Words&Dirt

“‘Where do you keep your memories of love, past lovers?’

QiRia looked at her.  ‘In my head, of course.’  He looked away.  ‘There are not so many of those, anyway,’ he said, voice a little quieter.  ‘Loving becomes harder, the longer you live, and I have lived a very long time indeed.’  He fixed his gaze on her again.  ‘I’m sure it varies across species––some seem to do quite well with no idea of love at all––but you soon enough come to realise that love generally comes from a need within ourselves, and that the behaviour, the…expression of love is what is most important to us, not the identity, not the personality of the one who is loved.’  He smiled bleakly at Cossont.  ‘You are young, of course, and so none of this will make any sense whatsoever.’  His smile melted away, Cossont thought, like late spring snow over a morning.  ‘I envy you your illusions,’ he said, ‘though I could not wish their return.’”

––The Hydrogen Sonata, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 174

“So it was that in 123, after a decade of agitation, Gaius Gracchus finally succeeded in pushing through a fateful law.  By its terms, Pergamum was at last subjected to organized taxation.  The lid of the honeypot was now well and truly off.

Pragmatic and cynical in equal measure, the new tax regime worked by actively fostering greed.  Lacking the huge bureaucracies that the monarchs of the East relied on to squeeze their subjects, the Republic turn instead to the private sector to provide the necessary expertise.  Tax-farming contracts were publicly auctioned, with those who bought them advancing in full the tribute owed to the state.  Since the sums demanded were astronomical, only the very wealthiest could afford to pay them, and even then not as individual contractors.  Instead, resources would be pooled, and the resulting companies administered, as befitted huge financial concerns, with elaborate care.  Shares might be offered, general meetings held, directors elected to the service of the board.  In the province itself a consortium’s employees would include soldiers, sailors, the postmen, quite apart from the tax-collecting staff.  The name given to the businessmen who ran these cartels, publicani, harked back to their function as agents of the state, but there was nothing public spirited about the services they provided.  Profit was all, and the more obscene the better.  The aim was not only to collect the official tribute owed to the state, but also the strong-arm the provincials into paying extra for the privilege of being fleeced.  If necessary, commercial know-how would complement the thuggery.  A debtor might be offered loans at ruinous rates and then, once he had been leeched of everything he owned, enslaved.  Far distant in Rome, what did the shareholders of the great corporations care for the suffering they imposed?  Cities were no longer sacked; they were bled to death instead.”

––Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland, loc. 793-806