The historical claim of this chapter is that the preamble of the Edict on Maximum Prices, in Kent's translation, blames a few rich sellers for dear goods, closes off the other explanations, the harvest above all, and says nothing of the coinage; that it builds its measure clause by clause from that blame; and that it names the soldiers and the poor as those who suffered while presenting the measure as burdening only those it counts as guilty. For the reading of the edict as an imperial pronouncement issued beside a monetary reform (Corcoran 1996), the chapter adds that the preamble's public argument depends on leaving out the setting in which the scholarship places it. The preamble is given here in this study's own words, sentence by sentence, from Kent's English (Kent 1920).
4.1Whom the preamble blames
The preamble opens not with prices but with peace. Its first sentence gives thanks, after the gods, for the quiet in which the world now rests, a quiet won in wars against barbarian peoples, and states the aim of guarding that peace with the defences of justice for all time. The enemy outside has been defeated. The second sentence turns to an enemy within.
That enemy is first a vice and only later a set of people. In the second sentence of Kent's translation, avarice rages without limit and grows not by the year, the month or the day but almost by the hour and the moment, and it shows no regard for the human race. If anything restrained it, the sentence says, or if the common fortunes could bear its excesses calmly, the emperors might have looked away and kept silent. They cannot, because the common fortunes are being torn apart day after day. The division the preamble draws here, between a vice that belongs to some and a commonwealth that belongs to all, holds for the rest of its length.
The third sentence makes the vice a fury that feels no tie of common humanity and will stop harrying the fortunes of all only when forced to. Against it the sentence sets those whom extreme poverty has made aware of their wretched state, and it casts the emperors as watchful parents of the whole human race, for whom it is fitting that justice step in as arbiter.
The avarice is given its people by what they do and what they own, most fully in the eighth sentence. They are those who are always eager to turn even the blessings of the gods to their own profit and to check the tide of general prosperity; who, in a bad year, bargain over the sowing of seed and over the business of retail dealers; and who, each possessed of a fortune large enough to have enriched whole peoples, seek private gain and press for ruinous rates of profit. In its last clause the sentence turns to address the people of the provinces directly and tells them that regard for common humanity compels the emperors to set a limit to that avarice.
The culprits, then, are rich, they act on the trade in seed and in retail goods, and they are set against an audience: the many are spoken to and the few are spoken about. The eighteenth and last sentence makes the count explicit. The statute, it says, provides not only for single cities, peoples and provinces but for the whole world, to whose ruin a few have raged beyond measure, men whose greed neither time nor the wealth they sought has been able to satisfy.
The blamed are never named as persons, nor as a legal class. In Kent's English they are men whom the trades of the markets and cities have engaged, profiteers, plunderers and pillagers of the commonwealth, and an avarice that retails against the statutes. The ninth sentence explains why no more precise charge is laid, and in doing so states a theory of what the law is for. The emperors must now give their reasons, it says, so that the justice of the remedy may be known, even though an avarice that runs riot through the whole world can hardly be exposed by a specific proof. Instead, the lawless will be made to recognise their own unbridled desires when these are given a definite name and description. The preamble admits that its charge is hard to prove by a specific proof, and appeals instead to what its fourth and sixth sentences say everyone knows and has seen. It makes naming part of the remedy: the edict accuses first and lets the accusation do some of the law's work.
Even the edict's timing is turned into a charge. The fourth and fifth sentences say that the emperors had long delayed, hoping that humanity, caught in its crimes, would reform itself, and that the wicked had seen in their many years of silence a lesson in restraint and refused to learn it. The delay is presented as patience, and the patience as a test the sellers failed.
4.2What the preamble rules out
A complaint about dear goods invites the reply that goods were scarce. The preamble meets that reply in advance.
Its sixth sentence asks, as a question that expects only one answer, who is so dull or so far from human feeling as not to have seen that in the markets and the daily trade of the cities prices have run so wild that neither plentiful supply nor fruitful seasons can moderate the greed for plunder. The seventh draws the conclusion: there is no doubt that the men engaged in this trade are always calculating, watching even the stars to profit from the winds and seasons, and that in their wickedness they cannot bear to see the land watered by rain and made fruitful, since they count it a personal loss when abundance comes to the world through a kindly sky.
The argument is closed at both ends: high prices in a good season show greed, and so does a dislike of rain. The weather, which a reader might offer as the cause, becomes evidence of the culprits' wickedness.
The tenth sentence names a place where the trouble shows itself, and the place matters. Wherever the public good requires the armies to march, it says, a scheming audacity appears with a spirit of profiteering, in villages, in towns and along every road, and drives up prices not fourfold or eightfold but beyond what words can express. The soldier, by the price of a single purchase, is sometimes stripped of both his bounty and his pay, and the contributions of the whole world for the upkeep of the armies end as the gains of plunderers, so that the soldiers seem to hand over the whole fruit of their service to these profiteers.
The preamble records that prices rise where the armies go and reads it in one way only: as an audacity that waits for the army in order to plunder it. It does not consider that an army arriving in a village is itself a great new demand for the village's goods, an explanation this study reads the sentence's own observation as bearing as well. Its only figures, fourfold and eightfold, are given to say that the rise went past them.
The largest silence is about money. In all eighteen sentences of Kent's translation there is no word for coin, for the currency, or for its value. The soldier is robbed of his bounty and his pay, but the preamble never asks what the pay was paid in. Here the scholarship and the text part. The scholars place beside the edict a cause for which the government that issued it was answerable, and the preamble leaves that cause out of its public argument. This study does not say what caused prices to rise in 301; the texts read here cannot show it. They show the shape of the case: every explanation the preamble names is a fault of sellers, and the explanation the scholarship adds is one the preamble does not name.
4.3From blame to measure
The second half of the preamble turns from accusation to remedy, and the remedy is drawn from the accusation point by point.
The eleventh sentence is the hinge. Moved by all that has been said, and since humanity itself seemed to be praying for release, the emperors resolved, it says, not that prices should be fixed, for that would not be just, since many provinces rejoice in the good fortune of low prices, but that a maximum should be fixed. Then, whenever high prices appeared, avarice, which could not be checked across what the sentence calls the endless plains, would be confined within the bounds of the statute.
The edict, on its own account, does not fix prices: a fixed price would bind the provinces where goods are cheap, a maximum only excess. The fault alleged is excess, so the remedy is a ceiling. The twelfth sentence states the consequence in the same terms. The prices in the list that follows are to be observed throughout the empire, so that everyone understands that the freedom to exceed them is removed; but where goods plainly abound, cheapness is not to be hindered, and ample provision is made for it, the sentence says, if avarice is limited and curbed.
The thirteenth sentence extends the limit to sellers and buyers who enter trading ports and visit provinces overseas, and calls the restraint a mutual action between them: they already know that the limits cannot be exceeded, and at the time of retailing the places, the bargains and the whole transaction are to be reckoned so that those who carry goods nowhere sell at an unduly high price. Then comes the penalty, and with it a second theory, this time of human nature.
The fourteenth sentence appeals to the practice of the ancestors, that boldness should be curbed by a prescribed penalty, and gives the reason: men seldom accept by free consent a condition that would benefit them, and it is always fear, which the sentence calls the justest teacher of duties, that keeps them on the right path. Whoever acts boldly against the letter of the statute is therefore to suffer capital punishment. The ninth sentence had placed the culprits' fault in the unbridled desires of their minds; the fourteenth answers that only fear restrains men. A fault of the will is met with a penalty aimed at the will, and the heaviest available. The fifteenth sentence adds that no one should think the penalty harsh, since moderation will be a refuge from the danger.
The next two sentences widen the circle of blame, and they show something the first half did not. The sixteenth puts under the same peril the buyer who, eager to purchase, comes to an agreement with a seller who breaks the statute. The seventeenth declares guilty also the holder of goods needed for food or use who, after the regulation, thinks to withdraw them from the market, and it sets for him a heavier penalty still, on the ground that the one who causes need deserves worse than the one who exploits it.
These are acts the earlier sentences did not charge. The buyer appears in the thirteenth sentence only as a party to a mutual restraint, and the holder not at all; neither is among the profiteers who followed the armies. They are the people whose conduct would defeat a ceiling: a buyer willing to pay more, a seller unwilling to sell at the limit. This study reads the sixteenth and seventeenth sentences as naming in advance two ways in which the measure might fail and turning each into a crime, with the holder punished most heavily of all. In the first half, blame justified the measure; here the measure generates new blame, and the person most severely blamed, on this reading, is the one whose refusal to sell would show that the maximum was below what goods could be had for.
The preamble says nothing about the end of the measure. Its only phrase of perpetuity belongs to the peace in the first sentence, and the maximum is described as a standing bound that takes hold whenever high prices appear. There is no term, no condition of review and no one named who might lift it. Gross and Ní Aoláin's question of where an emergency act places itself (Gross and Ní Aoláin 2006) has here a double answer: the edict speaks of the bounds of its statute and the limits of the law it promulgates, so it presents itself as law, while its fifth sentence justifies it by remedies that the necessity of the case had long demanded. It is an emergency measure in its argument and a permanent one in its form.
4.4Who suffered, and who is to pay
The preamble distinguishes those who suffered before the edict from those who are to pay under it, and it keeps them apart with care.
Those who suffered are named most plainly in two places: in the third sentence, the people whom extreme poverty has made aware of their condition; in the tenth, the soldiers. Through the soldier the state suffers too, since the contributions for the armies are public revenue, and the preamble presents the profiteer as robbing the commonwealth through its army.
Those who are to pay are the blamed. The penalty falls on whoever exceeds the maximum, on the buyer who conspires with them, and on the holder who withdraws goods. The twelfth sentence adds that where goods plainly abound the measure is not to hinder cheap prices, and that cheapness is provided for once avarice is curbed. The preamble names no cost to anyone but the guilty, so that on its own account the measure burdens them alone.
What the preamble does not contain is any seller who charges above the list for a reason other than avarice. A seller whose own costs were high has no named place in its eighteen sentences; the thirteenth asks only that those who carry goods reckon places and bargains so as nowhere to sell too dear, and anyone who exceeds the maximum has acted boldly against the letter of the statute. That absence is the condition on which the measure can be presented as costless to the innocent: if every excess is avarice, every penalty falls on the avaricious.
4.5The modern record
Skeptron's record of the case keeps the preamble's accusation and its purpose, in two short sentences.
It blames the pricing behavior of merchants who pursue excessive profit. This is the preamble to an edict that justifies price control.
Its answer to the question of what the preamble alone can establish adds a caution.
The responsibility claim in the preamble is separated from trading data. The fact of enactment is not the same as the execution or success of control.
The record treats the blame as a claim made by the edict, not as a finding about the market, and it refuses to read enactment as enforcement. This chapter has kept both cautions: no text read here says whether the edict was enforced or whether prices fell. The record's last answer names what a later comparison with the edict would have to observe.
What must be observed is the change in quantity, price, and the possibility of transaction after control. If announced figures have been substituted for actual transaction prices, calculations of profit and cost of living are withdrawn.
That condition looks past the preamble to the market it sought to control, to the question the preamble closes off in advance: whether goods could still be bought at the listed prices.
What the record leaves out is the rest of the structure. Its word "merchants" is its own; Kent's English speaks of men engaged in the trades of markets and cities, of profiteers and plunderers, and specifies that they are rich and few. The record says nothing of the soldiers or the poor, nothing of the maximum as distinct from a fixed price, nothing of the penalty of death, and nothing of the buyers and holders the preamble added to the blame. A reader of the record learns that the edict blamed traders, but not whom it said they harmed, how the remedy was shaped to the fault, or on whom the remedy was to fall. The study's two independent readings of the record did not agree on whether it names who bore the cost at all.
4.6What the case adds
The case speaks to the reading of the edict as an imperial pronouncement made beside a monetary reform. It adds that the published argument of the preamble works by exclusion: it turns the weather into evidence against sellers, reads the rise of prices where armies march as plunder rather than demand, and is silent about the coin in which soldiers were paid. For the series' question, the preamble names no end for its measure and names who is blamed, who suffered and who is to pay, and arranges them so that those who are to pay are the ones blamed. The modern record keeps only the first.