Quinquagesima
Quinquagesima (1.) A tax of the fiftieth part, or 2 per cent., upon the value of all slaves who were sold; instituted by Augustus (D. C. 55.31).
In A.D. 56 the rate was 1-25th, or 4 per cent. (vectigal quintae et vicesimae venalium mancipiorum, Tac. Ann. 13.31). Marquardt (Staatsverwaltung, 2.270) would reconcile the two passages by reading, with Lipsius, πεντεικοστῆς for πεντηκοστῆς in Dio Cassius.
(2.) Tacitus (Tac. Ann. 13.51) speaks of Nero abolishing a quinquagesima. But the charge on slaves was now 1-25th, not 1-50th; Nero, therefore, must have abolished some different tax. It may have been one of Caligula's taxes (Suet. Cal. 40), though Claudius seems to have repealed these (D. C. 60.4); or similar to the charges of quinquagesimae mentioned by Cicero (Cic. Ver. 3.49, 78) as made by publicani on the aratores of Sicily; or it may have been some other illegal exaction (see under QUADRAGESIMA and Marquardt's Staatsverw. 2.184).
A duty of 2 per cent. was levied at Athens on exports and imports [PENTECOSTE].
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.