An Economic History of Rome

of the regulations of the Idios Logos,29 the bureau of special taxes, recently found, reveals how old social customs were generally accepted outright by him and how little the Roman government cared to alter the stereotyped caste system imposed by the Greeks. There is not a hint that the native Egyptian might ever earn the right to Roman or even Alexandrian citizenship, or establish a claim to community self-government which the Spanish and Gallic tribes possessed. Such regulations as the requirement to register in the native town at the census taken every fourteen years, and the necessity of producing a pass30 when leaving Egypt, imply that freedom of movement was not completely established in the case of natives. This may have mattered little since free labor had hardly any market outside of Egypt, but it is significant of Rome’s policy not to alter social conditions. It would be interesting to know whether the partial liberation of Egypt from the monopolistic system affected any betterment in economic conditions. We have abundant proof of a rise in wages, but until we know more about the purchasing power of these wages a final answer is not possible. Even though we can now weigh and estimate the silver contents of the deteriorating coins in Egypt we do not know to what extent an artificial exchange rate with the Roman denarii kept some fiat value in them. However, since few denarii reached Egypt it is safest to assume that these coins generally passed for very little more than the market value of the metal. Furthermore, in comparing wages with the price of wheat, we are not absolutely certain that we have a right to reckon the Egyptian artaba as invariably equal to 29.1 liters (eight-tenths of the imperial bushel) as is usually done. The Ptolemaic silver drachma of the third century had about 3.6 grammes of silver (about the same as the Neronian denarius, which exchanged for about twenty cents’ worth of gold). Before Cleopatra’s day the drachma had been debased and lightened so that it was usually worth less than a half of its face; and when Tiberius gave a stable currency to Egypt, he took as the standard the four-drachma pieces then current which had only about twenty-five per cent silver. This tetradrachma was probably recognized as equivalent to the Roman denarius, making one drachma exchangeable with the sestertius, but we must add that very little was thus exchanged: Egypt still went her own course. However, when we find wages in Roman Egypt four times as high as in the early Ptolemaic day, we do not forget that the coins used in payment were worth only about one-fourth as much as before, and that the actual weight of silver received had not increased. These tetradrachmas continued to be issued on the Tiberian standard till about the time of Sep-timius Severus, in that respect faring somewhat better than the Roman denarius. After Septimius there was a further debasement though it was not as rapid as at Rome. The tetradrachma now lost about half of its value but remained at this value till Aurelian’s day. During the last years of anarchy at Rome it was debased like the Roman denarius into a bronze coin with merely a silver wash. Diocletian then, in reforming the currency of Rome, also abolished the separate coinage of Egypt and