Finances publiques, intérêts privés dans le monde romain

This book brings together more than twenty articles by a specialist on Roman taxation, plus his post-doctoral dissertation on the staffing of the Roman Empire’s financial administration. For everyone interested in the history of this hegemonic construction, which has often been presented as a model of rapaciousness, this collection provides more than just a plunge into the unpopular world of publicans and tax collectors. In attempting to go beyond the clichés passed down by the Ancients themselves, it proposes an in-depth and nuanced view of varied domains in which the sphere of state levies and the ramified structure of the inspection apparatus intersected with private partners, who made the most of opportunities arising from the farming out of public revenue collection, and all of the provincial populations, which Roman rule subjected to its fiscal pressure while presenting the regular payment of taxes as the precondition for the security it ensured in return – and which was nothing other than the celebrated pax romana. A fundamental question runs through these pages: Was the Roman administration just sophisticated imperial racketeering or did it contribute to an original form of association between the core and the peripheries?