tricts and thereby kept at a distance
the dangerous Roman middlemen. Six years before, when the province
of Asia had fallen to the Romans, the senate had organized it
substantially according to the first system.(20) Gaius Gracchus(21)
overturned this arrangement by a decree of the people, and not only
burdened the province, which had hitherto been almost free from
taxation, with the most extensive indirect and direct taxes,
particularly the ground-tenth, but also enacted that these taxes
should be exposed to auction for the province as a whole and in Rome--
a rule which practically excluded the provincials from participation,
and called into existence in the body of middlemen for the -decumae-,
-scriptura-, and -vectigalia- of the province of Asia an association of
capitalists of colossal magnitude. A significant indication, moreover,
of the endeavour of Gracchus to make the order of capitalists
independent of the senate was the enactment, that the entire or
partial remission of the stipulated rent was no longer, as hitherto,
to be granted by the senate at discretion, but was under definite
contingencies to be accorded by law.

Jury Courts

While a gold mine was thus opened for the mercantile class, and the
members of the new partnership constituted a great financial power
imposing even for the government--a "senate of merchants"-a definite
sphere of public action was at the same time assigned to them in
the jury courts. The field of the criminal procedure, which by right
came before the burgesses, was among the Romans from the first very
narrow, and was, as we have already stated,(22) still further narrowed
by Gracchus; most processes--both such as related to public crimes, and
civil causes--were decided either by single jurymen [-indices-], or by
commissions partly permanent, partly extraordinary. Hitherto both the
former and the latter had been exclusively taken from the senate;
Gracchus transferred the functions of jurymen--both in strictly civil
processes, and in the case of the standing and temporary commissions--
to the equestrian order, directing a new list of jurymen to be
annually formed after the analogy of the equestrian centuries from
all persons of equestrian rating, and excluding the senators
directly, and the young men of senatorial families by the fixing of
a certain limit of age, from such judicial functions.(23) It is not
improbable that the selection of jurymen was chiefly made to fall
on the