Taxation of Asia

The system of Roman financial administration, under which the indirect taxes as well as the domain-revenues were levied by means of middlemen, in itself granted to the Roman capitalist-class the most extensive advantages at the expense of those liable to taxation.  But the direct taxes consisted either, as in most provinces, of fixed sums of money payable by the communities—­which of itself excluded the intervention of Roman capitalists—­or, as in Sicily and Sardinia, of a ground-tenth, the levying of which for each particular community was leased in the provinces themselves, so that wealthy provincials regularly, and the tributary communities themselves very frequently, farmed the tenth of their districts and thereby kept at a distance the dangerous Roman middlemen.  Six years before, when the province of Asia had fallen to the Romans, the senate had organized it substantially according to the first system.(20) Gaius Gracchus(21) overturned this arrangement by a decree of the people, and not only burdened the province, which had hitherto been almost free from taxation, with the most extensive indirect and direct taxes, particularly the ground-tenth, but also enacted that these taxes should be exposed to auction for the province as a whole and in Rome—­ a rule which practically excluded the provincials from participation, and called into existence in the body of middlemen for the -decumae-, -scriptura-, and -vectigalia- of the province of Asia an association of capitalists of colossal magnitude.  A significant indication, moreover, of the endeavour of Gracchus to make the order of capitalists independent of the senate was the enactment, that the entire or partial remission of the stipulated rent was no longer, as hitherto, to be granted by the senate at discretion, but was under definite contingencies to be accorded by law.

Jury Courts

While a gold mine was thus opened for the mercantile class, and the members of the new partnership constituted a great financial power imposing even for the government—­a “senate of merchants"-a definite sphere of public action was at the same time assigned to them in the jury courts.  The field of the criminal procedure, which by right came before the burgesses, was among the Romans from the first very narrow, and was, as we have already stated,(22) still further narrowed by Gracchus; most processes—­both such as related to public crimes, and civil causes—­were decided either by single jurymen [-indices-], or by commissions partly permanent, partly extraordinary.  Hitherto both the former and the latter had been exclusively taken from the senate; Gracchus transferred the functions of jurymen—­both in strictly civil processes, and in the case of the standing and temporary commissions—­ to the equestrian order, directing a new list of jurymen to be annually formed after the analogy of the equestrian centuries from all persons of equestrian rating, and excluding