Terry Madenholm

Scroll through almost any social media feed, and you're likely to encounter a carefully curated vision of domestic bliss: a woman dressed in the romanticized 1950s aesthetic moves gracefully through her day, effortlessly tending to her numerous children while kneading artisanal sourdough from scratch.

The true benchmark of civic maturity isn't a society's monuments; it's how it manages what it discards. The moment humans began living in densely populated settlements, sanitation became a demographic time bomb. Without a way to flush away its own waste, a city is less a triumph of human progress than a countdown to epidemic disease. Nowhere was this demographic pressure more acute than in the capital of the Mediterranean world. At its peak, Rome housed roughly one million inhabitants.

The importance of taxes to the existence of the Roman Empire was already highlighted by Cicero in the 1st century B.C.E., though the legendary Roman orator, statesman, and lawyer viewed them through the lens of necessity and stability rather than personal enthusiasm. Cicero explained that the primary purpose of taxation was to safeguard the state and protect its citizens, particularly by supporting and maintaining the military.