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Out from the open, windowless office ran the senior partner, Sextus Fulvius Flaccus, a stout, comfortable, rosy-faced old eques, who had half Rome as his financial clients, the other half in his debt.
Britannorum acies, in speciem simul ac terrorem, editioribus locis constiterat ita, ut primum agmen aequo, ceteri per acclive jugum connexi velut insurgerent: media campi covinarius et eques strepitu ac discursu complebat.
Thus, then, he gave way before envy, and lived in honour at the Court of that King; and he died at the age of forty-nine, and was given honourable burial by the same man, with this epitaph: DELLUS EQUES FLORENTINUS PICTURÆ ARTE PERCELEBRIS REGISQUE HISPANIARUM LIBERALITATE ET ORNAMENTIS AMPLISSIMUS. H. S. E. S. T. T. L.
Ego bis tricenis actis annis sine nota, Eques Romanus e lare egressus meo, Domum revertormimus ni mirum hoc die Uno plus vixi mihi quam vivendum fuit. * Porro, Quirites, libertatem perdimus." In these noble lines we see the native eloquence of a free spirit. But the poet's wrathful muse roused itself in vain.
An individual eques would lean to the senatorial faction or the faction of men too poor to keep a horse for cavalry service, just as his connexions were chiefly with the one or the other. How, as a body, the equites veered round alternately to each side, we shall see hereafter.
What was to be done in default was not spoken; for down went poor old Vindex on his knees: "Oh, Sir Richard! Excellentissime, immo praecelsissime Domine et Senator, I promise! O sir, Miles et Eques of the Garter, Bath, and Golden Fleece, consider your dignities, and my old age and my great family nine children oh, Sir Richard, and eight of them girls! Do eagles war with mice? says the ancient!"
But Cicero declares that for nearly fifty years, while the equites discharged this office, there was not even the slightest suspicion of a single eques being bribed in his capacity as judex; and after every allowance has been made for Ciceronian exaggeration, the statement may at least warrant us in believing that Gracchus had some reason for hoping that his change would be a change for the better, even if, as Appian declares, it turned out in the end just the opposite.
This law of Gracchus had had the result of constituting an ordo equester alongside of the ordo senatorius, with a property qualification of 400,000 sesterces, or about £3200, not of income but of capital. Any one who had this sum could call himself an eques, provided he were not a senator, even if he had never served in the cavalry or mounted a horse.
Disputes rose as to who had really won the day. Marius generously insisted on Catulus sharing his triumph. But it was to him that the popular voice ascribed the victory, and there can be little doubt that the popular voice was right. There were risings at Nuceria, at Capua, in the silver mines of Attica, and at Thurii, and the last was headed by a Roman eques, named Minucius or Vettius.
The closed number of the equites probably continued to subsist down to Sulla's time, when with the -de facto- abeyance of the censorship the basis of it fell away, and to all appearance in place of the censorial bestowal of the equestrian horse came its acquisition by hereditary right; thenceforth the senator's son was by birth an -eques-. Alongside, however, of this closed equestrian body, the -equites equo publico-, stood from an early period of the republic the burgesses bound to render mounted service on their own horses, who are nothing but the highest class of the census; they do not vote in the equestrian centuries, but are regarded otherwise as equites, and lay claim likewise to the honorary privileges of the equestrian order.
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