s
not with Gaius Gracchus, but with the oligarch Sulla. The leasing system
was allowed to continue for the indirect taxes, in the case of which
it was very old and--under the maxim of Roman financial administration,
which was retained inviolable also by Caesar, that the levying
of the taxes should at any cost be kept simple and readily manageable--
absolutely could not be dispensed with. But the direct taxes
were thenceforth universally either treated, like the African
and Sardinian deliveries of corn and oil, as contributions
in kind to be directly supplied to the state, or converted,
like the revenues of Asia Minor, into fixed money payments,
in which case the collection of the several sums payable
was entrusted to the tax-districts themselves.

Reform of the Distribution of Corn

The corn-distributions in the capital had hitherto been looked on
as a profitable prerogative of the community which ruled and,
because it ruled, had to be fed by its subjects. This infamous
principle was set aside by Caesar; but it could not be overlooked
that a multitude of wholly destitute burgesses had been protected
solely by these largesses of food from starvation. In this aspect
Caesar retained them. While according to the Sempronian ordinance
renewed by Cato every Roman burgess settled in Rome had legally
a claim to bread-corn without payment, this list of recipients,
which had at last risen to the number of 320,000, was reduced
by the exclusion of all individuals having means or otherwise
provided for to 150,000, and this number was fixed once for all
as the maximum number of recipients of free corn; at the same time
an annual revision of the list was ordered, so that the places vacated
by removal or death might be again filled up with the most needful
among the applicants. By this conversion of the political privilege
into a provision for the poor, a principle remarkable in a moral
as well as in a historical point of view came for the first time
into living operation. Civil society but slowly and gradually
works its way to a perception of the interdependence of interests;
in earlier antiquity the state doubtless protected its members
from the public enemy and the murderer, but it was not bound to protect
the totally helpless fellow-citizen from the worse enemy, want,
by affording the needful means of subsistence. It was the Attic
civilization which first developed, in the Solonian and post-Solonian
legislation, the prin