Roman Public Life

by A. H. J. Greenidge

(ii.) Disqualifications were pronounced as a consequence of certain modes of life, trades, or professions. Actors were perpetually disqualified from all civic privileges,[1087] and gladiators were probably subject to a similar degradation.[1088] Amongst dishonourable employments was reckoned that of a money-lender who exacted an excessive rate of interest.[1089]

(iii.) Breaches of political duty in any sphere called down the censor’s displeasure. The magistrate might be degraded for cruelty or insubordination in the exercise of his office,[1090] for the neglect of constitutional formalities,[1091] for a misuse of the auspices,[1092] or even for the passing of a law likely to injure the morals of the community.[1093] The judex might be punished for accepting bribes,[1094] the soldier or officer for shirking service or for showing cowardice or disobedience,[1095] and the voting citizen for a misuse of his judicial or elective power.[1096] Disgraceful conduct in a court of law might also entail the censure. It visited the collusion of a prosecutor with the accused or malicious prosecution in a criminal case (praevaricatio, calumnia),[1097] and attended false witness and false oaths. Since there was no secular punishment for perjury, its visitation was peculiarly the work of the censors.[1098]

(iv.) The censors sometimes pronounced disqualifications as the result of a judicial sentence.[1099] Theft and other private delicts were attended with infamy, and sometimes the censure was independent of the judgment of a court.[1100] The censure, which followed a criminal condemnation, might be either one of the censors’ own creation[1101] or the mere fulfilment of a disqualification already enjoined by law. Of the second kind were the disabilities pronounced by the lex Cassia of 104 B.C.[1102] or by the lex Calpurnia de ambitu of 67 B.C., the latter of which enjoined perpetual exclusion from the Senate as a result of condemnation.[1103]

IV. The effects of the censorian infamia depended partly on the rank of the person disqualified, but were always regulated to some extent by the gravity of the offence. The senator was removed from the list, the knight from the equestrian centuries, the commoner is said tribu moveri or aerarius fieri, or both.[1104] “Removal from the tribe” has two meanings: either that of the milder penalty of relegation from a higher to a lower tribe, or of the severer punishment of total exclusion from the tribes, while aerarium facere implies exclusion from the centuries.[1105]

V. The lustrum.—After the ranks of the various orders had thus been purified, the lustral sacrifice (lustratio) was offered for the whole assembled army in the field of Mars.[1106] The ox, the sheep, and the pig (suovetaurilia), which were led round the host and then sacrificed to the god, were at once an atonement for sin and a thanksgiving for blessings prayed for at the preceding lustrum and since vouchsafed.[1107] The completion of this ceremonial marked the close of the censor’s functions, at least of those connected with the census.

VI. Other functions of the censors.—The necessity for the division of functions, which had created the censorship, led to financial duties, analogous to but unconnected with those of the census, being taken from other magistracies and attached to that office. These were the leasing of the public revenues, the maintenance of public property, and the administrative jurisdiction connected with these duties.

The Roman state, in its administration of the public property, had always favoured the system of contracting out. The system was that of purchase or lease by middlemen (publicani) of a prospective source of revenue, which the individual or the company farmed at its own risk or profit. Sometimes the middleman was himself the occupant (possessor) of, or the contractor (conductor) for, the source of wealth from which the revenue was derived. This principle was applied to limited sources of wealth or those requiring particular industrial appliances, such as fisheries, salt-works, mines, and forest-land. This system of direct farming was sometimes applied to domain-land both in Italy and the provinces. The ager Campanus was dealt with in this way, and the royal domains of the kings whom Rome had supplanted were, with the confiscated territory of Corinth, let on long leases to publicani,[1108] who doubtless in most cases sublet these territories to smaller holders. Such contracts were put up to auction, and their terms were fixed by a lex censoria dictated by the censor as the representative of the state. This lex, besides specifying the revenue which the lessee was required to pay, also fixed the conditions under which the contract was to be undertaken.[1109]

The second kind of tax-farmer is a true middleman.[1110] The publicanus here is not himself employed in working the source of wealth; he is not a possessor or occupant, but one who has bought from the state the right to collect revenue from such an occupant. The right is put up to auction and bought for a fixed sum, for which the company of successful contractors furnishes security. Their gains depend on the prospective surplus of the revenue which they propose to farm over the sum which they have agreed to pay. This was the method of dealing with the public land which had been left open for occupation by squatters (occupatorius ager). It was either tilled land (ager) enjoyed by a possessor, or pasture land (silva pascua, saltus) over which the pastor grazed his flocks. Both occupants were tolerated by the state on condition that they paid a fixed due for their precarious tenure.[1111] The publicani were the men who had the right to collect this vectigal from the user of the land, and the dues which they might collect were determined by the lex dicta under which the censor sold the right.[1112] A further class of revenues collected in this manner were the harbour dues (portoria). They were based on the same leading idea of the use of public ground by a private occupant; he pays for this use, and the right of collecting this vectigal within a given area is sold to a company of publicani. A great extension was given to this system of tax-farming by its application to provincial administration. The Roman translated the tithe (δεκάτη, decuma) which he found in Sicily and Asia into his own familiar vectigal, but for a time he adhered to the existing conditions of local collection, and in Sicily the tithes were sold in the island itself in accordance with the lex Hieronica.[1113] Asia was the first province to which the experiment of a collective sale of the taxes in Rome was applied.[1114] The system was apparently extended to the Asiatic provinces organised by Pompeius, and the censorship was the normal vehicle through which the revenues of a vast kingdom could be purchased by a company of Roman speculators.

The censors exercised great discretionary powers in the conclusion of these contracts, but a revision of such as had already been concluded belonged not to them but to the Senate.[1115] Their merely executive capacity is an explanation of the fact that they could not alienate the property of the Roman people. Wherever the sale of public lands or buildings by these officials is described, we must assume the concurrence of the people or the Senate.

The extent of the censors’ control of the property of the state made their registers (tabulae) assume the proportions of a budget, which must have been the guide of the state’s expenditure. Although only quinquennial, this budget was tolerably stable, for the varying returns (as opposed to the invariable revenues, such as the fixed tribute of some of the provinces) were estimated for the interval that elapsed between one lustrum and another. An unusual increment, such as that from booty, which might appear in any year, would have formed the ground for a statement made by the quaestors, the permanent officials of the aerarium.