Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi Volume LVI, June 2022: 149-176 ISSN: 2532-4969 doi: 10.26331/1175 ROME AND THE POLIS: TRADITION AND CHANGE IN THE FINANCIAL ACCOUNTS OF TAUROMENION, 1 ST CENTURY B.C. Filippo Battistoni * Marco Martinez ** Keywords: Ancient Economy, Roman Rule, Roman Sicily, Public Finance. JEL Codes: N00, N01, N44.* Università di Pisa. Address for correspondence: flippo.battistoni@unipi.it. ** Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa. Address for correspondence: marco.martinez@ santannapisa.it. We thank the participants in the workshop in honour of Stefano Fenoaltea as they were very supportive and gave us valuable feedbacks. The present article is the result of joint eforts and we are responsible in solido for it. However, sections 1 and 2 should be ascribed to Filippo Battistoni whereas the Introduction, chapter 3 and the Conclusion to Marco Martinez. We deliberately avoided erudite discussions and references in the footnotes, a choice that could displease classicists should they read this paper. We preferred however to concentrate on the Ancient historians provide us a partial, mostly favourable to Rome, picture of the expansion during the Republic. However, not much attention has been devoted to the local economic history of the Greek cities that became part of the Roman state. Thanks to a completely new edition of the fnancial accounts of the Greek city-state of Tauromenion f rom the I century B.C., we shed new light on the inter- twined process of institutional and economic change in Sicily during the I century B.C. In addition to informing us about the aggregate economic movements of the city, the Tauromenion accounts also show clear signs of Roman influence as months and magistrates were named after the Roman tradition. We fnd that there was no structural break in the civic accounts associated with this institutional change, but rather that the generally wealthy city of Tauromenion showed signs of fnancial dis- tress in the last years before the change. The evidence suggests that rather than be- ing an imposition of Rome, institutional change was voluntarily embraced by mid- dle-sized cities such as Tauromenion and could be motivated by economic reasons. ABSTRACT