Perhaps collection of taxes by the Roman State was now introduced, and the division of Judea into eleven toparchiai must have probably been intended to facilitate this: these had their meéro- poleis and komai, and were probably not divided into poleis on the Greek system.
Many taxes were paid in the province Judzea— a heavy poll-tax, customs duties payable at the frontiers, road-tax on those who used the roads, land-tax, and many others.§ The system was probably much the same as in the Seleucid times.
The so-called ‘ publicans,’ reAGvac in NT, were the agents in collecting these taxes. It is obvious that these ‘ publicans” have no connexion with or relation to the old publicani of the Roman Re- public. Those old publicani had been financiers on a vast scale, who farmed the taxes of an entire province, paid a lump sum to the Roman State, collected the taxes.by their own staff of agents, and made large profits out of the revenue which they collected. ‘Their staff was a highly trained band of clerks and agents, consisting chiefly of their slaves and freedmen, who were familiar with the work of tax-collecting, ready to be employed in any province farmed by the financial com-
* This stipendiwm, an unusual kind of tax in the Roman State, was probably imitated from the Seleucid custom in Syria. f
" This, of course, implies that the tax in Palestine was col- lected, not by agents of the publicant but by the government of the land of Juda, which in turn paid it to the publicant. This avoided the worst evils.
t+ Mommsen and others suppose that) Judea was freed from the tax by Ozxsar, and that the edicts on the subject (Josephus, Ant. Jud. xv. v. 6) refer only to Joppa. Niese in Hermes, Ks 435, and Viereck, Sermo Grecus, p. 100, show that the text of Josephus must not be tampered with (as Mommsen has to do). Appian mentions Herod among the kings who paid tribute.
$ Goldschmid, ‘ Les Impots et Droits de Douane en Judée sous les Rom.’ (Rev. d. Ht. Juives, 1897, p. 192ff.); also Ruggiero, Diz. Epigraph. iii. p. 126; Wilcken, Grech. Ostraka, i. 247.
pany, almost always foreigners and not natives of the province where they were stationed. But the telonai of the NT were Jews, who prayed in the temple, and with whom Jesus and His dis- ciples sat at meat. They were contractors or farmers on a small scale: they arranged for the collecting of one tax in one town or small district. Their precise relation to the Roman government and their method of remuneration is not attested, but Rostowzew regards it as practically certain that they did not pay down a lump sum by con- tract and retain all that they could collect over that amount, and he suggests that they perhaps may have been paid through a percentage on the amount collected.
Hence the ¢elonai in a town were very numer- ous (Lk 577-80, Mk 216-27, Lk 191, Mt 9%). Each had his own office, where he sat, where he col- lected his own special tax alone or with others, for associations or companies of telonai sometimes united to make the contract. Those ¢elonat were persons of some property, as is quite distinctly implied in the Gospels (cf. also Josephus, BJ I. 14. 4 [Niese, § 287]). ‘They were permitted by law to collect only a certain fixed duty according to law or tariff, though there were many instances in which they illegally collected more than the proper amount ; see Lk 3!-18, They had no right of ex- acting arrears, but could merely denounce and accuse defaulters before the officers of the State (cuxopavretv, Lk 198; Rostowzew, p. 343f.): their powers, therefore, fell far short of those exercised by the old Republican publicant and their agents. These telonaz were evidently all natives of the country ; and the fiscal system was practically the same as in Roman Egypt, a slightly modified con- tinuation by Augustus of the Hellenistic system, which utilized the native population as collectors.
The change which Julius Cesar in B.C. 47-44 introduced, and which Augustus in A.D. 6 con- firmed, in abolishing the sway of the publicant in Judeea,* was only part of the General change in- troduced gradually in the Empire. The exactions and tyranny of the publicant had been the greatest evil of Republican Roman government in the pro- vinces. The Emperors gradually increased the activity of the government, narrowly watched the conduct of the publicani, reduced their gains, collected the new Imperial taxes (such as that on inheritances) without their aid, and finally abol- ished them entirely, as Rostowzew has shown with admirable skill in the dissertation from which we have so frequently quoted. The collection of customs duties (portoria) was the sphere in which the publicani had persisted longest, because in that department, through their immense stafis of trained agents, they had a great advantage ; but even there they were superseded, at latest in the 2nd cent., in Judea already by the arrangenents of Julius Cesar. The Imperial government rarely substituted direct collection by its own officials and staff; sometimes it employed the cities, c.g. Palmyra, as above pointed out, but generally it used a large staff of small farmers of revenue, who collected each one tax in a small district, and who were carefully superintended by Imperial officials, to whom they had to refer all doubtful cases.