tically closed circle of the governing senatorial families who
kept aloof from direct speculation and invested their immense capital
partly in landed property, partly as sleeping partners in the great
associations. The core of the second class was composed of the
speculators, who, as managers of these companies, or on their own
account, conducted the large mercantile and pecuniary transactions
throughout the range of the Roman hegemony. We have already shown(16)
how the latter class, especially in the course of the sixth century,
gradually took its place by the side of the senatorial aristocracy,
and how the legal exclusion of the senators from mercantile pursuits
by the Claudian enactment, suggested by Gaius Flaminius the precursor
of the Gracchi, drew an outward line of demarcation between the senators
and the mercantile and moneyed men. In the present epoch the mercantile
aristocracy began, under the name of the -equites-, to exercise a
decisive influence in political affairs. This appellation, which
originally belonged only to the burgess-cavalry on service, came
gradually to be transferred, at any rate in ordinary use, to all
those who, as possessors of an estate of at least 400,000 sesterces,
were liable to cavalry service in general, and thus comprehended the
whole of the upper society, senatorial and non-senatorial, in Rome.
But not long before the time of Gaius Gracchus the law had declared
a seat in the senate incompatible with service in the cavalry,(17) and
the senators were thus eliminated from those qualified to be equites;
and accordingly the equestrian order, taken as a whole, might be regarded
as representing the aristocracy of speculators in contradistinction
to the senate. 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.(18)

This order of the equites--that is to say, substantially, of the
wealthy merchants--in various ways came roughly into contact with
the governing senate. There was a natural antipathy between the
genteel aristocrats and the men to whom money had brought rank.
The ruling lords, especially the better class of them, stood just
as m