58o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



81,180,000; and, according to Mr. Boeckh, the revenues of the 

 city never exceeded two thousand talents, or $2,360,000. The 

 annual tax paid on the property of Demosthenes by his guardi- 

 ans amounted to only one fifth of one per cent of its valuation ; 

 and as, before the Peloponnesian war, the receipts from the 

 silver mines owned by the state were so abundant that the sur- 

 plus revenue was divided among the citizens of Athens, it is evi- 

 dent that for a time there was no necessity for taxation. 



Taxation in Rome. Up to the time of Servius Tullius taxa- 

 tion in Rome consisted of a capitation assessment, arbitrarily 

 fixed, without regard to the means of the individual.* After the 

 termination of the last Punic war, and down to nearly the epoch 

 of the Empire a period of at least one hundred and twenty-five 

 years the people of Rome were exempt from all direct taxation. 

 This was due to the circumstance that Rome had accumulated 

 great wealth, and was in receipt of an annual revenue from her 

 conquered provinces fully adequate to defray all the expenses of 

 the government, including the military establishment of the state. 

 A large revenue for a considerable period was also derived from 

 the imperial silver mines in Spain. Cicero, who lived before the 

 empire, in one of his epistles to Atticus, laments the possibility 

 of a resort to taxation by the state at some time in the future as 

 something ominous of evil. 



One of the first acts, however, of Augustus, after assuming the 

 reins of government, was the gradual institution of an extensive 

 system of taxation. He organized a land tax for the whole 

 empire ; and followed it up with what Gibbon terms " an artful 

 assessment " on the real and personal property of the Roman 

 citizens, who, as before shown, had been long exempted from any 

 contributions for the support of the state. A tax of five per cent, 

 or one twentieth, was also imposed on all legacies and successions, 

 which did not apply to objects inherited of less than a specified 

 value (" probably," says Gibbon, " of fifty or a hundred pieces of 

 gold ") ; nor was it exacted from the nearest of kin on the father's 

 side, t 



This tax which appears to have been most productive, was one 

 of the most permanent taxes of the empire, and its amount was 

 increased by the successors of Augustus. 



Gibbon seems to have been in doubt as to the motive which 



* Ortolan, History of Roman Jurisprudence, English edition, p., 257. 



f " Such a tax was most happily suited to the situation of the Romans, who could frame 

 their arbitrary wills according to the dictates of reason or caprice, without any restraint 

 from the modem fetters of entails and settlements. From various causes, the partiality of 

 parental affection also often lost its influence over the dissolute nobles of the empire ; and 

 if the father bequeathed to his son a fourth part of his estate, he removed all grounds of 

 legal complaint." {Gibbon, vol. i, p. 192.) 



