Making late Roman taxpayers pay: imperial government strategies and practice
Hartmut G. Ziche (Cambridge University)
Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, edited by H. Drake (Ashgate, 2006)
Abstract
Taxes under the later Roman Empire were a subject of passionate debate, no less so than at other times or in other cultural contexts. As in many modern discussions, the topic of fiscal justice was widely problematized by fourth- and fifth-century writers and legislators. The focus of the late Roman debate on fiscal justice however seems quite peculiar to the modern observer. There was no notion, for example, that the poor should pay proportionally less taxes than the rich or that there should be some form of fiscal recognition of services rendered to the economy, the community, or the state.
This statement might, at first glance, seem overly dogmatic, but even the Christian church and its clerics, the main ‘charity’ of the empire, represent only in part a counter-example to this claim. Tax reduction was not granted for orphans fed and widows succored, but was really given to clerics by virtue of their superior social status. Clerics enjoyed tax privileges because they were clerics, not because of what they did as clerics. In the same way senators enjoyed tax privileges, because they were senators, and not because some of them organized praetorian games in Rome or acted as patrons and benefactors for a community in the provinces. Fiscal justice thus was really rather a question of fiscal dignity. Privileged elite groups like senators, civil servants, or clerics demanded and were granted tax exemptions, because it would not have been fitting for socially superior groups to be subjected to state-organized taxation in the same way as humiliores.
Making late Roman taxpayers pay: imperial government strategies and practice
Hartmut G. Ziche (Cambridge University)
Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, edited by H. Drake (Ashgate, 2006)
Abstract
Taxes under the later Roman Empire were a subject of passionate debate, no less so than at other times or in other cultural contexts. As in many modern discussions, the topic of fiscal justice was widely problematized by fourth- and fifth-century writers and legislators. The focus of the late Roman debate on fiscal justice however seems quite peculiar to the modern observer. There was no notion, for example, that the poor should pay proportionally less taxes than the rich or that there should be some form of fiscal recognition of services rendered to the economy, the community, or the state.
This statement might, at first glance, seem overly dogmatic, but even the Christian church and its clerics, the main ‘charity’ of the empire, represent only in part a counter-example to this claim. Tax reduction was not granted for orphans fed and widows succored, but was really given to clerics by virtue of their superior social status. Clerics enjoyed tax privileges because they were clerics, not because of what they did as clerics. In the same way senators enjoyed tax privileges, because they were senators, and not because some of them organized praetorian games in Rome or acted as patrons and benefactors for a community in the provinces. Fiscal justice thus was really rather a question of fiscal dignity. Privileged elite groups like senators, civil servants, or clerics demanded and were granted tax exemptions, because it would not have been fitting for socially superior groups to be subjected to state-organized taxation in the same way as humiliores.
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