Chapters
In the Roman state, local administration was based on the so-called curiae (equivalent to modern city councils), assemblies made up of the wealthiest inhabitants in a given administrative area, known as curiales. Interestingly, a council member did not necessarily have to be a Roman citizen, as the only quality necessary to enter the ranks of decuriales, from which councillors were recruited, was enough wealth, so freedmen or merchants sometimes served as councillors, although the latter had to close their businesses before taking up the office.
The duties of curials and their adult sons included managing the local community, carrying out the orders of the governor and imperial authorities, as well as collecting taxes. This last task, a rather dubious honor for those who performed it, will be discussed at greater length in this article.
Tax collection
It should be explained that the collection of taxes (Latin: munus exigendi tributi) had to be carried out by members of the city council, since by its nature it was neither degrading work nor simple manual labour, and could therefore not be delegated to members of other social classes that served the council. This principle was recorded in the Digesta Iustiniani, a collection of excerpts from the writings of Roman jurists compiled on the order of Emperor Justinian I the Great in order to unify statutory law.
50, 1, 17, 7: Exigendi tributi munus inter sordida munera non habetur et ideo decurionibus quoque mandatur.
“The duty of collecting taxes is not considered a degrading task and is therefore also entrusted to decurions” (authorial translation).
By further read of this collection we also learn that tax collection was a “personal duty,” meaning a task assigned to a specific council member. This duty was also hereditary, passing from father to son, though it was theoretically possible to relinquish the post in favour of another person, which however was not so simple, as will be discussed later.
City councils collected taxes of various types and purposes: local fees, rents from municipal property, donations from the wealthy, interest on loans made to private individuals, and taxes imposed by imperial authorities, with the exception of customs duties. The collected taxes were then redistributed in two ways: donations and rents fed directly into the budget of the council and the city, whereas the rest was transferred to the imperial treasury, where the money was divided with part of it being sent back to the region where it had been collected. For most of this period the amount was one third of what the city had originally transferred, but under the Severan dynasty, for example, cities were stripped of the ability to manage their own funds, and all investments became dependent on the will of the imperial authorities.
In modern times we might call this a cheap PR stunt, yet the Severans were known for their authoritarian approach, so their fiscal policy didn’t have to be linked to want of g