Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/530

Rh 510 E Q IT E Q U In 400 B.C., during the siege of Veii, on account of the want of sufficient cavalry, those who possessed the requisite fortune offered to provide horses at their own expense. These new equites, distinguished as equites equo private, in opposition to the equites equo publico, received regular pay, but, as by the very circumstances of their origin they had neither horse-money (ces equestre) nor barley-money (ces hordearium), they formed a distinct body from the old equites, and had no share in any of their peculiar privileges. In 303 B.C. the censors Q. Fabius and P. Decius established a law by which it was ordained that every fifth year a pro cession of the equites should take place, and that those who had misconducted themselves should be degraded from their rank. The procession (equitum transvectio) took place every year on the 15th of July (idibus Quintilibus), the anniversary of the battle of Lake Regillus. The knights in full equipment rode from the Temple of Honour in the south of the city through the Porta Capena and onwards past the temple of Castor and Pollux through the Forum to the Capitol. Their ranks were purged by the censors, before whom they filed past on foot. If the censor had no fault to find, lie said to the eques, traduc equum, lead on your horse ; but if he was dissatisfied he said, vende equum, sell your horse, and the eques ceased to belong to the order. This review bore the name of equitum recognitio, or, as the Greek writers translate it, l-mri^v tTria-Keif/Ls. The equites evidently soon became a very power ful body in the state ; yet in 186 B.C. we find it allowed as a reward to P. JEbutius that the censor should not assign him a public horse, and thereby compel him to serve as an eques against his will, proving that the duties must have been burdensome and regarded by many with distaste. In the later period of the republic the equites increased in power and consequence, and at the same time gradually ceased altogether to be what their name implied, the military service which they had formerly rendered being now obtained from allies and auxiliaries. To be an eques came to mean simply that a man was pos sessed of a certain amount of wealth without belonging to the senatorial order. The judicial functions were transferred from the senate to the body of equites by the Sempronian law, passed by C. Gracchus about 123 B.C. ; and a short time afterwards they became the farmers of the public revenues, by which they were enabled to amass immense riches. They were deprived of their judicial powers by Sulla; but they now possessed too much influence in the state to be excluded from the higher and more dignified offices. After his death they were admitted to their former power, which, however, they shared with the senate. Towards the end of the republic, and under the emperors, the fortune requisite for an eques seems to have been four hundred sestertia, equal to about 3230 of our money; and even at this time knights horses were furnished by the state, as we find by ancient inscriptions of that period. The equites, who still in the reign of Augustus adhered for the most part to the use of the simple iron ring, had before the time of Pliny obtained the right of wearing the golden ring formerly distinctive of the senatorial order. Their dress was a tunic with a narrow purple stripe (tunica angusticlavia), in contrast to the senatorial tunic with a broad stripe (tunica, latidavia). In 67 B.C. a peculiar privilege was granted them by the Roscian law (lex Roscia theatralis), which reserved fourteen rows in the theatre behind the senatorial benches for their exclusive use. Under the empire appears a class of equites distinguished as singulares Augusti imperatoris, which has been the subject of much debate. The epithet singularis is by some supposed to refer to their possession of a single horse, and by others it is regarded as indicative of their singular rank ; but Henzen explains it as equivalent to particulars, because they were attached to the service of an individual. They formed a sort of body-guard to the emperor, were stationed- in Rome, and only under peculiar circumstances were called to serve outside of the city. They appear to have consisted largely of foreigners, more especially from the north of Europe : the names of Ger mans, Batavians, Frisians, Frissevonians, Britons, Helvetians,. Dalmatians, Bessians, Thracians, Rhaetians, Pannonians, frequently occur. A considerable number are evidently freedmen who have adopted the name of the reigning emperor on their entrance into his service; but the advan tages of the position also attracted not a few of the Roman citizens. At what time the corps was established is un known : Henzen thinks it was by one of the Flavian emperors, as there is no mention of them under the Julian and Claudian families, but they were certainly in existence under Trajan. They disappear in the reign of Constantino. Their relation to the auxiliaries was similar to that of the pwetorians to the Roman army proper. They were under the command of the prefects of the pra3torium, and occu pied two camps in the city, one of which was at Torre Pignattara, where their monuments are frequently found. See Madvig, &quot; De loco Ciceronis in Libro IV. de Republics, &quot; in Opuscula Acadcmica, vol. i., 1830; Muhlert, DC cquitibus Romanis, Hild. 1830; Marquardt, Historia equitum Romanorum, Berlin, 1840; Zumpt, Ucbcr den riJmischcn Rittcrstand, Berlin, 1840; Henzen, &quot; Sngli equiti singolari degl imperatori Romani,&quot; in Annali dell Instil. diCorr. Arch, di Roma, 1850; Gomont, Lcs chevaliers roma ins depuis Romulus jusqu a Galba, 1854; Belot, Hist, des chevaliers romains dcpuis le temps des roisjusqu au temps dcs Gracqucs, 1867, and Hist, dcs ckev. rom. dcpuis le temps des Gracqucs jusqu a la division de V empire romain, 1873 ; Ramsay, Manual of Roman Antiquities, 10th edition, 1876. EQUITY in its most general sense means justice ; in its most technical sense it means a system of law, or a body of connected legal principles, which have superseded or supplemented the common law on the ground of their intrinsic superiority. Aristotle (Ethics, bk. v. c. 10) defines equity as a better sort of justice, which corrects legal justice where the latter errs through being expressed in a universal form and not taking account of particular cases. &quot;When the law speaks universally, and something happens which is not according to the common course of events, it is right that the law should be modified in its application to that particular case, as the lawgiver himself would have done, if the case had been present to his mind. Accord ingly the equitable man (eTrtetK^s) is he who does not push the law to its extreme, but, having legal justice on his side, is disposed to make allowances. Equity as thus described would correspond rather to the judicial discretion which modifies the administration of the law than to the antagonistic system which claims to supersede the law. The part played by equity in the development of law- is admirably illustrated in the well-known work of Sir Henry Maine on Ancient Law. Positive law, at least in progressive societies, is constantly tending to fall behind public opinion, and the expedients adopted for bringing it into harmony therewith are three, viz., legal fictions, equity, and statutory legislation. Equity here is defined to mean &quot; any body of rules existing by the side of the original civil law, founded on distinct principles, and claiming incidentally to supersede the civil law in virtue of a superior sanctity inherent in those principles.&quot; It is thus different from legal fiction, by which a new rule is introduced surreptitiously, and under the pretence that no change has been made in the law, and from statutory legislation, in which the obligatory force of the rule is not supposed to depend upon its intrinsic fitness. The source of Roman equity was the fertile theory of natural law, or the law common to all nations. Even in the Institutes of Justinian the distinction is carefully drawn in the laws of a country between those which are peculiar to itself and those which