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Updated: June 21, 2025
This body of exclusive families really possessed the political power of the State. The Senate was made up from their members, and was the mainstay of Roman nobility. The equites, or equestrian order, was also composed of the patricians and wealthy plebeians. Noble youths gradually withdrew from serving in the infantry, and the legionary cavalry became a closed aristocratic corps.
The reason for this difference is probably to be sought in the fact that at that period the infantry were formed anew for each campaign and discharged on their return home, whereas the cavalry with their horses were on military grounds kept together also in time of peace, and held their regular drills, which continued to subsist as festivals of the Roman equites down to the latest times.
It was not necessary or desirable that the judiciary law should make any mention of a class, or employ the courtesy title of equites to designate the new judges. The effect might be less invidiously secured by demanding qualifications which were practically identical with the social conditions requisite for the possession of titular knighthood.
The class of officers especially had deeply degenerated. The higher ranks, senators and equites, grew more and more unused to arms.
This etymology, which associates the word with -arquites-, -milites-, -pedites-, -equites-, -velites- those respectively who go with the bow, in bodies of a thousand, on foot, on horseback, without armour in their mere over-garment may be incorrect, but it is bound up with the Roman conception of a burgess. With this view the -usus loquendi- coincides.
But Caius may have proposed that for judicial purposes 600 equites should form, as it were, a second chamber, which, being twice as numerous, would permit two judices for every senatorial judex. In civil processes, and in the permanent and temporary commissions for the administration of justice, the equites were henceforth supreme.
It may be considered certain that he did all that he could to humiliate the equites; but the settlement of Italy was probably not due to him. Another dealt with forgery, another with violence to the person or property, another with marriage and probably adultery. Another was a sumptuary law, which is said to have limited the price of certain luxuries.
Thirdly, the senators were once more installed in the office of jurymen in room of the Gracchan equites.
Nevertheless those members of senatorial families who had not entered the senate, especially the younger members, did not cease to serve as equites and consequently to bear the name; and, in fact, the burgess-cavalry properly so called that is, the eighteen equestrian centuries in consequence of being made up by the censors continued to be chiefly filled up from the young senatorial aristocracy.
The general name for this class was, strange to say, equites, or knights, as they are often but unfortunately called in modern histories of Rome.
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