What things cost in ancient Rome

http://www.forumancientcoins.com/NumisWiki/view.asp?key=Edict%20of%20Diocletian%20Edict%20on%20Prices

by pg • 17 years ago

80 45 17 years ago

forumancientcoins.com

sam_in_nyc• 17 years ago

History is a fascinating topic.

It's a bit hard to make sense of this without seeing it converted into current units ($/lb or something).

pg4• 17 years ago

The best you can do is probably go by wages, which are also included.

tptacek3• 17 years ago

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.

pg4• 17 years ago

An As was a bronze coin.

http://www.coin.com/cgi-local/find1Coins.cgi?47261

ardit33• 17 years ago

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.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

I think the 'with maintenance' means 'room & board'.

DanielBMarkham3• 17 years ago

Love 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...

dmix• 17 years ago

Ancient Rome had a population of roughly one million people. That's quite a large market for a government to attempt to manipulate back then, especially before any financial system had matured. Now with populations a hundred times the size and economies many times more complex, its interesting how they are still trying.

DanielBMarkham3• 17 years ago

Did you check out the penalty? Death.

You sell a loaf of bread for a proscribed price and they come and kill you. I would imagine the arresting, jury, and trial took only a very short amount of time.

There's a human urge to try to micromanage economics. It all looks so simple. You just set the price of bread so that everybody can afford a loaf each day. How much easier could it get? Or if people are poor, just up the minimum wage. Heck, make the minimum wage 100 bucks an hour and we'll all be upper middle-class! All of us! Above average. All it would take would be some smart politicians to write a law.

Somebody once said that voters should have one year of economics before they would be allowed to vote. I'm against that, but the guy had a point: of all the political topics, economics is the most non-intuitive.

jwilliams• 17 years ago

Indeed - Mugabe attempted the same in Zimbabwe 18 months ago: http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20070706-Robert-Mugabe-dri...

dhughes• 17 years ago

As did Chavez.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

Very 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!

tokenadult• 17 years ago

It's noteworthy how teachers were paid 'by the pupil'

Indeed, the Roman author Quintilian held teachers who insisted on small class-sizes in contempt, as mere "pedagogues" (by etymology, slaves who baby-sat children), and insisted that a skilled teacher could handle a large class by his rhetorical power.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

I've seen that difference up close, we had a math teacher in high school that was a fairly small, unassuming little guy. But he radiated a fair amount of power and whenever he lectured you could have heard a pin drop in the pauses. The year after we got one of the 'pedagogues', the grade point average dropped right through the floor and pandemonium was more likely than order. Same kids... what a difference.

kragen• 17 years ago

Architecture is still lower on the social ladder than rhetoric; rhetoric is what politicians, CEOs, lawyers, judges, lobbyists, and to a lesser degree, managers, specialize in.

bprater• 17 years ago

How much is a denarius worth in today's US dollars?

swombat2• 17 years ago

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.

pg4• 17 years ago

That is a complicated issue. If it's not meaningless to ask what a dollar 50 years ago was worth in present terms, then it isn't meaningless to ask about further back. E.g. the answer would appear not to be a trillion, or a trillionth.

However, while this seems to be the view of most economists, I think it's meaningless to ask even what the value of a dollar 50 years ago was, because we are so much richer now. A dollar now can buy you computing power that would have been unthinkable then, cures for diseases that were then incurable, and so on. Economists deliberately ignore immensely valuable new innovations till their prices stabilize (= decline dramatically), since otherwise the CPI would jump around wildly. But this means the CPI greatly understates the growth in wealth.

rokhayakebe2• 17 years ago

Please Explain.

thorax• 17 years ago

Well, not what he meant in context, I bet, but the question certainly isn't meaningless when the context is collectibles:

http://ri.ms/ebay_denarius

fauigerzigerk2• 17 years ago

What remains comparable is how much humans need to eat in a day. So it could be meaningful to work out how many people a day's wage could feed back then and use that as a baseline to calculate the imaginary USD/DRI exchange rate.

tlb• 17 years ago

It is hard to make a good comparison because the economy was so fundamentally different. Our modern kg of corn could be anywhere from pennies (for animal feed) to several bucks at Whole Foods. Which do you compare against?

(In fact, what we call corn is a new world crop, unknown in Europe until the 16th century. The word would have referred to barley or wheat before that.) So not even the most basic foodstuffs were comparable.

Wages are a much better basis for comparison. Unskilled, medium-skilled, and high-skilled jobs are pretty comparable now and then.

iamelgringo• 17 years ago

Using the prices listed and assuming a 10 hour work day, one denarius was worth:

   1/4 of a decent beer, or 1/2 of a Egyptian beer
   1/2 an ounce of Pork Mincemeat
   1/12th of an Italian pound of Venison
   1/2 a bath

With a 10 hour day, laborers made:

    2.5 denarii an hour for farm labor
    5 denarii an hour for carpentry
    2.5 denarii an hour for data entry (scribing)
    1.5 denarii an hour for entry level teaching
        (assuming 10 pupils and 10 hour workday

supahfly_remix• 17 years ago

Thanks -- it's interesting that the professions presumably requiring some form of literacy (scribing, teaching) pay less than carpentry.

gruseom• 17 years ago

Interesting 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.)

nihilocrat• 17 years ago

Even though I don't really know what Roman courts were like, I bet a lot more things were punishable by death, so I figure a good lawyer might be the difference between being let free (or at least getting out alive) or being executed.

KevBurnsJr• 17 years ago

I wouldn't think that would be particularly interesting. Lawyers make a lot in our culture too.

What I find more interesting is the extremely high relative wage for Teachers.

elai• 17 years ago

But do think a lawyer would get that fee every day? Or only once or a few times per month?

yters• 17 years ago

It's all about preventing taxes and death: lawyers and doctors.

rokhayakebe2• 17 years ago

So Lawyers always made more money than most people.

bd2• 17 years ago

Here is another list, a bit different, with more goods and professions and with some additional commentary (though based on the same historical source):

http://www.constantinethegreatcoins.com/edict/

There is some interesting information, for example about soldiers pay and costs, exchange rates or about a death penalty for refusing to sell goods at the stated price.

Also silk prices have been crazy: 12,000 denarii for a libra of white silk and a whopping 150,000 denarii for a purple silk (use of which was regulated by the Emperor with misuse punishable by a death penalty).

pg4• 17 years ago

Incidentally, that site is wrong about why silk was so expensive. The problem was not lack of machines, but that in Roman times it was imported overland from China.

bd2• 17 years ago

Indeed, in these times China had a monopoly for silk production [1].

It would be also interesting to know prices of spices, other luxury product driving international trade in ancient times [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_silk

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incense_Route, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road

Haskell• 17 years ago

Is there something like a census with the percentage of workers in each profession for those times?

Allocator2008• 17 years ago

Funny that barristers cost just as much then as now! They had by far the highest wages in the careers listed in the article.

What things cost in ancient Rome

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