We read a section of Plutarch’s Life of Caesar in class today where he mentions that “before [Caesar] had any public employment, he was in debt thirteen hundred talents,” and the usual question came up: “How much is that?” A good question, indeed. And one to which, I said, there was no easy answer. Suffice it to say that it was a heaping lot of cash, I said, and we moved on, for we had other pisces to percoquere.
So. Here’s some more detail, for those of you who may be interested. First, thinking about specific amounts of money across, oh, 2,000 years or so is crazy to begin with. Not only is our culture (and the value we place on goods and services) vastly different from those two millenia ago, but “money” in the ancient world was thought of and treated differently, as well. Weights and measures were not as standardized as we are used to, and economies were more local than global. And then there’s the problem of comparisons—what exactly does it mean if I know I could get an apple for 1 obol in ancient Athens, and 75¢ today? Not much, really.
If we want to even begin to make a comparison, we need to find some common ground to work fromsome common unit of measurement that would make sense to an ancient Greek or Roman and a modern American. What we might try to use is the “value” of a day’s work for an average laborer.
Well, after an afternoon of hasty research, I’ve come up with an amount. It is about as accurate as Polyphemus’s rock-throwing after his eyes were out, but it’ll at least give you something to imagine. Here’s my process:
» Things are screwy right off the batPlutarch is a Greek, but he’s writing about Roman stuff. The term he uses to describe Caesar’s debt, τᾰλαντον, is a Greek unit of measurementof weight, actually. So it seems like we need to first find out what a talent was to the Greeks.
» There’s a couple of sources out there, but this Wikipedia page seems to be a good, concise summary. Here’s what we find out: 1 talent = 60 mina. Great. But wait, there’s more: 1 mina = 100 drachma, and 1 drachma ≅ 4.5–6 grams (of what? gold? silver? bronze? I don’t know. Silver seems to have been the most common, but we’ll let that one go).
» Therefore, a talent weighs around 5g × 100 × 60 = 30,000g or 30 kilograms. So far so good; this seems to line up with things I’ve read elsewhere. 33kg is roughly equivalent to 66lbs, so you can see already that Caesar owes quite a large chunk of metal to his debtors66lbs × 1,300 = 85,800lbs!
» Here’s where we get slippery: Our Greek drachma, at least in the days of the Peloponnesian War, seems to have been about a standard day’s pay for a soldier. Now here’s our move to Rome: On this Wikipedia page, it mentions that “classical historians regularly say that in the late Roman Republic…the daily wage for a laborer was one denarius.” You can even check your Bible on this one. In Matthew 20:2, the owner of the vineyard contracts with some men to work all day for one “penny,” according to the King James translation. The Greek word, though, is δηνάριονone denarius.
» So this is our kludgeeven though the time-span is probably too great to be meaningful, let’s make this pronouncement:
Let 1 drachma = 1 denarius = 1 average day’s pay
Wow. Now let’s get even more dicey with this one:
Let 1 modern average day’s pay = $5.25 × 8 hours = $42
That will allow us to say:
1 drachma = $42!
I shall now go hide my head in shame at the bogus math I’ve done…
» But before I go, let’s plug back in, shall we? If 1 talent = 6,000 drachmas (60 minas × 100 drachmas), and (according to our screwy math) 1 drachma = $42, then 1 talent = 42 × 6,000, or $252,000. Therefore, if Caesar owed 1,300 talents, he was in debt to the tune of 252,000 × 1,300 = $327,600,000!?! Ouch.
Is this at all reliable? I doubt it. But it sure gives us a huge, fancy number to look at, and a brief glimpse at some ancient weights and measures, so it’s probably worth the trip, nevertheless. If you’d like to read a little more, I also ran across a page about ancient prices, and an essay about buying and selling in the Roman world, which turns out not to be as much about the Roman world as one could have hoped, but sheds light on the sticky problem of “How much was that worth?” that got us in to this mess to begin with.