|
Please note that Mommsen uses the AUC chronology (Ab Urbe Condita), i.e. from the founding of the City of Rome. You can use this reference table to have the B.C. dates
From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson
Page 77
Financial Reforms of Caesar - Leasing of the Direct Taxes Abolished
As soon however as the threads of Roman state-finance were concentrated no longer as hitherto in the senate, but in the cabinet of Caesar, new life, stricter order, and more compact connection at once pervaded all the wheels and springs of that great machine. the two institutions, which originated with Gaius Gracchus and ate like a gangrene into the Roman financial system--the leasing of the direct taxes, and the distributions of grain--were partly abolished, partly remodelled. Caesar wished not, like his predecessor, to hold the nobility in check by the banker-aristocracy and the populace of the capital, but to set them aside and to deliver the commonwealth from all parasites whether of high or lower rank; and therefore he went in these two important questions not with Gaius Gracchus, but with the oligarch Sulla.
The leasing system was allowed to continue for the indirect taxes, in the case of which it was very old and--under the maxim of Roman financial administration, which was retained inviolable also by Caesar, that the levying of the taxes should at any cost be kept simple and readily manageable-- absolutely could not be dispensed with. But the direct taxes were thenceforth universally either treated, like the African and Sardinian deliveries of corn and oil, as contributions in kind to be directly supplied to the state, or converted, like the revenues of Asia Minor, into fixed money payments, in which case the collection of the several sums payable was entrusted to the tax-districts themselves.
Do you see any typos or other mistakes? Please let us know and correct them
|
Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/rome/5-11-old-republic-new-monarchy.asp?pg=77