A significant indication, moreover, of the endeavour of Gracchus to make the order of capitalists independent of the senate was the enactment, that the entire or partial remission of the stipulated rent was no longer, as hitherto, to be granted by the senate at discretion, but was under definite contingencies to be accorded by law.
Jury Courts While a gold mine was thus opened for the mercantile class, and the members of the new partnership constituted a great financial power imposing even for the government--a "senate of merchants"-a definite sphere of public action was at the same time assigned to them in the jury courts.

The field of the criminal procedure, which by right came before the burgesses, was among the Romans from the first very narrow, and was, as we have already stated,( 22) still further narrowed by Gracchus; most processes--both such as related to public crimes, and civil causes--were decided either by single jurymen [-indices-], or by commissions partly permanent, partly extraordinary.

Hitherto both the former and the latter had been exclusively taken from the senate; Gracchus transferred the functions of jurymen--both in strictly civil processes, and in the case of the standing and temporary commissions-- to the equestrian order, directing a new list of jurymen to be annually formed after the analogy of the equestrian centuries from all persons of equestrian rating, and excluding the senators directly, and the young men of senatorial families by the fixing of a certain limit of age, from such judicial functions.( 23) It is not improbable that the selection of jurymen was chiefly made to fall on the same men who played the leading part in the great mercantile associations, particularly those farming the revenues in Asia and elsewhere, just because these had a very close personal interest in sitting in the courts; and, if the lists of jurymen and the societies of -publicani- thus coincided as regards their chiefs, we can all the better understand the significance of the counter-senate thus constituted.

The substantial effect of this was, that, while hitherto there had been only two authorities in the state--the government as the administering and controlling, and the burgesses as the legislative, authority--and the courts had been divided between them, now the moneyed aristocracy was not only united into a compact and privileged class on the solid basis of material interests, but also, as a judicial and controlling power, formed part of the state and took its place almost on a footing of equality by the side of the ruling aristocracy.

All the old antipathies of the merchants against the nobility could not but thenceforth find only too practical an expression in the sentences of the jurymen; above all, when the provincial governors were called to a reckoning, the senator had to await a decision involving his civic existence at the hands no longer as formerly of his peers, but of great merchants and bankers.