As we have noticed in the passage quoted from the introduction, it is unlawful for a person to charge more for any of his wares than the amount specified in the law.  Consequently, the prices are not normal, but maximum prices.  However, since the imperial lawgivers evidently believed that the necessities of life were being sold at exorbitant rates, the maximum which they fixed was very likely no greater than the prevailing market price.  Here and there, as in the nineteenth chapter of the document, the text is given in tablets from two or more places.  In such cases the prices are the same, so that apparently no allowance was made for the cost of carriage, although with some articles, like oysters and sea-fish, this item must have had an appreciable value, and it certainly should have been taken into account in fixing the prices of “British mantles” or “Gallic soldiers’ cloaks” of chapter XIX.  The quantities for which prices are given are so small—­a pint of wine, a pair of fowls, twenty snails, ten apples, a bunch of asparagus—­that evidently Diocletian had the “ultimate consumer” in mind, and fixed the retail price in his edict.  This is fortunate for us, because it helps us to get at the cost of living in the early part of the fourth century.  There is good reason for believing that the system of barter prevailed much more generally at that time than it does to-day.  Probably the farmer often exchanged his grain, vegetables, and eggs for shoes and cloth, without receiving or paying out money, so that the money prices fixed for his products would not affect him in every transaction as they would affect the present-day farmer.  The unit of money which is used throughout the edict is the copper denarius, and fortunately the value of a pound of fine gold is given as 50,000 denarii.  This fixes the value of the denarius as .4352 cent, or approximately four-tenths of a cent.  It is implied in the introduction that the purpose of the law is to protect the people, and especially the soldiers, from extortion, but possibly, as Buecher has surmised, the emperor may have wished to maintain or to raise the value of the denarius, which had been steadily declining because of the addition of alloy to the coin.  If this was the emperor’s object, possibly the value of the denarius is set somewhat too high, but it probably does not materially exceed its exchange value, and in any case, the relative values of articles given in the tables are not affected.

The tables bring out a number of points of passing interest.  From chapter II it seems to follow that Italian wines retained their ancient pre-eminence, even in the fourth century.  They alone are quoted among the foreign wines.  Table VI gives us a picture of the village market.  On market days the farmer brings his artichokes, lettuce, cabbages, turnips, and other fresh vegetables into the market town and exposes them for sale in the public square, as the country people in Italy do to-day.  The