his brought
him great reputation and popularity in the provinces. He proposed,
too, to send out colonies and to make roads and to build
granaries, personally managing and controlling all these
undertakings, never failing in attention to a mass of details, but
with extraordinary quickness and application working out each task
as if it alone engaged his efforts, with the result that even
those who hated and feared him were astounded at his universal
thoroughness and efficiency. Most people on meeting him were
surprised to see him surrounded by contractors, craftsmen,
ambassadors, commanders, soldiers, and scholars. Treating them all
with an easy good nature, being at once kind and dignified, and
suiting himself to the character of the individual, he proved that
it was gross slander to call him dictatorial, or presumptuous, or
violent. Thus his gift for popular leadership was shown rather in
personal association and conduct than in public speeches.

Plutarch, liv. 6.

He was a tremendous worker and all his plans were thought out to the
smallest detail. They were not vague ideas on paper. He began on his
land policy. If it were to have any chance of being carried he must, he
saw, break the solid majority of the landowning classes and their
friends. The most important of these friends were the class known as the
Knights, or Equestrian Order. The Senate was composed of men selected
from among those who had held one of the high offices of State. Senators
might not take part in business, but they alone served as jurors to try
the cases which concerned people who carried it on, and particularly
those who carried on one important kind of business, that of
tax-collecting in the provinces. This was largely in the hands of the
knights. Their name went back to the days of the old constitution when
men of a certain wealth served in the cavalry, and were given votes as
so serving. The so-called Equestrian Order had greatly grown in number.
They were the money-makers, financiers, capitalists of Rome. As against
changes in the land system they might stand with the Senate, but when
Caius Gracchus proposed that the juries which tried people for political
offences should be drawn not from the Senate, but from the knights, he
won their support against it. He then turned to win that of the people
by a new Corn Law which arranged that the Government should buy corn
wholesale and supply it to the Roman people