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The View from the Customs House 227
attest—from Cicero’s recognition, for instance, that Rome’s
imperial hegemony was hated for its arrogant display of power
and for the economic advantage that it drew from it through
the system of portoria: the insignia of our magistrates are
hated, our name is bitter in their mouths, our taxes and duties—like
death. 73 The yield of interdependence continued, the
Mediterranean environment being what it was, to be one of the
most important and flexible pieces in the game of economic
diplomacy.
Some have seen an important transition from civic autarky to
imperial fiscality in the early Roman empire. 74 This should not,
however, be envisaged as a part of a grand narrative of the
erosion of local power by larger hegemony. Rather, local fiscal
self-determination in the ancient world was always in tension
with the demands, more or less urgent, more or less imperative,
of a wider frame. The fiscal was one of the most important
domains on which the unifying, ordering, controlling forces of
supra-regional integrative hegemony might operate. Within
that operation, it was normal for pluralism—the patchwork
fiscality which we observed in the Classical Greek Mediterranean—to
subsist. 75 Rather than building grand administrative
structures or conceiving of novel fiscal schemata, the Romans
continued, albeit on a larger scale than ever before, to adapt the
rhythms and opportunities that they found, granting the enjoyment
of the fruits of harbour dues to certain cities, even handing
out major new opportunities, as when Marius donated to Massalia
the right to tax movements on his new canal at the mouth
of the Rhône, but reserving for the ruling power the yield of
major nodes in the network of movements of goods and
people. 76 So France has been able to show that in Gaul it was
73
Cicero, Flacc. 19: ‘odio sunt nostrae secures, nomen acerbitati, scriptura,
decumae, portorium morti’.
74
France, Quadragesima 11–12, for Gaul.
75
S. Mrozek, ‘Le fonctionnement des fondations dans les provinces occidentales
et l’économie de crédit à l’époque du Haut-Empire romain’, Latomus
59 (2000), 327–45, argues interestingly for a microregional distribution of
credit trust in the empire, reflected in the incidence of foundations. This fiscal
patchwork is recognizably the same texture as the one I am trying to evoke
here.
76
Fossae Marianae toll: Strabo 4. 18; Plutarch, Marius 15. 4.