Rome: An Empire's Story (35 page)

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 subject 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

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.