s of the imperial fiscal procurators rather than
those of the governors that the provinces suffered under the principate.
Although the term of the senatorial governors, as before, was limited to
one year, tried imperial appointees were frequently kept at their posts
for a number of years in the interests of good government.

It has been mentioned before that under Augustus the taxation of the
provinces was revised to correspond more closely to their taxpaying
capacity. Under the principate these taxes were of two kinds, direct or
_tributa_ and indirect or _vectigalia_. The _tributa_, consisted of a
poll-tax (_tributum capitis_), payable by all who had not Roman or Latin
citizenship, and a land and property tax (_tributum soli_), from which
only communities whose land was granted the status of Italian soil (_ius
Italicum_) were exempt. The chief indirect taxes were the customs dues
(_portoria_), the five per cent tax on the value of emancipated slaves,
possibly the one per cent tax on sales, and the five per cent inheritance
tax which was levied on Roman citizens only. In the imperial provinces the
land tax was a fixed proportion of the annual yield of the soil, whereas
in the senatorial provinces it was a definite sum (_stipendium_) annually
fixed for each community.

The principate did not break abruptly with the republican practice of
employing associations of _publicani_ in collecting the public revenues.
It is true that they had been excluded from Asia by Julius Caesar, and it
is possible that Augustus dispensed with them for the raising of the
direct taxes in the imperial provinces, but even in the time of Tiberius
they seem to have been active in connection with the _tributa_ in some of
the senatorial provinces. Their place in the imperial provinces was taken
by the procurator and his agents, in the senatorial at first by the
proconsul assisted by the taxpaying communities themselves and later by
imperial officials.

On the other hand the indirect taxes long continued to be raised
exclusively by the corporations of tax collectors in all the provinces.
However, the operations of these _publicani_ were strictly supervised by
the imperial procurators. In place of the previous custom of paying a
fixed sum to the state in return for which they acquired a right to the
total returns from the taxes in question, the _publicani_ now received a
fixed percentage of the amount actually collected. Under Hadrian the
companies