Add to these revenues the rents of state pastures, state forests, and state mines.  Into the treasury came also unclaimed property and the property of certain classes of condemned criminals.

So much for the nature of the taxation.  In point of government, the Romans were singularly liberal.  When a province was conquered or annexed, the Senate sent out a commission of ten persons, who carefully considered the existing state of things, the laws and forms of administration actually in vogue, and drew up a constitution for the province, embodying as much of these as was possible or at all commendable; as much, in fact, as was compatible with the Roman connection.  This constitution, when sanctioned by the Senate, was binding, whatever governor might be appointed by Rome to the province.  Such a governor might interpret the law; he could not alter it.

But though a province was a unit in so far as it was under one governor, the Romans were firm believers in strictly local administration.  Their policy in this, as in conquest, was “divide and rule.”  It did not suit their ends to make any large part of the empire conscious of a corporate existence.  The unit of administration was, therefore, a town and its district—­a “community.”  In Gaul there were about sixty such divisions, each roughly corresponding in size to a modern French “department.”  Such a community had its own local council and officials, who were ultimately responsible to the governor.  So long as they performed their municipal or communal functions correctly and honestly they were not interfered with.  The chief principle upon which Rome insisted was that their local government should be aristocratic, or rather that office should be based on wealth.  The governor, of course, stepped in when he felt it to be his duty.  He was required to suppress all secret societies or political unions.  A strike of the bakers in one city of Asia Minor was promptly put down by the governor as interfering with social order and social needs.

The communities made their own by-laws, they collected the land-tax of their own district and handed it over to the financial representative of the Roman government.  This was done by men of their own people, often of a low class, known in the Gospels as the “publicans,” who were so commonly associated with sinners.  St. Matthew had been one of the minor agents for such collection in Galilee.  Other taxes—­those which were indirect—­might be collected by the great tax-farming companies of Roman “knights,” who offered a lump sum for them to the government, and made what they could out of the bargain.

One incidental consequence of this systematic division into communes was that there spread throughout the empire a strong municipal patriotism, especially in the Greek world.  This was followed by liberal local expenditure on the part of rich provincials in beautifying their centres with public buildings and works of art, chiefly, no doubt, given for the sake of the local honours with which they were repaid, but given nevertheless.