Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/652

580 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 guardians 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 surplus revenue was divided among the citizens of Athens, it is evident that for a time there was no necessity for taxation.

—Up to the time of Servius Tullius taxation 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.

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