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

structure and of national defence. This was a crisis from which the Empire was only rescued by fantastic military efforts. But the price of maintaining the recovery had been a huge, permanent increase in taxation, and an intensification of all the numerous totalitarian kinds of pressure needed to rake its proceeds into the treasury.
    And now the pressure had become more exacting still. Successive Emperors each tried to turn the screw a little tighter, and a torrent of laws and edicts of Theodosius 1 shows that he, in particular, tightened it almost to breaking point. It was no use the poet Claudian patriotically denying that the provinces were hard hit by taxes, or the envoy Priscus of Panium (Barbaros) in Thrace, half a century later, assuring an expatriate Greek that all was for the best in the Imperial arrangements.
    Valentinian 111 openly admitted the savagery of his own system, and even remitted arrears of taxation - at least for the rich. When Majorian came to the throne shortly afterwards, and Sidonius welcomed his accession with a congratulatory address, he managed to insert a reference to the tax burden which oppressed his native Gaul. And the new Emperor himself issued a legal pronouncement deploring these severities with a vivid frankness that left nothing to the imagination.
    During the emergencies of the third century, the custom had grown of demanding tax-payments in goods rather than cash - a reversion (like the payment of soldiers by the same means) towards the barter systems of primitive times. Towards the end of the Empire, this taxation policy began to be reversed, and levies in kind were increasingly commuted to gold once again -first of all, the provision of horses, oxen and uniforms for the army, and then the regular land-tax previously payable in grain, wine, oil and meat. This was a sort of recovery, in terms of general, long-term concepts of progress. Yet it did not help the men and women who were hardest hit by taxation.
    And to make matters worse, the population was gravely inconvenienced by the inadequacies of the currency, which was far inferior to the well-planned coinages of earlier Imperial times. It was true that, after a period of unreliable gold issues, Constantine had done well to reintroduce a stable unit in this metal, the solidus. But that was of little use to the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Empire, who rarely if ever possessed a gold coin at all (although payment in gold was required for certain taxes); and even Theodosius' new gold denomination, one-third of the solidus in size, did not seriously help to bridge the gulf. He and his colleagues also issued a small silver coin, but it did not last for any length of time. Most people never saw anything but a coinage of bronze or lightly silvered bronze, and this, moreover, as time went on, was able to buy less and less.
    This inflation was largely caused by increases in the face-value of the solidus. This ostensible value, in terms of its bronze fractions, was no less than forty-five times larger in 400 than it had been one hundred years previously. That meant that the government issued more and more of the bronze pieces - without withdrawing many in the form of taxation, so often paid in gold -so that they cluttered the market and became worth progressively less and less in terms of goods. The authorities remained unconcerned about this unfortunate result, since the bronze,

being a token currency, could be issued at quite arbitrary face-values, bringing a large profit to themselves. And in any case, like everyone else in the ancient world, they were unaware of the economic law insisting that if the number of coins increases and the goods available remain the same, then prices are bound to rise.
    The resulting hardship was colossal, as it had already been during successive inflations throughout the previous century. The trades-people of the Western provinces, who were mainly Greeks and Jews, must have found life almost