This is correct … however, you completely misunderstood the base that was taxed.

Romans were *NOT* taxed on what their income was. What was taxed, were their *ASSETS*.

So, if a landowner earned 500 bucks or 5 million bucks or nothing at all … was completely irrelevant (except of course regarding his ability to pay the taxes).

Relevant was, he did own a piece of land, and a house on it, an olive orchard, and 100 slaves, and three dozen livestock, and all of this together was estimated to be worth 100,000 bucks by the tax department … so, normally you payed 1,000 bucks in taxes for it, but could go up to 2,000 in emergencies or 3,000 in really dire “we’re fucked”-emergencies. That 3% rate was of course unsustainable over any longer period of time. Return on Investment on your landowner assets would mostly be somewhere between 1.5% and 2% - under good conditions. Much lower in case of a draught or generally poor harvest.

The good news for any Roman living in the core regions, in Italy … as soon as the Empire (or rather, that was already the case in Republican times) had enough colonies, Italians were completely freed of taxes. So, no need to bother with this at all.

Profits from enterprises were a bit different. So, say you owned a pottery production that produced lots and lots of amphores to be sold. But still it would not be your income or earnings that would be taxed, but you would pay what was called portorium. A tax that was levied on the value of all goods that exited or entered the city. If you only produced for local demand … no tax.

There were of course some other taxes except this standard tributom soli (land tax) … customs for merchants, or a tax when you freed your slaves, or another tax if you imported slaves from foreign lands, a special tax on unmarried men and women who could bear children, an inheritance tax (close relatives were exempt from this one), etc. But those were not always levied, some where introduced and later dropped again, or only levied in some cases or times. We are talking about a really long time, so of course things changed.