The notion that "Rome" built aqueducts, sewers, ports, etc is problematic in the academic sense because it isn't entirely wrong, nor is it entirely misleading, but it does not really capture the full picture. To illustrate this I will copy out here Pliny's letter to the emperor Trajan regarding some public works in the city of Nicomedia, and Trajan's response (translation taken from here:

To Trajan.

Sir, the people of Nicomedia spent 3,329,000 sesterces upon an aqueduct, which was left in an unfinished state, and I may say in ruin, and they also levied taxes to the extent of two millions for a second one. This too has been abandoned, and to obtain a water-supply those who have wasted these enormous sums must go to new expense. I have myself visited a splendidly clear spring, from which it seems to me the supply ought to be brought to the town as indeed they tried to do by their first scheme - by an aqueduct of arches, so that it might not be confined only to the low-lying and level parts of the city. Very few of the arches are still standing; some could be built from the shaped blocks {lapis quadratus} which were taken from the earlier work, and part again, in my opinion, should be constructed of brick {opus testaceum}, which is both cheaper and more easily handled, but the first thing that might be done is for you to send an engineer skilled in such work, or an architect, to prevent a repetition of the former failures. I can at least vouch for this, that such an undertaking would be well worthy of your reign owing to its public utility and its imposing design.

Trajan to Pliny.

Steps must certainly be taken to provide the city of Nicomedia with a water-supply, and I have every confidence that you will undertake the duty with all necessary diligence. But I swear that it is also part of your diligent duty to find out who is to blame for the waste of such sums of money by the people of Nicomedia on their aqueducts, and whether or not there has been any serving of private interests in thus beginning and then abandoning the works. See that you bring to my knowledge whatever you may find out.

From one perspective this is a classic example of "Romans building an aqueduct" as here we have the governor of Bithynia sending a letter to the emperor asking for assistance and technical expertise, and the emperor responding favorably with instructions to oversee the project and investigate what went wrong with the prior attempts. And it is by no means alone in that, if you read through the letters you get the sense that supervising public works was a pretty major part of the job of provincial administration. However, the letter also points to something strikingly different: these were public works projects that were initiated by local political unites and funded by taxes raised by those units for the purpose, with "Rome" being essentially a mere consultant to the process and it seems imperial officials did not even know about it until they physically went to the city.

So how do we talk about the aqueduct of Nicomedia? Was it Roman? It was constructed during the period of the Roman empire, with techniques used throughout the empire, and eventually drawing on empire wide networks of expertise. That's pretty Roman! But it was also about as far from "the Romans" coming into a place and building an aqueduct as can be imagined. There is not really a wrong answer to that, and it all depends on your perspective and what about the Roman empire you want to focus on.

The bit about taxes also relates to your question, because it is not the case that Joeius Publicus was filling out his VV-II on the Ides of April to pay his taxes. Taxes during the Early Imperial Period (when a more formalized system than the wildcat days of Republican tax farming was implemented) were assessed by imperial officials but actually levied by local government bodies on land, property, commerce, professional revenue, etc, and sent up the chain to speak, so there was not a centralized government agency. As for how burdensome taxation was, the sources are mixed. Tax revolt and protest crops up less than in, say, Chinese imperial history, but that could easily be a case of vastly different quality and quantity of source material, and I have personally seen different people characterize Roman taxation as surprisingly light or quite burdensome. Without documentation we do not have it is very hard to give a full answer. In the very recent Taxation, Economy, and Revolt in Ancient Rome, Galilee, and Egypt, the historian David Hollander summarizes the different sides of the argument and gives his own characterization of the taxation system as being "opaque, inconsistent, and unfair" which crucially is not the same thing as burdensome.

[There is also a historical mention of a general, I believe it was Quintus Flaminius, boasting that after conquering Greece (?) the new subjects actually paid less in taxation than they did before. The general theory being that while the Roman empire had a much larger and costlier military than any other Mediterranean polity, it was significantly less than the total combined military spending of the previously existing polities, and thus represented a much smaller portion of the "Mediterranean GDP" so to speak. However I cannot for the life of me remember who it was so I am keeping this in a sidenote]

u/Tiako has already made a very good comment addressing the difficulties of this question, and I'd like to offer some more thoughts. The difficulty with assessing the economy of the ancient world – apart from the standard issues of uncommon/unreliable sources – is that it doesn’t really fit into our models. As u/Tiako has pointed out, the ‘economy’ and infrastructure of the Roman Empire (and this applies also to earlier geopolitical powers like the Seleucid Empire) was intensely localised, because the huge geographic scale of these empires meant it was impossible to reliably extract taxes: a remote town in the Seleucid Empire could entirely possibly just not pay taxes by running away when they heard the royal tax collectors were coming. Coupled to this high level of localisation, the ancient world understood time differently to us (as I’ve discussed here https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/x253vl/how_far_did_the_ancient_egyptian_technology/imlkpjw/?context=3), which meant that any ‘economics’ was essentially an ad hoc process without any real commitment to ensuring constant long-term financial growth. This included taxes: a king could just decide as a reward for a city doing something nice for him to exempt them from taxes, as Antiochus I/II did for the city of Erythrae after they gave him a gold crown (OGIS 223), or as Eumenes I did for his mercenaries after they threatened to revolt (OGIS 266).

Alongside this was a fundamentally basic understanding of the economy. The most expansive discussion of the economy in the ancient world is Pseudo-Aristotle’s Economics. In Book 2, he classifies economies into four kinds: of kingdoms, of provinces, of free states, and of households. The stunning conclusion to this analysis, and the rule that is held to be true to all four kinds of economies, is summed up as follows (1346α):

ὃ πάσαις μὲν ἐπικοινωνεῖται ταῖς οἰκονομίαις καὶ προσήκει σκοπεῖν αὐτὸ μὴ παρέργως, μάλιστα δὲ ταύτῃ, τὸ τἀναλώματα μὴ μείζω τῶν προσόδων γίνεσθαι.

There is one aspect which is common to all the economies, and it will be best to examine it not as a footnote, but at this very point: that expenses should not be greater than income.

​

Not only is this incredibly basic by our standards, it’s not even true: most economists will tell you that a household budget is nothing like a national budget, and the same rules cannot apply (though this fiction remains popular politically, and is the reason for the crippling austerity policies of certain governments). Unfortunately, the governments of the ancient world also apparently bought into this fiction, and so instead of sustained and managed use of government borrowing to finance consistent economic and infrastructure policies, ancient governments (including, and perhaps even particularly) the Roman Empire were stuck in a zero-sum game. If they needed money immediately, they immediately raised taxes or melted treasure or did some plundering; if they didn’t need money, they could lower taxes and spend money on public services like bread or temples or stoas or triumphal arches.

The lack of a guiding, long-term economic strategy goes some way to explaining the imperial taxation system of the late second-century AD. When the Romans conquered a place – particularly in the Greek world – this place had normally been part of a ‘functioning’ (bearing in mind the caveats above) economy for centuries, paying its taxes, funding its infrastructure, sending gifts to whoever was politically dominant so that they didn’t get wiped out. The Romans just took these taxes for themselves, and instituted a dual tax-system: Roman citizens paid Roman taxes, the peregrini (foreigners) paid their own taxes. As you’ll probably have gathered by now, taxation was haphazard and non-uniform, but there were two societal issues that had important effects on Roman tax-law. The first is that the Romans were disproportionately fond of freeing their slaves compared to the Greeks (largely to extract economic and social benefits from them as client freedmen, and to avoid having to take care of them); this reached a high enough rate that it prompted a legal clampdown, and as a result a manumission tax of 5% was imposed on freeing slaves (the 5% being of their value, however that was calculated). The second is due to Augustus’ concerns with public morality: in a bid to stop people leaving all their possessions to non-family members, he imposed a tax of 5% on inheritances unless the recipient was a member of the immediate family. These taxes specifically and legally only applied to Roman citizens.

In 212 AD the Emperor Caracalla murdered his brother Geta and, as periodically happened, decided the empire needed more money and a party. He therefore passed the constitutio Antoniniana, which fortunately for us is (probably) preserved in Greek on Papyrus Gissensis 40: this granted Roman citizenship to almost every free person in the empire. This meant that all these people were now liable for the manumission and inheritance taxes, which Caracalla also removed the exemptions for and raised to 10% (and so Cassius Dio at 78.9.5 alleges this was the reason for the granting of citizenship).

As for how onerous these new taxes were? Probably not very, and the evidence, as u/Tiako has pointed out, is problematic. But it doesn’t seem to have been perceived as a distinctly great burden, because it was the cause of the single most annoying phenomenon of the ancient world to modern papyrologists. It was typical for people being granted citizenship to take on the name of their benefactor: the Greek poet Archias, for example, had been patronised by Lucius Licinius Lucullus and so upon being granted Roman citizenship (maybe – Cicero’s argument that he was made a citizen in the pro Archia is slightly undermined by the tablets that apparently recorded this event were mysteriously burned down in a fire) he took up the name Aulus Licinius Archias. You can perhaps see where this is going: when one individual gives citizenship and their name to one person it’s still possible to identify them. When one individual gives citizenship and their name to approximately 50% of the entire Roman Empire at once, it becomes really annoying to try and distinguish one Aurelius from another. So Caracalla imposing those taxes might not have been too onerous for his citizens, but it is unfortunately very, very onerous for poor, suffering, modern historians.

​

Reading

Besson, A. (2020), Constitutio Antoniniana: l’universalisation de la citoyenneté romaine au 3e siècle (Basel)

de Blois, L. (2014), ‘The constitutio Antoniniana (AD 212): Taxes or Religion?’, Mnemosyne 67: 1014-21

Heichelheim, F. M. (1941), ‘The Text of the Constitutio Antoniniana and the Three Other Decrees of the Emperor Caracalla Contained in Papyrus Gissensis 40’, JEA 26: 10-22

Shaw, B. J. (2019), ‘Did the Romans Have a Future?’, JRS 109: 1-26

Wolff, H. (1976), Die Constitutio Antoniniana und Papyrus Gissensis 40 I (Köln)

It’s kind of well-known that for most of Ancient Roman history the western provinces were running at a deficit.

In other words, Rome was spending more on them than the tax revenue it collected. The eastern provinces, on the other hand, were where all the money was. They were the hubs of trade, resources, and civilisation. Their tax revenues funded their upkeep, Rome, and the aqueducts build in the western provinces.

Tax received by Rome was not the same amount paid by its subjects because tax was collected by private companies who took a cut. Tax collectors bid for collection rights and paid Rome the amount they bid. But they could collect as much as they wanted, making a profit. Apply rules of capitalism (business trumps morality) and some taxes could be extremely onerous as collectors squeeze every last coin from a community. Hence the hatred for tax collectors recorded in new testament