Paper presented at the workshop “First Millennium” held at the University of St Andrews, 23-24 May 2019

Paolo Tedesco
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE LATE ROMAN EMPIRE:
AN ESSAY IN SPECULATION

Introduction

The debate around the economy of Late Antiquity is centuries old, but recent studies have

framed the story within a different context from that which usually prevailed heretofore. Late

Antiquity is now seen as a period of agrarian growth, monetary expansion, and social mobility,

and, therefore as one of relative prosperity for a large part of the population of the

Mediterranean basin and the Middle East1. Expanding on this notion, this essay takes up three

interconnected aspects of the Late Antique economy: it examines inflation, gold, and tax

arrangements in order to identify certain dynamics which determined the transformation of the

Roman world in the fourth and fifth centuries. I will argue that, at the beginning of the fourth

century, the massive injection of gold solidi into the economy ordered by Constantine (305-

337) generated substantial inflation, which in turn forced the state to implement tax

commutation in order to protect the salaries of members of the bureaucracy and the army. Once

established, however, these fiscal arrangements became so profitable for these two corporations

that inflation resulted from their choice to bargain for gold with the landowning class. Since all

three groups involved themselves at various levels in the assessment, collection, and

redistribution of taxes, I shall refer to them collectively as ‘tax intermediaries’. Under the

Valentinians (364-378), this state of affairs changed. The state restored a fixed value for the

1
Tedesco 2018a.
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Paper presented at the workshop “First Millennium” held at the University of St Andrews, 23-24 May 2019

gold solidus, and in turn re-established a fixed and centralized price of taxation. Because of

these changes, taxation was no longer profitable for those groups in power who managed it.

The Valentinian reforms were followed by a period in which the Roman government and its

apparatuses (bureaucracy, army, and provincial landowners) competed for control over tax

assessment. From the 440s onwards, two main paths emerged: in the West, provincial

landowners and the army agreed on a tax reduction favouring the landholding class, in return

for land assignments that benefited senior military commanders. In the Eastern Empire, in

contrast, the government took up a radical taxation reform that transformed monetary taxes into

the main source of revenue for the state apparatus, and in parallel, translated in-kind levies

(coemptiones) into a mechanism of enrichment for the large and middling landowners.

To clarify this complex pattern, this article is organized as follows. In section 1

(Inflation), I present a set of revised and contrasting views about fourth-century inflation in

order to show that they can be reconciled if one accepts that gold assumed a new function in

the monetary system of the Late Empire. Section 2 (Taxation) examines how and under what

circumstances the value of gold was negotiated by the social actors involved in tax collection

and redistribution. In essence, it shows that tax collectors used the oscillating price of gold to

extract profit from the taxpayers. In section 3, entitled Continuity and Divergence, I move on

to explore the causes and effects of the transformations of the monetary economy during the

fourth century. In essence, I argue that, through the restoration of the solidus as a standard of

value, the state reinstated its control over taxation, which in turn ceased to be profitable for the

three bodies listed above. This paved the way for change in the relationships between the state,

its apparatuses, and the landholding class.

Before proceeding further, a preliminary clarification is required. My intention is to

produce a short essay of political economy, limited to the basic question of the interaction

between inflation, taxation, and social divergence; it is in no way exhaustive, and it does not

present a detailed examination of the sources upon which my argument relies (since I have done
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Paper presented at the workshop “First Millennium” held at the University of St Andrews, 23-24 May 2019

this elsewhere)2. I have brought in what seemed to me the most important concrete material and

the various views about it. In all further details, my discussion of inflation relies on a review of

the meticulous and brilliant works by Roger Bagnall, Jean-Pierre Callu, Noel Barrandon, Elio

Lo Cascio, and Chris Whittaker. The studies of Jairus Banaji and Elio Lo Cascio are my crucial

references for the function of gold in Late Antiquity, while the works of Jean-Michel Carrié,

John Haldon, and Chris Wickham have been equally important to my understanding of taxation.

My thesis of a possible correlation between the status of gold, inflation, changes in tax

arrangements, and related social divergence is in part the legacy of Santo Mazzarino’s

scholarship and that of his successors3, and in part by-product of my studies on late Roman

taxation4.

1. Inflation

The debate surrounding the late Roman economy goes back to the nineteenth century and

earlier. A.H.M. Jones’ contributions in 1964 and 1974 for a time served as an endpoint, and his

formulations are the most convenient starting point5. Jones explained the economic life of the

fourth century roughly as follows. In the third century, the debasement of the denarius drove

gold out of circulation, thus reducing its price and forcing the government to abandon the use

of money. The increasing use of taxation in kind by the state apparatuses, which left a massive

quantity of coins in circulation, made the inflation worse. Constantine’s monetary policy,

centred on the gold solidus, supposedly led to a return to a cash economy. The consequence of

this reform, which was reinforced by fiscal measures, was that a substantial part of the public

and private sectors became extensively monetised by the last quarter of the fourth century. Only

then, according to Jones, as gold became more abundant, were payments and levies in kind

2
Tedesco 2016.
3
Mazzarino 1951; Giardina 2008; 1977; Lo Cascio 2009; 2007; Mazza 2013; 1973.
4
Tedesco 2016; 2015.
5
Jones 1964, I: 107-109; II: 1050-1051; 1974.
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Paper presented at the workshop “First Millennium” held at the University of St Andrews, 23-24 May 2019

gradually commuted into solidi. In his account, this process depended on the increased use of

the adaeratio, which he nevertheless meant as a mere mechanism to convert taxes – that is,

without any impact on the social and economic condition of the taxpayers. For Jones, the goal

of monetization was achieved through increasing centralization, and a level of bureaucratic

control that made the late Roman empire an increasingly top-heavy society. Jones’s view of

inflation has been challenged from two separate positions. One, more heterogeneous (which

pulls together Lo Cascio, Bagnall, Callu, and Barrandon), argues that the fourth-century

inflation was a monetary phenomenon – that is, it was the by-product of the injection of large

quantities of coins, rather than the consequence of a regression to an in-kind economy.

Schematically, Lo Cascio argues for a change in the function of coined gold, the price of which

was negotiated in the market, thus generating an inflationary cycle6; Callu and Barrandon claim

that inflation was caused by a rapid increase in the quantity of gold coins in circulation7;

Bagnall, for his part, modifies Callu and Barrandon by showing primarily that the devaluation

of bullion by the state was the motor and, at same time, the remedy for this rise in prices8. The

other view takes its clue from Chris Whittaker, who argued in two influential articles in 1980

and 1993 that inflation might have been generated by a temporary imbalance between

population and production on the one hand, and increased state expenditures on the other9.

Having set out these different outlooks, let me now summarize their main achievements in

further detail. To start with, during the Early and Middle Empire, the monetary system had been

based on fixed value relations between the various denominations and the unit of account (the

sesterce first, and then the denarius). In such a context, the causes of the inflationary process

were often, though not always, related to state intervention – that is, debasements coincided

with financial policies and intensified government expenditure10.

6
Lo Cascio 1993; 1986.
7
Callu 1993; Callu-Barrandon 1986.
8
Bagnall 1985.
9
Whittaker 1993; 1980.
10
Rathbone 1996.
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Paper presented at the workshop “First Millennium” held at the University of St Andrews, 23-24 May 2019

The inflationary crisis of the second half of the third century is a clear example of this trend:

high state spending, high taxation, and presumably falling production caused a rise in prices. In

order to meet this increase in prices, the state increased the quantity of the bullion coinage by

debasement, but prices in turn adjusted to debasement because of the lower silver content, and

the inflationary spiral became unstoppable, thus causing the disruption of the monetary system

of the Middle Empire11. The dissolution of the Roman monetary system at the end of the third

century meant that bimetallism was no longer in place. On this basis, Lo Cascio argues that

from Aurelian (270-275) onwards, gold coinage came to occupy a peculiar position within the

Roman monetary economy. Since it was no longer linked through a fixed value relationship to

the other denominations and to the unit of account, gold became a commodity (merx) rather

than money (pretium), as is plainly shown by Diocletian’s Price Edict, where a maximum price

is established for gold bullion and for coined gold – and it is the same price12.

Under Diocletian (284-305), the issuing authority did not give up attempting to establish a fixed

value relationship between the monetary pieces used in small transactions and the unit of

account, and between both and gold coinage, but such an attempt was always doomed to fail,

thus generating a further increase in inflation. When Constantine gave up fixing the ‘price’ of

gold coins, the solidus became the basis of the new monetary system, replacing the silver

denarius in this role13. In essence, a new monetary and economic scenario had emerged14.

As Jairus Banaji has correctly pointed out, there were from this point onwards two laws

regulating the circulation of the gold coinage. One, reflecting the needs of the imperial

authorities, prevented economic actors from devaluing the solidus in relation to the unit of

account; in essence, it prevented the prices expressed in gold from dropping in terms of bullion.

The other, reflecting the power of economic groups, allowed the same actors to assess the value

11
Corbier 1998; Whittaker 1993: 4; MacMullen 1976: 104-106.
12
Edictum de pretiis 28, 1-2.
13
Anonymus, De rebus bellicis 2, 1-4; Lo Cascio 1986: 551-552.
14
Lo Cascio 2008: 172-173.
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Paper presented at the workshop “First Millennium” held at the University of St Andrews, 23-24 May 2019

of the gold in relation to the unit of account according to the oscillations of market prices 15.

Taken together, these two mechanisms elucidate and reconcile the various explanations of

inflation argued so far. In essence, they explain why the increased volume of gold in circulation,

its greater velocity, and the heightened need for bullion generated an increase in prices,

expressed in units of account (bronze coinage), as Callu and Barrandon have convincingly

shown, without, however, altering the price of the commodity expressed in gold (as opposed to

the quantity theory of money). In addition, they offer an explanation for Roger Bagnall’s

principal thesis that the rises in price levels expressed in units of account in fourth-century

Egyptian papyri were the product of changes in metallic content ordered by the state. Bagnall,

in fact, observes the correlation between the change in the metallic content of bullion, the rise

in prices, and the adjustment of the nominal value of the former, but he does not exclude the

hypothesis that government decisions reacted against a change in the ratio between gold and

bullion, generated by forces which the government was unable to control16.

In order to identify these forces, we shall now move from the monetary sphere to the realm of

real factors. Chris Whittaker has made an attempt to integrate these two dimensions in order to

offer an explanation for inflation that combines monetary and real factors (land and population).

Notwithstanding his brilliance, Whittaker admitted that, in those circumstances in which they

may be quantified, changes in population and production do not explain why gold prices were

immune from such pressures17. I would add that it is even more difficult to identify a correlation

between demographic change, the degree of monetization, and inflation, in a context in which

access to money – and to gold in particular – was regulated by political constraints, and taxation

served as a means for preserving this state of affairs18. To further elucidate this point, I shall

return to the interaction between taxation and inflation in the following section.

15
Banaji 2007: 38.
16
Bagnall 2000: 89-90; 1989; 1985.
17
Whittaker 1993: 3.
18
Tedesco 2018b: 409-412.
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Paper presented at the workshop “First Millennium” held at the University of St Andrews, 23-24 May 2019

2. Taxation

Jones argued that a regression to taxation in kind took place as a reaction against the negative

impact of price inflation. Numerous studies have shown that taxation never experienced such a

reversion; by contrast, they have pointed out two main features of the late Roman tax system.

First, from Diocletian onwards, the government primarily implemented a cadastral tax

assessment complemented with a few production factors, such as land quality, irrigation system,

and labour force19. Based on this, the Fisc and its local apparatuses collected a set of taxes

(direct and indirect), the most important of which were the land and the personal taxes20.

Second, while this tax assessment remained based on in-kind payments, the government

developed a complex system of tax commutation that allowed its apparatuses to collect taxes

and to pay salaries directly in cash21. These mechanisms are called in legal sources adaeratio

and coemptio. The adaeratio had two functions. One was to commute taxes assessed in kind

into cash. The other was to commute the in-kind salaries (annonae) of the army and of the

administrative personnel into cash salaries. This distinction was not merely formal, but rather

it took into account various parameters such as market prices, as well as transport and

transactional costs; in fact, it involved different social actors: tax collectors and taxpayers in the

first case, financial clerks and military officers in the second. The coemptio had a similar

purpose but a different structure from the adaeratio. It consisted of an in-kind levy designed to

collect foodstuffs and other goods at prices lower than those in the local market. In essence, the

coemptio supplemented the adaeratio when rises in prices made market purchases impossible

for the ‘state salaried’. I have already argued elsewhere that these arrangements were not mere

fiscal transfers: not only did these mechanisms preserve political-cum-economic divergence

19
Chouquer 2014: 71-87; Carrié 1994.
20
Bowman 2018: 30-40.
21
Lo Cascio 2007: 95-98; Tedesco 2016: 124-126.
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Paper presented at the workshop “First Millennium” held at the University of St Andrews, 23-24 May 2019

between the powerful and the powerless, but, above all, they widened the socio-economic

divide between those who managed the tax system based on gold, and the rural population who

struggled to gain access to precious currency22.

At this point, it is reasonable to ask how tax intermediaries profited from the operations of tax

commutation. Schematically, these two fiscal arrangements had to constantly refer to market

prices; otherwise, they quickly became dysfunctional23. Numerous laws from the Theodosian

Code reinforce this view, by referring to market prices to establish the rate of taxation24. A

series of papyri from fourth-century Egypt also reveals that the imperial government instructed

local authorities to record the prices of a certain number of goods25. Based on these documents,

Lo Cascio identified a correlation between the inflationary trend and the requirement to record

local market prices. He convincingly suggested that financial offices (and their incumbents)

used these records to establish a rate of tax commutation as close as possible to the prices in the

local markets26. In essence, Lo Cascio held that insofar as coined gold was traded as a

commodity according to the price that it assumed as a precious metal in the market, the state

was unable to establish a centralized rate of taxation, and thus it required the collaboration of

these actors for the collection of the necessary state revenues27. Expanding upon his argument,

I would add that in such a scenario, the economic actors involved in the process of tax collection

and redistribution had substantial room for negotiation on the price of gold in terms of unit of

account, and could thus fix a rate of tax commutation (from in-kind into cash, or the other way

round) to their own advantage. In essence, if, on the one hand, inflation forced the Roman state

22
Tedesco 2018a: 123-127; 2016: 126-128.
23
Temin 2012: 72.
24
Cod. Theod. 7, 4, 10 (364); 11, 2, 2 (365); 14, 4, 4 (367); 11, 15, 2 (384); 7, 4, 28 (406); 7, 4, 32 (409); 7, 4, 36
(424); 11, 1, 37 (436). Lo Cascio 2002: xvii.
25
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, LIV, 1987: 91-107, 113-119, 124-133, 135-138, 174-178, 181-194, 197-199, 217-
221.
26
Lo Cascio 2009: 259-262.
27
Lo Cascio 2007: 96.
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Paper presented at the workshop “First Millennium” held at the University of St Andrews, 23-24 May 2019

to allow the price of taxation to be established in the market, on the other hand, inflation enabled

tax intermediaries to translate that tax rate into a speculative price.

So far, I have generically referred to those groups involved in the process of tax collection and

redistribution as mere economic actors serving as tax intermediaries. Now, it is time to classify

them in further detail. Banaji identified two main groups: the senior military officers and the

members of the imperial bureaucracy. Serving as tax collectors or tax redistributors, members

of the bureaucracy and the top ranks of the army valued and traded gold as a commodity above

or below the nominal value of the solidus, according to their requirements28. To supplement

Banaji’s picture, I would like to draw attention to a third larger and more heterogeneous group

made up of the members of the municipal councils, the relevance of which has been highlighted

by Peter Brown in numerous works29. Curials and decurions owed their power to the tax

arrangements created by the imperial apparatus to supply the army and the cities30. Under such

a system, inflation increased their control over taxation. They governed the sphere of in-kind

tax assessment and cooperated with the two state corporations during the process of tax

commutation and collection. Together, these three corporations hegemonized a stratified rural

society that hardly gained any access to gold currency.

3. Continuity and divergence

The Constantinian Empire and its immediate successors used gold and inflation to gain the

collaboration of important segments of Roman society: primarily, the urban elites that filled the

ranks of the imperial bureaucracy, the army, and the provincial landholding class. In essence,

the state accepted and used inflation as a political solution to resolve strife over wealth

distribution. But was this situation tenable in the long term? If it was not, when, why, and under

what circumstances did it change?

28
Banaji 2016; 2007: 51-57; Tedesco 2018a: 126-127.
29
Brown 2012: 23-25; 2001: 29-30; 1992: 25-28.
30
Brown 2012: 110-114, 187; Wickham 2005: 62-80.
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Paper presented at the workshop “First Millennium” held at the University of St Andrews, 23-24 May 2019

As anticipated in the introduction, from the Valentinians onwards, the financial and economic

conditions of the Late Roman Empire experienced numerous transformations. These emperors

enacted a monetary reform (364-368) that restored the nominal value of the solidus31. A

contemporary law shows that for the first time since its introduction, the solidus might have

been reduced in value in relation to the unit of account32. Because of this change, the gold coin

resumed its function as the standard of value, prices began to be expressed in terms of gold

solidi (or their subdivisions), and since those prices still expressed in bronze coinage dropped

as a result, inflation necessarily ceased. This state of affairs enabled the government to restore

centralized rates of taxation. This did not imply a complete monetization of taxation, but it

involved greater control by the state over the process of tax commutation, as clearly emerges

from the legislation on the recruitment tax: for instance, by establishing a fixed price for the

recruit, the state prevented the tax collector in charge (called capitularius or temonarius) from

bargaining on the price of commutation (from praebitio tironum into aurum tironicum) to the

detriment of the taxpayers33.

There is a further aspect to be noted, however. Since in enacting a new tax regime the attempt

to establish fixed value relations between the various components of the monetary system (in

essence, between gold and bronze) had to be abandoned, the imperial authority could not

prevent tax collectors and redistributors from profiting from the oscillations of the prices

between the two coined metals. The period that followed the Valentinian reforms saw the state

and the three power groups described above competing with each other to establish the rate of

taxation. This competition did not concern an alternative between in-kind or in-cash taxation,

but rather between the application of official rates established by the authorities and unofficial

prices imposed by the members of these three corporations. The Law Codes contain 45 laws,

31
Lenski 2002: 301.
32
CI 11,11,2 (371-373); Lo Cascio 2007: 96; 1986: 550; Tedesco 2016: 129.
33
Lenski 2002: 307-319; Carrié 1995: 39-44; Zuckerman 1998.
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Paper presented at the workshop “First Millennium” held at the University of St Andrews, 23-24 May 2019

dated from the 370s to 440s, which clearly describe this alternation between two opposite

interests34. This state of affairs ceased from the 440s onwards, when the Eastern and Western

imperial authorities enacted three significant measures which substantially limited this trade

(nundinatio):

(i) a fixed monetary rate for the land tax;

(ii) a fixed monetary pay for bureaucrats and soldiers, shortly after to be extended to all tax

collectors (by regulating the so-called adiectio or commoda);

(iii) a band of oscillations between the gold solidus and the unit of account (expressed in nummi

in the West while referred to the weight of the bronze coins in the East)35 in order to restrain

speculation on the exchange rate between the two coined metals.

Because of these reforms, the three corporations saw their opportunities for profiting from

taxation enormously reduced. A new political, fiscal, and economic scenario then emerged.

Scholars have correctly pointed out that there was in the western provinces an increased fiscal

disaffection among the taxpayers. It rapidly grew into opposition to centralized taxation, thus

paving the way to political fragmentation36. This is certainly correct, but this sentiment must be

interpreted not only as the reaction against the augmented tax burden (determined by the

reduction of the number of taxpayers and the rise in military expenses), but, above all, as the

response against a system from which provincial elites no longer gained the expected profits.

This sentiment might also have affected provincial armies, which were mainly made up of

barbarian recruits who were allowed to enter onto imperial soil in exchange for service to the

Roman state, paid in gold.

By contrast, scholars have argued that in the Eastern Empire, the peculiar configuration

of the landholding elites, composed of middling landowners tied to the imperial establishment

34
Tedesco 2016: 131.
35
Filocamo 2013: 106-107; Zuckerman 2004: 63-64.
36
Sarris 2011: 55-68; Heather 2005: 385-430; Wickham 2005: 81-87; Ward-Perkins 2005: 54-57.
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Paper presented at the workshop “First Millennium” held at the University of St Andrews, 23-24 May 2019

by a system of land allocation and associated tax functions, assured greater cohesion against

internal fragmentation37. It is worth supplementing this view by adding that from the middle of

the fifth century, in order to preserve this social cohesion, the Eastern Roman state intervened

in matters of taxation several times, and these interventions primarily concerned the functioning

of the coemptiones38. The state progressively transformed these compulsory purchases from

mere requisitions (often requested at the top of the tax assessment) into a means for

compensating large and middling landowners for the agrarian produce they delivered to the

army. In essence, the Eastern Roman state revised its tax regime in order to keep the emperor,

the army, and the landholding class cohesive39.

Conclusion

This short essay pulls the literature pertaining to inflation, gold, and tax arrangements into a

coherent narrative. In so doing, I have proposed the following arguments: first, by exploring

the various causes and effects of inflation, I showed that, in addition to monetary factors, social

forces might have played a role not only in generating inflation, but, above all, might also have

contributed to the increase and duration of inflation in order to manipulate the system of

resource allocation. Second, I argued that the late Roman state allowed these social entities to

use fiscal arrangements to their own advantage in return for their support in managing an

unstable taxation system. In the final part, I argued that the restoration of the nominal value of

the gold stopped inflation and progressively re-established a centralized monetary taxation.

These changes affected the existing tax regime and the collaboration of those groups who had

managed it until then. Expanding on this, I examined two alternative ways to deal with these

economic and monetary changes. One, the Western way, was to abandon the pre-existing tax

37
Banaji 2016: 52-60; Hickey 2012: 149-155; Sarris 2006: 155-162; Gascou 2008: 150-158. For a summary
Tedesco 2018a: 129-130.
38
Brandes 2002: Haldon 1994.
39
Haldon 2016a: 258-266; 2016b.
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Paper presented at the workshop “First Millennium” held at the University of St Andrews, 23-24 May 2019

regime in order to resort to a new system of resource allocation, based on a simplified tax system

and on land assignments to the army. The other, the Eastern way, consisted of the

implementation of new fiscal devices, which, by compensating the landholding class in return

for their agrarian produce, enabled the army to be paid, and the state to survive.

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