Widows, Horses, Taxes… and Cato? The aes equestre between History and Historiography

Widows, Horses, Taxes… and Cato? The aes equestre between History and Historiography

This paper reconsiders standard assumptions regarding the supposed tax, commonly termed the aes equestre, widows in the Roman Republic supposedly paid to fund the public horse of the equites equo publico. I argue that a critical reading of the evidence for this impost cannot support the general reconstruction found in modern literature on the subject. Rather than preserving the memory of a real tax fallen into abeyance, I argue that the connection between the aes and widows can be traced back to the works of Cato the Elder, who either invented or heavily embellished this tradition to serve his own political agenda.

Historians have on the whole uncritically accepted the authenticity of our evidence for this impost (Hill, 1943; Nicolet 1974; Gabba 1977; Oakely 1998-2007; Davenport 2019). First, from a few preserved lines of a speech of Cato, we know that aes equestre was an authentic term used to describe money paid by the state to purchase a public horse (Cato ORF 85–86). Antiquarian and legal sources originating in the late republic or early principate confirm this (Paul. Fest. 71L, 91L, Gai. Inst. 4.27). However, none of these specify how this cost was financed. For this, historians turn to two brief notices in Livy (1.43.9) and Cicero (Rep. 2.20), who both state that the public horse was started in monarchic period and was funded by a tax placed on widows. However, Livy does not mention this tax again in his narrative. Taken all together, modern scholars assume that Livy and Cicero preserve a memory of a tax which used to exist in the archaic and possibly early republican periods, but fell out of use sometime in the middle republic. As one commentator confidently states: “the facts speak for themselves” (Ogilvie, 1965).

Or do they? The antiquarians of the later first century BCE, where much of our evidence is derived, had a unique interest in Cato, who is the most cited prose author within the tradition. This antiquarian interest in the aes equestre stems, I argue, from a need to understand and comment on the very speech Cato made about it. Indeed, this was probably not the only occasion on which Cato brought up the aes. Verbal parallels between Livy’s language and the surviving Catonian corpus suggest that Livy derived his information regarding widows from reading Cato. Since we know that Cato had a vested interest in both reforming the equestrian order and in monitoring women and their property, seen most clearly in censorship activities and his opposition to the lex Voconia, I argue that the association of the aera with a tax on widows was a tradition invented by Cato to further his political interests.