Please note that Mommsen uses the AUC chronology (Ab Urbe Condita), i.e. from the founding of the City of Rome. You can use this reference table to have the B.C. dates
In order at least to understand this agitation
we must recollect how the democratic party stood towards
the question of interest. The legal prohibition against
taking interest, which the old plebeian opposition had extorted
in 412,(65) had no doubt been practically disregarded by the nobility
which controlled the civil procedure by means of the praetorship,
but had still remained since that period formally valid;
and the democrats of the seventh century, who regarded themselves
throughout as the continuers of that old agitation as to privilege
and social position,(66) had maintained the illegality of payment
of interest at any time, and even already practically enforced
that principle, at least temporarily, in the confusion of the Marian
period.(67)
