s; then wine, oil, vinegar, salt,
honey, meat, fish, cheese, salads, and nuts. After these articles, in
chapter VII, we pass rather unexpectedly to the wages of the field
laborer, the carpenter, the painter, and of other skilled and unskilled
workmen. Then follow leather, shoes, saddles, and other kinds of raw
material and manufactured wares until we reach a total of more than eight
hundred articles. As we have said, the classification is in the main
systematic, but there are some strange deviations from a systematic
arrangement. Eggs, for instance, are in table VI with salads, vegetables,
and fruits. Buecher, who has discussed some phases of this price list, has
acutely surmised that perhaps the tables in whole, or in part, were drawn
up by the directors of imperial factories and magazines. The government
levied tribute "in kind," and it must have provided depots throughout the
provinces for the reception of contributions from its subjects.
Consequently in making out these tables it would very likely call upon the
directors of these magazines for assistance, and each of them in making
his report would naturally follow to some extent the list of articles
which the imperial depot controlled by him, carried in stock. At all
events, we see evidence of an expert hand in the list of linens, which
includes one hundred and thirty-nine articles of different qualities.

As we have noticed in the passage quoted from the introduction, it is
unlawful for a person to charge more for any of his wares than the amount
specified in the law. Consequently, the prices are not normal, but maximum
prices. However, since the imperial lawgivers evidently believed that the
necessities of life were being sold at exorbitant rates, the maximum which
they fixed was very likely no greater than the prevailing market price.
Here and there, as in the nineteenth chapter of the document, the text is
given in tablets from two or more places. In such cases the prices are the
same, so that apparently no allowance was made for the cost of carriage,
although with some articles, like oysters and sea-fish, this item must
have had an appreciable value, and it certainly should have been taken
into account in fixing the prices of "British mantles" or "Gallic
soldiers' cloaks" of chapter XIX. The quantities for which prices are
given are so small--a pint of wine, a pair of fowls, twenty snails, ten
apples, a bunch of asparagus--that evidently Diocletian had the "ulti