HBO\'s "Rome" to present more realistic look at the

[Ebusitanus]

Hey...we disccused this not long ago:

Browsing the script for the latest episode - six - and I come across the following line: "The troops need paying. We must get the money somewhere."

Money. As much of an obsession for the ancient Romans as it is for us. The Romans were unabashed in their desire to get rich. Most, of course, never managed and spent lifetimes worrying about the next rent check. But it didn't stop them dreaming. 'Salve Lucrum' reads one of the more famous inscriptions on a doorway in Pompeii. 'Welcome Profit!'

Understanding Roman attitudes to money is, accordingly, a key to understanding the Romans themselves. There were the usual contradictions. The only people who could afford to be blasé about money were the super-rich, and they despised those who actually had to work and get their hands dirty to make it.

For the vast majority of Romans, (who were poor, overwhelmingly so by our standards), money had to be an obsession. Coin, what the Romans called 'nummi', was what you needed, and you did what you had to to get your hands on it. Hard cash to survive in a hard world.

One simple, but significant barrier to understanding Roman money is calculating a rate of exchange. What's the dollar/denarius rate today? This is trickier than it looks. Inflation means that any suggested equivalent almost immediately goes out of date.

The most effective way is to take an average wage in the ancient Roman world and to see what it would have bought you. That way you get a sense of how little you would have been forced to survive on. And calculating like this turns up some surprises.

The average annual wage at the time ROME is set was 900-1,000 sestertii. It meant you had to get by on between 2 to 3 sestertii per day. Now even the most basic room in Rome cost 2 sestertii per day. So you've already got just one sestertius to play with. That was enough to buy you one cup of good Italian wine, (admittedly a cheap cup would have cost only a quarter of that.) Alternatively it would have been enough to buy some bread, a tiny piece of meat, (probably pork) and some chickpea relish to go with it.

It's not much. And when you factor in the need for clothing, and the fact that most people contributed insurance to a funeral fund for fear of dying without receiving a proper burial, it's clear that some days you'd have to go hungry if you were to have a roof over your head. It's also clear that the line between surviving and going under was razor-thin. You'd make your own clothes, try and grow your own food, and depend wherever you could on a benefactor to bail you out when things got too tough.

The same calculations reveal the gigantic gap between rich and poor. A slave cost 5,000 sestertii minimum. Five times the annual wage. An immense luxury. Imagine spending five your times your entire annual salary on a single item. Even renting a slave cost 2,000 sestertii a year.

And we know that some rents, for a swank condominium on the Palatine say, were 30,000 sestertii per month. That's 360,000 sestertii per year. 360 times the average annual wage - for an apartment.