that the equites should have twice as much power as the Senate itself.  This at first sight seems nonsense.  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 form he may have devised that ‘counter-senate,’ which, as it has been shown, he in fact created. [Sidenote:  The effects of it.  The Senate abased, the equites exalted.] But whether Caius provided that all the judices or only two-thirds of them should be chosen from the equites, and in whatever way he did so, he did succeed in exalting the moneyed class and abasing the Senate.  In civil processes, and in the permanent and temporary commissions for the administration of justice, the equites were henceforth supreme.  Even the senators themselves depended on their verdict for acquittal or condemnation, and the chief power in the State had changed hands.  Of course the change would not be felt at once to the full; but this was the most trenchant stroke which Gracchus aimed at the Senate’s power.  Here, again, it is customary to write of his actions as if they were governed solely by feeling, quite apart from all considerations of right and wrong.  But Cicero declares that for nearly fifty years, while the equites discharged this office, there was not even the slightest suspicion of a single eques being bribed in his capacity as judex; and after every allowance has been made for Ciceronian exaggeration, the statement may at least warrant us in believing that Gracchus had some reason for hoping that his change would be a change for the better, even if, as Appian declares, it turned out in the end just the opposite.  Indeed, it is beyond question that, as the provinces were governed by the senatorial class, judices who had to decide cases like those of Cotta would be more fairly chosen from the equites than from the class to which Cotta belonged.

[Sidenote:  The taxation of Asia.] We know little of the arrangements for the taxation of Asia made by Gracchus.  He provided that the taxes should be let by auction at Rome, which would undoubtedly be a boon to the Roman capitalists and a check to provincial competition.  He is said also to have substituted the whole system of direct and indirect taxes for the previously existing system of fixed payments by the various states.  There was a certain narrowness about the conceptions of both the Gracchi with regard to the transmarine world, which was common to all Romans; to which, for instance, Tiberius gave expression when he spoke of the conquest of the whole world as a thing which his audience had a right to expect; and this sentiment may have in this instance influenced Caius to use harshness. [Sidenote:  The common criticism on the measure of Caius unjust.] But even here to condemn without more knowledge of his measures would be unjust.  Fixed payments it must be remembered were not always preferable to tithes of the produce.