Page:Roman Constitutional History, 753-44 B.C..djvu/130

116 their estates. This law seems also to have contained a general prohibition against their participating in public contracts (redemptiones). By these provisions Flaminius intended to prevent the nobles from employing their public position for enriching themselves. He may have been successful to some extent, but the law could easily be evaded by means of partnerships. On the other hand, it exerted an influence that perhaps had not been foreseen: it tended to make the nobles more than ever a class of great landowners, and in so far increased their competition with the small farmers. Furthermore, it emphasized the distinction already existing between the nobility as a superior governing class and the purely moneyed class, or aristocracy of wealth, which was engaged in trade and commerce, but especially in lending money and in executing government contracts.

The Aristocracy of Wealth. — This aristocracy of wealth may be said to date from the introduction of voluntary service in the cavalry (equites equo privato) in 403 (p. 64). It then became the duty of the censors to decide who were qualified to serve in the cavalry. They regularly chose rich men, and in early times they appear to have required of all volunteers the possession of property assessed at about $22,000, or ten times the census of the first class. They established this property qualification also for admission to the equestrian centuries, and promoted the formation of a new privileged class based on wealth. This class was further developed by the change of the voluntary service into an obligation, which seems to have taken place by the time of the second Punic war; but it did not form so close a body as the nobility. This was due to its unstable basis — wealth — and to the fact that the equestrian centuries, which would naturally have become its nucleus, consisted in the main of the senators and young nobles, and