and twenty-five years before the establishment of the empire under Cæsar, were enabled, through the great spoils of war obtained from subjugated nations, to relieve themselves from taxation for the support of their government; and, in so doing, it appears that they first threw off their direct taxes, and at a later period those taxes that were indirect. But when under Cæsar it became necessary to reimpose taxes, they established them in a reverse order—that is, the indirect taxes were renewed first and in preference to those which were direct; thus recognizing and affirming in practice the idea that characterizes the fiscal policy of most modern governments—namely, that it is expedient to conceal as far as possible the burden of taxes from the people who are to pay them.
The gross amount of annual revenue which the empire of Rome collected in its best day is estimated by Gibbon to have been about twenty million pounds sterling ($100,000,000); later authorities place it at a much higher figure, or $200,000,000, In default, however, of exact information as to the purchasing power of money at the time, it is obvious that neither of these estimates can give us any true idea of the real amount of the Roman revenue; but, taking the probable price of wheat in Rome at the close of the republic as an indication of the price of other commodities, the purchasing power of Gibbon's twenty million pounds sterling ($100,000,000) must have represented a much greater sum, or at least $150,000,000. If the largest of these estimates of the revenue of imperial Rome should seem inadequate for the support of a government that extended over the greater part of the then known surface of the earth, that included a population of at least 150,000,000, and maintained a military and naval establishment of 450,000 men, it should be remembered that, apart from the greater increased purchasing power of money than now prevails, the expenditure by the state for the support of its military forces was comparatively small ("the ratio of military draft upon society before the inception of Rome's decadence being but little more than one third as great as that of the seven principal states of present Europe"[1]); that the present complexity and magnitude of expenditure in the form of taxes did not exist; and that a Roman national debt, with its burden of constantly accruing interest—the one thing most grievous to modern states—was entirely unknown.
The taxes, or rather exactions, on the people of the conquered provinces of Rome were always more numerous, discriminating, and onerous than those levied upon the population of the imperial city and its adjoining districts; and from the time of the
- ↑ Baker. The Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans. D. Appleton & Co., 1894.
