The growth of the Empire had always been based on conquest, and the Empire’s economy had been fuelled by the exploitation of new colonies. When the Empire ran out of putative victims, its economy ceased to make sense, particularly as the mere maintenance of the Empire, with its garrisons and its bureaucrats, was so expensive. From the beginning of the second century AD, the State had to raise higher and higher taxes to maintain itself and its armies. It was under the Emperors Hadrian and Trajan, when the Empire was at its largest, that residual freedoms started to get knocked away to ensure that revenue was collected. Special commissioners, curatores, were appointed to run the cities. An army of secret police were recruited from the frumentarii. To pay for the extra bureaucrats, yet more taxes were raised, and the state increasingly took over the running of the economy – almost on ancient Egyptian lines. In AD 301, the Emperor Diocletian imposed fixed wages and prices, by decree, with infractions punishable by death. He declared that ‘uncontrolled economic activity is a religion of the godless’. Lanctantius wrote that the edict was a complete failure, that ‘there was a great bloodshed arising from its small and unimportant details’ and that more people were engaged in raising and spending taxes than in paying them. The origins of medieval feudalism emerged from the Roman Empire as it decayed. To ensure that the peasants continued to work under an economy which had lost its free-market incentives, Constantine promulgated a law in AD 332 which bound all coloni to the state as serfs. Their children were glebe adscripti, tied to the soil. To reinforce state control on all aspects of the economy, the city trade guilds or collegia imposed compulsory, hereditary trades on all. An edict Of AD 390 forbade children of the workers in the mint to marry outside their caste or trade. The towns shrank, and the population condensed on the patriarchal, self-sufficient, isolated estates that adumbrate the medieval European villages. Indeed, the word ‘village’ derives from the Latin villa, indicating that the feudal villages originated as the private estates of Roman magnates. And the Roman Catholic Church, once adopted by Constantine as the official religion, started to burn heretics. Religious and intellectual freedom, the great gifts of the Graeco-Roman period, were extinguished. No new technology emerged."
Terence Kealey, The Economics of Scientific Research
