Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices

Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices was a Roman schedule of prices and wages issued in 301 AD. In the book, it serves not simply as evidence of imperial price regulation but as a quantitative source for comparing ordinary workers’ living standards across centuries. Using the wages recorded in the edict, an economic historian estimated that an unskilled Roman worker’s standard of living was almost exactly that of an unskilled worker in seventeenth-century Italy.

The Edict as Evidence

The text set out wages for different types of workers, giving historians a basis for estimating the income available to an unskilled laborer. That estimate is reconstructed rather than a direct measurement of everyday consumption: the book notes that it is not known exactly how well the edict’s wages and prices were enforced. The schedule therefore offers a valuable historical indicator, but its figures must be read with that uncertainty in mind.

Roman and Later Living Standards

The comparison places Roman workers’ estimated living standards alongside those of seventeenth-century Italy, where the levels were found to be nearly identical. The book uses this result to emphasize the persistence of low ordinary incomes across long stretches of history, rather than assuming that the scale of Roman power or economic activity translated into a markedly higher standard of life for an unskilled worker.

The Edict in a Wider Contrast

The wage comparison appears in a broader account of historical change. The book contrasts the Roman and Italian estimates with conditions farther north in England, where wages were higher and rising. The edict thus anchors a specific comparison while helping introduce the question of how and why economic conditions began to change in England. Its significance lies in what its recorded schedule allows historians to estimate, as well as in the limits of that evidence: the figures support a comparison, but do not establish how consistently the rules were applied in practice.