The excellent conference on which this volume has been based, ‘Roman Port Societies through the Evidence of Inscriptions’, made all of the participants reflect afresh on many fundamental questions about how this medium illustrates the surprisingly elusive issue of what kinds of societies were characteristic of Roman harbour settlements. These concluding remarks are intended to address some of these. Two very basic questions about the medium stood out: how – and how far – do surviving inscriptions actually reflect ancient social history in the first place; and (in particular) does the level of diversity in the epigraphic record mirror actual variety across time and space in the Roman world?2 Roman ports make rather good laboratory specimens for such enquiries. The papers at the conference, in accordance with the aims of the Portuslimen project, addressed a good spread of ports, all, except Delos and Ephesos, from the western basin of the Mediterranean, principally Aquileia, Arelate, Hispalis, Lugdunum, Narbo, Narona, Ostia/Portus and Puteoli.

ABSTRACT. This contribution focuses on the sea as a source of substantial income for ancient states of the Mediterranean through taxation. It reviews its forms, and balances the sea as a source of corruption by the alien with the amounts earned by the States in taxing the sea, and shows that for that reason, connectivity eventually wins. It also points out how little was the perception the Ancient had of economic growth with respect to the immediateness of fiscal income.

RÉSUMÉ. Cette contribution s'intéresse à l'utilisation de la mer comme source de revenu conséquent via sa taxation par les anciens états de la Méditerranée. Elle examine les formes d'imposition et évalue la mer en tant que source de corruption venu de l'étranger contre le montant du revenu sous forme d'impôts, et démontre qu'en fin de compte la connectivité finit par gagner. Elle souligne également le peu de perception qu'avaient les peuples de l'Antiquité quant à l'apport direct des revenus fiscaux sur la croissance économique.

INTRODUCTION: ‘FRUITFUL FOR EVERYONE?’ (PLINY, LETTERS 10, 41)

Why should the Océanides project include a chapter on ‘taxing the sea’? Especially one which centres on the Mediterranean, and draws most of its material from the ancient Greek and Roman world? All tax regimes vividly evoke how societies picture their world, reflecting and creating priorities and patterns. The tax systems of the Greeks and Romans and their neighbours had an extraordinarily emphatic place for the sea. That derived from, and speaks eloquently of, the role which the sea, and above all the sea which they saw as ‘their own sea’ (which we call the Mediterranean), had in the fabric of social, economic, cultural and political life. Trade, sea-warfare, communications, all speak directly of how basic the sea was to the consistency of ancient societies, but the theme of exactions levied on movements by sea – which intersect with all three of those domains – expresses that centrality more completely and clearly.

Introduction

During the period of the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean basin, a singular form of deracinated but coherent society came into being. Starting as mercenaries, even pirates, and moving seamlessly into the world of commerce and ultimately the management of Roman provinces, a whole diaspora of mobile, opportunistic Italians outside Italy - men and women, slaves and free, very rich and grindingly poor - had come into being by the beginning of the first century B.C. Their identity was not much shaped by a sense of a common homeland, because Italy itself was so heterogeneous and - especially at this time - changing so fast. The changing fortunes of this loose collectivity have resisted generalization because of its erratic and labile distribution in space and time. Yet it can claim to be one of the great diasporas, to be compared with the archaic Phoenician and Hellenic diasporas, or that of the Hellenistic Jews. It was maintained through common interaction with the Roman state, especially through military service, and through a growing feeling of shared advantage over non-Romans. It was therefore indeed neither a simply colonial nor a truly ethnic phenomenon: but in it lie clues to the dynamic of Roman imperial power, and to the cultural weave of the empire itself, east and west, of the provinces and, in many respects, of Italy too. These - besides free-born Romans they included grantees of citizenship, and freedmen and their descendants - were the people who formed the Roman core of provinces and who bound client-kingdoms into the fabric of the imperium.

The fifteen decades which elapsed between the expedition to Sicily of the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War and the war between Pyrrhus of Epirus and the Romans are something of a heroic age in Italian history. It was a time of trial during which the success or failure of communities was constantly at stake, and in which the patterns of the preceding centuries were often obliterated and those which were to endure until the late imperial period formed. The trial took the form of almost unceasing warfare, confused by continuous changing of sides according to a mutable diplomacy and the exigencies of more or less mercenary manpower. Overall, the losers were the already ancient apoikiai, the city states of the Greek diaspora, whose champions, whether leaders from within the body politic or condottieri summoned from the east, all failed to establish their power sufficiently for either their descendants or their successors to share in it. The victory went to the Italic communities, whose elites in this period provided the forebears of long lines of city aristocrats whose tradition endured until the Roman empire. That such continuity came out of this period reminds us that it was no Dark Age. The victors were not usually in a position to despoil or obliterate completely; the fighting was not genocidal. This was partly because the warfare of the time was promoted and fuelled by background social and economic conditions which were tending, despite the dangers of the time, in positive directions: demographically, Italy was regarded at this time as a place with relatively abundant manpower, and the rewards of the integration of local production systems into Mediterranean-wide networks of distribution and consumption were becoming generally more palpable.

It is said that Caligula's exasperated wish was that the people of Rome had only a single neck. That they had a single – and very strongly felt – collective identity is, by contrast, our historical problem. Urban populations at all periods suffer from being treated corporately – as the demos, the many, the mob, the multitude, the masses: under such concepts a sneer lies close below the surface, and the dehumanizing effect of the collective designation has never lost its political point. The difficulty is particularly acute in the case of ancient Rome. The population in question was very large (though for reasons that we shall see, quantification poses serious problems, not just of evidence). Secondly, the Roman elite had every reason to develop the vocabulary of disdain, and has processed almost all the information we possess. Thirdly, there were indeed ways in which the plebs Romana was in reality a corporate entity, and really did cohere as a collectivity, so even when the dismissive perceptions of ancient aristocrats have been allowed for, our analysis still has to penetrate an institutional façade before it can depict and explain the differentiations within the Roman populace.

Our subject-matter in this chapter is the resident population of the city of Rome; but there are two other collectivities that need to be distinguished. The first, the plebs urbana, was a subset of the urban population; it comprised the Roman citizens resident in the city who were not members of the senatorial or equestrian census-categories: it excluded slaves and foreigners (peregrini). The second, the populus Romanus, was the sum of all Roman citizens of whatever status everywhere.