Edict on Maximum Prices

The Edict was criticized by Lactantius, a rhetorician from Nicomedia, who blamed the emperors for the inflation and told of fighting and bloodshed that erupted from price tampering.

Earlier in his reign, as well as in 301 around the same time as the Edict on Prices, Diocletian issued Currency Decrees, which attempted to reform the system of taxation and to stabilize the coinage.

[*Following a time of constant wars for power the reigning authorities looking for campaign resources made a series of changes; Diocletian set the value of coins for saving expenses altering the amount of silver contained in them from 50% and a weight of 5 grams per coin to 1% silver and 3 grams weight producing a huge rise in prices.

The text has been reconstructed from fragments of Greek and Latin copies at a number of different sites, most of them in the eastern provinces of Roman empire: Phrygia and Caria in Asia Minor, mainland Greece, Crete, and Cyrenaica.

[4] The version of the decree inscribed on the wall of the bouleuterion at Stratonikeia in Caria was the first to be discovered and copied, by William Sherard, the English consul at Smyrna, in 1709.

[5] The first attempt at a composite text was made in 1826 by William Martin Leake, working from Sherard's copy of the Stratonikeia inscription and a fragment purchased in Alexandria and subsequently brought to Aix-en-Provence.

[16] The first two-thirds of the Edict doubled the value of the copper and billon coins, and set the death penalty for profiteers and speculators, who were blamed for the inflation and who were compared to the barbarian tribes attacking the empire.