patron, were designed to be a sort of bodyguard for the oligarchy and
to help it to command the city populace, on which, indeed, in the
absence of a garrison everything in the capital now primarily depended.

Abolition of the Gracchan Institutions

These extraordinary supports on which the regent made the oligarchy
primarily to rest, weak and ephemeral as they doubtless might appear
even to their author, were yet its only possible buttresses, unless
expedients were to be resorted to--such as the formal institution
of a standing army in Rome and other similar measures--which would
have put an end to the oligarchy far sooner than the attacks of
demagogues. The permanent foundation of the ordinary governing
power of the oligarchy of course could not but be the senate,
with a power so increased and so concentrated that it presented a
superiority to its non-organized opponents at every single point
of attack. The system of compromises followed for forty years was
at an end. The Gracchan constitution, still spared in the first
Sullan reform of 666, was now utterly set aside. Since the time of
Gaius Gracchus the government had conceded, as it were, the right of
-'emeute- to the proletariate of the capital, and bought it off by
regular distributions of corn to the burgesses domiciled there;
Sulla abolished these largesses. Gaius Gracchus had organized and
consolidated the order of capitalists by the letting of the tenths
and customs of the province of Asia in Rome; Sulla abolished the
system of middlemen, and converted the former contributions of the
Asiatics into fixed taxes, which were assessed on the several
districts according to the valuation-rolls drawn up for the purpose
of gathering in the arrears.(9) Gaius Gracchus had by entrusting
the posts of jurymen to men of equestrian census procured for
the capitalist class an indirect share in administering and in
governing, which proved itself not seldom stronger than the official
adminis-tration and government; Sulla abolished the equestrian and
restored the senatorial courts. Gaius Gracchus or at any rate the
Gracchan period had conceded to the equites a special place at the
popular festivals, such as the senators had for long possessed;(10)
Sulla abolished it and relegated the equites to the plebeian benches.(11)
The equestrian order, created as such by Gaius Gracchus, was deprived
of its political existence by Sulla. The senate was to exercise
the supreme power