Military of Ancient Rome - Funding and Expenditures

Funding and Expenditures

Although early in its history troops were expected to provide much of their own equipment, eventually the Roman military was almost entirely funded by the state. Since soldiers of the early Republican armies were also unpaid citizens, the financial burden of the army on the state was minimal. However, since the Roman state did not provide services such as housing, health, education, social security and public transport that are part and parcel of modern states, the military always represented by far the greatest expenditure of the state.

During the time of expansion in the Republic and early Empire, Roman armies had acted as a source of revenue for the Roman state, plundering conquered territories, displaying the massive wealth in triumphs upon their return and fueling the economy to the extent that historians such as Toynbee and Burke believe that the Roman economy was essentially a plunder economy. However, after the Empire had stopped expanding in the 2nd century, this source of revenue dried up; by the end of the 3rd century, Rome had "ceased to vanquish." As tax revenue was plagued by corruption and hyperinflation during the Crisis of the Third Century, military expenditures began to become a "crushing burden" on the finances of the Roman state. It now highlighted weaknesses that earlier expansion had disguised. By 440, an imperial law frankly states that the Roman state has insufficient tax revenue to fund an army of a size required by the demands placed upon it.

Several additional factors bloated the military expenditure of the Roman Empire. Firstly, substantial rewards were paid for the demeanor of "barbarian" chieftains in the form of negotiated subsidies and for the provision of allied troops. Secondly, the military boosted its numbers, possibly by one third in a single century. Finally, the military increasingly relied on a higher ratio of cavalry units in the late Empire, which were many times more expensive to maintain than infantry units.

While military size and costs increased, new taxes were introduced or existing tax laws reformed in the late Empire in order to finance it frequently. Although more inhabitants were available within the borders of the late Empire, reducing the per capita costs for an increased standing army was impractical. A large number of the population could not be taxed because they were slaves or held Roman citizenship, which exempted them from taxation in one way or another. Of the remaining, a large number were already impoverished by centuries of warfare and weakened by chronic malnutrition. Still, they had to handle an increasing tax rate and so they often abandoned their lands to survive in a city.

Of the Western Empire's taxable population, a larger number than in the East could not be taxed because they were "primitive subsistence peasant" and did not produce a great deal of goods beyond agricultural products. Plunder was still made from suppressing insurgencies within the Empire and on limited incursions into enemy land. Legally, much of it should have returned to the Imperial purse, but these goods were simply kept by the common soldiers, who demanded it of their commanders as a right. Given the low wages and high inflation in the later Empire, the soldiers felt that they had a right to acquire plunder.