In spite of their concord in opposing a common foe such as was Tiberius Gracchus, a deep gulf lay between the nobility and the moneyed aristocracy; and Gaius, more adroit than his brother, enlarged it till the alliance was broken up and the mercantile class ranged itself on his side.
Insignia of the Equites That the external privileges, through which afterwards the men of equestrian census were distinguished from the rest of the multitude-- the golden finger-ring instead of the ordinary ring of iron or copper, and the separate and better place at the burgess-festivals--were first conferred on the equites by Gaius Gracchus, is not certain, but is not improbable.

For they emerged at any rate about this period, and, as the extension of these hitherto mainly senatorial privileges( 19) to the equestrian order which he brought into prominence was quite in the style of Gracchus, so it was in very truth his aim to impress on the equites the stamp of an order, similarly close and privileged, intermediate between the senatorial aristocracy and the common multitude; and this same aim was more promoted by those class-insignia, trifling though they were in themselves and though many qualified to be equites might not avail themselves of them, than by many an ordinance far more intrinsically important.

But the party of material interests, though it by no means despised such honours, was yet not to be gained through these alone.

Gracchus perceived well that it would doubtless duly fall to the highest bidder, but that it needed a high and substantial bidding; and so he offered to it the revenues of Asia and the jury courts.
Taxation of Asia The system of Roman financial administration, under which the indirect taxes as well as the domain-revenues were levied by means of middlemen, in itself granted to the Roman capitalist-class the most extensive advantages at the expense of those liable to taxation.
But the direct taxes consisted either, as in most provinces, of fixed sums of money payable by the communities--which of itself excluded the intervention of Roman capitalists--or, as in Sicily and Sardinia, of a ground-tenth, the levying of which for each particular community was leased in the provinces themselves, so that wealthy provincials regularly, and the tributary communities themselves very frequently, farmed the tenth of their districts and thereby kept at a distance the dangerous Roman middlemen.

Six years before, when the province of Asia had fallen to the Romans, the senate had organized it substantially according to the first system.( 20) Gaius Gracchus( 21) overturned this arrangement by a decree of the people, and not only burdened the province, which had hitherto been almost free from taxation, with the most extensive indirect and direct taxes, particularly the ground-tenth, but also enacted that these taxes should be exposed to auction for the province as a whole and in Rome-- a rule which practically excluded the provincials from participation, and called into existence in the body of middlemen for the -decumae-, -scriptura-, and -vectigalia- of the province of Asia an association of capitalists of colossal magnitude.