lity.

The Nobility in Possession of the Equestrian Centuries

The institution of the equites was developed into a second, less
important but yet far from unimportant, organ of the nobility. As the
new hereditary nobility had not the power to usurp sole possession of
the comitia, it necessarily became in the highest degree desirable
that it should obtain at least a separate position within the body
representing the community. In the assembly of the tribes there
was no method of managing this; but the equestrian centuries under
the Servian organization seemed as it were created for the very
purpose. The 1800 horses which the community furnished(12) were
constitutionally disposed of likewise by the censors. 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. Perhaps it was even fixed by law that the
senator might retain it as long as he wished. Accordingly it became
at least practically the rule for the senators to vote in the eighteen
equestrian centuries, and the other places in these were assigned
chiefly to the young men of the nobility. The military system, of
course, suffered from this not so much through the unfitness for
effective service of no small part of the legionary cavalry, as
through the destruction of military equality to which the change gave
rise, inasmuch as the young men of rank more and more withdrew from
service in the infantry. The closed aristocratic corps of the equites
proper came to set the tone for the whole legionary cavalry, taken
from the citizens who were of highest position by descent and wealth.
This enables us in some degree to understand why the equites during
the Sicilian war refused to obey the order of the consul Gaius
Aurelius Cotta that they should work at the trenches with the
legionaries (502), and why Cato, when commander-in-chief of the army
in Spain, found himself under the necessity of addressing a severe
reprimand to his cavalry. But this conversion of t