Reception and Enforcement of the Price Edict

Law needs compliance or force. The Prices Edict had lists; it did not have consent. In 301–302, as provincial authorities tried to hold merchants to the maxima, markets reacted in the oldest way: they hid goods or walked away. Lactantius, a Christian rhetorician hostile to the regime but an eyewitness to the era, wrote of turmoil and bloodshed as governors tried to enforce ceilings with threats and punishments [1][12].

The edict’s preface had framed profiteering as a moral plague; its penalties turned enforcement into a public drama. In Antioch, the scratch of a stylus calculating fines could turn to the clatter of soldiers’ hobnails in an instant. In Corinth’s agora, a scarlet‑cloaked official might read out maxima while bakers folded their arms and watched loaves disappear [7][12]. Where inscriptions were fresh—the stone white, letters sharp—the law felt present. Where slabs cracked or were ignored, the market shrugged.

The breadth of the schedule made evasion easy to detect but hard to stop. Freight rates, wages, bolt‑cloth prices: all had ceilings, but all could be bundled, delayed, or swapped across jurisdictions. A fish listed at 24 denarii in one harbor might be declared a different quality upriver. Local knowledge beat imperial certainty [7].

Enforcement varied by region. In the East, where bureaucracy ran deep and the Tetrarchs’ presence was heavy, crackdowns cut harder; in Gaul and Britain, distance dulled the blade. Even in success the policy tasted of iron: the sound of a door bar slamming on a stockroom, the sight of an empty stall that had been full the week before.