What things cost in ancient Rome
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What things cost in ancient Rome
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Re: What things cost in ancient Rome
#2History is a fascinating topic.
It's a bit hard to make sense of this without seeing it converted into current units ($/lb or something).
Re: What things cost in ancient Rome
#3Love the flowery language.
Yep -- anybody who thinks government can control prices should take a look at history. This kind of thinking goes back a long ways.
Wiki has the result: "However, the Edict did not solve the problem, as Diocletian's mass minting of coins of low metallic value continued to increase inflation, and the maximum prices in the Edict were apparently too low. Merchants either stopped producing goods, sold their goods illegally, or used barter. The Edict tended to disrupt trade and commerce, especially among merchants. Sometimes entire towns could no longer afford to produce trade goods. Because the Edict also set limits on wages, those who had fixed salaries (especially soldiers) found that their money was increasingly worthless as the artificial prices did not reflect actual costs."
la plus ca change...
Re: What things cost in ancient Rome
#4History is a fascinating topic. It's a bit hard to make sense of this without seeing it converted into current units ($/lb or something).
The best you can do is probably go by wages, which are also included.
Re: What things cost in ancient Rome
#5History is a fascinating topic. It's a bit hard to make sense of this without seeing it converted into current units ($/lb or something).
Isn't it a bit hard to do that without a detailed, possibly subjective study of what the scarcities were in Rome? The dollar isn't anchored to the value of ten asses anymore, and salt is basically free.
Re: What things cost in ancient Rome
#6Very interesting read! It seems that once again, those that don't study history are bound to repeat it.
It's noteworthy how teachers were paid 'by the pupil', and how architecture is apparently lower on the social ladder than rhetoric.
An advocates fee for a pleading works out to teaching 5 pupils geometry for a month. Some things never change!
Re: What things cost in ancient Rome
#7How much is a denarius worth in today's US dollars?
Re: What things cost in ancient Rome
#8Interesting that lawyers were the most expensive.
(Actually, it's a little hard to compare, because some of the rates are monthly, some daily, and some are per pupil.)
Re: What things cost in ancient Rome
#9History is a fascinating topic. It's a bit hard to make sense of this without seeing it converted into current units ($/lb or something).
Here are the very basic:
Pork 1 Italian pound 12
Assuming a person eats 1/2 of meat a day, plus bread and other stuff, you could deduct that it would take about 8-10 Denarii per day for a person to feed themseleves.
The lowes wage, is for unskilled famer: Farm laborer, with maintenance (daily) 25
So about 33% of the income is spend on food, nevermind basic necessities. But when you compare to today's countries in development, it fares pretty well. http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgallery/displaystory.cfm...
Now if you are a wall painter, things get better: Wall painter, as above (daily) 75
You are spending only a small fraction of your income in basic food.
from that limited data, it seems that life wasn't bad at all during those times.
Re: What things cost in ancient Rome
#10How much is a denarius worth in today's US dollars?
This question is meaningless.
Why?
1) The value of the denarius was clearly subject to inflation, and so varied greatly. You could say "how much was the denarius worth of October 1st, 10 AD?", but that value would have changed by the next day. In fact, around the time this edict was proclaimed, clearly the value of the denarius was inflating rapidly.
2) The only way you could come up with a relative value for even one day is by looking at how much comparable goods cost. The thing is, are there any comparable goods? The average "consumption basket" (used to calculate the inflation index in modern times) was drastically different back then. The standard of living of people around that time was incomparable.
A kilogram of corn, which you might think would be a good item to evaluate relative prices, was harder to come by back then. Relative and absolute scarcity of resources was different.