Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices
A surviving stone fragment of the Edict on Maximum Prices of AD 301, which fixed ceilings for more than a thousand goods and wages across the Roman Empire.
The edict is the most ambitious act of price control before the twentieth century, and one of the best-documented failures. Diocletian blamed inflation on speculators and set maximum prices with death as the penalty for exceeding them; the currency kept debasing, goods left the legal market, and the edict quietly stopped being enforced. It survives mainly because it was cut into stone in dozens of cities, which is why we can still read the price of a pint of beer in AD 301. Read the full story in our article on Diocletian's Price Edict and the Struggle to Reform the Late Roman Economy.
CC BY-SA 3.0 — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
