James Tan | Fiscal Networks and State Creation in Republican Rome

Roman troops were paid for their service a century before the first Roman coins and almost two centuries before the first truly large issues of coinage. While it is impossible to know how much Rome’s armies cost—or even what that verb meant—in the fourth century BCE, it is possible to recreate the methods of tax collection and payment. Rome, Tan argues, relied on rural socio-economic networks to fund the soldiers’ pay. Local notables (tribuni aerarii) reimbursed local troops and collected taxes by incorporating such payments into their existing matrices of exchanges, debits, credits, leases, employment etc. All of this allowed “money” to circulate via well established networks and with little to no involvement from the fisc. By focussing on the networks through which resources were mobilized, we can capitalize on relational dimensions of fiscality rather than trying to establish quantitative ones. This approach unlocks various new approaches to Roman Republican history without ever having to reconstruct the unknowable data of Roman public finance. The ability to embed military pay in pre-coinage economic networks, for example, allowed Rome to deploy empire-scale armies without first establishing empire-scale revenues or coin stocks. By embedding military pay in decentralized communities, moreover, it also reshaped rural society by tying the local prominence of wealthy landowners to the most valued source of status in Rome: collective warfare.

About the Speaker

Image

James Tan is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney, and was formerly assistant professor of History at Hofstra University and Visiting Assistant Professor at Union College. He is the author of Power and Public Finance at Rome (264-49 BCE), published with Oxford University Press.