In the year 301 A. D., the Emperor Diocletian issued an elaborate edict fixing maximum prices for all salable articles and for personal services. The Edict was nominally to apply to the whole empire; but the various fragments of copies which have been found have all been discovered in the eastern quarter of the empire, which was under the special administration of Diocletian, and the Edict seems therefore to have been intended only for that portion.

It is time now to sum up the results of this investigation, which has been carried through seven inscriptions (one of them in three copies), in five languages, and has listed the presence of about 450 errors. Such a summary is the more necessary, because the study has inevitably advanced item by item, without any generalizations except those implied by the tabulations at the end of each chapter.

THE significance of our reconstructed forms, precisely what is intended by them, is an old question which some of us discussed briefly at the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences of 1904 (cf. the publication, vol. III, pp. 35, 57), and which has been elaborated in the long article of E. Hermann, KZ 41. 1ff. There is not only a difference in the views expressed by various scholars, but often in the case of the same one an apparent discrepancy between the interpretation of reconstruction that is explicitly professed and that which must be inferred from his practice. For example Meillet, Introd. 24ff., insists on the unreality and the purely formulaic character of the reconstructions, saying that these are nothing but convenient formulae for given correspondences (similarly Oertel, Lectures 128, and others). Yet throughout the work he is constantly, like any other scholar in the field, asserting or discussing the sound, form, or type that must be assumed for the parent speech to account for given correspondences, and whether this and that type is inherited from the parent speech or an innovation. Again, not believing in the existence of three guttural series in the parent speech, he does not recognize the ‘plain velars’ of other scholars, whereas from his professed principle one would expect him to have the least compunction in admitting them as convenient formulae for a well-known set of correspondences. The fact is, of course, that to him, and to all, the reconstructions, while mainly useful as formulae, are still something more than mere formulae of correspondences, they imply a certain interpretation of these correspondences, a conviction or a provisional theory regarding their approximate common starting point.