The Price Edict, or inflation declared illegal
In 301 Diocletian fixed by law the maximum price of more than a thousand goods and services, on pain of death. The measure failed within a few years, but it leaves us the most detailed price list to survive from antiquity.
The diagnosis
The preamble of the edict is explicit: prices are soaring, soldiers pay tenfold for everything, speculation is presented as culpable greed. The diagnosis is moral, the cause monetary — a century of debasement had destroyed confidence in the coinage.
The text has come down to us through copies cut in stone, chiefly in the East and notably at Aphrodisias. One reads there the price of a bushel of wheat, of a mason's day, of a pound of purple.
Why it could not work
A price ceiling does not increase the quantity of metal available. Goods vanished from the official markets, trade moved towards direct exchange, and the edict fell into disuse without ever being formally repealed.
The administration drew its lesson elsewhere: it was taxation in kind, and later the stability of gold, that restored an economic order.
The link with the coinage
The edict is contemporary with an official doubling of the face value of the nummus, attested by another document of 301. In other words, the state froze prices with one hand and revalued its coinage with the other — the contradiction is in the texts themselves.
For the collector, this episode gives meaning to the large module of the first nummi and to their continuous shrinking over the following decades: the coin one holds is evidence of the attempt, and of its failure.
Further reading
S. Lauffer, Diokletians Preisedikt, Berlin, 1971, the edition of the text.
K. Erim and J. Reynolds, publications of the Aphrodisias copy, Journal of Roman Studies.