- Power and Public Finance at Rome, 264-49 BCE by James Tan
Tan provides a novel approach to understanding the politics of the Roman Republic—follow the money. In the process, he breaks through a longstanding loggerhead in the debate about the political character of the Republic: Was it fundamentally aristocratic, with a narrow set of families dominating high office in the city, or basically democratic, given that citizen assemblies elected magistrates and passed legislation?
Tan argues that the Roman people had the most leverage over state policy when they paid taxes, particularly a property tax called tributum. After the conquest of Macedonia in 167 b.c., tributum was permanently suspended, and the Roman state financed itself largely from the proceeds of empire. The Roman populace being less interested in how other people's money was spent, elites enjoyed freer reign. The aristocracy then chose to maintain a fiscally weak and decentralized state. Because few Roman senators would ever hold the highest offices (consul or censor), they therefore had a collective interest in keeping the state underfunded to limit the resources available to the fortunate few who did. This dynamic explains the decline of public-works projects after the 140s b.c. Most importantly, maintaining a poor state allowed the aristocracy to funnel the wealth of the Mediterranean into their own coffers.
Despite rapid overseas expansion, Roman public revenues increased only modestly during the second and first centuries b.c., while private fortunes skyrocketed. Rome did not follow the trajectory of modern states, where, in Tilly's axiom, "war made the state and the state made war."1 Instead, the relatively underdeveloped Roman state handily won wars, [End Page 563] but the elite declined to engage in further state building or resource maximization of the sort theorized by Levi.2 Roman aristocrats had a theory of predatory rule, but mainly for the purposes of personal enrichment. According to Tan, one reason for the Roman introduction of provincial tax farming was the opportunity that it afforded governors and their staffs to enrich themselves, given that this corruption did not impact the fixed amount guaranteed to the public treasury through the tax farmers' contract.
The second part of the book tacks back to the First and Second Punic Wars (264-241 and 218-201 b.c., respectively), when the state was still funded in large part by tributum, and citizen assemblies routinely interjected themselves into the conduct of wars. Tan is correct to correlate such ground-level activism with taxpaying. He largely ignores the parallel role of military conscription as a motivator for active political participation (although serving in the legions was a way to avoid tributum). Roman citizens provided the blood, as well as the treasure, that fueled the war effort; such sacrifices certainly persisted after 167 b.c. Tan points to several moments, however, when money was undoubtedly the main point of contention between the aristocracy and the commons—as when citizens voted to reject peace with Carthage in 241 b.c. until the indemnity paid to Rome was substantially increased.
Tan closes with a discussion of the murder of the Gracchi brothers (Tiberius in 133 b.c. and Gaius in 121 b.c.) at the hands of their senatorial colleagues. Their "crimes" were steps to regularize and intensify the fiscal power of the state at the expense of aristocratic initiative—Tiberius' law appropriating the revenues of Asia and Gaius' establishment of a permanent grain dole. Tan would have done well to discuss the late republic in greater detail; his methodology would do much to illuminate the running disputes about the corruption courts, the continued presence of radical tribunes, and the rise of military dynasts commissioned by popular laws. A sequel would be welcome.
This revelatory book creatively employs the methods of fiscal sociology to provide new perspectives on Rome's turbulent politics. Tan's accessible vision of a republic ruined by a predatory elite, an inattentive populace, and destabilizing concentrations of wealth is a cautionary tale that would benefit an audience of...