It is probable that with parties so evenly balanced as the _populares_ and _optimates_ no very decisive result would have been attained, had it not been for the existence in the state of a perfectly homogeneous body of men with few ideals but very decided wants. This was that upper middle class of large and moderate capitalists which, through an accident in nomenclature, had come to be known as _equites_.[1558] It was a class that possessed the tradesman’s narrow honesty and complete indifference to all politics not connected with business. Like all classes, they were quite willing to plunder the provinces while state officials did the same; but they desired strong government more than plunder. They longed for an administration which should secure them adequate protection in the conquered world over which they had spread the network of their trade, and which should also ensure a freedom from revolution at home. Hence their wavering and yet always decisive attitude. To secure their first end they join the attacking party, to secure their second they attach themselves to the government, and their adherence or disaffection always turns the fortune of the day. It was the _equites_ who helped the democrats to raise Marius to power, who forced their own creature to abandon his revolutionary colleague Saturninus, who ruined the schemes of the younger Drusus and set the Varian commission on the track of his adherents; it was their hostility that proved equally fatal to the schemes of Sulla and of Catiline, their commercial instincts which lifted Pompeius into power and led them at the crisis of 60 B.C. to abandon the Senate and give their whole support to Caesar. There is something tragic in the ruthless massacre of _equites_ which ushers in the Augustan monarchy; for no class had done more for its existence and to none did it prove a greater boon.