The next step in the climb of the plebs was a demand for definite, written, and secular laws. Heretofore the patrician priests had been the recorders and interpreters of the statutes, had kept their records secret, and had used their monopoly, and the ritual requirements of the law, as weapons against social change. After a log resistance to the new demands, the Senate (454) sent a commission of three patricians to Greece to study and report on the legislation of Solon and ot