in the Ancient Roman Empire

Whether paying your taxes in Roman times was as unpleasant as it is universally perceived to be today depends on who you were and when you lived. By 167 B.C. the Roman government had so successfully enriched itself at the expense of its recently captured provinces and through revenues from its Spanish silver mines that it no longer needed to levy a tax against land owned by its citizens in Italy.

It was a different story in the provinces, which were subject to every unauthorized revenue-generating scheme known to man. The infamous publicani were private tax-farmers hired by the provincial governors to collect whatever taxes they could above and beyond the official rate. Pocketing the difference they colluded with other Roman capitalists to buy up grain at a low rate at harvest time and then sell it back at inflated rates in times of shortage. They also lent money to hard-pressed provincials at a usurious rate of 4% or more per month. No wonder they are so persistently lumped in the New Testament with the "sinners."

Each emperor faced the challenge of meeting the soaring costs of administration, and schemes to revise the tax structure came and went as the empire rolled on. The biggest changes came late in the day. Diocletian (A.D. 284-305) imposed a universal price freeze with mixed results at the same time that he reinstated the land tax on Italian landowners (mostly paid in kind rather than coin). He also imposed special tolls in money on traders and corporate associations. While in theory his scheme should have brought a degree of relief to the various classes of taxpayers, in practice it did not, largely because additional taxes were levied once the land tax had been paid. In addition the burden of payment was shifted onto the members of the local senatorial class who were subject to financial ruin in the case of any fall-short. To make matters even worse, Diocletian's successor, Constantine, made the municipal senatorial class hereditary, so that even if your spendthrift father had pauperized you and your family, you still inherited his rank as a senator along with his tax burden.