exorbitant schedule of food rates. The
following facts of history, as recorded by Lord, will serve to make the
matter clear: "The taxes required in the Roman empire, to sustain the
court and civil service, the army and desolating wars, and the hungry
brood of office-holders, as well as to provide largesses to the
soldiers, were excessive in the extreme, so as to prove an almost
insupportable burden to the people. The ordinary and economical expenses
of the government were great; but when we take into view that during a
period of seventy-two years previous to Diocletian, there were
twenty-six individuals who held the imperial crown, besides a great
number of unsuccessful aspirants, and that each of these must secure the
favor of the army and the people by large donations of money, we may
well conceive that the taxes and exactions laid to raise the needed
amount must have proved a crushing burden. They were so great as
sometimes to strip men of their wealth and reduce them to poverty. These
were laid upon everything that could be brought into service. Nothing
was too insignificant to escape.... The taxes might be paid in money, or
in produce, grain, fruit, oil, or whatever else it might be;... The
exactions were so excessive that the people were led to avoid them in
every possible mode, as men always will under such circumstances." Once
in fifteen years, a Roman indiction, an assessor would go round to levy
upon the products of the soil, and the assessment was made according to
the amount of the yield. One method adopted to secure a lower assessment
at this time was that of mutilating their fruit trees and vines. We find
among the Roman laws severe enactments against such as "feign poverty,
or cut a vine, or stint the fruit of a tree" in order to avoid a fair
valuation, and the penalty attached was the death of the offender and
the confiscation of all his property. The fact that this law existed
shows that the offense was committed and also that the exactions of the
government must have been of the most oppressive kind.

With these facts before us it is easy to discern the nature of the
symbol, being that of a Roman magistrate prepared to enforce his severe
exactions upon the people at the exorbitant rate of three measures of
wheat for a penny and three measures of barley for a penny, accompanied
by the solemn injunction, "See thou hurt not the oil and the wine," that
is, the olive-trees and the vines.

It is evident tha