After the Mithridatic Wars the collection of tithes on agricultural production from Rome’s Asian provincial subjects probably resumed under pre-war conditions, according to Cicero’s framework for provincial taxation outlined in the third speech of the Verrines (Cic. Verr. 2.3.12). Indeed, Cicero’s brother Quintus was provincial governor of Asia in 60 bce. In a letter to Quintus offering useful advice, Cicero implies that contributions (vectigalia) collected from the Asian subjects are needed on a permanent basis if a peacekeeping scenario is to be indefinitely maintained in the province (Cic. Q.Fr. 1.1.34; further developed by T. Ñaco del Hoyo, ‘War, Peace and Rome’s Empire-Building Ideology in the Making’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 98 [2020], 55–66). Instead of imposing war indemnities to punish the towns that had collaborated with Mithridates, as Sulla had done in 85 bce, what Rome expected from most of its Asian subjects in exchange for perpetual peace was at least regular payments from their agricultural production as well as port duties and other vectigalia. This land taxation would probably supply both the Roman armies deployed across the Mediterranean and Rome’s granaries. A few decades before the Augustan peace, contributions of this nature were conceptually understood as a reward for victory. They also became a reminder to the Asian subjects of not only the actual cost of permanently ‘enjoying’ the ‘benefits’, but also the ‘costs’ of the Roman peace (E. Torregaray and T. Ñaco del Hoyo, ‘Women’s Mediation and Peace Diplomacy. Augustan Women through the Looking Glass’, in: S Betjes, O. Hekster, E. Manders [edd.], Tradition and Power in the Roman Empire [2024], pp. 43–60). In Cicero’s view both provincial subjects and any profits extracted from them were thus considered the ‘property’ (praedia) of the Roman people (Cic. Verr. 2.2.7). Except for Sicily and Asia, where regular land taxes had already been collected previously, this conceptualisation put forward by Cicero was clearly new in general terms in the Republican period. For most provincials permanent taxation was not extensively implemented until the Augustan Principate, when provincial administration was reorganised and a completely new ideology of power rose up from the ashes of the old Republic.
Although highly influential works such as W.V. Harris’s War and Imperialism in Republican Rome 327–70 bc (1979) remain milestones in the study of the Roman Republic’s empire building, new scholarly literature continues to pose significant questions regarding the evidence and the tradition of scholarship (F. Russo, ‘Rome as the Last Universal Empire in the Ideological Discourse of the 2nd Century bce’, in: K. Berthelot [ed.], Reconsidering Roman Power. Roman, Greek, Jewish and Christian Perceptions and Reactions [2020], pp. 22–35; M. Zanin, ‘Introduzione. Gli ‘imperialismi’ della Roma medio-repubblicana’, in: L’aristocrazia senatoria e l’egemonia del Mediterraneo: uno studio sulle forme dell’imperialismo romano nel II secolo a.C. [2024], pp. 15–38), to quote only two representative works. However, in this review article I will focus on three recent studies that leave new research avenues on the ‘benefits and costs’ of Rome’s expansion worth exploring. For instance, the role of the army in shaping the Italian economy due to being primarily responsible for the Roman Republic’s financial stability is addressed in a monograph by Biglino (2025). Meanwhile, a multi-authored volume edited by Girardin (2023) focuses on the ability of Rome’s provincial administration to adapt and reuse previous tax systems for its own ends when it was necessary to administer effectively new subjects and extract their resources. Finally, Lange (2024) offers a thought-provoking reassessment on the nature of the entire Republican political system during the height of Rome’s territorial expansion in the second century bce, which is presented through the historiographical lens of the Late Republican conceptualisation of civil wars and related technical vocabulary.
The most recent contribution, Biglino’s The War Economy of the Roman Republic, is an insightful piece of research. From a general standpoint, Biglino’s main thesis is encouraging. In contrast to the traditional view in favour of a decline in Italy’s population and economy as a consequence of the devastation wrought by Hannibal and the massive recruitment of Roman citizens for overseas wars, this book argues that the Roman army also played a key role in Italy’s economic take-off in both the third and the second centuries bce. Biglino claims that the Roman army became a driving force behind Italy’s economy, not only by extracting resources such as wages, booty and slaves captured from overseas, but also by stimulating consumption and forcing food production to meet the challenge of supplying the increasingly larger armies involved in campaigns that became longer and longer.
At first, I was completely misled by the title of this book and its use of the term ‘war economy’ with regard to the Middle Republic’s territorial expansion. I understand this term rather differently, as a clear connection with financing and taxation, which is vaguely present in the volume. For instance, the introduction argues that a term such as ‘war economy’ – understood as if production, exchange and consumption in Republican Italy were entirely militarised – has been borrowed from modern and economic historians or even war studies scholars, rather than from classical ancient historians. In Biglino’s view, which is highlighted in Chapter 5, devoted to ‘The Roman War Economy’ and the finest piece of writing in the book, it is both the supply of needs and also the rewards achieved by the Roman armies fully involved in overseas campaigns that supported a multi-dimensional growth of the Italian economy (which he argues was a war economy) during the middle republic, and which became the core of the new Republican empire building. A clear example is the effort made to rebuild a Roman fleet in the mid third century, in order to continue the fight against the Carthaginians in Sicily in 254 bce, after some major setbacks (Plb. 1.38). The economic impact of the logistic needs of the armies deployed overseas must also be taken into account. According to Biglino, these needs were to be fulfilled through emporia or ‘regional military supply centres’ (p. 184) such as Victumviae (Fidentia, mentioned by Livy 21.57), but one wonders whether the archaeological record might also be of use, as for instance in Gaul (J. Metzler, et al., ‘Comptoir commercial italique et occupation romaine dans l’oppidum du Titelberg’, in: M. Reddé [ed.], Les armées romaines en Gaule à l’époque républicaine. Nouveaux témoignages archéologiques [2018], pp. 179–205). Furthermore, Chapter 5 argues that there were 112 years of peace in Italy from 203 to 91 bce, as if the Cimbric migrations at the very end of the second century were not a matter of concern in at least some areas of northern Italy (p. 190). More interestingly, Biglino seems to oppose the concept of a ‘peaceful’ Italy as against ‘the rest of the Mediterranean world’ in constant bellicosity, as if Italy’s population only benefited from the overseas campaigns, without suffering from war stress from time to time (Livy 26.26.10–11).
When examining the need for silver metal as the main form of military pay from the mid second century onwards in Chapter 1, Biglino mostly relies on the traditional views of an increased production in the Iberian mines at around this period, and rejects the arguments based on the archaeological and epigraphic records of those questioning the consistency of this dating established by the literary sources (Chapter 1, p. 17 n. 40). In fact, most of the inscriptions revealing how some societates operated in several mining regions date from the late second or early first century bce at the earliest. More recently, data on lead pollution from ancient layers of Greenland ice, which had suggested that mining in Hispania effectively peaked during the second century, are now considered inconclusive (J.R. McConnell et al., ‘Lead Pollution Recorded in Greenland Ice Indicates European Emissions Tracked Plagues, Wars, and Imperial Expansion during Antiquity’, PNAS 115 [2018], 5726–31; D. Pavlyshyn, I. Johnstone, R. Saller, ‘Lead Pollution and the Roman Economy’, JRA 33 [2020], 354–64, esp. 361; N. Silva-Sánchez, X.-L. Armada, ‘Environmental Impact of Roman Mining and Metallurgy and its Correlation with the Archaeological Evidence: a European Perspective’, Environmental Archaeology. The Journal of Human Palaeoecology [2023], DOI: 10.1080/14614103.2023.2181295). Similarly, when addressing issues as vast as the economic impact of the Hannibalic War and the expansion overseas in the second century bce in Chapters 3 and 4, some limitations in the scholarly literature used by Biglino are apparent, particularly when addressing Rome’s expansion overseas. For instance, F. Cadiou’s Hibera in terra miles. Les armées et la conquête de l’Hispanie sous la République (218–45 av. J.-C.) (2008) should be consulted. In fact, the section on Hispania (pp. 106–10) is not only far from original, but also poorly referenced. Biglino relies on a chapter on Hispania from a more general study by S. Dyson (The Creation of the Roman Frontier [1985]), which is out of date regarding archaeological developments and the general historical debate. Readers should be aware of recent works by ancient historians and archaeologists such as F. Quesada, J. Principal, E. Sánchez-Moreno, to quote only a few, who have published extensively in English on these Hispanic topics in recent years.
Unlike other chapters in which a state-of-the-art narrative renders the reading rather predictable and somehow disappointing, and after his magnificent and more theoretical Chapter 5, Chapters 6 and 7 contain new and exciting contributions. First, Biglino is right to point to the ‘forgotten work force’ as one of his original research targets when dealing with the economy of Roman republican Italy. Although some of his case studies, such as Marcia (p. 222) and Spurius Ligustinus (pp. 230ff.) are perhaps not entirely convincing, Biglino makes his case in arguing more generally that the traditional view of the Roman soldier returning home, and specifically to his piece of land, in order to save it from stagnation, makes no sense when the rest of his family – women, children and to some extent slaves – could have also carried out farming, even when the household’s main breadwinner was away at war (p. 240). Finally, Chapter 7, which, with Chapter 5, contains a decent summary of the entire argument, includes a couple of insights – related to each other – worth mentioning. First, according to Biglino the war-oriented economy that developed in Republican Italy, and was based on small farms and large villae, was used to feed the Roman armies, which in turn became the driving force behind the economy through manpower, salaries, booty and slaves (pp. 241ff.). Second, there is an interesting and highly speculative argument posed in Chapter 7 regarding the possibility that Italian villae might not perhaps have directed all their food production to the local and urban markets, but also directly contributed to the need to feed the Roman armies engaged overseas (pp. 286ff.). Although these ideas certainly challenge the economic rationality of the ‘villa system’ as it has been usually understood by classical archaeology, the vast size of the armies and their need for food in the latter centuries of the Republic at least offer pause for thought. The results of Biglino’s work illustrate that the economic benefit caused by Rome’s bellicosity overseas counterbalanced the profound changes taking place in Italy, particularly after the Second Punic War.
A further issue when addressing the benefits and costs of Republican empire building concerns exactly how Rome forced its new provincial subjects not only to pay for the expenses of their own conquest, but also to pay for them in perpetuity. The second volume under review, Fiscalités antiques. Aux origines de l’administration provinciale romaine, of a very different nature, the proceedings of a conference, helps us partially understand this process by digging deeper into the pre-existing taxation systems, which were sometimes adopted by and more often adapted to Roman provincial administration. Edited by Girardin, this multi-authored volume is published by ‘L’Erma’ di Bretschneider in a series that has already published three volumes on Roman taxation. This series is currently edited by C. Soraci, a specialist who also contributes to this volume. An introduction by Girardin is followed by nine chapters, which deal with various regions in the Roman world, are written in several scholarly languages and include their own bibliographies at the end of every chapter. The contributors focus on pre-existing forms of taxation Rome might have reused, mostly to facilitate the integration of those provinces into the rest of the Roman world after conquest. The introduction points out that this volume deals with adaptation of local forms of tax collection into a fully functional Roman fiscal administration. According to Girardin, although pre-Roman entities were not always assimilated into civitates and they needed some sort of integration process into the Roman world, sustaining tax collection through local polities instead of individual taxpayers was innovative in ancient fiscal policymaking (pp. 10–12).
C. Soraci’s chapter on pre-Roman taxation in Sicily argues that what is understood about the subject owes a great deal to Cicero’s remarks about Rome’s comprehensive reuse of a Lex Hieronica. Nevertheless, its precise contents are only known to us after projecting Cicero’s detailed description of the Roman ‘adaptation’ of the Syracusan system, which was fundamentally based on the tithe system, but one and a half centuries after Syracuse had been conquered. Although there are grounds to believe that tithes were also levied on the epikrateia, the other side of the island under Punic hegemony, the evidence is limited, and war indemnities destined to pay and feed Carthage’s mercenary armies were probably common (pp. 51, 58–60, 66). Indeed, the latter is mostly based on ideas discussed in A. Llamazares’s chapter, which argues that the lack of direct evidence makes it difficult to determine the scope and full significance of the Carthaginian tax system, and this problem is much more acute for overseas taxation. Alternatively, modern scholarship is forced to project classical works and their financial and fiscal vocabulary onto particular Punic institutions, leading to interpretations that are perhaps too biased, such as when Livy describes the Tripolitanian towns as urbes vectigales – a technical term quite controversial even in Latin – with respect to Carthage (p. 81, and similar cases are cited on pp. 82, 84, 87). Like Soraci, Llamazares has difficulty avoiding the paradox that most of what is known about Carthaginian taxation comes from a later Roman adaptation of it (p. 90). For instance, recent research pays particular attention to the earliest forms of contribution by African subjects immediately after the Roman conquest in 146 bce and in the next century, highlighting the reuse of some forms of Punic administration, such as the local pagi (S. Aounallah, ‘Les statuts juridiques des communautés de l’Africa sous la République (146–27 a.C.)’, in: L’epigrafia del Nord África: novità, riletture, nuove sintesi [2020], pp. 33–52; S. Aounallah, ‘Géographie administrative de la Provincia Africa (146–27 a.C.)’, in: L’Africa antica dall’età repubblicana ai Giulio-Claudii [2024], pp. 99–109, esp. 102–4).
In the chapters by L. Lamoine on Gallic taxation and by S. Günther on Germanic taxation most of the debate on any adaptation to previous tax systems by the Roman provincial administration also revolves around the interpretation of ancient technical vocabulary. Since it was used by classical authors to describe Gallic and Germanic institutions, and individuals such as civic or religious magistrates involved in financial and fiscal activities, any discrepancy in its meaning resulting from modern scholarship may result in completely differing historical interpretations (C. Soraci, Il lessico della sottomissione. Studi sul termine stipendiarius [2020]; J. France, Tribut. Une histoire fiscale de la conquête romaine [2021], pp. 133–4). For instance, whereas Lamoine understands stipendium in Caes. BG 1.44 to be a perpetual tax in cash collected by Caesar from the Aedui (p. 128), I see this passage as a clear example of an unsystematic war indemnity claimed in the aftermath of Caesar’s victory against those Gauls. Likewise, S. Günther makes it clear in his interesting comments on the famous passage by Tacitus (Ann. 4.72.1–3), dealing with the contributions in kind (horses) paid by the Frisians to the Romans in Germany, that Tacitus’ use of technical terms such as stipendium and tributum, and particularly their fiscal meanings, had changed since the days of the Republic, in line with the evolution of Roman imperial taxation (pp. 147–8).
As for the rest of the volume, the chapters focusing on Roman provinces in the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond show more complex tax collection systems than those in the west, as they mostly adapted previously existing and equally sophisticated Hellenistic or Near Eastern fiscal traditions. Additionally, it can hardly be denied that our knowledge of this complexity benefits from the fortunate preservation of inscriptions containing tax laws such as the Lex Portorii Asiae from Ephesus, and receipts for tax payments on ostraca and papyri from Egypt, the South Levant and Mesopotamia. Nonetheless, I wonder whether for instance A. Carrara’s magnificent overview chapter on taxation in the Late Hellenistic Greek towns facing Rome is to a certain extent biased in its description of a rather swift adoption of regular taxation by the Roman provincial administration in the East after 146 bce, simply because importing a fiscal tradition inherited from earlier and already working frameworks is what might be expected from an empire-to-be such as Republican Rome at this stage (p. 109). Similarly, in N. Dogaer’s chapter about Egypt there is room for debate between advocates of a clear continuity of Ptolemaic taxation during the Early Roman Empire and, on the contrary, those who argue that the new liturgies created under Augustus permanently transformed Egypt’s taxation. Dogaer seems to favour an adaptation of the Ptolemaic system rather than the imperial fiscal administration. Overall, this volume is a very interesting addition to the current scholarly literature on Roman provincial administration and taxation, which will in due course be supplemented by the forthcoming publication of the proceedings of CEDANT 2024, a project on a much larger scale devoted to revisiting this topic (A. Tosques, ‘Cronaca dei lavori del Collegio di Diritto Romano 2024: Le imposte a Roma fra città e impero: storia, economia e diritto (III sec. a.C. – III d.C.) (Pavia, 8–26 gennaio 2024)’, Athenaeum 112 [2024], 329–33).
With an innovative and more direct approach than the previous books, Lange’s From Hannibal to Sulla. The Birth of Civil War in Republican Rome addresses the political costs of Rome’s fight for hegemony and building up its Republican empire. This volume has been published in a new series by De Gruyter called Studies in Ancient Civil War. Despite its moderate length, it is divided into an introduction, eight chapters and an epilogue, and is supported by an impressive collection of historical evidence, which is mostly literary and usually provided in the original Latin or Greek and in translation, in addition to a vast amount of modern scholarship. Dedicated to his students, past and present, the complexity of Lange’s main argument is perhaps shown in his systematic attempt to recapitulate in every chapter, adding new semantic layers to his definition of ‘civil war’, which is really what this book seems to be about, despite its chronology focusing on the previous century.
Although summarising Lange’s argument in one sentence is no easy task, in my view the volume suggests that the historical narrative provided by Roman historiography, between Fabius Pictor and Polybius in the second century bce and the historians of the Augustan Age and the first centuries of the Empire, shows the profound upheaval caused by Hannibal in Italy during Rome’s war against the Punic superpower as the first episode in a re-enactment of the first century’s civil wars. In other words, the political costs to Rome of responding to the Carthaginians’ challenge and maintaining their quest for hegemony apparently initially went unnoticed, when Rome was focused on expelling the Punic armies from Italy. However, in the long run, such a quest meant risking an ‘internal war’ (against allies) and eventually a civil war (against other Romans), to use Lange’s wording. Much of his conceptual framework, based on the existence of one or several ‘antebellum’ periods prior to the civil wars of the first century bce, is put forward in the introduction and subsequently developed in the first chapter. Similarly, readers are regularly reminded of the main assets of this theoretical framework. The next chapters tend to follow a chronological order, from Hannibal’s invasion of Italy in Chapter 2 up to the Social War in Chapter 8, except for a historiographical digression in Chapter 5. Polybius’ treatment of the Truceless War is addressed according to schemes based on current internal conflicts at Rome in his own time.
I have two main concerns about this book. First, I am not entirely convinced by Lange’s arguments concerning exactly how biased Roman historiography was when describing the second-century warfare through the eyes, conceptualisation, and civil and military strife of the civil wars. Nonetheless, these arguments give pause for thought about recent debates regarding the Middle Roman Republic. For instance, it has recently been suggested that the understanding of this period will not improve unless the literary sources (overly biased by Late Republican and Early Imperial perspectives?) are supplemented by new archaeological and numismatic records, together with innovative scientific approaches such as the use of palaeoenvironmental and palaeodietary analyses (D.-E. Padilla Peralta and S. Bernard, ‘Middle Republican Connectivities’, JRS 112 [2022], 1–37, esp. 9–13, an article cited by Lange, but not concerning this particular issue). Second, what Lange’s book lacks is an inclusion of the provincials in the discussion. In particular, it might have been interesting to know whether their staseis and internal conflicts fit into an ‘imperial’ framework based on concepts such as bellum intestinum, which is probably ultimately excessively focused on Italy. Nonetheless, the volume is not only a robust piece of scholarly research, exquisitely written and addressing the relevance of historiography when dealing with the entire Roman Republican history, but also a decisive contribution to the current debate about the political costs for Rome and its allies of endeavouring to build an empire in the making.
Overall, these three exquisite volumes clearly show that Roman republican empire building was sustained by the economic benefits produced by warfare and unsystematic forms of taxation over the provincial subjects, but at the expense of increasing discord and civil strife at Rome, which ultimately led to severe political costs and a new approach to ruling the empire.
