LATE ROMAN SOCIETY AND ECONOMYright, so that they are not allowed to leave the places by whose crops they
are nurtured or desert the fi elds which they have once undertaken to culti-
vate, but the landlords of Palestine do not enjoy this advantage: we ordain
that in Palestine also no tenant whatever be free to wander at his own
choice, but as in other provinces he be tied to the owner of the farm.
(CJ XI.51.1)The tax collector looms large in contemporary literature as a hated and dread-
ed fi gure, and the danger to those who could not pay was very real. Paphnu-
tius, a hermit near Heracleopolis in the Thebaid, met a former brigand who
told him how he had once come upon a woman who had suffered in this way,
and asked her why she was crying; she replied:
‘Do not ask me, master; do not question me in my misery but take me
anywhere you wish as your handmaid. For my husband has often been
fl ogged during the last two years because of arrears of taxes amounting
to three hundred gold coins. He has been put in prison and my beloved
three children have been sold as slaves. As for me, I have become a fugi-
tive and move from place to place. I now wander in the desert but I am
frequently found and fl ogged. I have been in the desert now for three
days without eating anything.’
‘I felt sorry for her,’ said the brigand, ‘and took her to my cave. I gave
her the three hundred gold coins and brought her to the city, where I se-
cured her release together with that of her husband and children.’
(Russell, Lives of the Desert Fathers, 95)The repeated laws show, however, how little the government could actually
do to enforce collection of revenue. The taxes were highly regressive: small
peasant proprietors paid the same as great landlords for the same amount
of land. And despite Constantine’s reforms, the traditional emphasis on the
land still led to a failure to tap major sources of wealth, whether from trade
or, importantly, from senatorial incomes. In the latter case, especially, it was
in part the nature of the tax laws themselves which enabled senators to amass
colossal fortunes while the government went short. Emperors themselves
shared the traditional view that exemption from taxation was a privilege to
which rank and favour allowed one rightfully to aspire, and thus their grants
of exemption were not simply a way of gaining popularity but an expression
of this traditional attitude. Cancelling arrears was another common device, in
the face of real inability to enforce the law, for political reasons or in response
to these traditional attitudes, and there was little conception of budgeting for
the future. On the other hand, as Jones points out, the eastern government
at any rate seems to have been able to collect very substantial sums on a con-
tinuous basis;^48 this was despite the outfl ow of large sums of gold to buy
peace with Persia, or for ‘subsidy’ payments to barbarian groups.^49 The sums
expended for both purposes could be very high, and the practice continued