The Aphrodisias Prices Edict: Decoding Roman Inflation Strategies

Imagine walking through a bustling marketplace in the ancient Mediterranean during the late third century AD. The air is thick with the smell of spices, roasting meats, and the sweat of frustrated merchants. Citizens are furiously haggling over the price of grain, olive oil, and basic clothing. But there is a palpable sense of panic. The coins in the hands of the buyers are practically worthless, their silver content having been stripped away by decades of imperial manipulation. Prices are doubling, then tripling, wiping out the savings of ordinary families and making it impossible for the Roman state to afford its own massive legions.

It is against this backdrop of runaway hyperinflation and societal exhaustion that Emperor Diocletian unleashed one of the most audacious and comprehensive economic experiments in human history: The Edict on Maximum Prices (Edictum De Pretiis Rerum Venalium) of 301 AD.

Carved into stone and erected across the eastern half of the Roman Empire, the Edict sought to conquer the invisible forces of supply and demand through the sheer willpower of imperial decree,. Today, the most spectacular and well-preserved remnants of this colossal legislative effort survive in the ancient city of Aphrodisias in modern-day Turkey,. Through the monumental inscriptions found on the facade of the city's Civil Basilica, historians and economists have been able to decode the Roman Empire's desperate strategies to control an economy in freefall,.

The Roots of Roman Hyperinflation

To understand the sheer scale of Diocletian’s intervention, one must first understand the devastating era that preceded it, known as the Crisis of the Third Century. For over fifty years, the Roman Empire was fractured by endless civil wars, devastating plagues, and invasions from all frontiers,. Between 235 and 284 AD, dozens of emperors and usurpers claimed the throne, most of them meeting violent ends.

Warfare is an expensive endeavor. Because the emperors could not simply print paper money, they resorted to an insidious method of expanding the money supply: currency debasement. Beginning as far back as the reign of Nero and accelerating wildly under his successors, the Roman state began calling in the standard silver coin, the denarius, and re-minting it with cheaper alloys like copper and bronze. By the time Diocletian came to power in 284 AD, the currency had been reduced to a silver-washed shadow of its former glory, containing less than a fraction of its original precious metal.

The result was classic hyperinflation. As the intrinsic value of the currency plummeted, citizens hoarded older, purer coins and merchants demanded exponentially more of the new, debased coins for the exact same goods,. The state found itself trapped in a vicious cycle. The more they debased the currency to pay the army, the more prices skyrocketed, forcing them to mint even more debased coinage.

Diocletian’s Grand Monetary Illusion

When Diocletian ascended to the throne, he was determined to restore order to a fractured world. He reorganized the empire into a Tetrarchy (rule of four), vastly expanded the civil bureaucracy, and restructured the military and provincial administrations,. He also established a systematic tax system based on land and population.

However, taxation alone could not fix a fundamentally broken monetary system. Diocletian decided to overhaul the currency itself. He introduced a new, tri-metallic coinage system: the aureus (or solidus) struck in pure gold at sixty to a pound; the argenteus, a nearly pure silver coin struck at ninety-six to a pound; and the nummus (or follis), a large copper coin with a tiny wash of silver.

The problem was that the state was minting these coins at a loss, their face value being lower than the intrinsic market value of the precious metals they contained. To sustain this, the government essentially requisitioned precious metals from citizens at artificial state-mandated exchange rates. By the autumn of 301 AD, the system was failing, and inflation was surging once again. In a desperate attempt to protect the value of his new currency, Diocletian issued a Currency Edict, re-tariffing the value of the coins and doubling the face value of the common nummus. Rather than stabilizing the economy, this sudden revaluation only poured gasoline on the inflationary fire.

The Edict on Maximum Prices

Realizing that monetary manipulation was failing to curb the rising costs, Diocletian decided to tackle the prices directly. Between November 20 and December 10, 301 AD, he issued the Edict on Maximum Prices,. This was not a subtle fiscal adjustment; it was a heavy-handed, empire-wide command that set hard price ceilings on over 1,200 individual goods, services, and wages,.

The Edict was prefaced by a long, highly rhetorical, and deeply moralizing preamble. Diocletian and his co-emperors entirely absolved the state of any responsibility for the inflation caused by their own currency debasement,. Instead, they placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of merchants, traders, and speculators. The preamble thundered against the "limitless and furious avarice which with no thought for mankind hastens to its own gain". Diocletian framed his intervention as a righteous act of justice designed to protect the common citizens and the soldiers of the Roman legions from greedy profiteers,.

To ensure compliance, the Edict was backed by the ultimate threat: anyone caught selling goods above the maximum price, or even a consumer caught willingly paying an inflated price, could face the death penalty. Informers were actively encouraged to report their neighbors.

The Aphrodisias Inscriptions: A Masterpiece of Epigraphy

Such an unprecedented law had to be communicated to millions of citizens across a vast, predominantly illiterate empire. The Edict was inscribed onto massive stone slabs and erected in public squares, basilicas, and marketplaces in both Latin and Greek,. While fragments of the Edict have been discovered as far away as Aigeira in the Peloponnese, no site on earth has preserved the text of Diocletian’s desperate gamble quite like the ancient city of Aphrodisias.

Located in Caria (western Anatolia), Aphrodisias was a thriving center of art, sculpture, and civic life. Here, the Edict was carved into the expansive marble paneling along the elaborate columnar facade of the city’s Civil Basilica. Discovered over decades of meticulous archaeological excavation—championed by legendary scholars such as Kenan Erim and Joyce Reynolds, and more recently by Michael Crawford—the Aphrodisias inscription stands as the longest surviving Latin inscription from the ancient world,.

The sheer physical scale of the Aphrodisias text is awe-inspiring. It stretches for well over a thousand lines, meticulously listing out commodities in tabular form. In recent years, the Aphrodisias Excavation project, sponsored by institutions like Oxford and NYU, has gone to great lengths to preserve and display this crucial economic artifact. In 2023, the remaining parts of the Edict of Maximum Prices were set up on ten custom-designed metal mounts along the line of the Basilica's west wall, accompanied by Turkish and English translations, allowing modern visitors to stand face-to-face with the ancient world's most aggressive price control legislation.

A Walk Through the Ancient Roman Marketplace

Thanks to the exhaustive lists preserved on the stones of Aphrodisias, modern historians and economists are granted an unparalleled, granular snapshot of daily economic life in Late Antiquity. The 1,200-plus items read like an ancient catalog, revealing what the Romans valued, what they consumed, and what they deemed luxurious,.

The listed price ceilings offer a fascinating study in contrasts:

Basic Foodstuffs: A measure of crushed beans was capped at 100 denarii communis, while uncrushed beans were 60 denarii. A measure of dried kidney beans also cost 100 denarii.
Animal Upkeep: A simple bundle of fresh green animal fodder cost a mere 1 denarius, making it one of the cheapest items on the list.
Wages and Labor: The Edict strictly regulated what laborers could earn. A farm worker’s daily wage was capped, while specialized services had their own metrics. A veterinary surgeon could charge 6 denarii for clipping an animal's hooves, or 20 denarii for bleeding an animal's head. A writer or scribe was paid based on output, allowed to charge 25 denarii per 100 lines for the "best writing," and 20 denarii for "second quality" writing.
Clothing and Textiles: Unlike the modern era, where mass production has made clothing relatively cheap, textiles in the ancient world were exorbitantly expensive. Every single thread had to be spun by hand using a drop spindle before being woven on a loom. Consequently, fine cloaks and garments cost vast sums of money compared to basic sustenance.
Extreme Luxuries: At the very top of the pricing spectrum were the extreme luxuries of the imperial elite. If you wished to purchase a first-class male lion for the arena, the maximum legal price was capped at a staggering 150,000 denarii. Similarly, a single pound of pure, purple-dyed silk—the ultimate status symbol of the Roman upper class—was also set at 150,000 denarii.

The Anatomy of an Economic Failure

Despite the terrifying threat of the death penalty, the Edict on Maximum Prices was a spectacular, almost immediate failure,. By trying to override the natural laws of economics with imperial decree, Diocletian created a catastrophe.

The primary flaw of the Edict was its complete ignorance of supply and demand,. Diocletian imposed a blanket, empire-wide price list that completely ignored regional variations. It failed to account for local crop failures, the varying availability of goods, or the massive costs associated with overland and maritime transportation. For a merchant to transport grain from a fertile region to a famine-struck region, the transportation costs alone often exceeded the maximum legal price the grain could be sold for upon arrival.

As a result, merchants faced a stark choice: sell their goods at a massive loss, or refuse to sell them at all. Unsurprisingly, they chose the latter,. Goods were systematically hoarded and immediately disappeared from the public markets. A massive underground black market sprang into existence overnight, where goods were traded secretly at their true, inflated market values,. Furthermore, because the currency was so thoroughly distrusted, citizens began to abandon coinage altogether, plunging parts of the highly sophisticated Roman economy back into a primitive system of direct barter,.

We do not have to rely solely on modern economic theory to know how this played out; we have the eyewitness testimony of the ancient Christian writer Lactantius. Living in the imperial capital of Nicomedia, Lactantius recorded the devastating human toll of Diocletian’s policy. He wrote that the emperor's meddling caused a "prodigious scarcity," noting grimly that "much blood was shed for trifling and poultry wares",. Lactantius observed that out of sheer terror of the death penalty, merchants closed their stalls and "nothing appeared in the market," which naturally made the scarcity much worse.

The Legacy of the Edict

The Edict on Maximum Prices is generally recognized by historians as an act of "economic lunacy". Within just a few years of its implementation, the law proved so unenforceable and destructive that it was quietly ignored by imperial magistrates. By the time Diocletian abdicated his throne due to illness in 305 AD, the Edict was functionally dead, and the Roman economy only truly began to stabilize decades later under the gold solidus reforms of Constantine the Great.

Yet, the legacy of Diocletian’s Edict endures as one of history's most profound cautionary tales. It remains a foundational case study for modern economists demonstrating the inherent dangers of broad price controls,. The rhetoric of Diocletian—blaming corporate greed, speculators, and price-gougers for inflation rather than state monetary policy—has echoed through the centuries,. From Richard Nixon’s 90-day freeze on wages and prices in the United States during the stagflation of the 1970s, to modern debates surrounding rent control and anti-gouging laws, governments continually flirt with the idea that they can legislate away the realities of supply and demand.

Today, as one stands before the grand Civil Basilica of Aphrodisias, looking at the meticulously carved Latin letters detailing the price of beans, lions, and the wages of schoolteachers, the stones speak of a universal truth,. They are a monument not just to the astonishing administrative reach of the Roman Empire, but to the absolute limits of state power. Diocletian commanded armies that conquered continents, yet even he, armed with the threat of death, could not command the price of a loaf of bread,.