… soldiers of the Rhine army who rose against Tiberius… demanded to be paid a denarius a day, and they got it.[3]
One Sistertius is worth 1/4 of a Denarius, and 1/2 a Sisterius can buy a loaf of bread.
So 1 Denarius a day = 4 Sisterius = 8 loaves of bread a day
If we assume 3 USD is the price of a loaf of bread now, then these soldiers were being paid 24 dollars a day. Seems pretty low, but I guess bread was maybe more expensive back then?
Soldiers now make around 60 USD a day (random googling), so we’re dealing with a factor of 3 error which doesn’t seem so bad
AFAIK bread was quite a bit more expensive in the past, since baking involved getting up hours in advance to start a fire inside the massive earthen oven, not to mention that all the other parts of making flour were also way more difficult than they are now…
I think it might be comparable to meat these days? Something that everyone eats, but at the same time most people on some level realize that it’s actually pretty fucking expensive and they should eat less of it, but it’s just so normalized and tastes good so they just keep eating it every day.
(And for reference meat in the past would have been much more of a luxury, not in that people were vegetarians or anything but they’d just have less meat in every meal and they wouldn’t turn their nose at organs and “low quality” stuff like we do.)
From the wiki link above:
One Sistertius is worth 1/4 of a Denarius, and 1/2 a Sisterius can buy a loaf of bread.
So 1 Denarius a day = 4 Sisterius = 8 loaves of bread a day
If we assume 3 USD is the price of a loaf of bread now, then these soldiers were being paid 24 dollars a day. Seems pretty low, but I guess bread was maybe more expensive back then?
Soldiers now make around 60 USD a day (random googling), so we’re dealing with a factor of 3 error which doesn’t seem so bad
AFAIK bread was quite a bit more expensive in the past, since baking involved getting up hours in advance to start a fire inside the massive earthen oven, not to mention that all the other parts of making flour were also way more difficult than they are now…
I think it might be comparable to meat these days? Something that everyone eats, but at the same time most people on some level realize that it’s actually pretty fucking expensive and they should eat less of it, but it’s just so normalized and tastes good so they just keep eating it every day.
(And for reference meat in the past would have been much more of a luxury, not in that people were vegetarians or anything but they’d just have less meat in every meal and they wouldn’t turn their nose at organs and “low quality” stuff like we do.)