Comparisons and Silver Content
It is problematic to give even rough comparative values for money from before the 20th century, as the range of products and services available for purchase was very different. The coin's purchasing power in terms of bread in the first century AD has been estimated as equivalent to US$21 in 2005. Classical historians often say that in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire the daily wage for an unskilled laborer and common soldier was 1 denarius (with no tax deductions) or about US$20 in bread. By comparison, a laborer earning the minimum wage in the United States makes US$58 for an 8-hour day, before taxes. The silver content of the denarius under the Roman Empire was about 50 grains, or 1⁄10 troy ounce. In June 6, 2011, this corresponded to approximately US$3.62 in value if the silver were 0.999 pure.
The fineness of the silver content varied with political and economic circumstances. By the reign of Gallienus, the antoninianus was a copper coin with a thin silver wash.
Read more about this topic: Denarius
Famous quotes containing the words comparisons, silver and/or content:
“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
—Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)
“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice or wealth and chastity, which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Diety, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)