An authority that acts on prices has to say why prices went wrong. The reason it gives is rarely neutral. To say that goods are dear because the harvest failed is to ask for patience; to say that they are dear because the coin is worth less is to point back at the authority itself; to say that they are dear because sellers are greedy is to name an enemy and, usually, a penalty. The choice of culprit is already half of the measure.
This article reads two episodes in which that choice can be watched. The first is the Edict on Maximum Prices issued under Diocletian in 301. Its long preamble survives, and in Roland Kent's English translation of 1920 it runs to eighteen sentences that accuse, at length and with growing heat, those who sell. The second is the South Sea year of 1720 in Britain, when the shares of a company that had undertaken to take over part of the national debt rose sharply and then collapsed. For 1720 no statute or proclamation is read here. What is read is the chapter that Charles Mackay wrote about it in 1841, a work that set the popular picture of financial manias as outbreaks of collective folly, and the modern record that Skeptron, a studio in the RISCON family, keeps of each episode.
The question is threefold. Whom do the texts blame for the trouble of prices? Does the measure they describe follow from the blame they lay? And do the modern records of the two episodes keep the blame the texts lay, or replace it with something else?
The two episodes are far apart in time, in law and in kind: one is an order of a Roman government fixing what may be charged for goods, the other a bargain between a British Parliament and a chartered company over the state's debts, followed by a market's rise and fall. They are put side by side because their texts share a vocabulary. The preamble of 301, in Kent's translation, accuses an avarice without bounds; the lines of Pope that Mackay set at the head of his chapter show avarice creeping over the country like a mist. Both texts explain the movement of prices by a vice. The difference lies in who is said to have it, and in what follows from saying so.
Two scholarly debates meet here. On the edict, Simon Corcoran places it among the pronouncements by which the Tetrarchy made and published law, beside the monetary reform of the period and the problem of inflation (Corcoran 1996); the preamble does not mention the coinage at all. On 1720, Mackay's popular narrative tells the episode as a mania, Charles Kindleberger and Robert Aliber survey financial crises as recurring patterns of credit and confidence (Kindleberger and Aliber 2005), Peter Garber argues that fundamentals can explain much of the price movement (Garber 2000), and Richard Dale and Larry Neal read it as public finance and as a market system that survived (Dale 2004; Neal 1990). Both debates ask what caused prices to move. This study asks an earlier question: what the texts themselves say caused it, and whom they make answerable.
This study adds a distinction. In the texts three things stay apart that later accounts, the modern records among them, tend to run together: the party blamed, the party that suffered, and the party made to pay for the measure. The preamble of 301 names all three and makes them line up: the blamed are a few sellers, those who suffered are the soldiers and the poor, and the cost of the measure is to fall, as a penalty, on those it counts as guilty. Mackay's account of 1720 names many to blame, the directors, the legislature and the nation, and in the part read here reports the suffering only as a warning of what was to come. Skeptron's record of 301 keeps the accusation and drops the rest; its record of 1720 has no accusation at all, only a mechanism, the company's authority over the debt. Each move has a cost for a later reader, and the article says what it is.
Chapter 2 sets out the literature and Chapter 3 the texts, records and ledger. Chapters 4 and 5 read the two cases, Chapter 6 compares them, and the Conclusion states the limits.
This is one of a series of papers drawn from a longer study of emergency decisions in money and credit, written by AI from Skeptron's records and from public-domain texts. Skeptron's records are modern platform summaries of historical episodes, not documents of the time. The two texts read beside them are uncorrected machine readings or transcriptions, so they are given in this study's own words and are not quoted. The readings through the works of other scholars are this study's interpretation. Nothing in it is advice on financial, legal or policy decisions.