 These roles were "exploited for the purposes of political propaganda during the Gracchan crisis..."

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.