On June 1, 393 B.C., after the war in Magna Graecia ended, countless Theonians flocked to Thurii, the centre of Theonia, to witness the official enthronement of Davos as king in front of the Temple of Hades.
On that occasion, the whole city fell into celebration.
And at this moment, the Theonia City-State Union was renamed the Kingdom of Theonia, and King Davos declared that he would change the disordered Greek calendar and take the year of his accession as the first year of Theonia.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Time flew by, and it was now the tenth year of Theonia. (that is, 383 B.C.)
It was currently August with its hot weather. However, Galademus, the taxation official of Purosdemos in Naxos, was still out in the fields, checking the land owned by each family and the growth of their crops to estimate the amount of land tax each family would pay in his district after the autumn harvest.
The Theonian citizens can pay their taxes either in kinds, such as wheat, olive oil, grapes….or silver coins, which requires the taxation officials not only to have excellent computation but also to be familiar with the prices of the commodities in the market. In addition, they must have adequate manpower when collecting taxes to avoid mistakes. Thus during those days, the Demarchos of each demo would gather the civil servants to assist the taxation officials. They would also call additional registered accountants and scribes under their jurisdiction to be commanded by the taxation official.
Due to completing his studies at the junior, middle and senior level in the most famous school in Thurii and graduating with excellence in Mathematics, Galademus became a taxation official. And the scholar, who is the school's teacher, even hoped that Galademus could enter the Institute of Mathematics and continue his studies. However, he insisted on living independently as an adult as soon as possible. Thus he took one of the most challenging civil servant exams in the Kingdom of Theonia, the Taxation Officer Examination. (The other exam is the Judge Selection exam, which is known for requiring a massive amount of memorisation of countless laws and critical thinking.)
After two years of working hard as an apprentice tax officer and assistant, he officially became a junior taxation official in Theonia with excellent performance. He was then assigned to Naxos in Sicily by the Ministry of Finance of the Kingdom and was already working here for two years. Furthermore, since he is only 24 years old now, it is safe to say that he has a great future.
The demo in this region has five villages under its jurisdiction and was located in the middle reaches of the Alcantara, near the foot of Mount Etna. However, even though it doesn’t have flat terrain, its land is more fertile*. (Because of the volcanic ash. Moreover, it doesn't have much population and currently has 452 households and 1,822 people, and its land area is 1,786,666 square meters in total.)
After becoming a taxation official, Galademus took half a year to thoroughly understand the situation of the fields in his jurisdiction by going to each village and household. Naturally, the agricultural officer of the demo had a detailed record, and the taxation official only had to refer to the records to collect land taxes successfully. But Galademus was a serious man who always wanted to confirm the situation with his own eyes. Thus he doesn't get along well with the agricultural officer.
“Sir, you should drink some water as it's too hot.” A tax collector who followed him picked up a leather bag containing water and said that while wiping his sweat.
Over the years, the Theonian kingdom established schools in most cities, so many of its citizens who yearned to become civil servants took the civil servant examination in various departments after greatly improving their literacy, writing and arithmetic skills by studying in the school. In contrast, the citizens who couldn’t pass the official examinations can also take the secondary examinations as minor civil servants. However, they still have the opportunity to be promoted depending on how long they served the kingdom and their performance.
The two tax collectors following Galademus were local citizens who received salaries by working as tax collectors during the rest season and would go home during the planting and harvest season. In fact, the kingdom of Theonia relied on these part-time officials to support the most basic management work of the whole kingdom. During their apprenticeship, their superiors would warn every official taking up a post in the kingdom that they must respect those under them. Otherwise, they wouldn't get supported and would make it challenging to complete the tasks assigned by their superiors!
“Thanks, Gabrinus!” Galademus thanked him while taking the leather bag and drinking a lot of water, which immediately moistened his dry throat.
“What's there for you to thank for? Instead, I should be the one thanking you for helping me solve some math problems!” Gabrinus was determined to take the Taxation Officer Examination next year, so he was studying hard during this time.
Galademus just smiled and handed back the bag to him.
“Finally, we only need to check one last household before we can return to Megalos.” Another tax collector, Kabanus, urged politely. Kabanus was ten years older than Gabrinus, so when he was young, he had lived through the turbulent time when Naxos was destroyed. But because of his age, he was not as motivated as his colleagues and just wanted to live a full and peaceful life by farming and collecting taxes. And getting a ‘credit’ in the year-end-assessment would already be good for him as it would mean honour and more rewards. Although such a situation happened once last year, he understood that it was all thanks to Galademus. However, looking at this year, there was a good chance that the place they were in charge of would again receive a commendation, so he was happy to comply despite the exhaustion of following the young taxation official.
‘Last one!’ Galademus looked ahead while having a complicated feeling.
That is because the identity of the owner of the last household isn't simple. The owner is Ladician, a statesman of the kingdom's senate.
Ladician was from a prominent household in Naxos but later went into exile in Rhegium when Dionysius was the tyrant of Syracuse. Afterwards, he arrived in Sicily with the first legion of Theonia and served as one of the exiles' leaders and contributed to Theonia's ultimate victory over Syracuse and the acquisition of the Catanian plain. Later, when Naxos was integrated into Theonia, Ladician became a statesman of Theonia for his service and influence in Naxos. He then married his daughter to Antonios, then head of the first legion, an influential member of the Theonian senate and a trusted subordinate of King Davos.
After becoming a statesman, Ladician moved to Thurii. However, he did not sell his home in Naxos and had even gotten 3,333 square metres of land from Theonia’s allocation. In addition, through his relationship with Antonios, he bought land in Naxos from the legion soldiers, who got it for their military achievements.
Although it was forbidden to buy and sell the allocated land, it was later made possible because of the distance that made it impossible for the owner to take care of the land. For example, the legion soldiers living in Thurii or Amendolara would have to take three days to travel by boat to get to their land in Sicily. In addition, they would have to assign a trusted slave to look after the land and work on it all year round, which would have been both laborious and challenging. Thus they could only sell it to a fellow citizen of Theonia.
Of course, the war in Magna Graecia ten years earlier had given Theonia enough spare land in Magna Graecia. Hence the legion soldiers were primarily rewarded with land in Magna Graecia, with extra square metres of land in Sicily for some of the legion soldiers who had done exceptionally well. Although the land wasn't cheap, Ladician had the money. And if not for the officials of the Ministry of Agriculture responsible for the sale and supervision of land transfer, who later found and advised that he had raised the land price too high and bought too many lands, Ladician's land in Naxos wouldn't have been limited to the current 52,000 square metres.
When Galademus took his post in Naxos last year, he had some conflicts with Ladician's household because he found that in the past, the taxation official had levied less land tax on Ladician's family. In the beginning, most of Ladician's lands were halfway up a mountain, so it wasn't easy to water the fields. Thus when the taxation official initially calculated the tax, the land tax was low as most of his household's fields were classified as medium and low-grade farms.
However, upon Galademus' investigation, he discovered that eight years earlier, Naxos had built a large waterwheel by the Alcantara river. Since then, the river could efficiently irrigate all the fields of Ladician's family, solving the water problem. On the contrary, the harvest of the mountainside farms was even better than that of the flat land. Yet the tax on his family's land was still levied year after year at the same rate as before. However, the main issue is that Ladician didn’t build the waterwheel himself but built it with the public's money at the suggestion of the council of Naxos to the city's Praetor.
Thus Galademus believes that not only should they recalculate the tax for Ladician's land, but Ladician should also pay the tax he owed in the past few years.
But when Galademus informed Ladician’s household of this decision, they raised an uproar. Besides refusing to pay more taxes, the housekeeper who stayed behind had acted by asking the council to put pressure on the city's Praetor and criticise the taxation official for charging indiscriminately. The housekeeper even incited the village people to protest against the new taxation official for being too harsh and oppressing them Sicilians, making it difficult for Galademus to continue his tax collections. (It was because Galademus weighted the crops such as wheat seriously that he didn't even allow a gram less.)
Furthermore, Galademus' immediate superior, the middle-ranking taxation official of Naxos, feared that the discovery of this long-term mistake would make him look incompetent and jeopardise his future because Galademus had lifted the ‘lid’. Moreover, the friends Galademus made in Naxos had spoken in favour of Ladician's family. Thus besides severely criticising Galademus on several occasions, the taxation officials also rejected his proposal to ‘revise the amount of taxes Ladician’s household had to pay and have them make up for the deficits’.
But the incumbent Praetor of Naxos was Stromboli, an inflexible but conservative statesman of Amendolara, who would not succumb to pressure from the local councils. Not to mention that Galademus is also an Amendolaran.
