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Competition Between Public and Private Revenues in Roman Social and Political History

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Competition Between Public and Private Revenues in Roman Social and Political History Competition Between Public and Private Revenues in Roman Social and Political History (200-49 B.C.) James Tan Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Under the Executive Committee Of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Columbia University 2011 © 2011 James Tan All rights reserved ABSTRACT Competition Between Public and Private Revenues in Roman Social and Political History (200-49 B.C.) James Tan This dissertation applies the principles of fiscal dissertation to the study of the Roman Republic. I argue that the creation of a profitable empire allowed the ruling elite to end their reliance on domestic taxation to fund state activity, and that Rome’s untaxed citizens were effectively disenfranchised as a result. They therefore lacked the bargaining power to prevent aristocrats from enriching themselves at the expense of the state. The result was a set of leading individuals whose resources could overwhelm those of communal, public institutions. This wealth allowed them to control the distribution of economic resources within Roman society, reinforcing hierarchies and forcing less fortunate citizens to tie themselves to patronage networks instead of state institutions. This state, unable to command the respect of its constituents, was eventually picked off in the competition between great individuals. Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Introduction 1 Chapter one: Roman Tax Systems 39 Chapter Two: The Use and Abuse of Tax Farmers 65 Chapter Three: Revenues and the Provinces 100 Chapter Four: The Gracchi and the Aristocracy 145 Appendix 203 Conclusion 209 Bibliography 219 i Acknowledgements I am fortunate in having to acknowledge a great deal of financial assistance in the course of completing this dissertation. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University provided five years of support through a graduate fellowship, as well as administering the Wollemberg Family Fellowship which provided funding for a year of study in Rome. The Cooper Travelling Scholarship out of the University of Sydney provided generous support for three years. Finally, the Mrs Giles Whiting Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities allowed me to work without the obligations of teaching in this final year. I received consistent support from faculty members in Columbia University’s Classical Studies Program. James Zetzel and Richard Billows gave feedback on individual chapters, and William Harris saw and improved almost every draft version of every chapter. Beyond Classical Studies, Charles Tilly took me in and played a major role in exposing me to the social scientific literature which would inform so much of the eventual approach taken. It was a privilege to witness up close his generosity, professionalism and astonishing erudition. An even greater debt is due to Karen Barkey, who, like Chuck, was under no institutional obligation to supervise a Roman historian. Despite this, she poured time and energy into improving every section of this dissertation, despite the often alien and unhelpful prose of a Roman history specialist. Her expertise in historical sociology improved not only these pages, but my overall education; I have no doubt that her legacy will be clear in all I will go on to write in the future. More than any others, however, I owe a great deal to my fellow Columbia students. From beginning to end, they have made graduate school a positive experience in ii ways which extend far beyond scholarship. Zoë Tan is obviously chief among them. She read over the entire dissertation and made it far more readable than it had been. The reader owes her a great deal, but for this and so many other contributions, I owe her more. iii 1 Introduction In 49 B.C., having crossed the Rubicon, C. Julius Caesar was racing south towards the Pompeian forces embarking at Brundisium. As his troops approached Corfinium, across the Apennine mountains from Rome, they engaged forces under the command of L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, consul five years earlier and no friend of Caesar’s. Ahenobarbus saw his men forced back by Caesar’s veterans, and to prevent them from fleeing the fortified town altogether, he delivered a speech in which he promised to assign 40 iugera of his own land to every infantryman and proportionally more to each officer.1 In his effort to resist what he saw as Caesar’s private war on Rome, he did not hesitate to deploy his own private resources in defence of the res publica. Nor, apparently, did he see any chance of public resources being spent on his soldiers. If his troops were to be won over by economic gain, it would not to be by the generosity of the Roman treasury - Ahenobarbus himself would have to step up. It was far from only Ahenobarbus who was willing and able to use private resources on this kind of public scale. He was one of a handful of prominent Romans who could justifiably claim to be state-like powers in their own rights: they had populations of clients, incredible revenues, social prestige and – as witnessed by Ahenobarbus’ agrarian scheme – the potential to solve the quotidian problems of a large number of Roman citizens. In terms of the resources it could marshal, the res publica was not unchallenged, and over time, competition only grew from those whom Syme dubbed 1 Caes. B.C. 1.17. 2 dynasts.2 Public and private could be compared with respect to what each was or what each could do. By the end of the Roman Republic, they both had resources like money, land and grain, and could use them to exercise violence or to create social networks. Public and private power became blurred in a way foreign to our own, modern context: as Tilly expressed it for a different period, “every thirteenth-century noble household owned swords, but no twentieth-century household owns an aircraft carrier.”3 This did not, of course, mean that the super-wealthy of the late Republic saw themselves as actual civitates, but it is to claim that a large enough body of private resources granted the individual a dangerous independence from the collective. It was not for its scale but for its equation of wealth with military viability that Crassus’ famous saying earned notoriety: “he who cannot support a legion on his annual income is not rich.”4 The aim of this dissertation is two-fold: first, to show how this near equivalence of public and private resources was created and maintained; second, to analyse the effects which it had on Roman politics and Roman society between 200 and 49.5 I will examine the ways in which both the public treasury and the elite private estates profited from the conquest of the Mediterranean basin, and this will lead to a study of the immense inequalities in Roman society. In the end I will make three major claims: firstly, that Rome’s peculiar systems of raising and spending public revenues severely impacted the bargaining power of various constituencies in the body politic; secondly, that this 2 Syme 1939: 12: “The nobiles were dynasts, their daughters princesses.” I do not, however, follow Syme’s conception of a collusive clique, collectively dominating the “screen” and “sham” of the Roman constitution (Syme 1939: 15). Instead, I will focus on these powerful individuals as autonomous agents, able to warp social networks to their advantage through the deployment of their immense resources. On the economic motivations of soldiers, see Gabba 1976: esp. 25 and Brunt 1988: esp. 1931. 3 Tilly 1990: 84 4 Plin. N.H. 33.134: Crassus negabat locupletem esse nisi qui reditu annuo legionem tueri posset. 5 All dates are B.C. unless stated otherwise. 3 facilitated an extreme inequality of wealth as the elite could not be prevented from seizing more and more of the Empire’s profits; finally, that this focus on resources offers a realistic explanation for the persistent importance of social hierarchies and even for the descent into civil war. Like almost all studies of Roman politics, its orbit will inevitably centre itself on various modes of social domination, but I believe that my focus on resources, and particularly on taxes, is a fresh one. Fiscal issues have not traditionally been at the forefront of the field. Domination was ascribed to constitutional structures in the Staatsrecht of Mommsen, the usual vir post quem of Roman history.6 One of Mommsen’s own students, however, Elimar Klebs, would begin work on the prosopographical entries in Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft, a project which would shift the field from an analysis of institutions to one of individuals. While Klebs handled the biographies of individuals whose names began with A or B, those from C to P would receive famously detailed treatment from Münzer, and the light shed on individual careers by these studies would lead him to produce an influential monograph that focussed on the alliances and feuds supposedly formed by elite families in their quest for higher office.7 Münzer’s studies would lay the foundation for such scholars as Ronald Syme and Ernst Badian, the latter of whom went so far as to dedicate an article to his intellectual hero.8 By presenting in an accessible format the careers, marriages and anecdotal deeds of virtually every 6 On the abiding impact of this work, see Nippel 2005 and Hölkeskamp 2010: 12-3, 27, each with further references. 7 Münzer 1920, translated as Münzer 1999. The influence of Mommsen’s constitutional focus on Münzer’s prosopographical model can be seen in the latter’s belief that Roman politics ultimately revolved around the consulship – for Münzer, success and failure can be inferred from the record of which family made it to the top of the cursus honorum.
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