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He himself passed the night in the temple of Castor in the Forum; at early dawn the Capitol was filled with Cretan archers, the senate-house and Forum with the men of the government party the senators and the section of the equites adhering to them who by order of the consul had all appeared in arms and each attended by two armed slaves.
"Are the people, the equites, given body and soul over to the war party?" Drusus nodded sadly. "So long as the consuls are in the ascendant, they need fear no revolution at home. The people are not at heart your enemies, Imperator; but they will wait to be led by the winning side." "And you advise?" pressed Cæsar, returning to the charge.
In any given case the praetor named the decuria from which the jurymen were to be taken, and then drew from an urn containing their names the number assigned by law for the case to be decided. Each side could then challenge a certain number, and fresh names were drawn from the urn in place of those challenged. What Sulla did was to supply these decuriae from the senators instead of the equites.
The future war between the senate and the equites would not have been waged so furiously, had not Gracchus given his favoured class the chance of asserting a positive control, in virtue of an almost official position, over the richest domains of the Roman world.
According to the new arrangement the right of priority in voting was withdrawn from the equites, although they retained their separate divisions, and it was transferred to a voting division chosen from the first class by lot.
The method of determining the number of the equites by the number of duplications specified by the annalists is mistaken: in fact, each of these statements has originated and is to be explained by itself.
One of the noted masters of this art, Aristides of Bithynia, might have been known to Plutarch, though he was younger than Plutarch. Many of his unsubstantial declamations are extant. The Publicani at this period belonged to the order of the Equites.
The Consul rode in front of the few equites he could keep together, striving by voice and example to rally his forces, until he was pierced by one of the long Numidian javelins, and fell senseless from his horse.
It was, no doubt, the duty of these to select the equites on military grounds and at their musters to insist that all horsemen incapacitated by age or otherwise, or at all unserviceable, should surrender their public horse; but the very nature of the institution implied that the equestrian horses should be given especially to men of means, and it was not at all easy to hinder the censors from looking to genteel birth more than to capacity, and from allowing men of standing who were once admitted, senators particularly, to retain their horse beyond the proper time.
The new office gradually became the palladium of the aristocratic party, not so much on account of its financial influence as on account of the right annexed to it of filling up the vacancies in the senate and in the equites, and of removing individuals from the lists of the senate, equites, and burgesses on occasion of their adjustment.
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