To limit the wages of players, and restrain the
licentiousness of their partisans, many decrees were made: the most
remarkable were, "That no Senator should enter the house of a pantomime;
no Roman Knight attend them abroad; they should show nowhere but in the
theatre; and the Praetors should have power to punish any insolence in the
spectators with exile."
The Spaniards were, upon their petition, permitted to build a temple to
Augustus in the colony of Tarragon; an example this for all the provinces
to follow. In answer to the people, who prayed to be relieved from the
_centesima_, a tax of one in the hundred, established at the end of the
civil wars, upon all vendible commodities; Tiberius by an edict declared,
"That upon this tax depended the fund for maintaining the army; nor even
thus was the Commonwealth equal to the expense, if before their twentieth
year the veterans were dismissed." So that the concessions made them
during the late sedition, to discharge them finally at the end of sixteen
years, as they were made through necessity, were for the future abolished.
It was next proposed to the Senate, by Arruntius and Ateius, whether, in
order to restrain the overflowing of the Tiber, the channels of the
several rivers and lakes by which it was swelled, must not be diverted.
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