Part I · A republic that sold its revenues
The censor's auction
Every five years the two censors of Rome, both former consuls, sat on the Capitol and sold the state. Not the land or the legions, but the income: the right to collect the harbour dues at Puteoli and Ostia, the grazing fees on the public pastures of Apulia, the tithe of Sicilian corn, the silver of the Spanish mines, the five per cent on every slave set free. The buyer paid the treasury a fixed sum and for the five years of the lustrum collected what he could; the difference was his profit. At the same sitting the censors let the other side of the account: the contracts to pave a road, build an aqueduct, feed an army in Spain. In one auction Rome bought and sold everything it did not do itself, and it did very little itself. Polybius, the Greek hostage who watched the Republic at work in the second century B.C., saw what this meant for the men who bid.
“For contracts, too numerous to count, are given out by the censors in all parts of Italy for the repairs or construction of public buildings; there is also the collection of revenue from many rivers, harbours, gardens, mines, and land—everything, in a word, that comes under the control of the Roman government: and in all these the people at large are engaged; so that there is scarcely a man, so to speak, who is not interested either as a contractor or as being employed in the works. For some purchase the contracts from the censors for themselves; and others go partners with them; while others again go security for these contractors, or actually pledge their property to the treasury for them. Now over all these transactions the Senate has absolute control.”
Polybius, Histories 6.17 — trans. E. S. Shuckburgh (1889; public domain)
Polybius is explaining why the people deferred to the Senate, and his answer is the subject of this essay. The Senate could extend a contract, reduce it or cancel it; its members sat as judges in any suit that arose from it; and so every Roman with money in the revenues was at the Senate's mercy. That was the check. The contractor was rich, but the men who could break him had held the consulship, and they held no shares.
The Romans called these buyers publicani, men of the public business, and the word carried no praise. The Republic was a state of annual magistrates without salary, without a treasury staff beyond the quaestors and a few clerks, and without a single paid collector of anything. Its choice, never debated because never seen as a choice, was to keep the state small and let private capital do the rest. Mommsen traced the habit to the first years of the Republic, when magistrates who changed every twelve months could not themselves buy the city's salt and grain, and thought the class it bred, rich, sterile and master of the state it pretended to serve, the nearest thing antiquity had to the speculators of his own Berlin.
The company
No single fortune could stand surety for the tithe of a province, so the buyers formed companies. A manceps made the bid in his own name; socii, partners, put up the capital and shared the return; praedes, sureties, pledged their estates to the treasury against default. At Rome a magister kept the books and dealt with the Senate; in the province a pro magistro ran the collection with a staff of the company's own slaves and freedmen, who sat in the custom-houses, counted sheep on the pastures and measured the tithe at the threshing floor. The stones remember these men when the histories do not: a slave of the company of the fortieth paying his vow to Mercury near Perpignan, a slave of the company of the manumission tax building a tomb at Capua for himself and his brothers. And at Aquileia a small stone once stood for a man who had been a magistrate at home and a contractor in the capital.
P. Caesius P. f. Rom. aedilis Sorae, publicanus Romae.
Publius Caesius, son of Publius, of the Romilian tribe; aedile at Sora; tax-contractor at Rome.Tombstone, Aquileia. CIL V 936 = ILS 1469. Late Republic or early Empire. The stone is lost; the text survives in copies made between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Our rendering.
Caesius is the order in one line. Sora was a Latin colony in the Liris valley; he had held its aedileship, which a senator would not have troubled to record, and then gone to Rome to buy revenue. He was of the second order, the equites, the men of the census rating who did not sit in the Senate; and since the lex Claudia of 218 B.C. had barred senators from owning sea-going ships, trade and contracting were left to men like him. What the censors sold, the Caesii bought.
| Revenue | What it was | Where | How it was collected |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portoria | Dues on goods passing a harbour or frontier, a fortieth of the value in Gaul and Asia | Italy until 60 B.C.; every province | Sold to companies at Rome |
| Scriptura | Grazing fees on public pasture, by head of stock | Italy, Sicily, Africa, Asia | Sold to companies |
| Decumae | A tenth of the grain, wine and oil | Sicily; Sardinia; Asia after 123 B.C. | Sicily: sold town by town in Sicily under Hiero's law. Asia: sold whole, at Rome, by the censors |
| Mines, salt, quarries | Silver and lead of Spain; the Macedonian mines; the salt-pans | Spain; Macedonia until 167 B.C. | Sold to companies; Macedonia closed rather than farmed |
| Vicesima libertatis | Five per cent of the value of every slave freed, from 357 B.C. | Rome and Italy | Sold to a company; the gold banked in the temple of Saturn |
| Stipendium | A fixed tribute in money or grain, the price of defeat | Spain, Africa, Macedonia after 167 | Not farmed. Raised by the subject cities themselves, paid to the quaestor |
| Ultro tributa | What the state paid out: roads, aqueducts, temples, army supply | Italy and the armies | Let to contractors at the same auction |
The last two rows matter as much as the first five. Where a province paid a fixed tribute the cities gathered it and a quaestor received it; the company had nothing to sell. And the state's spending was farmed as well as its income. Tenney Frank reckoned that in Cicero's day two-thirds at least of the state's income never passed through a contractor's hands. The companies were never the whole of the revenue. They were the part that touched the subject directly, which is why they are the part the subjects remembered.
What Cato and Cicero thought of them
The governing class used the contractors, did not like them, and said so. Cato the Censor, who had held the auction himself in 184 B.C., opened his book on farming with a sentence every Roman schoolboy afterwards knew:
“For our ancestors considered, and so ordained in their laws, that, while the thief should be cast in double damages, the usurer should make four-fold restitution. From this we may judge how much less desirable a citizen they esteemed the banker than the thief.”
Cato, De Agri Cultura, preface — trans. Fairfax Harrison, Roman Farm Management (1913; public domain)
Cicero, a century later, was the tax-farmers' best friend in the Senate, and wrote them into his list of the occupations a gentleman avoided without a flicker of embarrassment:
“First, those means of livelihood are rejected as undesirable which incur people's ill-will, as those of tax-gatherers and usurers.”
Cicero, De Officiis 1.150 — trans. Walter Miller (Loeb, 1913; public domain)
Here is the first thing to hold in mind. The order on which the Republic depended for its revenue was an order its rulers had been taught to despise. A senator could not bid; the law and his dignity forbade it. So the men who fought and governed were, by rule, not the men who collected, and the collectors were never tested by the ladder of offices that made a consul. The Virtus essay on this site argues that Rome was strong while soldier, general and ruler were the same men. The publicanus was the exception written into the constitution from the start, and the history of the provinces is the history of what that exception did when it was let off the leash.
Part II · The contract in war, 215–167 B.C.
Three companies of nineteen men
The war with Hannibal is where the companies first step out of the auction and into the narrative. In 215 B.C., with Cannae a year old and the treasury empty, the two Scipios in Spain wrote to the Senate that their army had neither pay nor clothes nor corn. The Senate agreed that the request was just and had no money to meet it. A praetor was sent to ask the men who had grown rich on public contracts to supply Spain on credit, and to be paid first when there was money to pay with. Livy records the result.
“When the day arrived, three companies, of nineteen persons, came forward to enter into the contract; but they made two requests: one was, that they should be exempt from military service while employed in that revenue business; the second was, that the state should bear all losses of the goods they shipped, which might arise either from the attacks of the enemy or from storms. Having obtained both their requests, they entered into the contract, and the affairs of the state were conducted by private funds.”
Livy, History of Rome 23.49 — trans. Cyrus R. Edmonds (Bohn's Classical Library, 1850s; public domain)
Livy adds that this patriotism ran through every rank. Read the two conditions again. Nineteen men had bought exemption from the levy in the worst year of the worst war Rome ever fought, and had shifted every risk of the sea onto the treasury. Three years later the second condition bore fruit. Two of the contractors, Marcus Postumius of Pyrgi and Titus Pomponius of Veii, had been claiming for cargoes lost at sea.
“Their plan was to put a few goods of little value into old and shattered vessels, which they sank in the deep, taking up the sailors in boats prepared for the purpose, and then returning falsely the cargo as many times more valuable than it was. This fraudulent practice had been pointed out to Marcus Atilius, the praetor in a former year, who had communicated it to the senate; no decree, however, had been passed censuring it, because the fathers were unwilling that any offence should be given to the order of revenue farmers while affairs were in such a state.”
Livy, 25.3 — trans. Edmonds
That last sentence is the earliest statement of the Republic's dilemma, and it is Livy's, not a modern historian's. The Senate knew, and kept silent, because it needed the order more than the money. It was two tribunes, the Carvilii, who brought Postumius before the assembly in 212 B.C.; and as the tribes were about to vote, the contractors formed a wedge, forced their way through the crowd on the Capitol and broke up the meeting. Only then did the Senate find its voice. Postumius went into exile rather than face a capital charge, and the men who had led the rush followed him. Livy says the knavery of the tax-farmers was thus brought to an end. One fraud had ended, punished by the people after the Senate had looked away.
Cato at the auction
The one magistrate who could bite the companies was the censor, because the censor set the price, and in 184 B.C. the censor was Cato. Livy's account of his year is a catalogue of unpopular rigour: luxury goods assessed at ten times their value, private pipes cut from the public aqueducts, encroachments on public ground pulled down. Then the auction.
“They farmed out the several branches of the revenue at the highest prices, and bargained with the contractors for the performance of the public services on the lowest terms. When the senate, overcome by the prayers and lamentations of the publicans, ordered those bargains to be revoked, and new agreements to be made; the censors, by an edict, excluded from competition the persons who had eluded the former contracts, and farmed out all the same branches at prices very little reduced.”
Livy, 39.44 — trans. W. A. McDevitte (Bohn's Classical Library, 1850s; public domain)
Notice who yielded. The Senate, hearing the companies weep, ordered the bargains cancelled. The censors, who answered to no one for eighteen months, banned the weepers from bidding again and sold the same revenues at nearly the same price to other men. Livy says the censorship made Cato enemies for the rest of his life; he does not say the Senate was grateful. Cato's view of the matter was simple. The treasury was the people's, and a contractor who had bid too high had made a mistake.
Better no mines than a publican
The clearest statement of what the Senate understood about its own contractors was made about Macedonia. In 167 B.C., after Pydna, the Senate broke the kingdom into four republics and had to decide what to do with the royal mines, the richest in Greece. Its decision, as Livy gives it, is a verdict on a century of Roman practice.
“It was also provided, that the farming both of the Macedonian mines, which produced a very large profit, and that of crown lands, should be abolished; as business of this kind could not be managed without the intervention of revenue farmers; and wherever a tax-contractor was employed, either the rights of the people were a nonentity, or the freedom of the allies destroyed.”
Livy, 45.18 — trans. McDevitte
The Senate shut the mines. It preferred no income to income raised by a Roman company among a people it had just declared free, because it knew what the company would do there and did not think a quaestor could stop it. The mines were reopened nine years later, but the reasoning stands. The Senate of the second century had the contractors' measure. What it lacked was any instrument but the censor, and the will to use even him.
There was one province where the Republic had solved the problem, by leaving a Greek king's law alone. Sicily paid a tenth of its corn, and had paid it to Hiero of Syracuse before it paid it to Rome. The Romans kept Hiero's law entire: the tithe of each town was sold separately, in Sicily, at the old season and place, under rules that fined a collector who took more than his tenth as surely as a farmer who paid less. Sicilians could bid, and did. Cicero, prosecuting Verres for wrecking that arrangement, explained to a Roman jury how the tax of Sicily differed from the tax of everywhere else.
“that in the other provinces, either the tribute imposed is of a fixed amount, which is called stipendiarium, as in the case of the Spaniards and most of the Carthaginian provinces, being a sort of reward of victory, and penalty for war; or else a contract exists between the state and the farmers, settled by the censor, as is the case in Asia, by the Sempronian law.”
Cicero, Against Verres II.3.12 — trans. C. D. Yonge (1903; public domain)
The Sempronian law that Cicero names is the other road, and it is the road the Republic took.
Part III · Asia and the courts, 133–70 B.C.
The legacy of Attalus
In 133 B.C. Attalus III of Pergamum died and left his kingdom to the Roman people: the western coast of Asia Minor, its Greek cities, its wheat and wool and harbours, with a royal tax system already running. Rome took four years and a war to make it the province of Asia, and for another six seems to have left the collection much as the kings had had it, the cities gathering what was due. Then in 123 B.C. Gaius Gracchus, tribune of the people, needed money for a law that sold grain to the citizens of Rome at a fixed low price, and found it in Asia. His lex Sempronia put the tithe of the whole province up for sale at Rome, by the censors, as one contract. The buyer had to be a company, and the company had to be Roman.
It was a rational act by a man who needed a revenue he could count in advance, and the most consequential fiscal decision of the Republic. Frank doubted that Gracchus could have foreseen what the contract would become; the effect was slow. But the shape was set. The richest province of the Empire was to be collected neither by its own cities, as Sicily was, nor by tribute paid to a quaestor, as Spain was, but by the largest company of Roman capitalists that could be formed, bidding at Rome for a five-year monopoly on a country most of its shareholders had never seen. Everything that went wrong afterwards followed from the distance between the auction and the threshing floor.
Judges of their own governors
Gracchus did a second thing in the same tribunate, and it was the fatal one. Since 149 B.C. Rome had had a standing court for extortion by provincial governors, and its jurors were senators. Gracchus, citing acquittals that had shamed the Senate, transferred the jury to the equites and excluded senators from it. Appian, writing under the Antonines, saw what this did.
“For this power of sitting in judgment on all Romans and Italians, including the senators themselves, in all matters as to property, civil rights, and banishment, exalted the knights to be rulers over them, and put senators on the level of subjects.”
Appian, Civil Wars 1.22 — trans. Horace White (Loeb, 1913; public domain)
The two laws must be read together, and Mommsen was the first modern historian to insist on it. The jurors who would try a governor of Asia for extortion were drawn from the order that farmed the taxes of Asia; the leading men of the jury lists and of the companies were, in all likelihood, the same men. Polybius had explained why the contractors feared the Senate: because the Senate judged them. After 123 B.C. it was the Senate's governors who feared the contractors, because the contractors judged the governors. The one check that had bitten in 184 and 167 was reversed, by the tribune who is remembered for the grain law.
The proof came in 92 B.C. Quintus Mucius Scaevola, governor of Asia, and his legate Publius Rutilius Rufus, a Stoic of famous integrity, set out to hold the companies to their contract and give the Greeks a court against them. Scaevola's edict became the model for every honest governor after him; Cicero copied it in Cilicia forty years later. When Rutilius came home the companies prosecuted him, in the extortion court, for extortion.
“Publius Rutilius, a man of the strictest integrity, because he exerted himself, when lieutenant-general under Quintus Mucius, the proconsul, to protect the people of Asia from the oppression of the revenue farmers, became odious to the equestrian order, who had the cognizance of affairs of that nature, and being brought to trial, was condemned to exile”
Livy, Periochae 70 — trans. McDevitte
Rutilius went to live at Smyrna, in the province he had been condemned for robbing, and the cities he had robbed competed to receive him. The year after his trial the tribune Livius Drusus tried to give the courts back to the Senate and was murdered; the Italian allies rose; and the question of the juries ran through the civil wars for twenty years. Sulla restored them to the Senate in 81 B.C.; the lex Aurelia of 70 B.C. split them between senators, equites and a third panel; and there the matter rested, the companies never again sole judges but never again out of the room.
Sulla's fine and the debt of Asia
What the companies did to Asia when nothing restrained them can be read in Plutarch. In 88 B.C. the cities of Asia had risen for Mithridates and killed, on the king's order and on one day, every Italian in the province; the figure the tradition gives is eighty thousand. When Sulla returned in 84 he punished them with a levy that Plutarch puts at twenty thousand talents, five years' tribute at once, and quartered his soldiers on their households. Sacked cities could not pay it, and so they borrowed it, from the only lenders present: the Roman companies and the Roman bankers who followed them. Fourteen years later Lucullus, having driven Mithridates out of Asia a second time, stopped to look at what the loans had done.
“so plundered and enslaved by tax-farmers and usurers, that private people were compelled to sell their sons in the flower of their youth, and their daughters in their virginity, and the States publicly to sell their consecrated gifts, pictures, and statues.”
Plutarch, Lucullus 20 — trans. Dryden, rev. Clough
“The public debt was contracted when Asia was fined twenty thousand talents by Sylla, but twice as much was paid to the collectors, who by their usury had by this time advanced it to a hundred and twenty thousand talents. And accordingly they inveighed against Lucullus at Rome, as grossly injured by him, and by their money's help, (as, indeed, they were very powerful, and had many of the statesmen in their debt,) they stirred up several leading men against him.”
Plutarch, Lucullus 20 — trans. Dryden, rev. Clough
Lucullus fixed interest at one per cent a month, struck off interest that had exceeded the principal, limited the creditor to a quarter of the debtor's income, and forbade the addition of interest to capital. Plutarch says that within four years the debts were paid and the land went back to its owners. The figures are Plutarch's and cannot be checked; the mechanism can. The companies did not answer Lucullus in Asia. They answered him at Rome, where they held the debts of the men who voted, and in 67 B.C. a tribune's law took his command from him. It went, in the end, to Pompey.
The man who spoke for that law was Cicero, and the speech survives. He was praetor, he wanted the consulship, and he told the Roman people what Asia was for.
“The publicans, most honourable and accomplished men, have taken all their resources and all their wealth into that province; and their property and fortunes ought, by themselves, to be an object of your special care. In truth, if we have always considered the revenues as the sinews of the republic, certainly we shall be right if we call that order of men which collects them, the prop and support of all the other orders.”
Cicero, On the Manilian Law 17 — trans. Yonge
He was not lying. He went on to remind the assembly that when the Asian fortunes were lost in 88 B.C. credit had failed at Rome, and that the money-market of the Forum was bound up with the capital invested in Asia and would fall with it. The companies had made the treasury, the money-market and the political class into a single body with a single interest, and the interest was the tithe of Asia. Polybius had seen the same body from the other side, when the contractors depended on the Senate. Now the Senate depended on the contractors, and a praetor who knew what a tax-gatherer was told the people they were the prop and support of the state.
Part IV · Cicero's dilemma, 60–50 B.C.
The great obstacle
In 60 B.C. Cicero's brother Quintus was governing Asia, and Cicero sent him a long letter of advice that is the most honest document the order ever received from a friend, because Cicero was not speaking in public. He had told Quintus to be the father of Asia. Then he told him why he could not.
“the great obstacle are the publicani: for, if we oppose them, we shall alienate from ourselves and from the Republic an order which has done us most excellent service, and which has been brought into sympathy with the Republic by our means; if, on the other hand, we comply with them in every case, we shall allow the complete ruin of those whose interests, to say nothing of their preservation, we are bound to consult. This is the one difficulty, if we look the thing fairly in the face, in your whole government.”
Cicero, To his brother Quintus 1.1.32 — trans. E. S. Shuckburgh (1899–1900; public domain)
To satisfy the companies, he goes on, when they had taken the contract at a loss, and yet keep the allies from ruin, would need a virtue with something divine in it. His remedy, in the rest of the letter, is that the Greeks should be persuaded not to mind: they had paid taxes to their kings, they could not have raised Sulla's assessment without the companies' advances, the islands Sulla had given to Rhodes had asked to be taxed by Rome instead. All true, and none of it touched the difficulty he had just named, which was that a governor with the whole imperium of Rome behind him could not enforce a contract against the men who had bought it, because they could end his career. The contract taken at a loss is the thread to follow.
The company that had bought the Asian tithe in 61 B.C. had bid too high. It asked the Senate to remit a third of the price; it had done the Senate most excellent service, and expected the Senate to remember. The man who blocked it was Cato, great-grandson of the censor, and he blocked it for months.
“He has been for the last three months worrying those unhappy publicani, who were formerly devoted to him, and refuses to allow of an answer being given them by the senate.”
Cicero, To Atticus 1.17 — trans. Shuckburgh
Cicero thought this madness, and said so to Atticus: the courts had been shown rotten by the acquittal of Clodius, the rich cared only for their fish-ponds, and now Cato was driving the one order that could still be attached to the Senate into the arms of whoever would pay it. Someone did. In 59 B.C. Caesar was consul, and he had no need of the Senate.
“As Caesar did not want anything of the Senate then, but was employing the people only, he released the publicans from the third part of their obligations. For this unexpected favour, which was far beyond their deserts, the knights extolled Caesar to the skies.”
Appian, Civil Wars 2.13 — trans. White
Cato had been right on the law and Cicero right on the politics, and the Republic lost on both. A company that could not be held to its bid by the Senate could be bought by a consul, and it was. Cicero never forgave Cato, and years later, writing on duty, set the disagreement down in a sentence that shows what he thought the Senate's relation to the contractors ought to have been.
“it seemed to me that he was too rigorous in his watchful care over the claims of the treasury and the revenues; he refused everything that the farmers of the revenue asked for and much that the allies desired; whereas, as I insisted, it was our duty to be generous to the allies and to treat the publicans as we were accustomed individually to treat our tenants”
Cicero, De Officiis 3.88 — trans. Miller
As a landlord treats his tenants: with indulgence, in a bad year, because the estate is his and the tenant is his man. It is a perfect image of what the Senate had been to the companies in 215 B.C., and a confession that it was so no longer. A landlord does not have to be generous to a tenant who can vote him out of the house.
Forty-eight per cent
In 51 B.C. Cicero himself went out to govern Cilicia, and his letters from the province are the only account we possess of an honest governor managing the companies from the inside. He published an edict, on Scaevola's model, fixing interest at twelve per cent a year. Then he explained to Atticus how the edict and the companies were reconciled.
“You seem to wish to know how I treat the publicani. I pet, indulge, compliment, and honour them: I contrive, however, that they oppress no one.”
Cicero, To Atticus 6.1 — trans. Shuckburgh
His device was a deadline. Cities that paid the companies before it owed the twelve per cent of his edict; cities that missed it owed whatever the company had written into the contract. The Greeks paid, the companies were flattered, and everyone, he says, thought himself the governor's particular friend. Then the flattery ran out. The city of Salamis in Cyprus owed money to two Roman lenders, Scaptius and Matinius, on a loan the Senate had twice had to exempt from the law against lending to provincials, and Cicero discovered whose money it was.
“But Scaptius demanded forty-eight per cent.”
Cicero, To Atticus 5.21 — trans. Shuckburgh
“he has been a praefectus to Appius, and had, in fact, had some squadrons of cavalry, with which he had kept the senate under so close a siege in their own council chamber at Salamis, that five senators died of starvation.”
Cicero, To Atticus 5.21 — trans. Shuckburgh
The previous governor, Appius Claudius, had made the moneylender an officer of the state and given him cavalry to collect with; and the silent partner behind Scaptius, for whose sake Cicero was being asked to overrule his own edict, was Marcus Brutus, the future tyrannicide and the most admired young noble in Rome. Cicero refused the forty-eight per cent, refused Scaptius a command, sent the cavalry off the island, and then, because Brutus wrote kind letters to Atticus about him, left the Salaminians' payment in suspense for his successor to decide. This is what the best governor of the age could do: keep one Roman lender from starving one Greek town for one year, at the cost of the friendship of the man who was going to kill Caesar. He could not touch the system, and he knew it.
The god who had once been a man
One document shows the company's own mind, and it is a stone. In 73 B.C. the Senate settled a dispute between the sanctuary of Amphiaraus at Oropus in Boeotia and the company that farmed the revenues of the province. Sulla had exempted the god's lands from the tithe. The company's counsel argued before the consuls that the exemption in the censors' lease covered the lands of the immortal gods only, and that Amphiaraus, who had once been a hero at Thebes, was not immortal. The consuls, their council and the Senate found for the god, and the Oropians cut the whole proceeding into stone. Cicero gave the company's argument in one clause.
publicani cum essent agri in Boeotia excepti lege censoria, negabant immortales esse ullos, qui aliquando homines fuissent
The tax-contractors, since lands in Boeotia had been exempted under the censors' law, maintained that no one could be immortal who had ever been a man.Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 3.49, as quoted in Bruns, Fontes Iuris Romani Antiqui (1909) beside the Oropus decree, IG VII 413. Our rendering. The decree itself, in Greek, was found at Oropus and is dated 14 October 73 B.C.
Everything is taxable that the lease does not exempt; a god is a line in a contract; if the line can be argued away the god pays. The company had no theology. It had a lease, and it read the lease as it read the lands of Asia, for what could be got out of it. A senator would have laughed, and did; but the senator who laughed sat on the council that heard the case, and the company had put its argument to men who owned no shares. That was the arrangement of 184 and 167 B.C. still working, on a small matter, in a year when the Senate held the courts. On the large matters, in Asia, it had stopped working thirty years before.
Part V · The emperor's clerks
Caesar's Asia
The man who broke the Asian company was the man who had bought it. In 48 B.C., passing through Asia after Pharsalus, Caesar found the cities in the state Lucullus had found them, and did what Lucullus had not been allowed to do.
“In any case he did away with the tax-gatherers, who had been abusing the people most cruelly, and he converted the amount accruing from the taxes into a joint payment of tribute.”
Cassius Dio, Roman History 42.6 — trans. Earnest Cary (Loeb, 1916; public domain)
Seven years later Antony, raising money in the same cities for the war against Caesar's murderers, reminded the Greeks of what they had been given, and by whom.
“When the publicans, who farmed these collections by the authority of the Senate, wronged you by demanding more than was due, Gaius Caesar remitted to you one-third of what you had paid to them and put an end to their outrages: for he turned over to you the collection of the taxes from the cultivators of the soil.”
Appian, Civil Wars 5.4 — trans. White
Antony's speech is Appian's composition and its purpose was to ask for nine years' tribute in two; but the measure it describes is confirmed by Dio and by the later silence of the sources about Asian tithe-contractors. Caesar had converted the tithe into a fixed tribute and given its collection to the cities: the Sicilian arrangement, the Spanish one, the one the Senate had chosen for Macedonia in 167. The Republic had known the answer for a century. It took a dictator to apply it to the one province where the companies were strong enough to prevent it.
The procurator
Augustus finished what Caesar had begun, by the method the Republic had refused from the beginning: he hired men. The provinces were surveyed and their people counted, Gaul in 27 B.C., Judaea in A.D. 6, so that land tax and poll tax could be assessed on a register rather than guessed at by a bidder. The direct taxes were raised by the cities and paid to an imperial procurator, a man of the equestrian order chosen by the emperor, salaried by him, kept in his post as long as he pleased, and answerable to him for every sesterce. The order that had farmed the taxes now administered them, and the difference was the whole difference between a shareholder and an official. Tacitus, describing the government of Tiberius before it went bad, marks where the companies still stood.
“As to the duties on corn, the indirect taxes and other branches of the public revenue, they were in the hands of companies of Roman knights.”
Tacitus, Annals 4.6 — trans. A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb (1876; public domain)
The companies kept the harbour dues, the inheritance tax, the tax on manumissions, the tax on sales: everything that could not be assessed in advance from a register. They had lost the tithe of Asia and with it the power to ruin a province, and they had lost the courts. What remained was a nuisance, and in A.D. 58 Nero, or the men who advised him, thought for a moment of abolishing the nuisance outright. Tacitus reports that the people had been denouncing the collectors' greed, that Nero proposed to sweep away every indirect tax in the Empire, and that the senators, having praised his generosity, explained that the Empire would dissolve without the revenue.
“Certainly some restraint, they admitted, must be put on the cupidity of the revenue collectors, that they might not by new oppressions bring into odium what for so many years had been endured without a complaint.”
Tacitus, Annals 13.50 — trans. Church and Brodribb
The compromise was an edict: the regulations of every branch of the revenue, which had until then been kept secret, were to be published; claims not pressed within a year lapsed; suits against collectors took precedence in every court; two of the dues the collectors had invented were abolished outright.
“with other very equitable arrangements, which for a short time were maintained and were subsequently disregarded.”
Tacitus, Annals 13.51 — trans. Church and Brodribb
The rules of every tax had been secret for three hundred years; the taxpayer had never been entitled to know what the company was entitled to take. Tacitus, who had no reason to be kind to Nero, says the abolitions at least held. A customs law of Asia, engraved at Ephesus in A.D. 62 and reissuing rules that went back to the Republic, is very probably the result of the order to publish. Under Hadrian the companies gave way, revenue by revenue, to single lessees, conductores, on terms the treasury wrote; by the end of the second century the Danube customs were collected by an imperial procurator's own staff, and the stones of the frontier stations, which had named the company's slaves, name the emperor's. The publicanus did not fall. He was written out of the revenue one contract at a time, by the salaried men who had taken his place.
What Machiavelli and Nietzsche would say
Machiavelli laid down, in his chapter on the agrarian laws, the maxim that a well-ordered republic keeps the state rich and its citizens poor:
“it should be the object of every well-governed commonwealth to make the State rich and keep individual citizens poor”
Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius 1.37 — trans. N. H. Thomson (1883; public domain)
Rome in 215 B.C. had inverted it: the state was so poor that it borrowed from nineteen of its citizens, and the citizens grew rich on the loan. By 66 B.C. the inversion was complete. The treasury lived on the auction, the money-market lived on Asia, and Cicero could tell the assembly that the collectors were the prop of the state. Machiavelli's cure was the one the Republic used until 123 B.C., a censor who set the price and a Senate that owned no shares; and his warning, that corruption in a republic is gradual until it is sudden, is the history of the companies between Cato's auction and Rutilius' trial.
Nietzsche would have asked a different question. He held that a living aristocracy exploits by nature, and refused to be ashamed of the word:
“Exploitation” does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil §259 — trans. Helen Zimmern (1907; public domain)
The Roman Senate would have agreed, and would have added the distinction Nietzsche's sentence leaves out. The consul who took Asia had also to govern it, defend it, judge it and answer for it at Rome; his exploitation, if the word is wanted, was that of a man who had to live with the province afterwards. The company had none of those duties. It took, and went home, and if the province was ruined it bid for another. What Rome discovered between 123 and 48 B.C. was not that exploitation is wicked, which no Roman believed, but that exploitation without rule is a different thing from conquest, and that a state which lets the first loose in its provinces will not keep the second. The Senate of 167 B.C. had said it in one sentence.
Verdicts
- Tax farming was the price of a state without officials, and the price was tolerable while the censor set it. From the Hannibalic War to the fall of Macedon the companies were held by two instruments the Republic already had: a censor who could refuse their bid and a Senate that judged their suits and owned none of their shares. The Senate knew what they were. It closed the mines of Macedonia rather than let them in.
- The fatal year was 123 B.C., not 133 or 215. Gaius Gracchus sold the tithe of Asia at Rome as a single contract and, in the same tribunate, made the contractors' order the jury that tried provincial governors. The check was reversed. Rutilius' exile, Sulla's fine turned into a debt of a hundred and twenty thousand talents, Lucullus' recall and Cicero's letter to his brother are the same fact seen four times.
- The Empire cured the disease with the remedy the Republic had refused: a paid, appointed, long-serving official. Caesar gave Asia's tithe back to its cities; Augustus counted the provinces and set an equestrian procurator over their tribute; Nero published the rules. What went with the contractor was the other thing the Republic had prized above efficiency, the audit of every revenue by a magistrate the people had elected and could refuse. The Virtus essay describes that ladder. This one describes the one rung the Republic never built, and what it cost to leave the gap.
Cato, asked what a tax-farmer was, answered with the law of his ancestors: a thief pays double, a usurer fourfold. Cicero, who knew better and needed them, answered that they were the sinews of the state and the friends he could not afford to lose. Both were describing the same men, and both were right about their own century. What neither could say, because neither could imagine it, was that the Republic's refusal to pay a clerk had made the clerk's work into a fortune, the fortune into a power, and the power into a court. Augustus could imagine it. He paid the clerk. The provinces were the better for it, and the Republic, which had been many things but never a bureaucracy, was gone.
Sources & method
Quotations are copied from public-domain translations held in sources/publicani/raw/ (symlinks into the shared library plus three downloads made for this essay) and verified with tools/check_quotes.py: Polybius (Shuckburgh, 1889); Livy books 9–26 (Edmonds, Bohn) and 37–45 with the Periochae (McDevitte, Bohn); Cato (Harrison, 1913); Cicero, De Officiis (Miller, 1913), Against Verres and On the Manilian Law (Yonge, from the Perseus Digital Library's XML), the letters (Shuckburgh, 1899–1900); Plutarch (Dryden–Clough); Appian (White, 1913); Cassius Dio (Cary, 1916); Tacitus (Church and Brodribb, 1876); Mommsen (Dickson); Machiavelli (Thomson, 1883); Nietzsche (Zimmern, 1907). The Latin of ILS 1469 is copied from Dessau's Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae vol. I (1892) and of Cicero, De natura deorum 3.49 from Bruns's Fontes (7th ed., 1909), both from Archive.org scans; the renderings are ours.
- The auction and its parties: Polybius 6.17; the terms manceps, socii, praedes, magister, pro magistro from Cicero, Verr. II.2.169–175, Fam. 13.9, Att. 11.10, and the Oropus decree; the lex Claudia, Livy 21.63. The claim that no senator could bid is the customary reading of that law and of Livy 43.16; Asconius shows senators as sureties, which the essay does not deny.
- The table: portoria at a fortieth in Gaul and Asia from the Gallic and Ephesian customs inscriptions (ILS 1852–1856; the lex portorii Asiae, A.D. 62, whose text was published in 1989 and is used here as a locator only); scriptura and decumae, Cicero Verr. II.3 and Man. 15; the Spanish mines, Polybius in Strabo 3.2.10; the vicesima libertatis, Livy 7.16; the Macedonian mines, Livy 45.18 and 45.29, reopened 158 B.C. (Cassiodorus, Chron.); the Italian portoria abolished by Metellus Nepos in 60 B.C., Dio 37.51. Tenney Frank's two-thirds is from An Economic History of Rome (1920), ch. 11.
- Livy 23.48–49 (215 B.C.) and 25.3–5 (212 B.C.); Cato's censorship, Livy 39.44, Plutarch Cato Maior 19; Cicero on Cato and Sulla's sale of freedom, Off. 3.87–88. Macedonia, Livy 45.18. The lex Hieronica, Cicero Verr. II.3.12–15, 20; the Sicilian bidders, Verr. II.3.27 and 77.
- Attalus' bequest and the lex Sempronia de provincia Asia: Cicero Verr. II.3.12, Att. 1.17.9; the Asian tithe sold at Rome, Cicero Verr. II.3.12 and Fronto in Digest 39.4; the grain law's cost, Plutarch C. Gracchus 5–6. That Gracchus intended the Asian contract to fund the grain law is the essay's inference from the dates; the sources connect them only by juxtaposition.
- The jury law: Appian BC 1.22; Plutarch C. Gracchus 5; Diodorus 34/35.25; Mommsen, History of Rome bk. IV ch. 3 (“senate of merchants”). Rutilius: Livy Per. 70; Dio fr. 97; Velleius 2.13; Cicero Brutus 115. Drusus, Sulla's and Aurelius Cotta's jury laws: Appian BC 1.35, 1.100; Asconius on Pro Cornelio.
- Sulla's fine, Plutarch Sulla 25, Appian Mithr. 62; the eighty thousand dead of 88 B.C. is Valerius Maximus 9.2.4 ext. 3 and Memnon (Plutarch Sulla 24 gives 150,000) and is given as the tradition's figure. Lucullus in Asia, Plutarch Lucullus 7, 20, 23; his recall, Plutarch Lucullus 33–35, Dio 36.2 and 36.14–17. Cicero, Man. 14–19.
- Cicero, Q. fr. 1.1.32–36 (60 B.C.); the Asian company's remission, Att. 1.17.9, 2.1.8, 2.16.2; Appian BC 2.13; Suetonius Caesar 20; Dio 38.7. Cilicia: Att. 5.16, 5.21, 6.1–3; the Salamis loan and the Senate's two decrees exempting it, Att. 5.21.10–13 and 6.2.7. Scaevola's edict as Cicero's model, Att. 6.1.15.
- Oropus: IG VII 413 = Syll.³ 747, with Bruns, Fontes no. 36; Cicero De nat. deor. 3.49. The date is the decree's own (a.d. XVIII Kal. Nov. in the consulship of M. Lucullus and C. Cassius).
- Caesar in Asia, Dio 42.6, Plutarch Caesar 48, Appian BC 5.4; Augustus' censuses, Livy Per. 134 and 138, Dio 53.22, Luke 2.1–2 and Josephus Ant. 18.1–2 for A.D. 6; procurators, Dio 53.15, Tacitus Ann. 4.6, 4.15; Dio's own proposal for salaried collectors in the speech he gives Maecenas, 52.28. Nero's edict, Tacitus Ann. 13.50–51, Suetonius Nero 10. Conductores and the procurator's staff on the Danube customs: ILS 1461–1470 and 1851–1863 with Dessau's notes; the change to direct collection under Commodus is Dessau's own dating from those stones and is given as his.
- The Aquileia stone: CIL V 936 = ILS 1469, known from manuscript copies; “Rom.” is the tribe Romilia, and the stone's date is not fixed more closely than the late Republic or early Principate. The Perpignan and Capua stones mentioned in the same paragraph are ILS 1852 (CIL XII 5362) and ILS 1863 (CIL X 3875).
- Modern framing, all before 1950 per house rules: Mommsen, bk. II ch. 8 and bk. IV ch. 3, 10–11; Greenidge, Roman Public Life (1901) ch. 6 and History of Rome 133–104 B.C. (1904) on the Gracchan laws; Ferrero, Greatness and Decline vol. 1 ch. 4–6; Heitland, The Roman Republic §§ 700–720; Frank, Economic History (1920) ch. 8 and 11 and Roman Imperialism (1914) ch. 11; Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History (1926) ch. 1–2 for the Principate.
Where this essay argues rather than reports, it says so. That the jury law of 123 B.C. was the decisive step, rather than the Asian contract itself, is the essay's reading of Appian and Mommsen; a reader who weights Plutarch's account of the Asian debt more heavily may put the fatal year at 84. That Nero's order to publish the tax regulations lies behind the Ephesus customs law of A.D. 62 is a widely held inference from the dates and is presented as probable, not proved. The Senate's motive for closing the Macedonian mines is given as Livy states it; some older historians read the closure as a favour to the Italian mine-owners, and the essay prefers Livy.