Attested 1st-century prices, on a logarithmic scale: tavern wine at an as a cup, bread at two asses a loaf, a laborer's day at a denarius, a modius of wheat around seven sestertii, a plain tunic around fifteen.
Why the sestertius, not the dollar: Romans kept accounts in sestertii even when paying in gold, and this page keeps their habit rather than inventing a dollar rate — because no honest one exists. A denarius bought a day of vineyard labor and about eight loaves; whether that makes it $80 or $150 depends entirely on whether you price the labor or the bread, three-quarters of a Roman budget being food. The honest converter speaks in loaves and day-wages — and in proper Roman numerals, MMCCXXV denarii to the decade of a soldier's pay.
Convert Roman money — aureus, denarius, sestertius, dupondius, as, semis and quadrans in exact imperial ratios, with purchasing power in attested Pompeii prices, legionary pay and day-wages.
From the building accounts and sacrificial calendars: a skilled day on the Erechtheion at one drachma, a juror's sitting at three obols, a sheep around fifteen drachmae, an enslaved worker's auction price in the low hundreds — the ugliest line in every ancient ledger.
The talent test: a talent — six thousand drachmae, twenty-six kilograms of silver — was the unit of state affairs: one talent built a trireme, one more paid its two hundred rowers for a month, and the Parthenon consumed roughly 469 of them. When ancient sources casually mention someone worth "many talents," run the arithmetic on this page and feel the sentence properly. The weight standard behind it lives in our ancient units converter; the numerals it was tallied in, in the Greek numerals calculator.
Convert Athenian money — talents, minae, tetradrachm owls, drachmae, obols and chalkoi in exact classical ratios, with purchasing power from Erechtheion wages, jury pay and trireme costs.
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Convert Babylonian silver — talents, minas, shekels and barleycorns under Hammurabi's wage laws — and Egyptian deben and kite with Deir el-Medina grain rations and village prices: money working for millennia before anyone struck a coin.
The same purchase, priced in working days across three thousand years of history. The bars rhyme — which is the deepest fact this tool knows: economies separated by millennia priced life's basics in remarkably similar amounts of human time.
Read the fine print: "ordinary wage" means a hired laborer or craftsman where sources attest one — a denarius a day in the Gospels' vineyard, a drachma on the Erechtheion scaffolds, six barleycorns of silver in Hammurabi's harvest clause, a grain ration at Deir el-Medina. All are ranges flattened to typical values; slavery, rations, and household production mean "wages" never tell the whole ancient story. The rhyme across the bars is real; the decimals are not.
Ancient purchasing power compared — bread, garments, livestock and labor priced in wage-days across Rome, Athens, Babylon and Egypt, the only honest exchange rate across millennia.
Reported wealth of the richest Romans divided by a legionary's 900 sestertii a year, on a logarithmic scale — with one soldier-year on the left for scale. Ancient fortune figures are round rumors passed down by historians; the magnitudes, not the digits, are the point.
The through-line: every story on this tab is about the same discovery made over and over — that money is a social technology, older than coinage and bigger than metal. Babylon ran an empire on weighed silver and barley receipts, Egypt priced coffins in copper it rarely handed over, Athens minted trust into owl-stamped silver the whole Mediterranean accepted, and Rome learned that an emperor's decree cannot outrank arithmetic. The numbers those economies wrote it all down in live across our Babylonian, Egyptian and numeral systems pages — and their weights and measures in the ancient units converter.
Ancient money stories — Crassus's fortune in legionary pay, the Pompeii tavern graffito, Athenian owls as the first international currency, Diocletian's failed price edict, and silver-and-barley money before coins.