ABSTRACT
THE history of the coinage under the Empire is highly complex and its successive transformations—which were for the most part debasements—are to be explained solely by the financial needs of the State. In this respect the third and fourth centuries offer an extraordinary spectacle. It was principally from the time of Caracalla that the gold and silver pieces were reduced in weight and their percentage of fine metal diminished to an enormous extent. This characteristic development is proof both of the distress of the Imperial treasury and of the gravity of the general crisis, but it also contributed to aggravate that crisis. The coins which circulated under the guarantee of the Crown, and were legal tender, were no longer anything but bad money. The treasury demanded the payment of taxes in fine gold and paid its own debts in silvered copper, which had ceased to inspire confidence in anybody. A state of absolute anarchy grew up in the matter of coins; it became once more the practice to weigh them, as had been done in the early ages, and, in spite of the most severe regulations to the contrary, they were treated as so much metal. Several Emperors endeavoured in vain to set this disastrous situation right and to restore the semblance of order, but they either failed outright or else their reforms were practised for a short time, to be swept away by a still greater shortage of coins. The whole administration of the provincial mints, imposing though it was to the eye, failed in reality to conceal the disgraceful expedients to which it resorted and the poignant official poverty with which it was obliged to contend. When the State began its career of coining bad money and the medium of exchange aroused, in consequence, mistrust in every quarter, it is by no means surprising that manufacturers, already terrorized by the political situation, hid their products or only sold them at inflated figures: nor it is astonishing that traders, deprived of any guarantee of stability, organized a general rise in prices. At the end of the third century, these had attained four and eight times their normal level. It is this exceptional increase that explains the maximum-price edict of Diocletian, but he tried to obtain effects without understanding the causes. How could he have hoped to reduce the standard of prices when all factors were contributing to their progressive increase? And how could he have reduced salaries when the purchasing power of a coin had diminished by fifty per cent between the reigns of Nero and Alexander Severus? He was faced by an insoluble problem, with which neither the law nor good will could cope.
