by Woolf, Greg
Here too there were only a few fiscal options open to the rulers of tributary empires. Local rulers of various kinds could be recruited to act as agents of empire; tax farmers could be employed; or a tax-gathering bureaucracy could be created. Each method had its disadvantages. Depending on local elites meant surrendering some power over the provinces. A detailed comparison has recently been drawn between Rome’s use of local elites and the situation in the Mughal Empire which extracted tax with the help of local zamindars, in the process conceding them significant autonomy.7 Tax farmers minimized the risks and costs of tax collection, guaranteeing the state a fixed income. But they notoriously had short-term interests, and were the least sympathetic to taxpayers. The long-term disadvantages of public–private partnerships of this kind are now very familiar to us: tributary empires also had to run the risk of revolts and protests stirred up by profiteering. A bureaucracy gave emperors much more control, but it came at a significantly higher cost, one that in the end would have to be recouped from the taxpayers.
The broad path of Rome’s own journey through these tangled waters is simply stated. Roman expansion in Italy conforms closely to the ideal type of a conquest state. But already within the second century BC elements of more stable revenue extraction appear. Indemnities from defeated powers were replaced over that century by regular income, as former Hellenistic kingdoms were absorbed and other territory was won in the west. At first Rome depended on tax farmers: for a state already making the widespread use of public contracts that Polybius observed this was natural. But tax farming was impractical in some regions—notably Spain—and the appalling behaviour of those who held the contract to collect Roman taxes in Asia was widely blamed for Greek support for Mithridates. Caesar entrusted the collection of land tax to the local elites of Asian cities, and that system became widespread during the early first century AD except in Italy, which was exempt, and Egypt where the bureaucracy used by the Ptolemies was preserved, and perhaps some frontier zones where the military acted as different kinds of bureaucrats. The early imperial system remained, however, exceptionally complex and tax farming continued to be used for many indirect taxes.8 The Augustan system had most consistency at the very highest level. Further down, there was little desire to tinker with systems that worked well enough, and only a few attempts to make improvements can be documented. All this changed in the crisis of the third century. The empire needed greater revenue at a time when the economy was for one reason or another weaker, and when local aristocracies were under unprecedented pressure. The result was that as part of the imperial recovery a new system emerged, with new taxes, a new coinage, and a centralized bureaucracy that lasted into the Byzantine Middle Ages.
Good Times and Bad Times
Fiscal systems can be seen as governmental responses to the economic activities of their subjects. Ideally they extract as much as possible without harming that activity. As Tiberius is said to have put it: ‘I want my sheep shorn, not flayed.’ The historical ecology of the Mediterranean basin and its hinterlands has been described already.9 The agrarian regimes of classical antiquity were essentially stable. Roman rule brought a few new farming techniques and a few new crops into some regions, but there was no revolutionary change. That ‘normal’ background had some built-in short-term instability, especially in the Mediterranean part of the empire where food crises were not unusual.10 More generally the ancient Mediterranean was characterized by highly localized cycles of boom and bust that drove peasant cultivators into strategies of crop-diversification, storage, and exchange.11 Growth, where it took place, was the result of intensification. Where landowners had the funds and the desire we can observe them draining and irrigating; planting vines, olive trees, and gardens that would be more profitable than other crops; experimenting with new varieties of trees, with selective livestock breeding; improving the value of their estates by opening up clay-pits, building kilns and olive presses; constructing mill and storage facilities; and improving the transport facilities they used to get their surplus to market. Broadly speaking, the poor feared risk, the rich sought profit, but both pursued their ends by essentially traditional means.
Yet long-term trends did emerge from this activity, trends with which the tributary empire had to deal. Work progresses apace on filling out the details of these trends, and especially on quantifying them.12 Underwater archaeology has shown how the numbers of shipwrecks rose to a peak in the late Republican period, suggesting this was the period of greatest long-distance trade in the ancient Mediterranean.13 Over the same period Italian products, especially wine and ceramic tableware, are found all over the Mediterranean world, and beyond it too. From the early first century AD this evidence diminishes in volume. But there are indications of growth in the provinces, including the production of olive oil for export in North Africa and southern Spain, and the production of wine for local consumption in areas as varied as central France, the environs of Rome, and Egypt. Trade, in other words, boomed first, followed by the capacity to produce the same goods locally.14 New evidence for increased levels of mining and metal production has come from ice cores drilled through the Greenland ice cap. To judge from the levels of atmospheric lead and copper pollution attested there, the production of metals reached a peak in the early Roman Empire not repeated before the Industrial Revolution.15
For the most part, these changes were demand led. For example, one major stimulus to change was the spread of new styles of consumption across the empire, styles modelled on those of the Italian elites. Oil, wine, fish-sauces, textiles, bronzes, ornaments were all in demand among their provincial counterparts. Changes in consumption did not affect commodities alone. Teachers and potters and wall painters found employment in the provinces. Italian architects, engineers, and craftsmen were already at work on public buildings in the western provinces in the early first century AD.16 Once these skills had been taught to locals, quarries had been opened up, tile production had begun, and new carpentry techniques and design features were disseminated, we begin to see the transformation of domestic architecture, first in the cities and then in the countryside. Even more sophisticated engineering skills were needed to build aqueducts that powered monumental fountains and bathhouses, signs of new aesthetic and cosmetic sensibilities. All this was expensive, but if some of Rome’s subjects were exploited more to pay for it, others might make money satisfying these new tastes.17
The greatest change in lifestyle in many parts of the empire was the growth of cities. The number of cities, their density, and the population of the larger centres grew all over the empire. Regions with only villages before Rome—inland Gaul and Spain, central Anatolia, parts of Egypt and the Balkans—experienced the greatest growth. In a few areas, such as the Nile Valley, central Italy, and coastal Asia Minor, the proportion of non-producers who had to purchase their food crept up to as much as 30 per cent of the population. A large part of this growth was the consequence of the emergence of a small number of enormous cities at the top of the settlement hierarchy. The population of Rome reached around one million, and maybe ten other cities crossed the 100,000 mark. The urban system itself was changing, and in some areas small cities grew smaller as the larger ones swelled in size.18 But by most estimates the total urban population of the empire increased to a maximum around AD 200.19 Add to this the creation of a standing army that fluctuated between a quarter and half a million men, and it is clear where the new demand was coming from.
The Roman Empire promoted these processes accidentally and indirectly. By supporting urbanization and creating a standing army, the empire increased net demand. The models of civilized life that, under Roman rule, spread beyond the Mediterranean basin provided opportunities for merchants, craftsmen, and architects. Roman rule favoured the rich, and to the extent that they became richer their aggregate purchasing power increased. Standardized currencies and weights and measures, and investment in transport infrastructure—all designed to serve administrative and military ends— must have
made trade easier. Law, common languages, and peace must also have made their contributions. Perhaps taxation played a part as well, stimulating landowners to produce greater surpluses, whether to be supplied in kind to the army or sold to pay taxes in case.20
Intensification of this kind powered growth from at least the second century BC until some point in the third century AD. But then the process went into reverse. Cities shrank, investment in production seems to have diminished, and certain kinds of long-distance trade declined in volume. There are many uncertainties. In some cases a decline in trade reflected the growing success of local producers: cycles of production and consumption, in other words, were becoming more localized. Archaeological studies of some commodities, for example ceramic products from North Africa, suggest long-distance trade continued up to and beyond the collapse of the western empire. Africa remained a major exporter of grain too, even under the Vandals. Most indicators of economic decline also suggest a more dramatic decline in the north and west of the empire than in its southern and eastern provinces. The local economies of Syria and parts of Asia Minor actually seem to boom in late antiquity. Even less consensus exists about the reasons for the reversal of many of these trends, or indeed about the point at which this reversal began. The peak in shipwrecks is actually in the late Republic, and Italian wine exports reach fewer and fewer regions in bulk from the same period. Could improvements in shipping or increased domestic consumption of wine explain part of this? The urban apogee, however, is around two centuries later.
Once the urban peak was passed, collapsing demand certainly did have a major effect. Many western cities, Rome included, shrank dramatically in population between 200 and 300 AD. The occupied areas of some cities in the north-west provinces were reduced to a quarter of their second-century maximum by the end of the third century. A few cities were even abandoned. Many cities must have contained vast areas of crumbling buildings and empty plots in the late empire, and quite a few huddled around a fortified castle in old monumental centres. Hardly any new urban monuments were constructed after the 230s anywhere. Rome itself dropped to a third of its size in the same period. All this must have affected the market for foodstuffs and textiles, for ceramics and fuel, and also the construction industry. The rich remained rich and some became richer: some of the most splendid rural and suburban villas were constructed in the fourth century all over the empire. But their spending alone could not absorb the mass productions that agricultural intensification had aimed at generating.
Many factors have been suggested to explain these changes. It is sometimes suggested that as economies became more and more regional, some parts of the empire had simply opted out of its expensive urbanized civilization. But it is difficult to see the articulation of alternative value-systems in the literary texts of the fourth century. Indeed they are often so nostalgic in tone that they are described as classicizing. The barbarian invasions of the late third century cannot have done this much damage, which is also evident in areas unaffected by those raids such as Britain. Nor had the empire (yet) increased the tax burden to the point where the productive base was under pressure, nor were the wealthy (yet) so wealthy that they had crippled public finances.
Recently explanations in terms of plague and climate change have been revived. Does each age visit its own fears on the fall of the Roman Empire? A terrifying plague certainly did grip the empire in the middle of the second century AD.21 Vivid descriptions have survived, including one from Galen, the leading physician of the early empire. It may have been smallpox, or measles, or a disease that no longer exists. It came from the east, brought into the Roman Empire by an army that encountered it while campaigning against the Persians in the 160s AD, and spread rapidly along the militarized areas of the Danube and Rhine and eventually reached Rome driving refugees (and at one point emperors) before it. But it is difficult to estimate its effect on the long-term operation of the economy: comparative evidence shows plagues can have a range of effects, some even positive, on economic growth.22 The question of climate change is even less certain, and hinges on very large-scale estimation of fluctuations of mean annual temperature. If there was indeed a slight decrease in temperature around the middle of the first millennium BC, this could have affected agricultural productivity. Both these ideas see the high point of the Roman economy as resting on a rather fragile basis, and that thesis is genuinely difficult to assess in the current state of the data. And there are other alternatives. One strand of argument suggests that the ancient economy had reached its maximum carrying capacity even earlier, and that the growth of the last centuries BC was a final spurt generated by the incorporation of new regions into the Mediterranean system. It is difficult at the moment to decide between these hypotheses.
Whatever the reasons, the consequences of economic contraction for a tributary empire are clear. Indirect taxes tapped the profits of trade, auctions, and manumissions. If fewer of these took place, the revenue decreased. Direct tax was based on the land, but if land became less profitable there was a limit to what could be raised. This is, however, clearer to us than it was to them.
Harnessing the Ancient Economy
This picture of the economy that is emerging from the very latest research would have been incomprehensible to the Romans themselves. Their very practical understanding of economic activity did not include the use of predictive or descriptive modelling, they gathered little data from which they could have analysed trends, and ancient science had no concept of the economy as a separate entity. In that sense the emperors were flying blind as they designed and modified their tax systems.
But their solutions to problems were not foolish. When earthquakes devastated the cities of Asia, Tiberius remitted tax income for five years. When Augustus needed more money for the military he created new taxes. When prices began to soar at the end of the third century Diocletian tried to fix legal maximums. Historians understood that when new silver mines were opened up the price of silver would decrease, and also how changes in rules governing interest rates could provoke a shortage of coin (even if they did not have specialized terms for ‘supply and demand’ or ‘liquidity crisis’). It follows that the devices that the emperors employed to tax this vast economy were pragmatic, if also fundamentally reactive and adaptive. Not much effort was put into smoothing out differences between provinces taxed in different ways: uniformity and consistency were not sought in themselves, and establishing equity between different groups of taxpayers was never a concern. The emperors harvested the economy opportunistically, aiming to take a share of whatever profit was being made. As a result the early imperial system preserved institutional fossils of every stage of Roman imperialism, and of some earlier ages too.
The political economy of the Roman Republican state before the Punic Wars was almost non-existent. Successful campaigns brought some booty, especially chattel slaves and bullion, most of which was divided between the allies, the citizen soldiers, the general, and the gods. The state had in any case few expenses. Most of the monuments built in this period were temples constructed in fulfilment of battlefield vows and paid for out of the general’s share of the booty.23 The Roman census did allocate tax obligations according to wealth, but we know very little of this direct taxation, except that it was abolished for ever after the defeat of Macedon in 168 BC. Warfare up and down the peninsula extended Roman control over land and manpower. Conquered manpower it exploited through enslavement and those alliances that required subject states to provide troops to support Roman armies. Captured land became ager publicus and was used either to found colonies or else rented out to Roman citizens. Those rents (vectigalia) became one of the state’s first regular and predictable sources of income.24
Overseas wars with Carthage and Macedon brought other sources of income. Indemnities were imposed on defeated Carthage in 241 and 201, in both cases spread into a series of annual payments. Macedon and Syria too had to pay massive indemnities after their respective defeats in 196 and 188 BC. Durin
g this period great public building works were initiated in Rome.25 Other public contracts were issued for the provisioning of armies. Only Roman citizens with funds to guarantee them could take public contracts, which were a means of spreading the proceeds of empire among the propertied classes.
The political economy was transformed when Rome began to acquire territory overseas. The first province was Sicily. Carthage had taxed her possessions in the west of the island and perhaps Rome took over their fiscal system after the first Punic war. After the capture of Syracuse in 211 during the second Punic war, Rome adapted the tax system created by King Hiero. What became known as the Lex Hieronica in effect imposed a tithe on the agricultural produce of most of the Greek cities of the island. Rome allowed a few cities exemption, and deprived some others of their land. Using taxation to reward allies and punish enemies became a standard Roman technique. Absorbing this small Hellenistic kingdom probably opened the Romans’ eyes to the possibilities of using tax as a means of generating a regular income out of their military supremacy. Certainly when Tiberius Gracchus successfully urged the takeover of the kingdom of Pergamum in 133 the key motive was to provide an income stream for his own project of land distribution. The Roman people received the income from royal taxes and the royal lands. Tax farmers (publicani) made a profit from its collection, and this bought Gracchus political support in Rome.