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Updated: July 26, 2025
Of the two classes of business men we have been describing, the tax-farmers and the money-lenders, it is hard to say which wrought the most mischief in the Empire; they played into each other's hands in wringing money out of the helpless provincials. Together too they did incalculable harm, morally and socially, among the upper strata of Roman society at home.
Lucullus was now busy in looking after the cities of Asia, and having no war to divert his time, spent it in the administration of law and justice, the want of which had for a long time left the province a prey to unspeakable and incredible miseries; so plundered and enslaved by tax-farmers and usurers, that private people were compelled to sell their sons in the flower of their youth, and their daughters in their virginity, and the States publicly to sell their consecrated gifts, pictures, and statues.
While the senatorial order could govern the important provinces, command legions, possess large estates, and derive revenues from them, but could make money in other ways only through the more or less concealed agency of knights or their own freedmen, the knights were free to act as bankers, money-lenders, tax-farmers, and merchants or contractors in a large way, and to take charge of such third-rate provinces as the Caesar might think fit to entrust to them.
The couriers of the tax-farmers are just going, and, though I am actually travelling on the road, I must steal a moment to assure you that I have not forgotten your injunctions. I am sitting by the roadside to jot down a few notes about matters which really need a long letter. I entered, on July 31, with a most enthusiastic reception, into a devastated and utterly ruined province.
Much, however, of what the books call money-lending was only what we should consider legitimate banking. Be this as it may, the knights made large fortunes from the practice. They were also the tax-farmers, who operated in the case of those imposts which were still left indirect.
In the porticoes, and on the steps of the temples, in the area of the Forum, in the colonnade that surrounded it, on the housetops and on the overlooking declivities, were stationed dense and eager crowds of impoverished heirs and their guardians, bankrupt tax-farmers and corn merchants, fathers bewailing their children carried off to the praetor's harem, children mourning for their parents dead in the praetor's dungeons, Greek nobles whose descent was traced to Cecrops or Eurysthenes, or to the great Ionian and Minyan houses, and Phoenicians, whose ancestors had been priests of the Tyrian Melcarth, or claimed kindred with the Zidonian Jah."
So lost to all sense of honour was Louis, that he defiled his hands with bribes from tax-farmers who ground the faces of the poor, and became a large shareholder in an infamous syndicate of capitalists that bought up the corn of France in order to export and then import it at enormous profit.
I say he is building cannon to shoot bullets big as his father's tomb; when they are fired, the faithful at Medina will hear the noise, and think it thunder that to your third. And as to his doing getting ready for war, meaning business for everybody, from the Shiek-ul-Islam to the thieving tax-farmers of Bagdad to the Kislar-Jinn of Abad-on with them.
Salt is good: but if the salt become insipid, by what shall it be seasoned? It is neither fit for the land, nor for manure; but they cast it out. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. THEN drew nigh unto him all the tax-farmers and the sinners to hear him. And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man entertains sinners, and eateth with them.
The nobles and clergy were not anxious to be taxed; courtiers resented any reduction of their pensions; tax-farmers feared the reforming minister; owners of industrial monopolies were frightened; the peasants misunderstood his intentions; and riots broke out. Everybody seemed to be relieved when, in 1776, Turgot was dismissed. Turgot had been a theorist; his successor was a businessman.
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