Fiscal Semantics in the Long Second Century

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter examines the relationship between Roman citizenship and fiscality in the long second century. It takes as its point of departure the seemingly contradictory relation of citizens to taxation: there were taxes from which all citizens were exempt, but there were also taxes that only they paid. At the chapter’s core lies the contention that we can only understand this situation and its history if we take into account the competing meanings of taxation that existed within the empire. Taxes could signify constitutional, imperial, and social difference, but they could also constitute community and belonging. Tracing these meanings and their history allows us to understand Roman citizens’ relationship to the poll tax, from which they were exempt, and to the inheritance tax, which only they paid, and it allows us to get to the bottom of Italy’s long-lasting immunity from tributum. The chapter starts with a case against the existence of a fiscal meaning of citizenship, which scholars sometimes assume, and it concludes with an argument about what might have been the most far-reaching consequence of fiscal semantics in the empire: the possibility that what the chapter terms “Severan fiscal thought,” the demonstrably unique way in which Septimius Severus and Caracalla approached taxation, also underpinned the Constitutio Antoniniana.