“Emito sepiolas, lopadas, loligunculas.”
Even Pythagoras, according to Lilius Giraldus, believed that cupidity could be aroused, not by fish, which were apparently banned to his disciples, but by Urtica marina.[726]
Pliny’s list of proved aphrodisiacs and antaphrodisiacs includes among the former “the eye-tooth of a crocodile attached to the arm,” and among the latter “the skin from the left side of the forehead of the hippopotamus attached fast to the body in lambskin.”[727]
CHAPTER XX
DIOCLETIAN’S EDICT, 301 A.D.—PRICES OF FISH
AND OTHER ARTICLES THEN AND NOW
Struck with Adam’s words with regard to the Edict of Diocletian, 301 a.d.—“if we could fix the value of the denarius at this epoch, the prices of fish then would prove an interesting subject for comparison with those now (1883) current at Billingsgate”—I set to work to ascertain how great had been the depreciation of and what was the exact value of the denarius at the opening of the fourth century.
Much labour would have been saved, had I earlier come across Abbott’s The Common People of Ancient Rome, but I found some compensation in the solution of my sum coinciding approximately with his estimate of the denarius = ·4352 cent.[728]
The Edict of Diocletian[729] contains, as Mr. Abbott (to whose book I am indebted for very much that follows) indicates, many points of great economic interest to us at the present time.
First—sentences of the Introduction (probably from intrinsic evidence written by the Emperor himself) might well pass for a diatribe in to-day’s paper against a Beef or other Trust. Fortunate it is for these that the newspaper man possesses not the power of life and death wielded by Diocletian.