Rome: An Empire's Story (34 page)

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.
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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
.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
. During this period great public building works were initiated in Rome.
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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.

Tax farming of one kind or another remained important long into the empire for the collection of indirect taxes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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