Opinion The Third Edit | From ancient Rome to middle class today: There’s no escaping the taxman

Nothing is certain,” the saying attributed to Benjamin Franklin goes, “except death and taxes”. And the jury is out on death. Religions of various hues, after all, promise an afterlife or rebirth. But as long as the state and its punitively-minded bureaucracy are around, there is unlikely to be any relief from taxes. Tax collection is so central to the state that tax evasion has been both crime and protest — remember the Dandi March? Recent research on a 1,900-year-old legal document shows that long before The Beatles sang about the ultimate bogeyman in ‘The Taxman’, the tax evader was in the crosshairs of the state.

A paper published by Anna Dolganov et al in Tyche, an academic journal on ancient history, analyses legal documents that detail the prosecution of a tax evasion case — on papyrus — from the Roman Empire during the time of Emperor Hadrian. In the distant (from the centre of the empire) province of Judaea, Gadalias and Saulos (both likely Jewish) forged documents to escape the exchequer’s demands. Part of their offence was freeing slaves without paying the appropriate duties. The papyrus documents only the strategies and notes of the prosecution, which was committed to carrying out its duty and displayed great knowledge of Roman law at the edges of the empire.

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What’s most interesting, though, is the context Dolganov and her colleagues have provided. The tax evaders freed slaves during a period of rebellion and were subject to the same attention and harassment that many of the middle class today would be all too familiar with. The bureaucracy, of course, has its own logic — obfuscated in legalese and Kafkaesque to the core. And, like the narrator of The Beatles song, their motive is inscrutable: “Don’t ask me what I want it for… If you don’t want to pay some more… ’Cause I’m the taxman.”