mate
consumer" in mind, and fixed the retail price in his edict. This is
fortunate for us, because it helps us to get at the cost of living in the
early part of the fourth century. There is good reason for believing that
the system of barter prevailed much more generally at that time than it
does to-day. Probably the farmer often exchanged his grain, vegetables,
and eggs for shoes and cloth, without receiving or paying out money, so
that the money prices fixed for his products would not affect him in every
transaction as they would affect the present-day farmer. The unit of money
which is used throughout the edict is the copper denarius, and fortunately
the value of a pound of fine gold is given as 50,000 denarii. This fixes
the value of the denarius as .4352 cent, or approximately four-tenths of a
cent. It is implied in the introduction that the purpose of the law is to
protect the people, and especially the soldiers, from extortion, but
possibly, as Buecher has surmised, the emperor may have wished to maintain
or to raise the value of the denarius, which had been steadily declining
because of the addition of alloy to the coin. If this was the emperor's
object, possibly the value of the denarius is set somewhat too high, but
it probably does not materially exceed its exchange value, and in any
case, the relative values of articles given in the tables are not
affected.

The tables bring out a number of points of passing interest. From chapter
II it seems to follow that Italian wines retained their ancient
pre-eminence, even in the fourth century. They alone are quoted among the
foreign wines. Table VI gives us a picture of the village market. On
market days the farmer brings his artichokes, lettuce, cabbages, turnips,
and other fresh vegetables into the market town and exposes them for sale
in the public square, as the country people in Italy do to-day. The
seventh chapter, in which wages are given, is perhaps of liveliest
interest. In this connection we should bear in mind the fact that slavery
existed in the Roman Empire, that owners of slaves trained them to various
occupations and hired them out by the day or job, and that, consequently
the prices paid for slave labor fixed the scale of wages. However, there
was a steady decline under the Empire in the number of slaves, and
competition with them in the fourth century did not materially affect the
wages of the free laborer. It is interesting, in this chapter, to notic