What things cost in Ancient Rome (2007)
constantinethegreatcoins.com
constantinethegreatcoins.com
Here is general labor data in today's dollars
| labor | $USD | d.c. |
|:-----------------------------------------------------------------------|:-----|:-----|
| brick maker, for every 4 fired bricks and preparation of the clay | 50 | 2 |
| brick maker, for every 8 sun dried bricks, and preparation of the clay | 50 | 2 |
| clerk (based on specified bath attendant wage) | 625 | 25 |
| farm laborer, with maintenance | 625 | 25 |
| lime burner, with maintenance | 1250 | 50 |
| mule driver, camel driver, with maintenance | 625 | 25 |
| sewer cleaner, working a full day, with maintenance | 625 | 25 |
| shepherd, with maintenance | 625 | 25 |
| water carrier, working a full day, with maintenance | 625 | 25 |
| all other general labor | 625 | 25 |
I put the whole set in a file here: https://matthewbilyeu.com/what-things-cost-ancient-rome.txtPlus, those wages seem to be daily and the idea of a general laborer earning $625 a day is pretty nuts. Even assuming 12 hour days that's $50 an hour.
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3x0b7o/how_m...
The cheapest haircut I had was 1$ in Colombo, Sri Lanka on the street. It was actually pretty decent. You can get a haircut for 3-4$ on the street in some countries in SE Asia.
Also in countries with less sophisticated labour market there is a lot more barbers offering haircut and less Apple Stores.
Which makes calculations like yours very assumptions dependent.
New York is comparable size to Rome (only in 1974 amount of water used by the NY equaled amount of water delivered to Rome by aqueducts) but I think New York has different labour market dynamics. Just think of slaves and plebs on the dole in Rome. Also you have cars and public transport in NY, which affects labour market.
You get one in Bangalore for $2.5, but it means nothing when you measure it in $ terms, people don't exactly earn in dollars in India. They earn in rupees.
Arguably its pretty much the same(in terms of affordability) when you look it from that perspective.
Yes, but perhaps not as much as one might expect. Relevant Reddit post:
TIL that the Roman Empire in the year 150 was so wealthy that all of Western Europe may not have equaled its GDP until 1500 (<https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3prsxr/til_th...>)
> Not satisfied to execute just the seller, Diocletian decreed that the buyer was to be executed as well.
> As a final measure, if a seller refused to sell his goods at the stated price, the penalty was death.
So if you have something you don't want to sell, too bad? But then there's a simple loophole, too: once you've sold the thing, you can buy it back for the same price, and the original buyer, now the seller, can't refuse.
Modern chickens have ridiculously bulked up, and their feeding has been highly optimised, with the fastest growing breeds you can turn out a 4lbs broiler in 6 weeks, roman chickens would be far less optimised for meat, and as you note feed grain would be scarcer, so turning out a chicken for meat would also take a lot more time (hence even more expenses).
Similarly, dairy cow had been far less optimised, and so had dairy “husbandry”. Furthermore, cow milk was considered quite inferior to goat or sheep (not to mention ancient rome would have had pretty high levels of lactose intolerance, which are less of an issue with sheep and especially goat milk — a fact sometimes noted by roman writers e.g. Pliny). Thus dairy cow husbandry would have little presence in Roman culture, instead cattle was mostly work (oxen) and meat. Therefore the only balance (and opportunity cost) would be between these two, not unlike horse.
Foraging? Yeah if you don't mind foxes eating them, which is like the favoritest thing a fox can want. They figure out chicken coops built with way higher production values with chicken wire and the like, in the present day, back in Rome it must have been a cakewalk. And I don't blame the foxes, nor do I blame native Chilean cats that do the same, rather it's just to easy to prey on this flightless bird humans feed to eat. The whole concept of animal domestication, really, it's fish in a barrel.
So a 3 lb chicken, it's still ~1360g, 1360g of beef would be ~33.
In India going back as early as 1960s, Chicken used to be a very expensive delicacy.
I think poultry farming at scale is kind of a recent phenomenon.
I'm sure someone else might have more details on the penalty and dye-making process.
> In nature, the snails use the secretion as part of their predatory behavior in order to sedate prey and as an antimicrobial lining on egg masses.[14][b] The snail also secretes this substance when it is attacked by predators, or physically antagonized by humans (e.g., poked). Therefore, the dye can be collected either by "milking" the snails, which is more labor-intensive but is a renewable resource, or by collecting and destructively crushing the snails.
> David Jacoby remarks that "twelve thousand snails of Murex brandaris yield no more than 1.4 g of pure dye, enough to colour only the trim of a single garment."
I feel gold might be a stable indicator to assess prices over time.
400 g of rye bread = 400 g of rye flour = 0.95 liters[-1] = 7 d.c.
100 g of wheat flour = 0.2 liters[-1] = 2.5 d.c.
250 g of beans = 0.33 liters[-1] = 4 d.c
100 g of beef = 0.3 librae = 2.5 d.c
100 g of dessert grapes = 0.5 d.c
80 g of olive oil (second quality) = 0.09 liters[-1] = 4 d.c
1/2 litre of Egyptian beer = 4 d.c
Total: 24.5 denarii communes for raw ingredients. Add 20% for condiments and cooking, and get roughly 30 denarii communes for 1 trofa.
-----------------------------------
Here goes the previous comment[-2]:
A Polish numismatist, Zbigniew Żabiński, came up with trofa (from Greek trophe 'alimentation'), a universal measure of the value of money. One trofa is defined as an average person's daily ration of food typical for the given place and time. Altogether, it has 3000 kcal: 1800 kcal in 450 g of carbohydrates, 900 kcal in 100 g of fat, and 300 kcal in 75 g of protein.
For instance, in late 1970s' Poland, one trofa consisted of 400 g of rye bread, 100 g of wheat flour, 250 g of potatoes, 100 g of beef, 100 g of sugar, 80 g of butter, and 1/2 litre of milk. Assuming that its content has not changed, you take the cost of the food (8.70 PLN in 2016), add 20% for condiments and preparation, and get 10.50 PLN as the 2016 price of a trofa in Poland.[0]
In Octavian's times, one denarius could buy you 2 trofas (with content appropriate for ancient Mediterranean lands),[0] Judas's 30 pieces of silver were worth 60 trofas,[1] etc.
Unfortunately, Żabiński published in Polish behind the Iron Curtain so the trofa is virtually unknown outside Poland. The Big Mac index is its pale reflection.
More information in Polish:
[-2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22777042
[-1] https://coolconversion.com/
[0] A table of trofa's price from Octavian's Rome to contemporary Poland: http://blognumizmatyczny.pl/2016/03/14/trofa-miernik-wartosc...
[1] Thirty pieces of silver: https://bazhum.muzhp.pl/media//files/Collectanea_Theologica/...
[2] The purchasing power in medieval Balkans: https://repozytorium.amu.edu.pl/bitstream/10593/8080/1/11_Zb...
[3] Google search: https://www.google.com/search?q=Żabiński+trofa
According to Wikipedia, "the variety of cereal used [in the dish Polenta] is usually yellow maize", which is a New World cereal, so not available to the Romans.
However we also should consider that ancient eating habits were FAR different than actual ones, so was life. It's very hard to compare "prices" in completely different societies... In some part of our history there were a big abundance of certain products, in some other a big deficiency, in the '700 in western European countries most people eat FAR more than now to a point we can't probably sustain the rhythm today, in the '300 there was a very deep crisis and most people have nearly nothing to eat etc. Prices can't be a unique measure like today.
Just imaging a society where most families do have a bit of farm animals, for them does it matter their "price"? They raise chickens at home, so they have eggs and meat, what sense does the price of these "products" makes to them? They might just trade them to the few who travel at an accordingly high price, but local "poor" do have them in their own backyard for "free". Similarly if most people outside cities (so most people numerically in general) grow wheat in their own backyard how much it matter it's price? They trade it for wealthy people living in cities or as taxes, to create strategic stocks handled by their governments to cope with regular crisis, that's form the price, not what people have to pay really for it.
That wasn't ancient Rome, though. Poor people in Rome lived in (or around) insulae - apartment buildings.
Only the very wealthy lived in a domus.
Years ago I see a reconstruction from a famous historian (Alessandro Barbero) about ordinary Roman's life, unfortunately I can't find it now...
These prices would in practice largely have applied to Rome the city (and other cities of the empire), where no-one had farm animals. Outside cities there would indeed have been more barter (though the Roman Empire was more 'globalised' than you'd think; Italy was heavily dependent on food imports from Egypt and elsewhere for most of the span of the empire), but no-one was producing food in Rome itself.
Cities in the past were just polluted agglomerates of people living nearby for defense, services, communications, ancient Rome can be seen in modern terms like a set of colonial houses with some "central" buildings for social life, nothing like a modern city.
Also at that time earth was far more fertile than now, at least we can deduct that from the common and ease of hunting: they do not have any "long range" weapons and still they hunt much just around, enough to even nourish a moving army, food in the past was not that abundant of course but enormously more abundant than now.
Getting the horses and sheep up the stairs would perhaps be challenging.
> they do not have any "long range" weapons and still they hunt much just around, enough to even nourish a moving army
Wait, are you suggesting that Roman armies fed themselves by _hunting_? Where are you getting that from? A big part of the reason that Roman armies were so effective in general was their (for the time) excellent supply logistics.
Insula's in Rome were just houses for the people serving the wealthy, for commerce etc again they were not apartments, they might appear that to us, but they were just places where people rest upstairs and work downstairs, animals were common in internal courts.
And that's was just a very small fraction of the population, most do not live in cities at that time. A classic sign of how they live is considered the fact that even poor houses around the territory do have roofs with shingles while after the Empire most poor roofs is believed they were straw and similar materials. People often forget that Rome is damn ancient not "just a bit more than the '700 or '600". Society have changed much since then.
European "modern-city like" development arrive far after the Romans...
And depending on what you mean, "modern-city like" development is a concept that re-arrived in the early renaissance having disappeared after the fall of Rome. Rome itself had a population of over a million during the heydays of the empire, and some interpretations of that number have it as a million citizens, as the empire didn't really care to keep track of non-citizens except in the vaguest of terms.
Roman's was more traders and peasants with everything gravitating around the army than "citizens". Probably a modern-city comparison can be for the USA the "west" vs the "est", where in the west surely there was cities, witch in reality are "villages" for our modern lingo and people live more on trade and peasant's activities than else while the "east" was already a urban-centric civilization. I hope that's clarify a bit my view.
About urban replacement: honestly in the past "replacement" was far different than today, they build piled rock buildings, replacement happen after a war or in case of big incomes using the same rock and adding some. That does not really change the cities, that change was more addictive and slow rebuilding...
However in the ancient Rome the meaning of the words was different.
"Polenta" was barley porridge and "puls" was emmer porridge. Both were eaten by those who could not afford bread.
"Polenta" was made from "alica", which was a kind of semolina made from barley.
Which means that the article's claim that it was "probably identical in taste and texture" is wrong. Which was my point.
It's quite possible that "polenta" was a generic term for "seeds mushed and baked into a savoury cake" that later evolved into a more specialized use.
Sort of how the generic term "corn" now refers specifically only to maize (and to maize in general, so shedding all of its meaning in the process) in American English for some reason while its cognate "kernel" does not.