Chapter 5 — Roman Coinage

CHAPTER V

Roman Coinage

The history of Roman coinage¹ reveals one of the most interesting attempts in financial experimentation that can be found: an attempt to provide, with but little use of gold—which was far too scarce in early Italy for purposes of coinage—an adequate currency for a state growing by leaps and bounds; to establish for foreign trade an acceptable medium of exchange that might compete with the issues of hundreds of neighboring states; and to keep coins of the two metals, silver and bronze, in a bimetallic system near their intrinsic values when their market prices were fluctuating violently.

Our first surprise is that Rome managed to do without coins until the middle of the fourth century,² though neighboring Etruscan cities had been minting money for more than a century, and the Greek cities of Southern Italy and Sicily for more than two centuries. This dilatory behavior cannot be explained on the assumption that coins of other states may have flowed in sufficiently to supply the want, since the early treasure-troves of Latium disclose very few foreign coins. The only explanation is that Rome—as indeed the extant fragments of her early art imply—had quite fallen out of the currents of world trade after the Etruscan princes had been banished, and that the sluggish agricultural economy fared satisfactorily with ordinary bartering supplemented by the use of copper weighed in the balance. It was only after the new democratic element, which gained its first decisive victory over the aristocracy in 366, demonstrated its interest in commerce by founding a maritime colony at Ostia that the state undertook to coin money; and then only bronze was issued, in bulky one-pound pieces called asses, in uncial fractions of the pound, and in multiples of the pound.

1. Head, Historia Numorum²; Hill, Historical Roman Coins; Grueber, Coins of the Roman Republic. The standard works of Babelon and Mommsen serve as good introductions. Haeberlin’s Systematik der ältesten röm. Münzwesens, 1905–7, is an original contribution to the history of Roman coinage, but is faulty especially in its treatment of historical facts. My arguments for the view that the Roman system was bimetallic are presented in Classical Philology, 1919, 314.

2. See end of chapter III.

Bronze was indeed the only metal coined at Rome for the next eighty years, during the whole period of rapid expansion that made her supreme in Italy. However, a few years after this first issue, when Rome sent her armies into Campania to aid in checking Samnite invasions, her generals found themselves in contact with Greek and Oscan peoples who used silver currency. In order to buy army equipment from them, it was necessary to have an abundance of silver money; and the soldiers must also have desired their pay in a currency that would be respected in the cities where they were billeted. Silver was accordingly provided for use in Campania, though there is now some question as to how it was issued. Since these silver didrachms bear the name Romano, though their workmanship proves them the product of the Capuan mint, Mommsen held that Capua, as a dependency of Rome, struck the coins at Rome’s orders and for Rome’s convenience, and he therefore considered them Roman coinage issued from a subsidiary mint. It is now generally thought, however, that Capua was still sovereign at that time. Capua therefore seems to have lent her mint to the Roman generals,³ who issued military currency—as Flamininus did later in Greece—or she accepted a contract from Rome to issue silver for Rome’s southern trade, just as certain Campanian mints afterward coined money for Cora, Cales, and Suessa.

3. See Roman Imperialism, p. 41, which favors a theory that the coins were issued on a contract. Haeberlin follows Mommsen in thinking Capua a dependency; Babelon, I, p. xxix, calls it a military coinage.

The pieces in question were double drachms of the size then generally current in Campania. They weighed about 7.58 grams, so that the single drachm was considered to be 1/72 of the Oscan pound of 273 grams. On what basis it exchanged with the Roman bronze as we are not told. If bronze then exchanged with silver at the later normal ratio of 1:120, exchange must have been a cumbersome process, since the silver piece would then be worth 3⅓ bronze asses. But it is possible that bronze was then worth a trifle more and that three asses bought a didrachm.

Why the government did not bring this silver coinage to Rome during the fourth century is difficult to understand. The scarcity of these coins on Latian soil, while Capuan copper coins came in abundance, would indicate that Rome did not encourage their circulation northward. Could it be that Rome, taught by the financial troubles that followed her first coinage of copper, decided for the present not to introduce silver at home? That seems not unlikely, for we can hardly ascribe great financial experience to the simple legislators who forbade the charging of interest on money.

About 312 B.C.—if the wheel on the Romano-Campanian coin refers to the construction of the Appian Way—the size of the silver didrachm minted at Capua was reduced from 7.58 grams to about 6.82 grams, an act that must have displeased the Campanians among whom the coin was meant to circulate. Rome could hardly have done this unless her position in Campania had been strong both politically and financially. It is plausibly assumed that Rome could have ventured upon such a move only after Capua had committed acts of disloyalty to the league, as she did in 312, and had in consequence been relegated to a somewhat inferior position. Rome’s reason for reducing the coin was apparently to establish a convenient rate of exchange with bronze as her standard coin, at a ratio between silver and bronze of 120:1.

This slight change is interesting because its effects soon proved to Rome the force of “Gresham’s law”: that, other things being equal, an inferior coin tends to drive out one of superior value. What happened was that Rome presently came, in the conduct of the protracted Samnite War, into direct trade relations with Lucania and Apulia, where the currency of the South-Italian Greeks had hitherto dominated, and where her new didrachm, which was about 15 percent lighter than the Tarentine coin generally used, threatened to drive the latter out of circulation. Tarentum⁴ retorted with a similar reduction of her own coin. The incident demonstrates how powerful Rome was becoming in the South.

4. Haeberlin, op. cit., p. 24; Evans, Horsemen of Tarentum, p. 138; Regling, Klio, VI, p. 519.

In the decade following 312, the bronze as, which was still the standard coin at Rome, was gradually reduced to half a pound, and the fractional coins proportionally. This act is explained by Mommsen as an effort to relegate bronze to the position of token money.⁵ His theory, however, involves several difficulties. Bronze was still the trading metal in the Roman market, and there is little evidence that enough silver had come to Rome to take a dominating place. Throughout the Republic, moreover, Rome shows a great dislike for fiat money, making time and again a desperate effort to keep bimetallism⁶ intact and her coins in both metals at par value. Finally, the bronze as, being a crudely molded piece, could very readily have been counterfeited, and doubtless would have been if the metal in it had represented only half of its market value; for it must be remembered that the as was still a rather valuable coin, worth a third of a double drachm or a tenth the price of a sheep. A far more reasonable explanation seems to be that bronze, like all other commodities, was rapidly rising in value throughout the Mediterranean world because of the enormous treasures of silver and gold that Alexander the Great had recently found in the Orient and set into circulation. The price lists that can be made from the temple records of Delos⁷ for the fourth and third centuries B.C. demonstrate the fact that, during the half century that followed Alexander’s conquests, practically all commodities more than doubled in price. And while we have no record of the price of raw copper, there is no reason to suppose that it was an exception. The reduction in the size of the bronze as seems therefore due solely to a rise in the price of copper.⁸

5. Haeberlin, op. cit., p. 44, interprets it as an attempt to relieve debtors and therefore ascribes it to the year 286 B.C., when the plebeians seceded to the Janiculan hill. This seems to me wholly unacceptable. In view of the rise of commodity prices at the end of the fourth century, the date should not be placed later than 300 B.C.

6. Especially in the most important currency reforms of 312, 269, and 217 B.C.

7. Reinach, L’histoire par les monnaies; Glotz, “Le prix des denrées à Délos,” in Journal des Savants, 1913, an article based upon the mass of material published in Inscriptiones Graecae, XI, 3, in 1912.

8. The effort to preserve bimetallism by changing the weight of one of the coins had been tried repeatedly in Greece. The coinage of Agathocles of Syracuse furnishes a good example of about the same date. In order to meet the fall in the price of gold from 15:1 to 13:1, he reduced his silver coins from ten to eight litrae. Modern states have acted similarly. In 1864 France reduced her fractional coins because of the influx of gold from Californian mines; three years later she reduced the two-franc piece to the position of token money, and presently abandoned bimetallism completely. Had France waited a few years until silver was discovered in Nevada, the process might have been reversed.

However, this new coinage of half-pound asses, brought out about 300 B.C., was by no means permanent. The successive issues of the first thirty years of the third century provided coins of constantly diminishing weight until the as fell to two ounces, that is, a sixth of a pound. Again, the arguments just given preclude the assumption that the bronze coin was giving way to silver monometallism. It may seem drastic to posit a threefold rise in the value of copper in the first thirty years of the third century, but we have recently seen an equally startling rise⁹ in the price of copper produced in two years by causes not wholly unlike those then prevailing. The condition of the copper market was indeed peculiar. The steady demand for the metals during the long Samnite War was doubtless draining the market, since copper was then more extensively used in wagons, ships, war engines, harnesses, shields, and so forth than later. But the real crisis came in 296, when the Samnites secured the support of the Gauls and Etruscans. Then Rome’s supply, which had come almost entirely from Northern Etruria, must have been completely cut off. During the next year Rome cleared the North of enemies, but the source of supply again fell into the enemies’ hands between 285 and 280, while Rome’s need for the metal was increasing through the extension of the war north and south. Under such conditions, a threefold rise in the price is less strange than what happened to the metal in 1914–1916 A.D.

9. Copper in the American market rose from 12 cents per pound in 1914 to 36 cents in 1916. In 1919 it bears about the same ratio to silver as it did in 1914.

Pliny¹⁰ has by chance preserved the odd item of information that the Romans, in 280 B.C., when they captured the Etruscan city of Volsinii, carried away as booty two thousand bronze statues; and he cites a Greek author who joked about Rome’s making wars for love of art. But there may have been more than mere humor in the remark. Doubtless many of those portrait busts went into the furnace to compensate for the deprivations of years. When in 269 Rome reformed her coinage on a new system, she was able to restore the old ratio of 120:1, which had for some years fallen to 20:1. This was, of course, made possible by the reestablishment of peacetime prices throughout Italy and by the acquisition of large quantities of metal in her capture of Volsinii and Vulci in 280. And the process was doubtless aided by the fact that Greek trade and industry had now so far assimilated the extra currency of the last century that the prices of commodities had generally fallen back to those prevailing before Alexander’s conquest.

10. Hist. Nat., XXXIV, 34.

After the wars with the Samnites and Pyrrhus had ended in complete victory in 272, Rome found herself the dominant power of a confederation that included the whole of Italy, and yet her currency consisted of a Greek silver coin minted for her by a dependency and a crudely molded bronze coin issued at home. Obviously, the time had arrived for a more adequate and dignified system.

In 269 a thoroughgoing reform was undertaken. The old coinage was withdrawn, and the new was instituted at Rome and at several branch mints throughout Italy. The new currency was conceived on sound ideas, adequately managed, and soon gained respect throughout the Mediterranean basin. In the first place, the new Roman pound—the Attic pound of 327 grams—which had gained favor in Central Italy, was now substituted as a standard of weight for the Oscan pound, which was about one-sixth lighter. It was regularly divided into 12 ounces, or 288 scruples. The two-ounce bronze as, or 48 scruples, which had been found a convenient size, was adopted permanently into the new system. However, since peacetime prices had restored to 1:120 the ratio between bronze and silver, this new piece was worth only about one-sixth of the wartime as of two ounces.

For a standard silver coin, a four-scruple piece, the denarius, was adopted. This was the size of the Athenian drachm and therefore somewhat heavier than the Romano-Campanian drachm—4.55 grams instead of 3.80. The adoption of so large a coin would obviously entail a loss to Rome in South-Italian trade if merchants began to exchange the Greek and the Roman silver at par, for the cheaper money of the South might threaten to drive the larger pieces into the melting pot. But Rome apparently decided to take the risk for the sake of a sound and respected currency. At best, Rome might be strong enough financially to win in the competition;¹¹ at worst, she might use political pressure to suppress the mints of the South. Whether she used this power we are not told; at any rate, the southern silver mints closed one by one during the century, probably from financial incapacity to compete.

11. To tide over the season of confusion, and doubtless to call attention to the superior value of the denarius, Rome continued to issue from the Capuan and some other southern branch mints silver coins of the old weight—three and six scruples—which were called victoriati. They probably exchanged with the denarius on the basis of four to three, but they bore no mark of value and were treated, as Pliny says, mercis loco.

Since the ratio of exchange between the metals was now 1:120, the four-scruple silver coin was worth ten of the 48-scruple bronze asses, and the silver coin was accordingly called the denasius, which in time emerged as denarius. A one-scruple piece of silver was also issued, which was, of course, worth two and one-half asses and therefore called a sestertius. Various fractions of the bronze as were also struck.

Strange to say, later Roman writers, who lived when the emperors were alloying and debasing the coinage of their day, so misunderstood this great reform as to suppose that the adoption of the two-ounce as was an act of audacious debasement. Pliny¹² indeed goes so far as to say: “Thus a profit of five-sixths was made and debts were cancelled to that extent.” Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. In the new system, the government issued both silver and bronze at market value and, if anything, accepted a loss by adopting a denarius that was heavier than the coins with which it was likely to compete. Debts were probably calculated in silver and would naturally be computed in the intrinsic values of the respective issues. The fact that the new bronze as was only one-sixth of a pound could therefore do no harm. The word as, singly, meant a “unit,” and the Roman law courts were too respectful of property rights to be misled by a mere word into permitting the repudiation of debts. Those who had fallen into debt in terms of the old drachm and asses could readily be made to compute it in terms of the new denarii and asses; the process could hardly have been more difficult than when, after our Revolution, old contracts stipulated in pounds sterling had to be settled in terms of dollars and cents.

12. Pliny, XXXIII, 44–45; cf. Festus (Lindsay), 470, 87, 468. The last reference in particular, which ascribes the change to the Second Punic War, shows that Festus was capable of serious blunders. Apparently there was no trustworthy history of coinage available in the days of Pliny and Festus.

The charge of debasement came so naturally to historians who had endured the evils of imperial currency that they employed it to account for almost every change in the Republican coinage. As a matter of fact, while many autocrats, both Greek and Roman, debased their coins for the sake of profit, Greek and Latin republics never did except under very strong pressure. The Roman people at this time had little to gain from such an attempt. The neighboring states would at once have discovered the deception and refused to accept the coins at face value, while at home the people who received the currency from the state as pay for army service—a large proportion of the citizens—or for war materials and public contracts were also members of the assembly that had to authorize such an act. They obviously were not likely to favor it.

The situation in the Empire, when alloying became prevalent, was wholly different. Then the largest debtor, the one who had to pay the vast sums of the state budget, was an autocrat and could profit temporarily by paying those sums in cheapened money. Furthermore, since the Empire extended over most of the world of commerce, almost all trade was “domestic,” and it mattered little whether or not the rest of the world refused to accept the imperial coin. The situation resembled that of fourteenth-century England, whose kings could gradually reduce the so-called pound to one-fourth its size because it had a monopoly in trade, then largely domestic. With the growth of foreign trade in Elizabeth’s time, the coin came into competition with foreign issues, and then arbitrary reductions ceased. It is well, therefore, to scrutinize all statements charging a reduction for fraudulent purposes during the Republic. Most of them are due to the misattribution of a later evil. Only one, or at most two, early instances of such an attempt now seem probable.

The most interesting of all Rome’s experiments in finance is perhaps the act of 217 B.C., by which the as was reduced to one ounce,¹³ the silver denarius pronounced worth sixteen asses instead of ten, and gold issued in pieces worth 20, 40, and 60 sesterces.¹⁴ Pliny’s statement reads characteristically: “When Hannibal was pressing the Romans hard in the dictatorship of Fabius Maximus, the as was reduced to one ounce and it was decided that the denarius should exchange for 16 asses, the quinarius for eight, the sestertius for four. Thus the state made a gain of a half, but in paying military wages one denarius was still to be given for ten asses.” This measure is surprising if it was meant, as Pliny says, to repudiate state debts by one-half, since Fabius Maximus was of all men a sound aristocrat. Festus attributes the law to the democratic leader Flaminius, implying that the measure was of a revolutionary nature and meant to help individual debtors. Apparently authorities were at odds for an explanation, and well they might be.

13. Pliny, XXXIII, 45; Festus (Lindsay), 470. It seems likely that Pliny, in referring the act to the dictatorship of Fabius, is to be preferred to Festus, who ascribes the law to Flaminius. The latter was slain at the battle of Lake Trasimene, which brought on the crisis. Later authors who assumed that the law had a populistic purpose would naturally have hit upon Flaminius as the proposer. Festus, VIII, 26, seems also to believe that the law was issued to relieve debtors.

14. Gold had been issued once by the Romano-Campanian mint before the denarial system. That was also at a critical moment, perhaps when the treaty was made with Carthage during the Pyrrhic War, in 279 B.C. The coin represents the act of striking a treaty. Numismatists usually assume that this coin was issued about 300–290, since its value—four scruples of gold equaling 30 asses—seems to coincide with the libral as. But if we are right in holding that copper rose in value so that the new semilibral as was worth as much as the old libral as, this argument falls, and the gold coin may readily be assigned to the time of the Pyrrhic War.

Let us consider what the law effected. It was passed in 217, after the Roman armies had been almost completely annihilated by Hannibal. Huge armies had to be raised at once, Rome had to be fortified, fleets had to be built, there was need for very large issues of currency, and Hannibal held Etruria, the source of copper, while currency, as always happens in times of invasion, was disappearing into hiding places. It does not seem likely that the law was meant to relieve private debtors, for the state had recently allotted the Ager Gallicus. Nor is it easy to believe that the state passed that law for the sake of repudiating its obligations, since the state had no debts at that time. It explicitly raised the soldiers’ pay to cover the difference between the old and the new coin, and on all the contracts necessitated by the defeat it would in any case have had to pay market prices. We must conclude that Pliny and Festus are again projecting later theories backward.

What Fabius was attempting to do was clearly to increase the volume of currency by every means possible. Coining two small coins instead of one large one could not materially aid, but the new coinage did more than that. It recognized the wartime appreciation of copper and thus saved the amount of this appreciation for the treasury. The ratio of exchange was now 112:1; hence an ounce of bronze was worth about one-sixteenth of a four-gram silver coin. The denarius therefore was slightly reduced in size and pronounced, as indeed it was, worth 16 of the asses. There was no deception in either issue; both were meant to pass at market value. And as the state raised the pay of soldiers to conform to the new coin, the courts doubtless saw to it that private contracts were equitably settled by the proper readjustment.

The advantages to the state were numerous. In the first place, now that Rome had to buy war materials abroad, she had a silver coin nearer the size of the Carthaginian and the more prevalent Greek drachm, and this effected a saving. Then, as noted above, the act took advantage of the appreciation in the price of copper. Finally, by issuing smaller coins, the state enticed back to the mint the old currency that was disappearing into hiding. The sole disadvantage, beyond the labor entailed, was that henceforth the denarius was not equated with ten asses, as its name implied, but with sixteen, thus destroying the convenient decimal system of the earlier coinage. It is probably for this reason that businessmen began to calculate their accounts in sesterces, now worth four asses.

The gold coins issued at this same time were the first real Roman issues in that metal. Since the one-scruple piece was marked XX sesterces, and the new silver sesterces weighed about five-sixths of a scruple, the rate of exchange must have been about 1:16⅔. This rate seems high, for in Greece during this same period gold generally passed at the rate of 1:12. When we consider, however, that Italy was poor in gold, and that the purpose of the issue was to provide as much currency as possible at a time of severest stress, we cannot but conclude that the rate was moderate.

It is, of course, unfortunate that the decimal system was thus abandoned, but it is difficult to see how, in such a crisis, the state, without the aid of a well-developed credit system, could have proceeded more wisely to keep its metal in circulation, to expand its currency to meet enormous demands, and still to hold its issues in three metals at market rates when the exigencies of the war had raised the commodity price of copper.

The system adopted in 217 remained in vogue into the Empire, except that the gold coins were soon withdrawn from circulation, the issue of bronze asses was suspended from time to time, and the weight of the as was, during the Social War, reduced to half an ounce. What purpose governed this last reduction cannot be determined, since we do not know the market value of copper¹⁵ at the time.

15. See Grenfell and Hunt, Tebtunis Papyri, I, Appendix 2, and Mitteis-Wilcken, Chrestomathie, I, lxiv, for conflicting theories.

Rome’s currency system was, of course, not wholly satisfactory. The necessity of frequently changing the size of the as because of fluctuations in the market price of copper must have caused trouble in business; but gold was too scarce, at least in the earlier day, to trust as a standard, and its adoption might have led to worse evils. Doubtless a silver monometallism would have been better, but it is doubtful whether the hardheaded Roman populace could have been made to accept bronze coins of fictitious value any sooner than they did.

A second deficiency was the irregular way in which money was put into circulation. Since a free and unlimited coinage of silver and copper was out of the question, the size of the issues was determined by the consuls and senate, and these could hardly have had any good criterion for judging when more currency was needed. Doubtless many a financial crisis was due to the irregularity of the issues, especially as the banking and credit system developed very slowly. Yet there was perhaps a flexibility that might not have existed if Rome, like modern states, had permitted the chance output of gold mines to determine her per capita circulation.

At any rate, the history of three centuries of efforts in yoking together two such unmanageable metals as bronze and silver, in adapting the currency to the needs of a rapidly expanding empire, and in keeping it withal sound and respected is very creditable to the Republican statesmen. The three centuries of selfish manipulation by the autocratic emperors that followed brought the coins down to less than one-fiftieth of their one-time value.

Desirable as it would be, it seems impracticable to estimate the value of Roman money in terms of modern standards. To be sure, if we might attempt a purely statistical calculation without raising the question of what ought to enter into the cost of living, we might draw up a brief, though wholly inadequate, comparative list of Roman and modern commodity prices, and this would show that gold bought considerably more of the poor man’s necessities then than it has in recent years. Gold in Cicero’s day bought¹⁶ twice as much wheat, rye, and cheese, about the same amount of salt fish, three to five times as much of the common vegetables, and six times as many dried beans—these were the poor man’s staples—as it did in 1910, to adopt a year of normal prices. Cheap wine and oil, both necessities of his diet, could be had at about one-third the amount that the modern laborer at Rome had to pay before the war; shoes and coarse wool were about one-fourth the price.

16. For prices see chapter XV and Schulz, Sokrates, 1914, 75.

In the case of metals, gold bought somewhat less silver—the rate of exchange varying from 12:1 to 16:1—and 25 percent more copper, but only about one-fifth as much iron. The rich man had his ordinary labor at about one-tenth the modern price, but he had to have much more of it. Beef, pork, ham, mutton, and fowl, which the poor man could not afford, were sold at about one-half the prices current in 1910. The better grades of wine and imported table delicacies of all kinds do not seem to have been cheap. House rents, for which we have few statistics, varied then as now according to considerations other than capital cost. Cicero’s house in the exclusive section of Rome was far from new, but it cost 3,500,000 sesterces—about $150,000; Sulla, when a poor but respectable youth, had rented a flat for $150 a year; and there were apparently miserable rooms to be had for workmen at a dollar per month.

This enumeration, of course, does not lead us far, but it sums up the material on which historians arrive at the convenient and statistically true, though woefully misleading, generalization that gold in Cicero’s day had about three times the purchasing value that it had at the beginning of our century. This statement should not be made without immediate modification. In the first place, Rome’s was not a gold standard; if the small amount of gold then available had also been called upon to serve as the basis of currency, its price would certainly have risen very much. Hence a comparison is at once vitiated for any estimate of the currency.

Moreover, given commodities do not hold the same relative position in an ancient as in a modern list of utilities. Iron, for instance, was ordinarily of far less consequence in ancient life than it is today, and it was very costly. Labor, which was a larger item to those who could employ it, was shockingly cheap. Finally, prices were less stable and varied more than now according to the distance of the place of production from centers of trade, while wars and famines interfered with prices more frequently, and relief in times of stress was apt to be dilatory. For instance, some extremely low prices are quoted by Polybius as prevailing in Spain and Cisalpine Gaul. These, however, by no means represent normal rates, but rather conditions in frontier agricultural lands where a primitive self-sufficing economy still persisted, where commerce had not yet regularly entered to take the surplus product, and where currency was seldom seen.

It is also well to keep in mind that slavery placed so wide a chasm between the upper and lower classes of Rome that hardly a single necessity of a workman’s budget would recur in the list of a wealthy man’s necessities. Even bread, which must have taken 50 percent of a laborer’s salary if he had a family of four to provide for, could hardly have constituted one-half of 1 percent of Cicero’s annual expenses. And this leads to the greatest difficulty in attempting a comparison of values. While it is true that the laborer’s denarius bought two or three times as many bare necessities as in 1910, it is true largely because he had to confine himself to a few of the cheapest articles that must be had if he were to keep alive. It would not have been true if he had attempted to enjoy the variety of food, clothing, and amenities that the modern man must have, for then he would quickly have included a grade of articles that were as expensive as now.

In the case of the wealthy man, it is by no means accurate to say that gold bought two or three times as much as now, for he needed many articles and much service for efficient existence that, because of cumbersome transportation and lack of machinery, were very costly. Cicero’s journeys on official business by private carriage, yachts, and hand-borne litters; his mail, which had to be sent by private couriers; his skilled stenographers and copyists; and his private attendants, who were needed in the absence of street guards, were necessities, and very expensive ones. His ground rent in the section of Rome where he had to live does not seem cheap to the modern Roman. His furniture, plate, and house decorations were doubtless as heavy an item as they would be today because the application of slow hand labor, even though the labor was cheap, made them expensive.

The sum of 100,000 sesterces—about $4,000—which he had to expend annually for his son’s education at Athens does not really represent modern amenities, conveniences, and luxuries amounting to three times $4,000. The need of having individual teachers in a day when there were no organized universities, of employing personal attendants, the necessity of food, clothing, and apartments befitting his position, and the cost of travel, manuscript books, and so forth removed him from the market where cheap necessities could be had. For Cicero, a pound of Roman gold probably bought little, if any, more than its present-day equivalent.

CHAPTER V — ROMAN COINAGE

The history of Roman coinage* reveals one of the most interesting experiments in financial history. Rome attempted to provide an adequate currency for a state growing by leaps and bounds while making little use of gold—which was far too scarce in early Italy to serve as coinage. It also attempted to establish an acceptable medium of exchange for foreign trade that could compete with the issues of hundreds of neighboring states, and to keep the silver and bronze coins of a bimetallic system near their intrinsic values while their market prices fluctuated violently.

* Head, Historia Numorum²; Hill, Historical Roman Coins; Grueber, Coins of the Roman Republic. The standard works of Babelon and Mommsen provide good introductions. Haeberlin’s Systematik der ältesten röm. Münzwesens, [OCR unclear: iHS-7], is an original contribution to the history of Roman coinage, but it is faulty, especially in its treatment of historical facts. My arguments for the view that the Roman system was bimetallic are presented in Classical Philology, 1919, p. 314.

Our first surprise is that Rome managed without coins until the middle of the fourth century,² although neighboring Etruscan cities had been minting money for more than a century, and the Greek cities of Southern Italy and Sicily for more than two centuries. This delay cannot be explained by assuming that enough coins from other states flowed into Rome to meet the need, because the early treasure troves of Latium contain very few foreign coins. The only explanation is that, after the Etruscan princes had been banished, Rome had largely fallen outside the currents of world trade—as the surviving fragments of her early art also suggest—and that her sluggish agricultural economy functioned satisfactorily through ordinary barter, supplemented by the use of copper weighed in a balance. Only after the new democratic element, which won its first decisive victory over the aristocracy in 366 B.C., demonstrated its interest in commerce by founding a maritime colony at Ostia did the state begin to coin money. Even then, it issued only bronze, in bulky one-pound pieces called asses, in fractions of the pound measured in ounces, and in multiples of the pound.

² See the end of Chapter III.

Bronze was, in fact, the only metal coined at Rome for the next eighty years, throughout the period of rapid expansion that made Rome supreme in Italy. A few years after this first issue, however, Rome sent her armies into Campania to help check Samnite invasions. There her generals came into contact with Greek and Oscan peoples who used silver currency. To buy military equipment from them, the Romans needed an abundance of silver money. The soldiers must also have wanted their pay in a currency that would be accepted in the cities where they were billeted. Silver was therefore provided for use in Campania, although there is now some question about how it was issued.

These silver didrachms bear the name Romano, while their workmanship proves that they were products of the Capuan mint. Mommsen therefore held that Capua, as a dependency of Rome, struck the coins under Rome’s orders and for Rome’s convenience. He consequently regarded them as Roman coins issued from a subsidiary mint. It is now generally believed, however, that Capua was still sovereign at the time. Capua therefore seems either to have lent her mint to the Roman generals,* who issued military currency—as Flamininus later did in Greece—or to have accepted a contract from Rome to issue silver for Rome’s southern trade, just as certain Campanian mints later coined money for Cora, Cales, and Suessa.

* See Roman Imperialism, p. 41, which favors the theory that the coins were issued under a contract. Haeberlin follows Mommsen in regarding Capua as a dependency; Babelon, vol. I, p. xxix, calls it a military coinage.

The pieces in question were double drachms of the size then generally current in Campania. They weighed about 7.58 grams, so that the single drachm was considered one seventy-second of the Oscan pound of 273 grams. We are not told at what rate it exchanged for Roman bronze. If bronze then exchanged for silver at the later normal ratio of 1:120, the exchange process must have been cumbersome, because the silver piece would have been worth 3⅓ bronze asses. It is possible, however, that bronze was then worth slightly more and that three asses bought one didrachm.

It is difficult to understand why the government did not bring this silver coinage to Rome during the fourth century. The scarcity of these coins on the soil of Latium, while Capuan copper coins arrived in abundance, suggests that Rome did not encourage their circulation farther north. Could Rome, instructed by the financial troubles that followed her first copper coinage, have decided not to introduce silver at home for the time being? That seems possible, because we can hardly credit with great financial experience the simple legislators who forbade the charging of interest on money.

About 312 B.C.—if the wheel on the Romano-Campanian coin refers to the construction of the Appian Way—the size of the silver didrachm minted at Capua was reduced from 7.58 grams to about 6.82 grams. This action must have displeased the Campanians among whom the coin was intended to circulate. Rome could hardly have done this unless her position in Campania had been strong both politically and financially. It is plausibly assumed that Rome could have risked such a move only after Capua had committed acts of disloyalty to the league, as she did in 312 B.C., and had consequently been reduced to a somewhat inferior position. Rome’s apparent reason for reducing the coin was to establish a convenient rate of exchange with bronze, her standard coin, at a silver-to-bronze ratio of 1:120.

This slight change is interesting because its effects soon demonstrated to Rome the force of “Gresham’s law”: other things being equal, an inferior coin tends to drive a coin of superior value out of circulation. During the prolonged Samnite War, Rome soon entered into direct trade relations with Lucania and Apulia, where the currency of the South-Italian Greeks had previously dominated. Rome’s new didrachm was about 15 percent lighter than the Tarentine coin generally in use, and it threatened to drive that coin out of circulation. Tarentum* responded with a similar reduction in its own coin. The incident demonstrates how powerful Rome was becoming in the South.

* Haeberlin, op. cit., p. 24; Evans, Horsemen of Tarentum, p. 138; Regling, Klio, vol. VI, p. 519.

During the decade after 312 B.C., the bronze as, which was still the standard coin at Rome, was gradually reduced to half a pound, with its fractional coins reduced proportionately. Mommsen explains this action as an effort to relegate bronze to the status of token money.* His theory, however, presents several difficulties. Bronze was still the trading metal in the Roman market, and there is little evidence that enough silver had reached Rome to take a dominant place. Moreover, throughout the Republic, Rome displayed a strong dislike of fiat money, repeatedly making desperate efforts to preserve bimetallism and to keep its coins in both metals at par value. Finally, because the bronze as was a crudely molded piece, it could very easily have been counterfeited and undoubtedly would have been if the metal it contained had represented only half of its market value. It must be remembered that the as was still a fairly valuable coin, worth one-third of a double drachm, or one-tenth of the price of a sheep.

* Haeberlin, op. cit., p. 44, interprets the reduction as an attempt to relieve debtors and therefore assigns it to 286 B.C., when the plebeians seceded to the Janiculan Hill. This seems to me wholly unacceptable. In view of the rise in commodity prices at the end of the fourth century, the date should not be placed later than 300 B.C.

Rome made especially important efforts to preserve bimetallism in the currency reforms of 312, 269, and 217 B.C.

A far more reasonable explanation seems to be that bronze, like all other commodities, was rapidly rising in value throughout the Mediterranean world because of the enormous quantities of silver and gold that Alexander the Great had recently found in the East and put into circulation. Price lists compiled from the temple records of Delos* for the fourth and third centuries B.C. demonstrate that, during the half-century after Alexander’s conquests, practically all commodities more than doubled in price. Although we have no record of the price of raw copper, there is no reason to suppose that it was an exception. The reduction in the size of the bronze as therefore seems to have resulted solely from a rise in the price of copper.**

* Reinach, L’histoire par les monnaies; Glotz, “Le prix des denrées à Délos,” Journal des Savants, 1913, an article based on the mass of material published in Inscriptiones Graecae, XI, 3, in 1912.

** The effort to preserve bimetallism by changing the weight of one of the coins had repeatedly been tried in Greece. The coinage of Agathocles of Syracuse provides a good example from about the same period. To meet the fall in the price of gold from 15:1 to 13:1, he reduced his silver coins from ten to eight litrae. Modern states have acted similarly. In 1864 France reduced its fractional coins because of the influx of gold from the Californian mines. Three years later, it reduced the two-franc piece to the status of token money and soon abandoned bimetallism completely. If France had waited a few years, until silver was discovered in Nevada, the process might have been reversed.

This new coinage of half-pound asses, introduced about 300 B.C., was by no means permanent. Successive issues during the first thirty years of the third century provided coins of steadily diminishing weight, until the as fell to two ounces, or one-sixth of a pound. Again, the arguments just given prevent us from assuming that the bronze coin was giving way to silver monometallism. It may seem drastic to posit a threefold rise in the value of copper during the first thirty years of the third century, but we have recently seen an equally startling rise* in the price of copper, produced in two years by causes not wholly unlike those then operating.

* Copper in the American market rose from 12 cents per pound in 1914 to 36 cents in 1916. In 1919 it bore about the same ratio to silver as it had in 1914.

Conditions in the copper market were indeed unusual. The steady demand for metals during the long Samnite War was undoubtedly draining the market, because copper was then used more extensively than it was later in wagons, ships, war engines, harnesses, shields, and other equipment. The real crisis, however, came in 296 B.C., when the Samnites secured the support of the Gauls and Etruscans. Rome’s supply, which had come almost entirely from Northern Etruria, must then have been completely cut off. During the following year Rome cleared the North of enemies, but the source of supply again fell into enemy hands between 285 and 280 B.C., while Rome’s need for the metal increased as the war expanded both north and south. Under these conditions, a threefold rise in price is less surprising than what happened to the metal between A.D. 1914 and 1916.

Pliny* has happened to preserve the curious fact that, when the Romans captured the Etruscan city of Volsinii in 280 B.C., they carried away two thousand bronze statues as booty. He cites a Greek author who joked that Rome made wars for the love of art. There may, however, have been more than mere humor in the remark. Many of those portrait busts undoubtedly went into the furnace to compensate for years of deprivation.

* Historia Naturalis, XXXIV, 34.

When Rome reformed its coinage under a new system in 269 B.C., it was able to restore the old ratio of 120:1, which for several years had fallen to 20:1. This was made possible by the restoration of peacetime prices throughout Italy and by Rome’s acquisition of large quantities of metal through its capture of Volsinii and Vulci in 280 B.C. The process was undoubtedly also aided by the fact that Greek trade and industry had by then absorbed so much of the additional currency of the previous century that commodity prices had generally fallen back to the levels prevailing before Alexander’s conquest.

After the wars with the Samnites and Pyrrhus had ended in complete victory in 272 B.C., Rome found itself the leading power of a confederation that included all Italy. Yet its currency consisted of a Greek silver coin minted for it by a dependency and a crudely molded bronze coin issued at home. The time had clearly arrived for a more adequate and dignified system.

In 269 B.C. a thorough reform was undertaken. The old coinage was called in, and the new currency was issued at Rome and at several branch mints throughout Italy. The new currency was conceived on sound principles, adequately managed, and soon gained respect throughout the Mediterranean basin.

First, the new Roman pound—the Attic pound of 327 grams—which had gained favor in Central Italy, replaced as the standard of weight the Oscan pound, which was about one-sixth lighter. The Roman pound was regularly divided into twelve ounces, or 288 scruples. The two-ounce bronze as of 48 scruples, which had proved a convenient size, was permanently adopted into the new system. Because peacetime prices had restored the ratio between bronze and silver to 1:120, however, this new piece was worth only about one-sixth as much as the wartime two-ounce as.

A four-scruple piece, the denarius, was adopted as the standard silver coin. It was the size of the Athenian drachm and therefore somewhat heavier than the Romano-Campanian drachm: 4.55 grams instead of 3.80 grams. Adopting so large a coin would obviously cause Rome a loss in South-Italian trade if merchants began to exchange Greek and Roman silver at par, because the cheaper money of the South might threaten to drive the larger pieces into the melting pot. Rome apparently decided to accept the risk for the sake of a sound and respected currency. At best, Rome might be financially strong enough to prevail in the competition;* at worst, it might use political pressure to suppress the southern mints. We are not told whether Rome used this power. In any event, the southern silver mints closed one by one during the century, probably because they were financially unable to compete.

* To bridge the period of confusion, and undoubtedly to call attention to the denarius’s superior value, Rome continued to issue silver coins of the old weight—three and six scruples—from the Capuan mint and some other southern branch mints. These were called victoriati. They probably exchanged with the denarius at the rate of four to three, but they bore no mark of value and were treated, as Pliny says, mercis loco.

Because the ratio of exchange between the metals was now 1:120, the four-scruple silver coin was worth ten of the 48-scruple bronze asses. The silver coin was accordingly called the denasius, which in time became denarius. A one-scruple silver piece was also issued. It was, of course, worth two and one-half asses and was therefore called a sestertius. Various fractions of the bronze as were also struck.

Strangely, later Roman writers, who lived at a time when the emperors were alloying and debasing the coinage, so misunderstood this great reform that they supposed the adoption of the two-ounce as to have been an act of audacious debasement. Pliny* even says: “Thus a profit of five-sixths was made and debts were cancelled to that extent.” Nothing could, of course, be farther from the truth. Under the new system, the government issued both silver and bronze at market value and, if anything, accepted a loss by adopting a denarius heavier than the coins with which it was likely to compete. Debts were probably calculated in silver and would naturally have been computed according to the intrinsic values of the respective issues. The fact that the new bronze as happened to be one-sixth of a pound could therefore do no harm.

* Pliny, XXXIII, 44–45; cf. Festus (Lindsay), 470, 87, 468. The last reference in particular, which assigns the change to the Second Punic War, shows that Festus was capable of serious errors. Apparently, no accurate history of coinage was available in the time of Pliny and Festus.

The word as, used by itself, meant a “unit,” and Roman law courts were too respectful of property rights to be misled by a mere word into permitting debts to be repudiated. Those who had contracted debts in terms of the old drachms and asses could readily be required to calculate them in terms of the new denarii and asses. The process could hardly have been more difficult than settling, after the American Revolution, old contracts stipulated in pounds sterling by converting them into dollars and cents.

The accusation of debasement came so naturally to historians who had endured the evils of imperial currency that they used it to explain almost every change in Republican coinage. In fact, although many Greek and Roman autocrats debased their coins for profit, the Greek and Latin republics never did so except under very strong pressure.

At this time, the Roman people had little to gain from such an attempt. Neighboring states would immediately have discovered the deception and refused to accept the coins at face value. At home, the people who received currency from the state as payment for military service—a large proportion of the citizens—or for war materials and public contracts were also members of the assembly that had to authorize such an action. They were clearly unlikely to favor it.

The situation under the Empire, when alloying became common, was entirely different. The largest debtor—the person who had to pay the enormous sums in the state budget—was then an autocrat and could temporarily profit by paying those sums in cheapened money. Furthermore, because the Empire extended over most of the commercial world, nearly all trade was “domestic,” and it mattered little whether the rest of the world refused to accept imperial coins.

The situation resembled that of fourteenth-century England, whose kings could gradually reduce the so-called pound to one-quarter of its original size because England had a monopoly over trade, which was then largely domestic. With the growth of foreign trade in Elizabeth’s time, the English coin came into competition with foreign issues, and arbitrary reductions ceased. It is therefore wise to scrutinize every claim that Rome reduced its coins for fraudulent purposes during the Republic. Most such claims result from wrongly attributing a later evil to an earlier period. Only one, or at most two, early examples of such an attempt now seem probable.

Perhaps the most interesting of all Rome’s financial experiments was the act of 217 B.C., which reduced the as to one ounce,* declared the silver denarius to be worth sixteen asses instead of ten, and introduced gold pieces worth twenty, forty, and sixty sesterces. Pliny’s account** is characteristic:

“When Hannibal was pressing the Romans hard in the dictatorship of Fabius Maximus, the as was reduced to one ounce and it was decided that the denarius should exchange for sixteen asses, the quinarius for eight, and the sestertius for four. Thus the state made a gain of one-half, but in paying military wages one denarius was still to be given for ten asses.”

* Pliny, XXXIII, 45; Festus (Lindsay), 470. It seems likely that Pliny is to be preferred in assigning the law to the dictatorship of Fabius rather than Festus, who attributes it to Flaminius. Flaminius was killed at the Battle of Lake Trasimene, which caused the crisis. Later authors who assumed that the law had a populist purpose would naturally have selected Flaminius as its proposer. Festus, VIII, 26, also seems to believe that the law was issued to relieve debtors.

** Gold had once before been issued by the Romano-Campanian mint, before the denarial system. That issue also appeared at a critical moment, perhaps when the treaty with Carthage was made during the Pyrrhic War in 279 B.C. The coin represents the act of striking a treaty. Numismatists usually assume that this coin was issued about 300–290 B.C., because its value—four scruples of gold equaling thirty asses—seems to correspond with the libral as. But if we are correct in holding that copper rose in value so that the new semilibral as was worth as much as the old libral as, this argument fails, and the gold coin may readily be assigned to the time of the Pyrrhic War.

This measure is surprising if, as Pliny says, it was intended to repudiate half of the state’s debts, because Fabius Maximus was, of all men, a sound aristocrat. Festus attributes the law to the democratic leader Flaminius, implying that the measure was revolutionary and intended to help individual debtors. The authorities were apparently divided over its explanation, and understandably so.

Let us consider what the law actually accomplished. It was passed in 217 B.C., after Hannibal had almost completely annihilated the Roman armies. Enormous new armies had to be raised immediately; Rome had to be fortified; fleets had to be built; and very large issues of currency were needed. Meanwhile, Hannibal held Etruria, the source of copper, and currency was disappearing into hiding places, as always happens during invasions.

It seems unlikely that the law was intended to relieve private debtors, because the state had recently allotted the Ager Gallicus. Nor is it easy to believe that the state passed the law to repudiate its own obligations, because the state then had no debts. It explicitly raised the soldiers’ pay to compensate for the difference between the old and new coins, and on all contracts made necessary by the defeat it would, in any event, have had to pay market prices. We must conclude that Pliny and Festus were again projecting the conditions of a later age into the past.

Rome was clearly attempting to increase the amount of currency by every possible means. Issuing two small coins instead of one large coin could not materially help by itself, but the new coinage did more than that. It recognized the wartime appreciation of copper and thus preserved the amount of that appreciation for the treasury. The exchange ratio was now 112:1. An ounce of bronze was therefore worth about one-sixteenth of a four-gram silver coin. The denarius was accordingly reduced slightly in size and declared to be worth sixteen asses, as it actually was. Neither issue involved deception; both were intended to circulate at market value.

Because the state raised soldiers’ pay to conform to the new coin, the courts undoubtedly made sure that private contracts were settled equitably by making the proper adjustments. The advantages to the state were numerous. First, now that Rome had to buy war supplies abroad, it possessed a silver coin closer in size to the more widely used Greek drachm, which produced a saving. Second, as already noted, the act took advantage of the increase in copper’s price. Finally, by issuing smaller coins, the state drew back to the mint the old currency that was disappearing into hiding places.

The only disadvantage, apart from the labor involved, was that the denarius was thereafter equated with sixteen asses rather than the ten asses implied by its name. This destroyed the convenient decimal system of the earlier coinage. It was probably for this reason that businesspeople began to calculate their accounts in sesterces, each of which was now worth four asses.

The gold coins issued at this time were Rome’s first true issues in that metal. Because the one-scruple piece was marked XX, indicating twenty sesterces, and the new silver sesterces weighed about five-sixths of a scruple, the exchange ratio must have been about 1:16⅔. This rate seems high, because gold generally exchanged at a rate of 1:12 in Greece during the same period. When we consider, however, that Italy had little gold and that the purpose of the issue was to provide as much currency as possible during a period of extreme crisis, we must conclude that the rate was moderate.

It is, of course, unfortunate that the decimal system was abandoned in this way. Yet it is difficult to see how, in such a crisis and without a well-developed credit system, the state could have acted more wisely. It had to keep its metal in circulation, expand its currency to meet enormous demands, and still keep its issues in three metals at market rates when wartime conditions had raised copper’s commodity price.

The system adopted in 217 B.C. remained in use into the Empire, except that the gold coins were soon withdrawn from circulation, the issue of bronze asses was suspended from time to time, and the weight of the as was reduced to half an ounce during the Social War. The purpose behind this final reduction cannot be determined, because we do not know copper’s market value* at the time.

* See Grenfell and Hunt, Tebtunis Papyri, vol. I, Appendix 2, and Mitteis-Wilcken, Chrestomathie, vol. I, lxiv, for conflicting theories.

Rome’s currency system was, of course, not entirely satisfactory. The need to change the size of the as frequently because of fluctuations in copper’s market price must have caused commercial difficulties. Gold, however, was too scarce—at least in the earlier period—to be trusted as a standard, and adopting it might have led to worse evils. Silver monometallism would probably have been better, but it is doubtful whether the hard-headed Roman population could have been persuaded any sooner than it was to accept bronze coins with a fictitious value.

A second deficiency was the irregular way in which money entered circulation. Because free and unlimited coinage of silver and copper was out of the question, the consuls and Senate determined the size of each issue, and they could hardly have possessed a reliable standard for deciding when more currency was needed. Many financial crises were undoubtedly caused by the irregularity of the issues, especially because the banking and credit system developed very slowly. Yet the system perhaps possessed a flexibility that it would have lacked if Rome, like modern states, had allowed the accidental output of gold mines to determine its per-capita circulation.

In any event, the history of three centuries of attempts to link two metals as unmanageable as bronze and silver, to adapt the currency to the needs of a rapidly expanding empire, and at the same time to keep it sound and respected reflects great credit on the statesmen of the Republic. The three following centuries of selfish manipulation by autocratic emperors reduced the coins to less than one-fiftieth of their former value.

Desirable as it would be, estimating the value of Roman money in terms of modern standards seems impracticable. To be sure, if we attempted a purely statistical calculation without asking what should be included in the cost of living, we could draw up a brief, although wholly inadequate, comparative list of Roman and modern commodity prices. This would show that gold bought considerably more of a poor person’s necessities then than it has in recent years.

In Cicero’s time, gold bought* twice as much wheat, rye, and cheese; about the same amount of salt fish; three to five times as much of the common vegetables; and six times as many dried beans. These were the poor person’s staples. This comparison uses 1910 as a year of normal prices. Cheap wine and oil, both dietary necessities, could be obtained for about one-third of what a modern laborer in Rome had to pay before the war. Shoes and coarse wool cost about one-quarter of the modern price.

* For prices, see Chapter XV and Schulz, Sokrates, 1914, p. 75.

Among metals, gold bought somewhat less silver—the exchange rate varied from 12:1 to 16:1—and 25 percent more copper, but only about one-fifth as much iron. A rich person could obtain ordinary labor for about one-tenth of the modern price, but needed much more of it. Beef, pork, ham, mutton, and fowl, which poor people could not afford, sold for about half of their 1910 prices. Better grades of wine and imported table delicacies of all kinds do not seem to have been cheap.

House rents, for which we have few statistics, varied then as they do now, according to factors other than the capital cost. Cicero’s house in an exclusive part of Rome was far from new, but it cost 3,500,000 sesterces, or about $150,000. When Sulla was a poor but respectable young man, he rented an apartment for $150 a year. Apparently, miserable rooms could be rented by workers for one dollar a month.

This list does not, of course, take us very far, but it summarizes the evidence on which historians base the convenient and statistically true, though woefully misleading, generalization that gold in Cicero’s time had about three times the purchasing power it had at the beginning of the twentieth century. This statement should never be made without immediate qualification.

First, Rome did not use a gold standard. If the small amount of gold then available had also been required to serve as the basis of the currency, its price would certainly have risen greatly. Any comparison intended to estimate the currency is therefore flawed from the beginning.

Moreover, particular commodities did not hold the same relative position in an ancient list of useful goods as they do in a modern one. Iron, for example, was ordinarily far less important in ancient life than it is today, and it was very costly. Labor, which was a larger expense for those able to employ it, was shockingly cheap.

Finally, prices were less stable and varied more than they do now according to the distance between the place of production and commercial centers. Wars and famines interfered with prices more frequently, and relief during periods of crisis was likely to arrive slowly. Polybius, for example, quotes extremely low prices as prevailing in Spain and Cisalpine Gaul. These prices by no means represent normal rates. Instead, they reflect conditions in frontier agricultural regions where a primitive, self-sufficient economy still survived, commerce had not yet regularly entered to carry away the surplus product, and currency was seldom seen.

It is also important to remember that slavery placed such a wide gulf between Rome’s upper and lower classes that hardly a single necessity in a worker’s budget would have reappeared in a wealthy person’s list of necessities. Even bread, which must have consumed 50 percent of a laborer’s wages if he had to support a family of four, could hardly have accounted for one-half of 1 percent of Cicero’s annual expenses.

This leads to the greatest difficulty in comparing values. It is true that a laborer’s denarius bought two or three times as many bare necessities as the equivalent sum did in 1910. That was true largely because the laborer had to confine himself to a few of the cheapest articles needed to remain alive. It would not have been true if he had attempted to enjoy the variety of food and clothing, and the amenities, that a modern person expects, because he would quickly have begun purchasing classes of goods that were as expensive then as they are now.

In the case of a wealthy person, it is by no means accurate to say that gold bought two or three times as much as it does now. Because transportation was cumbersome and machinery was lacking, such a person needed many expensive goods and services simply to live efficiently. Cicero’s official journeys by private carriage, yacht, and hand-carried litter; his mail, which had to be sent by private couriers; his skilled stenographers and copyists; and the personal attendants he required because there were no street guards were all necessities, and very expensive ones.

The ground rent in the part of Rome where Cicero had to live does not seem cheap to a modern Roman. His furniture, plate, and household decorations were undoubtedly as large an expense as they would be today, because the use of slow hand labor made them costly even though labor itself was cheap.

The 100,000 sesterces—about $4,000—that Cicero had to spend each year on his son’s education at Athens does not truly represent modern amenities, conveniences, and luxuries worth three times $4,000. Because there were no organized universities, his son needed individual teachers and personal attendants. He also needed food, clothing, and accommodations appropriate to his position, and had to pay the costs of travel, manuscript books, and other requirements. These needs removed him from the market in which cheap necessities could be obtained. For Cicero, a pound of Roman gold probably bought little, if any, more than its present-day equivalent.