Today I Learned
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
view the rest of the comments
Where did that 15 billion number come from?
Plugging that into this website: https://testamentpress.com/ancient-money-calculator.html, gives ~ 390 million USD
Reading this stack exchange post, gives ~ 60 million USD
Reading the wiki page on Sesterius "A loaf of bread cost roughly half a sestertius", where bread now costs about 3 USD, so that's ~ 215 million USD
Still a lot obviously, but where did that factor of 10-100 come from?
I initially saw that number on a Facebook post and when I checked the source [1] it also mentioned the 15 billion figure so I went with it. Looking at it closely, the author did some "creative" math to get that number
Good catch, I should read the sources better and don't trust the Facebook (especially the Facebook)
You have to do some extraordinary mental gymnastics to expect paying for all soldiers in the roman empire is comparable to paying for all soldiers in the US.
Yeah that is an absolutely ridiculous bridge of assumptions and comparisons to walk across
You probably shouldn't compare the price of bread then vs the price of bread now. It's $3 in the store, but that's after decades of developing efficient methods to produce bread in gigantic quantities, which brings the consumer price down.
An artisan loaf of bread made fresh by a baker near to me costs closer to $9, for example. This would be closer to the way they made bread at the time, but even now we have modern efficiencies and easier access to ingredients.
Yeah, but back then there wasn't "artisan bread" since it all was. Also no middle men or board members and ceo's and property costs and such. You were just one or two guys buying flour and salt and wood, making bread every day, that you sold every day.
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.)
Even calculating based on the silver content when sestertius is 2.5g silver gives 90M grams of 90 metric tons. Each gram is valued around $1 so that's a 90M USD there.
Could you explain this math? If 0.5 Sestertius = 3 USD, we have a factor of 6. So then 35,863,120 Serterces should be 215,178,720 USD? What am I missing?
35,863,120 sesterces = (times by 2) 71,726,240 loafs of bread = (divide by 3) 23,908,746 USD
Isn't that right?
no, you are dividing loaves of bread by 3 to get USD, that would only be right if a loaf cost 1/3 of a dollar.
The sequence should be money in Sestertius / (Sestertius per loaf) = loaves
loaves * (USD per loaf) = money in USD
oh, doy! blinded by the numbers, fixed now
Let me know if you spot any more goofs
Ah, I see you already got it. 😄👍
Why are you dividing by 3?
Do these figures include earnings from garum endorsements?
They probably converted it using the BigMac index
This was if he had invested in Bitcoin right away.
Not sure but everywhere I look they say $15 billion
https://greekreporter.com/2025/05/16/diocles-15-billion-athlete-ancient-world/