ebus quaevel in mercimoniis aguntur vel diurna urbium
conversatione tractantur, in tantum se licen liam defusisse, ut
effraenata libido rapien--rum copia nec annorum ubertatibus mitigaretur.
The edict, as Col. Leake clearly shows, was issued A. C. 303. Among the
articles of which the maximum value is assessed, are oil, salt, honey,
butchers' meat, poultry, game, fish, vegetables, fruit the wages of
laborers and artisans, schoolmasters and skins, boots and shoes,
harness, timber, corn, wine, and beer, (zythus.) The depreciation in the
value of money, or the rise in the price of commodities, had been so
great during the past century, that butchers' meat, which, in the second
century of the empire, was in Rome about two denaril the pound, was now
fixed at a maximum of eight. Col. Leake supposes the average price could
not be less than four: at the same time the maximum of the wages of the
agricultural laborers was twenty-five. The whole edict is, perhaps, the
most gigantic effort of a blind though well-intentioned despotism, to
control that which is, and ought to be, beyond the regulation of the
government. See an Edict of Diocletian, by Col. Leake, London, 1826.
Col. Leake has not observed that this Edict is expressly named in the
treatise de Mort. Persecut. ch. vii. Idem cum variis iniquitatibus
immensam faceret caritatem, legem pretiis rerum venalium statuere
conatus.--M]

[Footnote 105: Indicta lex nova quae sane illorum temporum modestia
tolerabilis, in perniciem processit. Aurel. Victor., who has treated the
character of Diocletian with good sense, though in bad Latin.]

It was in the twenty first year of his reign that Diocletian
executed his memorable resolution of abdicating the empire; an action
more naturally to have been expected from the elder or the younger
Antoninus, than from a prince who had never practised the lessons of
philosophy either in the attainment or in the use of supreme power.
Diocletian acquired the glory of giving to the world the first example
of a resignation, [106] which has not been very frequently imitated by
succeeding monarchs. The parallel of Charles the Fifth, however, will
naturally offer itself to our mind, not only since the eloquence of
a modern historian has rendered that name so familiar to an English
reader, but from the very striking resemblance between the characters
of the two emperors, whose political abilities were superior to their
military genius, and whose specious vi