ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how a Marxist analysis on class lines can help to explain a historical process: in this case the disintegration of large portions of the Roman empire, part of a process which seemed to Edward Gibbon 'the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind'. For the peasant, it was the tax collector who was the cause of the greatest dread. Certainly, tax collection from the poor in Roman times was not a matter of polite letters and, as a last resort, a legal action: beating-up defaulters was a matter of routine, if they were humble people. The rulers of the empire rarely if ever had any real concern for the poor and unprivileged as such; but they sometimes realised the necessity to give some of them some protection, either to prevent them from being utterly ruined and thus become useless as taxpayers, or to preserve them as potential recruits for the army.
