United States or Cayman Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At the time of which we are speaking there were ways in which he could escape from his duties, ways only too often used; but many senators did undoubtedly employ members of the equestrian order to transact their business abroad, so that it is not untrue to say that the equites had in their hands almost the whole of the monetary business of the Empire.
At the termination of that contest its most important functions jurisdiction, street-police, election of senators and equites, the census and financial administration were separated from the consulship and transferred to magistrates, who like the consul were nominated by the community and occupied a position far more co-ordinate than subordinate.
It was only so much the worse, that the authors of this law by no means belonged to the obstinate and incorrigible Optimates; they were no other than the sagacious and universally honoured Quintus Scaevola, destined, like George Grenville, by nature to be a jurist and by fate to be a statesman who by his equally honourable and pernicious rectitude inflamed more than any one else first the war between senate and equites, and then that between Romans and Italians and the orator Lucius Crassus, the friend and ally of Drusus and altogether one of the most moderate and judicious of the Optimates.
He was a knight, and, as was customary with the Equites, had long been engaged in the pursuit of trade, making money by lending money, and such like. He had, it seems, been a successful man, but, in an evil time for himself, had come across King Ptolemy Auletes when there was a question of restoring that wretched sovereign to the throne of Egypt.
Sixthly, he took away from the equites and restored to the Senate the judicia. In civil suits the praetor, as we have seen, had the superintendence. Sometimes he decided a case at once. Sometimes, if he thought the case should be tried, he appointed a judex, giving him certain instructions by which after the investigation he must decide the case.
In the new arrangement as to the ranking and usual order of succession of the public offices the consulate stood indeed above the praetorship, aedileship, and quaestorship, but beneath the censorship, which in addition to the most important financial duties was charged with the adjustment of the rolls of burgesses, equites, and senators, and thereby wielded a wholly arbitrary moral control over the entire community and every individual burgess, the humblest as well as the most prominent.
A grand procession of the Senate he had saved, the equites, the magistrates, the vestal virgins, and his disbanded soldiers, bore his body to the funeral pyre, and his ashes were deposited beside the tombs of the kings.
However, when the Senate and the Equites began to combine and express their indignation, he drew out the soldiers into the Forum, and driving the party of Saturninus to the Capitol, he compelled them to submit for fear of dying of thirst, by cutting off the pipes that supplied them with water.
The Etruscans and Umbrians on the other hand held by Rome, as they had already taken part with the equites against Drusus.
Some disorderly conduct of the equites was rebuked by Cato in a bitter harangue which he afterwards published. Partly by craft, partly by good leadership in the field, Cato broke the strength of the turbulent natives and returned to enjoy a well-earned triumph. In the same year a brilliant triumph was celebrated by Flamininus.
Word Of The Day