Legionary pay in modern money

[Caballo]

I was doing a favour for a teacher friend in Stroud today and did a full kit visit (accompanied by my 17 year old son who (for the first time) kitted up as an auxillary).

An eight year old in Stroud, UK,asked me a question that had me completely stumped.

"How much would a Roman legionary and auxillary be paid in today's money?"

Any ideas?


Cheers

Caballo

[ambrosius]

An eight year old in Stroud, UK,asked me a question that had me completely stumped.

"How much would a Roman legionary and auxillary be paid in today's money?"Any ideas?

Hi Caballo,

A couple of your chaps in the RMRS were telling me, once, that in
the 1st c., a legionary was paid the equivalent of a modern skilled
craftsman. Say 30-40 k (that's pounds, of course :wink: ). Which
makes sense, if they were the target trades for recruitment. After
all, you wouldn't expect them to take a pay cut on enlistment. Ah,
but then there were all those 'deductions'...

Mike

[richsc]

I understood the British army in the Napoleonic era at least practiced 'stoppages' against pay. What did that amount to relative to pay?

[Tarbicus]

Seeing as how a unit of currency is only worth its value set against what it can buy, how about taking the price of an essential like bread, and use that to work out the value of the money (how many loaves could a legionary buy?).

Then take the price of a loaf of bread today and multiply by the amount of loaves a legionary could have bought, which might give you a good indicator of what a legionary's pay would be today.

Alternatively, I just found this website which does the same thing.
[url:34w7whd0]http://dougsmith.ancients.info/worth.html[/url]
It also has other useful info which some here might agree with, but others might not :wink:

If you can find the price of a loaf of bread and a legionary's basic pay at any single time you should be able to work it out fairly easily from there.

[FlaviusCrispus]

From Doug Smith's website:

Baked bread sold for a dupondius a loaf in the expensive cities like Rome and Pompeii and half that (one as) in more rural towns. By this time the legionary was earning nearly a denarius a day but the Praetorian Guard (at Rome) were paid more partially for their honored position and partly to offset the expense of living in the City. Comparing today's prices for bread at the supermarket might suggest an as was worth a bit over a dollar US placing the denarius at about $20.

I agree with Doug that a rough approximation of the worth of a denarius, from the mid first through second century AD, would be about $20 in today's money, making a sestertius about a $5 bill, a dupondius worth $2.50 and an as worth $1.25.

This great web page provides Roman military pay in denarii for different classes of soldiers throughout the Roman period:

http://www.personal.kent.edu/~bkharvey/ ... conomy.htm

Base Roman military pay from the reign of Domitian to Severus was 300 denarii per year, which translates to an annual "salary" of $6,000 for regular legionaries, $20,000 per year for Praetorian Guardsmen, $6,660 for an auxiliary cavalryman, and $500,000(!!!!) for a Primus Pilus Centurion.

No, that's what I call motivation for advancement!

[Primvs Pavlvs]

Whats sad is the average pay from an American infantryman in WW2 wasnt even this high.

[Jona Lendering]

I think that essentially, we can not convert ancient prices and wages into modern currency. The reason is that the subsystems of the modern economy are better integrated. Two examples.

(1)
The Talmud contains several stories, and the New Testament one, about the payment of a wage worker who did not work the full day. The general rule was that even if he was hired at the eleventh hour, he was to receive full payment, because the boss did not pay him a wage for his work, but to upkeep his family. This payment was one drachm (= one denarius) per day. The implication is that the labor market was not free (it was embedded in social care) and did not connected demand and supply.

(2)
The younger Pliny describes that at some stage during his term as interim manager in Bithynia, he had some money that was waiting to be invested. He did not find an object. So he consulted the emperor. One of the options was that rich people would be forced to borrow this money and pay interest; to sweeten the pill, it was agreed that the interest was to be lower than the traditional 12%. The fact that this needed to be discussed, proves that interest was only partly regulated by supply and demand.

To put it bluntly, the laws of supply and demand were largerly absent. People who used a situation of scarcity to raise the prices, were not certain to survive, as can be seen in the regular food crises (once every four years; a repeated bad harvest once in seven years).

Another important aspect is that calculating prices was different from the way we are used to do. The cost of labor can be specified, because we have clocks to express it as so and so many dollars per hour. This was impossible back then, and besides: useless, because all production was agricultural production by peasants, who were for 85% outside the market system (the other 15% was sold to obtain the money to pay taxes). From a modern point of view, 85% of the ancient economy was a "black economy", not controled by the taxman or the government.

So, I think that we must refrain from converting ancient into modern money. Still, some conclusions are more or less right:

(a)
In the Hellenistic age, the purchasing power of silver is highest where agricultural resources are best. As a rule of the thumb, Seleucid Babylonia, Egypt, Sicily, and Italy are 15 : 14-10 : 8 : 6.

(b)
In the first and second century, prices were slowly rising, due to an increasing population, which occupied marginal soils.

©
Debasements in the third century resulted in inflation.

I have lost interest in the ancient economy, but the book to read used to be Finley's Ancient Economy, which I felt contained a lot of "it either A or B"-statements, where a C and D seemed possible; I had the impression that the debate between primitivists and modernists was of a poor quality. The so-called "primitivists" were especially good in putting up and shooting strawmen. As I said, I lost interest.

Now, I am reading Makis Aperghis, The Seleukid Royal Economy. The Finances and Financial Administration of the Seleukid economy (2004 Cambridge), which is a bold and well-written book that I can recommend. There's a review here.

An eight year old in Stroud, UK

Perhaps the answer is: "we can not know". After that, tell the kid about the clocks. I think the beginning of wisdom, and something you can explain to children, is that those things we know, is a small island in an ocean of subjects about which we do not know, and can not know.

I end this long posting with a little poem by an American author named D.H. Rumsfeld:

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know. :wink:

[FlaviusCrispus]

I think that essentially, we can not convert ancient prices and wages into modern currency. The reason is that the subsystems of the modern economy are better integrated. Two examples.

Of course you're correct that we cant draw an exact comparison, since the ancient world economy was so drastically different than ours. In the ancient economy, LABOR (particularly slave labor) was extremely cheap, while MATERIALS (particularly metals) were expensive. In today's world, it's the exact opposite.

But people always seek to draw comparisons, and for a simple, rough rule of thumb, pegging the ancient monetary system to an everyday commodity like bread is probably as close as we can come.

Whenever someone asks me "what's that in today's money," I always explain that direct comparison is difficult if not impossible, but since leaving it at that is distinctly unsatisfying, I'll add a rough estimate based either on wages ("a denarius a day is an average wage for a skilled workman, a nobleman needs to have property worth a million sesterces to enter the Senate") or prices ("a dupondius will buy a loaf of bread, an as will buy a cup of cheap wine," etc.).

It is interesting that using the "bread gradiant" produces wages, at the low end of the scale, that aren't too different from those of equivalent positions in the modern world (an annual salary of $6,000 for a U.S. Private was about right up until the 1970s), although at the upper range (Primus Pilus), a modern General would have to retire and parlay his position into a CEO job at a major firm to make that kind of moolah.

(Love the Rumsfeld "poem," by the way.)

[Caballo]

Thanks, all for great replies- though I find it hard to belive that the laws of demand and supply wouldn't work...

"Base Roman military pay from the reign of Domitian to Severus was 300 denarii per year, which translates to an annual "salary" of $6,000 for regular legionaries, $20,000 per year for Praetorian Guardsmen, $6,660 for an auxiliary cavalryman, and $500,000(!!!!) for a Primus Pilus Centurion. "

And presumably an auxiliary footsoldier was paid less than the legionary ?

Cheers

Caballo

[Tarbicus]

And presumably an auxiliary footsoldier was paid less than the legionary ?

Gives all the more credence to the opinions that the common soldier was keen to see action. At least he'd be able to supplement his income with loot and booty.

[FlaviusCrispus]

And presumably an auxiliary footsoldier was paid less than the legionary ?

"Cohort infantryman" (presumably auxiliary) is listed at 100 denari per year, or $2,000 by Doug Smith's "bread gradiant." Of course, a denarius probably went a lot further out in those boondocks provinces...

A few interesting points of contrast:

In the U.S. army, an E-1 infantryman (Private) earns an annual salary of $15,282.

A four-star general with 26 years of service earns $145,596, or roughly 10 times what the entry-level infantryman earns.

So a Primus Pilus, who is technically not as high as a Legate (who, being a Senator and a political appointment, would presumably be paid on a different scale) earns nearly 84 times the salary of a basic infantryman, a much higher spread than one sees in the modern army.

[Praefectusclassis]

"Cohort infantryman" (presumably auxiliary) is listed at 100 denari per year

There's very limited evidence for the salary of auxiliaries, mainly derived from conceptions about status and one or two papyri with savings accounts which have been recombined into salaries. It's very much discussed, but most current calculations put it higher than 100 dn (i.e. 187 or even equal: 225).
Interesting observation on the higher spread in Roman times. I think it has to do with the larger stratification of society and concomitant status. A cohortalis in an auxiliary unit wasn't even a citizen, while a Primus Pilus qualified for the equestrian order.

[A_Volpe]

yeah the pay is lousy, but look at the benefits:

You get government supplied gear...Which happens to come out of your pay but who's counting?...it's Supplied to YOU!

You get training by the army. If you make Immunis you get to specialize

You get to see a whole new world outside of where you were born, and kill the natives of that area if they cause trouble :wink:

You get to share an 8-man tent with 7 other people with less than 1 foot of personal space. Makes for great dinner conversation! It makes you strong and supportive of each other!

You get paid for 25 years. If you do good, you can end up like your Primus Pilus and make a boatload of cash! Let's call that "Incentive" or "Motivation".

You also get to build walls and fortifications and then get to partol them. That ought to instill a feeling of pride in your work! :roll:

[petrinus]

An eight year old in Stroud, UK,asked me a question that had me completely stumped.

"How much would a Roman legionary and auxillary be paid in today's money?"Any ideas?

Hi Caballo,

A couple of your chaps in the RMRS were telling me, once, that in
the 1st c., a legionary was paid the equivalent of a modern skilled
craftsman. Say 30-40 k (that's pounds, of course :wink: ). Which
makes sense, if they were the target trades for recruitment. After
all, you wouldn't expect them to take a pay cut on enlistment. Ah,
but then there were all those 'deductions'...

Mike

ah like the real army, of which i have the displeasure of currently serving in, ive spent so much of my own loot cause they issue us crap, so after ive added up everything i spent i feel a lot like a legionare!

[Crispvs]

Caballo,

Talk to me at the next show and I will point you in the direction of two rather well argued (and opposing) articles, one by M.A. Spiedel and the other by R. Alston on the subject of pay.

Incidentally, I think that the 300 denarii per year from Domitian to Severus is an assumption. The same assumption in fact that brings other people to say that the figure was 400 denarii per year. If I remember rightly (and as I am working without my sources as I write this I may not be), in Caesar's time pay was set at 150 denarii / 600 sestertii per year, paid in three installments. I think that it was Augustus who doubled this figure to 300 denarii / 1200 sestertii, still paid in three installments. As I understand it, what we are told about Domitian's change to army pay is that he arranged that soldiers should be paid four times, rather than three times per year. Some people have chosen to see this as evidence that pay was increased by a third, thus becoming 400 denarii / 1600 sestertii per year, whilst others contend that they simply recieved less per installment and the overall figure remained the same. As all our literary information on pay rates (as far as I know) is in terms of multiples of the basic rate in Augustus' time, this means that the impass created by the differing interpretations of the change from three installments to four per year creates a blockage we cannot pass in terms of understanding the real pay rates of later times. We simply cannot be sure how much money Severus was doubling and Caracalla was doubling again.

Crispvs