A legal maximum is not a payslip. A printed supplement is not a cut letter. This page keeps those distinctions active while it lets two records touch: the 1893 edition's brackets and dots, and the later values Allen uses to turn wheat into bread, silver, and a household ratio.
The wheat price the 1893 edition could not read is 100 in the later Aphrodisias copy, as Allen used; the two painter wages behind the often-quoted ratio of 2 are editor's supplements in 1893, and the reachable Aphrodisias text is missing that block.
Touch the missing letters
Start with three lines from the 1893 pages. The color belongs to the editor's typography, not to our confidence. Press the button and the point estimates disappear wherever the print itself does not preserve them.
What if the wheat price moves?
The obvious dismissal is correct: this is not a measured standard of living. It is a statutory maximum joined to an economist's assumptions. The further result is still operable. Move the hypothetical wheat price and watch every dependent quantity update, while the instrument keeps saying which input came from which hand.
Set the assumptions
show the equation Allen printed
bread = 0.063 + 1.226 x (0.032 x wheat price / modius litres) + 0.014 x 0.032 x (50 + food allowance)
At the starting settings the engine gets . The printed anchor is rounded to 0.394, and the page keeps both numbers visible.
How much of the page is actually there?
This is not a confidence score. It is a typographic census of the 51 rows in the frozen scope: thirty-five grain rows from chapter I and the sixteen numbered wage rows on printed page 20. A status comes from the spans in the source extract, not from the number the editor chose to print.
1893 typography, live
chapter denominators
The 1893 editor's parenthesis is evidence about the edition, not evidence that the underlying stone carried those letters. The source convention says straight type inside parentheses is supplied from another exemplar, while italic type is supplied by conjecture. This page follows that convention and does not silently normalize either.
The basket does not close
Allen prints a Diocletian basket total of 163.921 grams of silver. Multiplying every quantity by the printed price in his Table 16.2 gives a different total. The engine shows the mismatch neutrally, then lets you choose which total feeds the welfare ratio.
| item | quantity | price | quantity x price |
|---|---|---|---|
| computed column sum | |||
| Allen's printed total | |||
On a narrow screen, swipe the table inside its frame to inspect every column.
The second witness has its own holes
The comparison layer is deliberately small. The Augustana HTML has no licence statement in the fetched page, so it is not copied row by row here. Only load-bearing later readings are frozen as derived values and cited in place. The open Aphrodisias page is useful for one important correction, then stops.
Newest reachable outcome. The open PHI text for Aphrodisias 77 prints centum at I 1. Its section 7 wage text is missing from 3a through 76, including the painter lines; a separate section 8 block is missing lines 1 through 32. The 2023 Crawford edition is the newest edition reached in the research trail, but its exact readings for VII 8 and 9 were not available in the open preview. That is why the page does not silently substitute a modern edition for the 1893 page image.
This is a provenance result, not a claim that the later edition is wrong. It names the edge of what was reachable for this build.
Ask for a number the record cannot give
A good computation needs a hard stop. Choose a tempting claim below. The refusal is part of the output, not an apology outside it. The page freezes named records; it does not fetch a changing modern edition at runtime.
Every moving part is named
The live result panels report values returned by engine.js. The fixed headline and share text state the dated source finding; the starting-settings bread anchor is Allen's equation, recomputed from the later wheat supplement because the 1893 I 1 price is dots. The 1893 anchor beside it is the count of nine italic-supplied prices among the sixteen numbered rows on printed page 20.
- Uncertainty: the wall painter's septuagin(ta quinque) and picture painter's centum quin(quaginta) are conjectural supplements in the 1893 print. The open rule reports candidate sets, never probabilities.
- Uncertainty: wheat I 1 is dots in the 1893 print. The later centum is a comparison value, not a restored stone letter in this witness.
- Free choice: reading mode, wheat price, food allowance, basket total, and modius conversion are live controls. The lacuna rule is enabled only for
stone-1893; the other-copy concept is unavailable because no price span in the frozen 51-row census is marked as supplied from another copy. - Boundary: maximum prices are legal ceilings, not observed wages. Allen's ratios are model outputs, not measured living standards.
- Provenance: the 1893 scan and every frozen data file are hash-pinned in the research record. The page makes no runtime request to an upstream service.