Political levelling and fixity 389 



so vast a scale. Perhaps careful observation and correction of errors 

 might have produced a reasonable degree of perfection in a long period 

 of unbroken peace : but no such period was at hand. The same strain 

 that drove the imperial government to the new taxation also prevented 

 any effective control of its working. 



It is perhaps inevitable that the exaction of dues in kind should 

 lead to abuses. At all events, abuses in this department were no new 

 thing: the sufferings of such Provinces as Sicily and Asia were notorious 

 i in the time of the Republic. A stricter control had made the state of 

 things much better in the first two centuries of the Empire. The ex- 

 ploitation of the Provincials was generally checked, and the imperial 

 government was not as yet driven by desperate financial straits to turn 

 ; extortioner itself. Caracalla's law of 212, extending the Roman fran- 

 chise 1 to all free inhabitants, was a symptom of conscious need, for it 

 brought all estates under the Roman succession-tax. At the same time 

 it did away with the old distinction between the ruling Roman people 

 ! and the subject nationalities : henceforth, wherever there was oppression 

 within the Roman world, it necessarily fell upon Roman 2 citizens. 

 Time had been when the Roman citizen, free to move into any part 

 of the Roman dominions and to acquire property there 3 under pro- 

 jection of Roman law, made full use of the opportunities afforded him, 

 to the disadvantage of the subject natives. Now all alike were the 

 helpless subjects of a government that they could neither reform nor 

 supersede ; a government whose one leading idea was to bring all in- 

 stitutions into fixed grooves in which they should move mechanically 

 year after year, unsusceptible of growth or decay. True, the plan was 

 absurd, and some few observers may have detected its absurdity. But 

 the power of challenging centralized officialism and evoking expression 

 of public opinion, never more than rudimentary in the Roman state, 

 Iwas now simply extinct. Things had come to such a pass that, speaking 

 generally, a citizen's choice lay between two alternatives. Either he 

 must bear an active part in the system that was squeezing out the vital 

 economic forces of the empire, making whenever possible a profit for 

 'himself out of a salary or illicit gains ; or he must submit passively to 

 'all such extortions as the system, worked by men whose duty and 

 'interest alike tended to make them merciless, was certain to inflict. 

 .The oppressors, though numerous, could only be few in proportion to 



1 Digest I 5 17, Dion Cass LXXVII 9 5. Schiller Geschichte I pp 750-1 thinks that 

 'military motives had much to do with it, as adding to the citizen troops. What is supposed 

 >to be a copy of the edict itself has been found in a papyrus, see Girard, textes part I ch 4 

 i 12. The text is in the Giessen papyri No 40. It seems certain that the lowest class of 

 peregrini (the dediticii} were not included in the grant. 



2 See Seeck n 323. Cf Lactant mart pers 23 5, Victor Caes 39 31. 



3 Through the ius commercii. 



