126 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
This general conclusion must be qualifi ed. The evidence is thin. Few
cities are visible, and when they come into focus, we are given only a
partial glimpse of their condition. The inscriptions that inform us about
individual food shortages are honorifi c. Their function was to advertise
the generosity of men who by their benefactions had averted crisis. They
issued from communities that were not in serious disarray or slow
decline. The latter did not expose their weaknesses through the medium of
epigraphy.
The problem recedes once it is recognized that the central government
had a fi rm stake in the survival and welfare of cities in general, less so in
those of individual cities, with some exceptions. Cities were needed to
perform a narrow range of essential administrative duties, and for this their
economic viability and demographic base had to be preserved. But this
general commitment to cities did not extend to the preservation of any
individual community at a given level of prosperity. So the territories of
cities and their revenues were increased or diminished; some were demoted
and became subservient to others, some were promoted or created out of
nothing, for a variety of reasons, often trivial. The continually changing
pattern of urbanization in the empire is not to be mistaken for an endemic
weakness in the administrative infrastructure of the empire.
A conclusion relating to the peasantry follows similar lines. The ebb and
fl ow in the countryside, as peasant households collapsed, survived, migrated
and prospered, should not be confused with the issue of the survival of the
peasantry as a class. If there was no group survival of the farming population,
then the cities, dependent upon the agricultural resources of the countryside,
would certainly have been in a state of collapse. As a fourth- century prefect
of the city of Rome put it to the Roman senate in time of famine in Italy: ‘If
so many cultivators are starved, and so many farmers die, our corn supply
will be ruined for good. We are excluding those who normally supply our
daily bread’ (Ambrose, off. 3.45ff.).
It remains to bring these conclusions to bear on the issues raised earlier,
the demands of the government and the way they were distributed.
Taxation, tribute, impositions under some other name, were not a new
phenomenon in the regions that made up the Roman empire. What occurred
as a result of imperial conquest and the imposition of empire- wide censuses
was that tax was raised somewhat more effi ciently and from a wider area
than ever before. Tax rates remained relatively low, at least outside Egypt,
and Vespasian is the only emperor known to have raised them. A high level
of taxation was unnecessary. The requirements of the government were very
limited, because its concerns were few.
Thus, the demands of the central government were not such as to threaten
the future of Rome’s subjects. Moreover, although those demands were
greater in aggregate than those made by any previous imperial state in the
Mediterranean region, they were also distributed throughout the empire,
and the empire was big enough to absorb them.