Equites Romani 研究序説

Abstract

It goes without saying that the equites played an important role in the history of the Roman Republic. This paper is an attempt to illustrate the processes of how they made themselves, what part they came to assume in the later Roman Republic. In spite of ambiguities of the term, the group concerned is not so difficult to identify. Its members were varied in wealth and activities, but the core of the group consisted of the landed proprietors and those who were engaging in commerce and industry. My study was, therefore, directed towards the economic activities not only of Italy but also of those provinces which stretched from Iberian Peninsular down to the Near East. Here we can witness the group making itself. The advance of the new class brought its self-conciousness in its train. It made itself felt through the control of quaestio de repetundis by which the equites attained the zenith of power both in economic and political field. Under the pressure of an environment in motion in the later Roman Republic there emerges some types of political function which the equites assumed. As a middling class of the society it might be a logical conclusion that the new class came across with vested interests of the senatores on one hand and with those of the populares on the other. This paper, roughly speaking, will follow those items from one to the other. As a matter of fact, the study in the equites must go further into the history of the Empire, but this time it remained untutched only suggesting some points en passant -- one of which is the military power they came to grasp under the new regime. The military despots were appearing; the old republican society disintegrating. Under these circumstances the equites became at last men of armes who flocked under the patronage of those military leaders. The military organization and the bureaucratic government which became so characteristic under the Empire were nothing but the conclusion of the social dislocation and the political breakdown of the preceding stages of the Roman Republic.