Public Land and the Revenues of Cities in the Early Roman Empire

James Macksoud (Stanford University)

In recent decades, great progress has been made in discerning the sources and scale of revenues belonging to the Roman Imperial State (Scheidel 2015). However, these developments have not been mirrored in the study of the public finances of the empire’s approximately 2,000 largely autonomous cities. While it is agreed that civic revenues were derived from various sources including rents from public lands, obligatory payments from magistrates (i.e., summa honoraria), fines, munera/liturgies, and indirect taxes or fees (portoria or vectigalia) (Abbott & Johnson 1926, Reynolds 1988), disagreement remains concerning the scale and relative importance of these sources of revenue (Zuiderhoek 2009). This paper contends that a reappraisal of the quantitative evidence for civic finances demonstrates that rents from public lands must have served as the backbone of public finance in a plurality or majority of cities in the early empire.

The importance of public land for civic revenue streams has been underappreciated in large part because summa honoraria (in the western Mediterranean) and indirect taxes (in the east) are more visible in the epigraphic record (Duncan-Jones 1990, Zuiderhoek 2009). Ironically, the indispensability of rents from public lands for civic budgets can be demonstrated by interrogating these alternative revenue sources. A comprehensive survey of the quantitative evidence for the scale of summa honoraria and vectigalia combined with estimates for the typical expenditures of Roman cities reveals that these revenue sources would have been woefully inadequate to meet the budgetary needs of most cities. In contrast, evidence for the scale of revenues from public land suggests that this source of income could indeed have produced the sums required for civic outlays. When combined with qualitative evidence from textual and legal sources concerning the ubiquity of public land, it stands to reason that public land was the central pillar of most civic finance.

Bibliography

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