by Woolf, Greg
Tax farming of one kind or another remained important long into the empire for the collection of indirect taxes.26 An inscription of Nero’s day found recently at Ephesus shows that the various customs duties created by the kings of Pergamum were still being levied in exactly the same way they had done more than two centuries after the Roman takeover.27 Tax farmers remained in charge of collecting internal tariffs long after they had lost the lucrative contracts to collect the land tax in the last years of the Republic. The tariffs levied at the frontiers of the old Pergamene kingdom were probably the model for new internal tariffs, like the 2.5 per cent tax on goods going in and out of the Gallic provinces created in Augustus’ reign. To begin with this was levied by publican companies, then by individual contractors (in both cases under the supervision of equestrian procurators, but the latter much easier to control), and finally was handed over to state officials in the late second century.28 That evolution perhaps illustrates a wider trend towards increased central control of taxation, even before economic contraction and the onset of the military crisis in the middle of the third century.
Fig 15. The tax law of Ephesus (now in Ephesus Museum)
Yet local diversity persisted, wherever local systems worked. The tax systems created in Egypt by the Ptolemies were far more complex than those of Sicily, and were administered by a bureaucracy headed by a chief minister in the palace. That system too was simply swallowed up after Actium. The royal Idioslogos was now an equestrian official who reported to the prefect of Alexandria and Egypt rather than to the monarch. Other examples abound. Neither Republican generals nor the emperors seemed to feel much need to impose uniform fiscal systems across their domains, so long as the provinces provided what was needed.
Not all parts of the empire had fiscal systems that could so easily be plugged into that of the empire. It is not clear that private property, in the sense that we or Romans would have understood it, even existed in some areas of the north and west before the Roman conquest. Caesar mentioned some customs dues levied by Gallic tribes, but most exchange was not monetized. Here the Romans were forced to develop new mechanisms. A partial exception in the west was the former Carthaginian territory in Spain and North Africa, acquired by Rome after the second and third Punic wars respectively. The silver mines created around Cartagena by Hannibal were confiscated as state property: they were then exploited by hundreds of small-scale contractors using slave labour. Equally the tribute in olive oil paid by the cities of Tripolitania to Carthage was diverted to Rome. But in many areas Romans had to improvise, usually driven by the need to feed and pay armies that might be in the field for much longer than one campaign and might have lesser expectations of booty. It was during the long campaigns in Spain that the pressure was first felt. Local populations had been required to provide subsistence for the armies since the Punic Wars: irregular levies were also made on allies to pay the troops. At some point during the early second century BC these irregular levies became formalized into regular annual levies of cash and grain.29
The reign of Augustus was a period of fiscal reorganization. Even before the military disasters in Germany towards the end of his reign, it was clear that Rome could not keep expanding forever. And the Augustan solution to civil war was expensive. At the centre a military treasury was created in AD 6, funded by a 1 per cent sales tax and a 5 per cent inheritance tax introduced to provide hypothecated income from which veteran discharge bonuses were to be paid. Eventually around 75 per cent of imperial revenue would be spent on the army.30 So great property assessments were made in many provinces during the 20s BC, renewed in theory at regular intervals thereafter, and permanent tax liabilities were fixed on entire communities. The language used was that of the census, but this was not an exercise in distributing political rights and responsibilities of the kind conducted by Republican censors. Many areas were given a cash assessment, others were instructed to pay taxes in kind. Particularly common were taxes of grain, most likely delivered to nearby military camps. One procurator was based in Trier on the Moselle Valley and coordinated imperial finances across northern France (the province of Belgica) and the Rhineland where around a third of the imperial army was based in the first century AD. It looks very likely he was responsible for local provisioning from the grain lands of the Paris basin. Some tax assessments were more unusual. The Frisians at the Rhine mouth were assessed in cattle hides: this made perfect sense in terms of the dependence of their local economy on stock raising and also in terms of the military need for leather. Other pragmatic idiosyncrasies existed in other parts of the empire.
Vast tracts of new territory were conquered during Augustus’ long reign. Much of it was simply subjected to taxation, with new civic territories created in tribal land rather as Pompey had done in Pontus and tribal leaders given the same governmental responsibilities as the civic elites of Asia and North Africa. A certain amount was expropriated to settle troops. Augustus also retained land for himself, especially former royal lands. Increasingly, the same equestrian procurators who supervised provincial taxation oversaw this imperial property in the provinces. Emperors controlled the greatest quarries, the mines, and much else besides. Some of their vast agricultural holdings had been confiscated from senators, some inherited from their predecessors. At Rome, a scrupulous distinction was maintained between public and imperial finances, but there was no independent oversight of either and the distinction was most useful because it allowed emperors to pose as personal benefactors.
Augustus did not change the taxation of the empire overnight. The terms ‘conquest state’ and ‘tributary empire’ describe ideal types in a sociological sense. From the second century BC, Rome exhibited features of both, but it moved steadily in the direction of a sustainable tributary economy. Booty remained a major objective of campaigning well into Augustus’ reign and occasionally beyond: Trajan’s great building projects in Rome were funded by his wars in Dacia. But the long-term trend was towards the sustainable income that only taxation could provide.
The early imperial Roman tax system strikes us as unnecessarily complex, and yet it did certain jobs well. Being built up of smaller regional tax systems it was able to accommodate the major variations in the economic life of Italy and the provinces, including differences in the level of trade, in the nature of land tenure, and even in farming practices. Uniformity matters most either in terms of distributional justice—not a major concern for the emperors—or if it enables centralized bodies to act more efficiently. But little was centralized. However, there were drawbacks. For a start, there was constant uncertainty over which taxes were current: this is useful for historians who rely largely on monumental epigraphic clarifications to reconstruct the system, but it must have wasted much time. Second, there was a tendency in all systems for the weight of taxation to be pressed on the poorest, since exemptions were commonly given to already privileged groups and individuals. Given the vast inequalities of wealth in the empire, the emperors could only really afford to let the rich off lightly when times were good. Lastly, there was little flexibility. Medieval European monarchs could call a parliament to get new taxes, modern governments adjust rates very regularly, but Roman emperors had no way of doing so; indeed they were vulnerable in tithed areas to poor harvests, and through indirect taxes to decreases in the volume of trade. When times were not good, the fiscal inflexibility of the imperial tax system would catch them out. As the economy went into contraction things got considerably harder.
Further Reading
The Roman economy has attracted some of the most imaginative work of recent years, and it has also been able to draw on large amounts of new archaeological data of very high quality. The most recent global assessment is contained in the Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge, 2007). These essays have not superseded the excellent chapters on economic matters and imperial finances in volumes x–xii of the Cambridge Ancient History. William Harris has made major contributions to both projects, and the s
ubject more generally: the most important are now collected in his Rome’s Imperial Economy (Oxford, 2011). The first products of a major new investigation have been published as Quantifying the Roman Economy (Oxford, 2009), edited by the project directors, Alan Bowman and Andrew Wilson. Archaeological contributions to the debate are surveyed in Kevin Greene’s Archaeology of the Roman Economy (London, 1986) and also a collection edited by David Mattingly and John Salmon entitled Economies beyond Agriculture (London, 2001). It is probably fair to say the highly original theses about economic life included in Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea (Oxford, 2000) have yet to be fully assimilated into these debates. Christopher Howgego’s Ancient History from Coins (London, 1995) is not just about Rome or just about the economy, but has fascinating things to say about both, and says them with wonderful clarity.
The study of taxation is based above all on papyrological and epigraphic material. Perhaps for that reason discussion has been mostly technical and mostly published in journals and conference proceedings, although a marvellous recent exception is provided by Michel Cottier’s The Customs Law of Asia (Oxford, 2008). The best introductions are Peter Brunt’s article ‘The Revenues of Rome’ originally published in the Journal of Roman Studies 1981 and reprinted in his Roman Imperial Themes (Oxford, 1990) and Dominic Rathbone’s chapter on ‘The Imperial Finances’ in Cambridge Ancient History volume x. Probably the most influential contribution to this subject was a paper by Keith Hopkins entitled ‘Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire’ published in Journal of Roman Studies 1980, arguing that the tax system of the early empire actually stimulated the economy. Hopkins returned to this theme on a number of occasions: his final version is most easily to be found (along with other important essays) in Walter Scheidel and Sitta von Reden’s collection The Ancient Economy (Edinburgh, 2002).
KEY DATES IN CHAPTER XIII
15 BC–AD 9
Main period of Augustan wars of conquest in Europe, ending with the loss of three legions in the Teutoberger Forest
AD 43
Invasion of Britain begins under Claudius
AD 66–70
The Jewish War
AD 69
Year of the Four Emperors. First civil war since Actium
AD 82–3
Domitian campaigns on the Rhine
AD 85–9, 101–2, 105–6
Domitianic and Trajanic wars against the Dacians
AD 106
Arabia annexed
AD 114–17
Trajan’s Parthian war. On his death Hadrian withdrew from the new province of Mesopotamia
AD 166–80
Marcus Aurelius’ Marcomannic Wars on the Danube frontier
AD 193–7
Civil wars leading to establishment of Severan dynasty
AD 226
Sassanians overthrow the Parthians in Persia
AD 241–72
Reign of Shapur I as Emperor of Persia
AD 249–52
Reign of Decius
AD 250s
Increasing raids across Rhine by Alamanni and other groups
AD 260
Capture and execution of Valerian by the Persians
AD 260–8
Reign of Gallienus. Gallic emperors and rulers of Palmyra allowed to become in effect autonomous. Among other disasters the Franks sack Tarraco (264), the Herculi sack Athens (267), and the Goths sack the sanctuary of Artemis at Ephesus (268)
AD 268
Claudius II defeats Goths at Naissos
AD 270–5
Reign of Aurelian. Campaigns against Vandals, Alamanni, and Iuthungi, builds a new wall around the centre of Rome, suppresses Palmyrene revolt, defeated Gallic separatist emperor Tetricus and triumphed over both in 274. Organized evacuation of Dacian provinces
AD 284
Accession of Diocletian
XIII
WAR
From Caesar Augustus’ day to our own time there have been nearly two hundred years. Over that time the Roman people might seem to have grown old and impotent, owing to the laziness of the Caesars, except that under the rule of Trajan it has stirred its limbs and, against everyone’s expectation of the old age of empire, it has revived, almost as if it were young once more.
(Florus, Epitome of Roman History 1 Preface 8)
The Laziness of the Caesars
The rise of the emperors coincided closely with the effective end of Roman expansion. Contemporaries noticed, and they complained. Tacitus, writing in the early second century, lamented the length of time the conquest of Germany was taking.1 Florus, writing around the same time, divided Roman history into four ages, each corresponding to one stage of a man’s life. Rome’s childhood had been under the kings, and its adolescence was the Republican period up until the outbreak of the first Punic war. From then until the reign of Augustus, Rome pacified the entire world. ‘This was at once the youth of empire and the robust maturity of Rome.’ But in the succeeding period Rome had grown old. The biological analogy no longer seems such a good way to describe imperial history, but the reign of Augustus still seems to mark a rupture.
That break is naturally a simplification. The emperors continued to celebrate their foreign victories on an unparalleled scale. They continued to fight wars after the death of Augustus, and even conquered a little more territory. But—leaving to one side a general trend to extend the system of provinces over regions previously governed by allied kings—there were only a few areas of genuine expansion. Britain was invaded in Claudius’ reign and conquered (very slowly, and cautiously) over the rest of the first century AD. In south-west Germany, the frontier was advanced under Domitian from the Rhine across the Black Forest to the Neckar Valley. Trajan conquered part of what is now Romania in the early second century. He also invaded Mesopotamia, modern-day Syria, and Iraq. But the scale of these expansions seems feeble compared with the audacious conquests of the 60s and 50s BC or even to those of the heyday of Augustan expansion between 15 BC and AD 9 when his sons fought their great wars across Europe. Besides, all the new territories except Britain were rapidly lost again. Mesopotamia was handed back to the Parthians by Trajan’s successor Hadrian. The conquests of Domitian and Trajan in Europe were lost in the military crisis of the third century AD. Future emperors campaigned beyond the Danube and the Euphrates, now and again, but the imperial frontiers hardly moved.
Fig 16. A detail of Trajan’s Column showing triumph of the emperor after the first campaign against the Dacians
Many of the core institutions of the Augustan empire built on the experiments of Caesar, Pompey, and even earlier generations. Alongside developments in taxation we can set the practice of extending the citizenship; a growing dependence on local elites to run their own communities; and the practice of using city-states as a basis for government, even in areas where they had never existed before. One way to describe the transformation of the empire at the turn of the millennium is to say that over a long period the Roman state experienced a tension between two divergent tendencies. The first we could label the pursuit for glory, the second the desire for security. A move in one direction made other moves that cohered with it more feasible, and so more likely. The disasters of the middle second and early first century BC—the Cimbric invasion, the Social and Mithridatic Wars, and the rise of the populares—had pushed the state a long way in the direction of security. Hegemony had been converted to empire, and new institutions developed to rule it. By contrast the accelerating competition between leaders from Sulla to Augustus pushed the empire towards the more risky pursuit of glory. After Actium security always trumped glory.
Perhaps this choice was never made consciously. Roman ideology certainly did not always reflect the new logic of empire. The idea that world conquest was a realistic and laudable aim was repeatedly restated, most influentially in the classroom, where it was encoded in the classics of Latin literature as defined in the last century BC. Imperial monuments and imperial ceremonial also reproduced t
he incidental music of a conquest state, long after it no longer suited the plot of Roman history.2 But detailed investigation of the military system of the empire—investigations made possible by a wealth of epigraphic data—reveals a set of mutually supporting institutions that were well geared to preserving peace, and that consequently made further conquests difficult and costly. It has even been argued that the emperors made so much noise about conquest to compensate for their reduced willingness to attempt it.3 Trajan was in some senses a throwback, a proof that an individual emperor need not be trapped by the role. Yet his reign, with its futile and short-lived conquests, is also a demonstration that expansion no longer suited the Roman Empire very well.
Augustus had offered an earlier object lesson when he decided on the conquest of Europe. Some historians have tried to excuse this on the grounds of geographical ignorance: maybe he did think the world was smaller than it was, or had no decent maps? None of this is believable. The diameter of the globe had been estimated two centuries earlier. Geographical works of the day included descriptions of India and mentioned the distant silk people, the Chinese. Africa had been circumnavigated half a millennium before Augustus. Much more likely, Augustus’ European front was a tactical error driven by short-term political difficulties. A number of Augustus’ challengers in the 20s BC had been commanders of major provinces. Did he dare let someone else achieve victories in the Balkans or south Egypt? Besides, it was still unclear what Augustus’ own role in the state would be once he had restored civil peace. Triumphs for his heirs might help their succession plans too. External warfare was evidently still popular in Rome, although it is noticeable that from this point on fewer and fewer Italians fought in the legions. So Augustus fell back on the pursuit of glory when the logic of his situation demanded more efforts to create security. The poetry written in his court advertised future campaigns, promising conquests in Britain and Parthia, India and Scythia, while monumental art offered images of a world already conquered.4