In this record-breaking year of global elections, taxation has become a hot topic, with governments and opposition parties around the world proposing tweaks and reforms to balance the public finances along with the mood of the voting public. It is a little surprising, then, that the issue seems to have occupied relatively little airtime in the birthplace of democracy: ancient Greece.
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Indeed, there are relatively few surviving sources that document people’s reactions to having to part with their hard-earned drachmas. What we do know, however, is that taxation was often seen as the price one paid to inhabit a safe and culturally enriching city. People flocked to Athens to live the high life, knowing it had it all – temples, theatres, festivals. The fact that extra financial demands were made of foreigners did not put off some 10,000 from settling in the illustrious city-state by 317 BC.
In fact, non-Athenians faced paying an additional tax to trade in Athens’s market.
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Resident aliens, known as ‘metics’, were also subject to a poll tax from which Athens-born citizens were exempt. The poll tax was payable by both men and women, and there were severe penalties for those who evaded it, including enslavement.
For most other Athenian citizens, taxation was indirect. There was a 2 per cent customs duty on imports and exports at the Piraeus, Athens’ bustling harbour. The largest shares of taxes raised were directed to the military and public works. An additional tax, known as the eisphora, could be levied in wartime. This was essentially a wealth tax which took the form of a proportional levy.
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Unsurprisingly, the prospect of paying tax rarely garnered much enthusiasm in ancient times. An exception can be found among those wealthy Greeks who voluntarily contributed funds for public benefit, including shipbuilding and festivals, as participants in so-called liturgies.
Naturally, some people did try to worm their way out of their fiscal responsibilities. An amusing allusion appears in Aristophanes’ Frogs, a comedy performed in Athens in 405 BC. Here, the veteran playwright Aeschylus chastised the younger playwright Euripides for dressing his kings in rags in his plays and thereby allowing the wealthy of Athens to play down their wealth to avoid paying taxes to fund the navy. The satire could have only worked if his audience were familiar with such ploys.
Protests against the payment of tax were not unheard of. The people of Ptolemaic Egypt, for instance, revolted following the introduction of a property tax. But citizens generally found that the best options for reducing what they owed the taxman were to sell off land, conceal some of their property or move abroad. (History does have a knack of repeating itself.)
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Sparta was perhaps the ancients’ answer to our modern tax havens, with few charges applied except in wartime. Spartan citizens relied heavily on donations made to their kings and on tribute from conquered peoples. Alternatives – not necessarily to be recommended today – included concealing cash in the ground. The rediscovery of vast hoards of coins from the Roman world sheds some light on the history of banking. When one such hoard, consisting of 70,000 coins and pieces of jewellery, was found on Jersey in 2012, the ‘offshore’ headlines very nearly wrote themselves.
