the Roman community, so that this organisation of free men was the political side of a system mainly directed towards the upholding of an effective army. This was, of course, conspicuous in early days owing to the necessities of the case; but in later times the army organisation was the engine by which the plutocratic classes impressed their power on the State. The Equestrian order, as the name implies, was originally the cavalry of the Roman army, composed of the richer citizens, since their equipment was more expensive; but in later times, when the bureaucracy was being formed, it became little more than a formal title of honour, indicating the possession of riches.
The Gracchan legislation points to the rise of this plutocracy, and its struggles with the older nobility, the patrician order, which by this time had diminished to a very small part of the population. It became finally dominant in the last days of the republic, and after having produced the chaotic period, during which 45 Roman history is a record of the struggles of great individualities amongst the rich, was reduced to order by the early empire. The latter was a definite and stable bureaucratic system, which was at least so much of an improvement as to make life tolerable for most people. All rights indeed, both political and social, had disappeared, except the rights of property as interpreted by the law courts; but the lower ranks of society, including the slaves, were decidedly bettered by the change; while the well-to-do were 1n a state of material ease unrivalled in the world’s history.
The institutions of marriage and slavery played a great part in the above-mentioned development of society. The group-marriage of the early kinship Communities, on the change in the holding of property becoming marked, grew to be superseded by a quasi-monogamy, which was in force at least as early as the Homeric period, though it is clear from that literature that it was personally, apart from the rights of property and succession, a very loose tie, and was supplemented. by widespread recognised concubinage. 46 Throughout the whole of the