ernment, which under the most favourable
circumstances and in an epoch of forty years of peace abroad and
at home neglected such duties, might easily allow taxes to fall
into abeyance and yet obtain an annual surplus of income over
expenditure and a considerable reserve; but such a financial
administration by no means deserves commendation for its mere
semblance of brilliant results, but rather merits the same censure--
in respect of laxity, want of unity in management, mistaken
flattery of the people--as falls to be brought in every other
sphere of political life against the senatorial government
of this epoch.

The Finances in the Revolution

The financial condition of Rome of course assumed a far worse
aspect, when the storms of revolution set in. The new and, even in
a mere financial point of view, extremely oppressive burden imposed
upon the state by the obligation under which Gaius Gracchus placed
it to furnish corn at nominal rates to the burgesses of the
capital, was certainly counterbalanced at first by the newly-opened
sources of income in the province of Asia. Nevertheless the public
buildings seem from that time to have almost come to a standstill.
While the public works which can be shown to have been constructed
from the battle of Pydna down to the time of Gaius Gracchus were
numerous, from the period after 632 there is scarcely mention of
any other than the projects of bridges, roads, and drainage which
Marcus Aemilius Scaurus organized as censor in 645. It must remain
a moot point whether this was the effect of the largesses of grain
or, as is perhaps more probable, the consequence of the system of
increased savings, such as befitted a government which became daily
more and more a rigid oligarchy, and such as is indicated by the
statement that the Roman reserve reached its highest point in 663.
The terrible storm of insurrection and revolution, in combination
with the five years' deficit of the revenues of Asia Minor, was the
first serious trial to which the Roman finances were subjected
after the Hannibalic war: they failed to sustain it. Nothing
perhaps so clearly marks the difference of the times as the
circumstance that in the Hannibalic war it was not till the tenth
year of the struggle, when the burgesses were almost sinking under
taxation, that the reserve was touched;(22) whereas the Social war
was from the first supported by the balance in hand, and when this
was expended after two campa