Free The Fall of the Roman Empire by Michael Grant Page A

insufficient.'
    The remark later cost Ursulus his life, at the hands of the soliders he had criticized. And, indeed, even if his censure of the fall of Amida was justified, and even if wastages of money were not uncommon, it still remained true that the army had to be maintained, so that the money for its upkeep simply had to be found. But it did not prove possible to find it. When Valentinian in confessed that his plans for the army had failed, he blamed the failure upon lack of funds. There was not enough money, he said, for his existing forces, let alone for new recruits.
    The writer On Matters of Warfare, not content with pointing to the general problem, has a number of specific suggestions to make: though, unfortunately, they are not always very useful. One such proposal - which he recognizes to be a perilous point to make to his masters - is that the government should cut down or abolish the bonuses it habitually paid to soldiers and civil servants alike, since he regards these payments as the principal cause of the Empire's decline. But earlier rulers, too, had found it a political necessity to distribute whatever gifts they could, whether the proceeds of taxation or of plunder, among their troops and their henchmen.
    Certainly the unknown author was justified in saying that the bonuses heavily burdened the taxpayer. But the only trouble was that it might be suicidal to cut them. He also suggested demobilizations at a younger age, in order to save higher salaries. But this too was probably not a practical possibility, owing to the absence of manpower to replace those who were discharged.
    Another anonymous author of the same period, one of the biographers of the Historia Augusta, refers with enthusiasm to an alleged statement by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Probus (276-82) that since things, under his rule, were going so well, there would soon be no need for a Roman army any longer.
. . . What great bliss would then have shone forth, if under his rule there had ceased to be soldiers! No rations would now be furnished by any provincial, no pay for the troops taken out of the public largesses, the commonwealth of Rome would keep its treasures forever, no payments would be made by the prince, no tax required of the holder of land! It was in very truth a golden age that he promised.
    It was indeed, and the golden age never arrived. What happened, instead, was exactly the reverse: the army became larger and larger. The Historia Augusta, however, was entirely correct in identifying the army as the principal cause and recipient of taxation. When, therefore, Valentinian I and Theodosius I both made gigantic efforts, in their different ways, to strengthen the military forces, heavy taxes were the inevitable result. Owing to the absence of floating capital, the government could not, in the modern fashion, throw part of its burdens on posterity by creating a public debt.
    As far as Valentinian, at least, was concerned, this taxation was imposed with considerable reluctance, since Ammianus specifically informs us of that Emperor's desire to grant the provincials financial relief. But whatever his personal wishes, he felt obliged to allow Petronius Probus, his praetorian prefect in Italy, Illyricum (Yugoslavia) and North Africa, to resort to very severe extortions, and towards the end of the reign taxation rose steeply.
    As for Theodosius I, his laws show a passionate desire to increase the influx of revenue by every possible means. 'No man', he pronounced in 383, 'shall possess any property that is tax exempt.' And he set out by a whole spate of regulations to enforce this principle, with ever-increasing harshness.
    He did so at the cost of unprecedentedly ruthless methods. The employment of such methods for the collection of taxes was no novelty. It had been practised for more than a hundred years past. The third century AD, crammed with critical foreign and civil wars, had witnessed an almost total breakdown of the political