The maintenance of the poor is almost a corollary of the compulsory wardship of women and minors. The artisan whose efforts no longer sufficed to maintain his family often absconded, or in very many cases succumbed physically to his tasks, leaving in either case a family for whose wardship his kinsmen or colleagues had to provide. The state foundations instituted and maintained by Trajan and his successors were probably abandoned during the third century, when the _tutela_ was systematized and minutely regulated.
All in all, every member of the state as such had certain fiscal duties to the state, _munera_, and his performance of these _munera_ determined his place in the state. The social cleavage between the _honestiores_, the “better classes,” and the _humiliores_, “the lower classes,” was of very great importance in criminal law, since the severity of the penalty varied according to the class to which the convicted criminal belonged; but we are not told on what basis the judge determined whether any given man was _honestior_ or _humilior_, and the whole distinction seems somewhat un-Roman.[394] For other purposes the various honors and ranks which multiplied in spite of the sinking significance of the many constituent communities were much less important than the drastically enforced classification of citizens by the taxes they paid.
The Jews of the Roman empire were to be found in all the classes that existed. As long as innumerable forms of local citizenship existed, distinct from citizenship in the Roman state, Jews might be met in all those groups. But when the Constitution of Caracalla merged all the local forms of citizenship in the _civitas Romana_, practically all the Jews then living in the empire became Roman citizens, although it is highly likely that the old names did not at once disappear.
Only one exception is known to have been made by Caracalla. A certain class of inhabitants known as the _dediticii_ were excluded from his general grant. To analyze the exact position of these _dediticii_ would demand more detailed argument than can here be offered, especially since it is a highly controversial matter. Recently it has been urged that all those who paid a poll-tax, particularly in Egypt and Syria, were classed as _dediticii_ and consequently excluded from Roman citizenship. For this, however, there is not the remotest evidence. In the Institutes of Gaius[395] there is an unfortunate lacuna where the matter is discussed, but from what is said there, it is likely that as early as the Antonines the _dediticii_ in Rome were a class of freedmen suffering legal disabilities for proven offenses, and that there were few others. The exemption of the _dediticii_ from the benefits of the Edict of Caracalla was therefore perfectly natural, and did not in the least imply the exemption of those who paid the poll-tax in Egypt and Syria, among whom were many Jews.