offers. But even of this military
budget considerable items were devolved on the communities--such as
the expense of making and maintaining the non-Italian military
roads, the costs of the fleets in the non-Italian seas, nay even
in great part the outlays for the army, inasmuch as the forces of
the client-states as well as those of the subjects were regularly
liable to serve at the expense of their communities within their
province, and began to be employed with increasing frequency even
beyond it--Thracians in Africa, Africans in Italy, arid so on--at
the discretion of the Romans.(14) If the provinces only and not
Italy paid direct taxes to the government, this was equitable in
a financial, if not in a political, aspect so long as Italy alone
bore the burdens and expense of the military system; but from the
time that this system was abandoned, the provincials were, in a
financial point of view, decidedly overburdened.

Extortions

Lastly we must not forget the great chapter of injustice by which
in manifold ways the Roman magistrates and farmers of the revenue
augmented the burden of taxation on the provinces. Although every
present which the governor took might be treated legally as an
exaction, and even his right of purchase might be restricted by
law, yet the exercise of his public functions offered to him, if he
was disposed to do wrong, pretexts more than enough for doing so.
The quartering of the troops; the free lodging of the magistrates
and of the host of adjutants of senatorial or equestrian rank, of
clerks, lictors, heralds, physicians, and priests; the right which
the messengers of the state had to be forwarded free of cost; the
approval of, and providing transport for, the contributions payable
in kind; above all the forced sales and the requisitions--gave all
magistrates opportunity to bring home princely fortunes from the
provinces. And the plundering became daily more general, the more
that the control of the government appeared to be worthless and
that of the capitalist-courts to be in reality dangerous to the
upright magistrate alone. The institution of a standing commission
regarding the exactions of magistrates in the provinces, occasioned
by the frequency of complaints as to such cases, in 605,(15) and
the laws as to extortion following each other so rapidly and
constantly augmenting its penalties, show the daily increasing
height of the evil, as the Nilometer shows the rise of the flood.