the Lex sacrata; the lives and property of those who violated this law were forfeit to Ceres, whose judgment was expressed by her aediles . The official decrees of the Senate (senatus consulta) were placed in her Temple, under her guardianship; Livy bluntly states this was done so that the consuls could no longer arbitrarily tamper with the laws of Rome . The Temple might also have offered asylum for those threatened with arbitrary arrest by patrician magistrates . Ceres was thus the patron goddess of Rome's written laws; the poet Vergil later calls her legifera Ceres (Law - bearing Ceres), a translation of Demeter's Greek epithet, thesmophoros . Those who approved the murder of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC justified his death as punishment for his offense against the Lex sacrata of the goddess Ceres: those who deplored this as murder appealed to Gracchus' sacrosanct status as tribune under Ceres' protection . In 70 BC, Cicero refers to this killing in connection with Ceres' laws and cults . </P> <P> Spaeth believed that he was killed because: </P> <P> Tiberius Gracchus had transgressed the laws that protected the equilibrium of the social and political order, the laws on the tribunician sacrosanctitas and attempted tyranny, and hence was subject to the punishment they prescribed, consecration of his goods and person (to Ceres). </P>

What led to the fall of roman republic