The third great branch of the Roman revenue was the portorium, which did not differ from those impositions which we now call customs and duties of export and import.

This was the ordinary revenue; besides which there were occasional impositions for shipping, for military stores and provisions, and for defraying the expense of the praetor and his legates on the various circuits they made for the administration of the province.  This last charge became frequently a means of great oppression, and several ways were from time to time attempted, but with little effect, to confine it within reasonable bounds.[25] Amongst the extraordinary impositions must be reckoned the obligation they laid on the provincials to labor at the public works, after the manner of what the French call the corvee, and we term statute-labor.

As the provinces, burdened by the ordinary charges, were often in no condition of levying these occasional taxes, they were obliged to borrow at interest.  Interest was then to communities at the same exorbitant rate as to individuals.  No province was free from a most onerous public debt; and that debt was far from operating like the same engagement contracted in modern states, by which, as the creditor is thrown into the power of the debtor, they often add considerably to their strength, and to the number and attachment of their dependants.  The prince in this latter case borrows from a subject or from a stranger.  The one becomes more the subject, and the other less a stranger.  But in the Roman provinces the subject borrowed from his master, and he thereby doubled his slavery.  The overgrown favorites and wealthy nobility of Rome advanced money to the provincials; and they were in a condition both to prescribe the terms of the loan and to enforce the payment.  The provinces groaned at once under all the severity of public imposition and the rapaciousness of private usury.  They were overrun by publicans, farmers of the taxes, agents, confiscators, usurers, bankers, those numerous and insatiable bodies which always flourish in a burdened and complicated revenue.  In a word, the taxes in the Roman Empire were so heavy, and in many respects so injudiciously laid on, that they have been not improperly considered as one cause of its decay and ruin.  The Roman government, to the very last, carried something of the spirit of conquest in it; and this system of taxes seems rather calculated for the utter impoverishment of nations, in whom a long subjection had not worn away the remembrance of enmity, than for the support of a just commonwealth.

FOOTNOTES: 

[15] There is a curious instance of a ceremony not unlike this in a fragment of an ancient Runic history, which it may not be disagreeable to compare with this part of the British manners.  “Ne vero regent ex improviso adoriretur Ulafus, admoto sacculo suo, eundem quatere coepit, carmen simul magicum obmurmurans, hac verborum formula:  Duriter increpetur cum tonitru; stringant Cyclopia tela; injiciant manum Parcae; ... acriter excipient monticolae genii plurimi, atque gigantes ... contundent; quatient; procellae ..., disrumpent lapides navigium ejus....”—­Hickesii Thesaur.  Vol.  II. p. 140.