What could a silver Tetradrachm buy in Ancient Greece?

MKUltra24

I’m curious ever since I picked up an “owl” Athenian tetradrachm. What could an Ancient Greek have purchased with it?

Like was it considered a pretty decent sum of money? Or was it like a $5 bill today where you couldn’t even buy a meal with it?

I know prices fluctuated over centuries but I’m thinking more around the time the coin was minted in 440-404 BC.

Thanks! ^_^

SYRACUSIAN

Although not my specialty at all, the tetradrachm is a pretty important silver coin with a lot of smaller denominations. Probably the most common biggest silver coin as the rare decadrachms are considered by many as commemorative coins. There were of course gold coins and the goods in a consumer’s basket, as the latter is determined to calculate inflation, have absolutely nothing in common with what was the standard back then. Tricky question, but it was a high value coin.

MKUltra24

@SYRACUSIAN said:
Although not my specialty at all, the tetradrachm is a pretty important silver coin with a lot of smaller denominations. Probably the most common biggest silver coin as the rare decadrachms are considered by many as commemorative coins. There were of course gold coins and the goods in a consumer’s basket, as the latter is determined to calculate inflation, have absolutely nothing in common with what was the standard back then. Tricky question, but it was a high value coin.

Thanks! But like what could it buy?

Like if I had a time machine and went back to 5th century BC Greece with a tetradrachm what would it buy me?

A simple mean of bread and wine?

A luxurious meal?

A luxurious meal for a family of four?

I’m curious what it could buy.

Here is a pretty cool coin!

A gold 20 stater coin weighing nearly 6 troy oz of almost pure gold. O_o

SYRACUSIAN

Definitely more than bread and wine and as for the luxurious meal, I don’t think that there were any luxurious restaurants the way you put it. What could a citizen of Athens during its golden age could have wanted? Besides daily needs that were much cheaper, let’s not forget that Athenian citizens had free labour from the non citizens that were either slaves from previous conquers, or a demand to a weaker city to provide Athens with more free labour. The alliance came at a cost.

He could probably buy pottery, good quality pottery, that was both essential, to store wine, water etc and I’m guessing to impress visitors if someone famous created it, Or various goods that flew to Athens from trade. Not everyday needs though, this is just my opinion of course. Someone more informed will give you a better answer.

Edited to add two things:
I had missed the gold 20 stater, but this is a huge amount, I doubt if these ever circulated other than purchase something for the State, military equipment for example

and 2: congratulations on your stater in the other thread, it’s a superb example.

MKUltra24

@SYRACUSIAN said:
Definitely more than bread and wine and as for the luxurious meal, I don’t think that there were any luxurious restaurants the way you put it. What could a citizen of Athens during its golden age could have wanted? Besides daily needs that were much cheaper, let’s not forget that Athenian citizens had free labour from the non citizens that were either slaves from previous conquers, or a demand to a weaker city to provide Athens with more free labour. The alliance came at a cost.

He could probably buy pottery, good quality pottery, that was both essential, to store wine, water etc and I’m guessing to impress visitors if someone famous created it, Or various goods that flew to Athens from trade. Not everyday needs though, this is just my opinion of course. Someone more informed will give you a better answer.

I read somewhere that a weapon & armor in those days was extremely expensive.

During this time Rome was just getting started and each class of citizens had to provide different armor & weapons.

The poorest citizens were exempt.

The slightly less poor had a simple sling

Then the slightly less poor then them had to buy a sword & helmet.

After that it was a sword, helmet and greaves.

It kept increasing as wealth increased.

The richest had to buy horses, a weapon, a breastplate, greaves, a helmet etc.,

Euclid

I found one resource you might find useful. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economy-of-ancient-greece/

In Athens the typical wage for a skilled laborer was one drachma per day at the end of the fifth century and two and a half drachmai in 377. In the fifth century a Greek soldier on campaign received a ration of 1 choinix of wheat per day. The price of wheat in Athens at the end of the fifth century was 3 drachmai per medimnos. There are 48 choinices in a medimnos. Thus, one drachma could buy enough food for 16 days for one person, four days for a family of four.

MKUltra24

@Euclid said:
I found one resource you might find useful. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economy-of-ancient-greece/

In Athens the typical wage for a skilled laborer was one drachma per day at the end of the fifth century and two and a half drachmai in 377. In the fifth century a Greek soldier on campaign received a ration of 1 choinix of wheat per day. The price of wheat in Athens at the end of the fifth century was 3 drachmai per medimnos. There are 48 choinices in a medimnos. Thus, one drachma could buy enough food for 16 days for one person, four days for a family of four.

Oh wow! That means my tetradrachm would’ve been a whole 4 days wages for the average Greek.

So today if someone making minimum wage makes $8/hour x 8 hours/day = $64/day x 4 days = $256.

It seems like it was worth about $256 dollars today or at least as accurate as we can get with it.

Not exactly chump change but not exactly a large amount of money either.

Definitely enough for someone to buy 2 weeks of groceries.

WillieBoyd2

Athens Classical Owl Tetradrachm
Silver, 23 mm, 17.18 gm, struck around BC 430

There was an episode of the television program "Law & Order" called "Survivor" which was about ancient coins.

A coin collector shows a tetradrachm to two police officers and tells them:

"Plato might have bought lettuce with that coin, Pericles may have had his sandals fixed, hired a prostitute, bought a slave..."

MKUltra24

@WillieBoyd2 said:

Athens Classical Owl Tetradrachm
Silver, 23 mm, 17.18 gm, struck around BC 430

There was an episode of the television program "Law & Order" called "Survivor" which was about ancient coins.

A coin collector shows a tetradrachm to two police officers and tells them:

"Plato might have bought lettuce with that coin, Pericles may have had his sandals fixed, hired a prostitute, bought a slave..."

I wonder if a coin would be worth more if there was some way to prove that it belonged to someone famous at some point.

Like a tetradrachm that was somehow proven to have belonged to Socrates at one point.

Or a denarius that was carried around by Julius Caesar on campaign in Gaul.

The coin itself wouldn’t be different physically but with that knowledge of ownership I wonder if it would be worth more.

SmEagle1795

@MKUltra24 said:

I wonder if a coin would be worth more if there was some way to prove that it belonged to someone famous at some point.

Like a tetradrachm that was somehow proven to have belonged to Socrates at one point.

Or a denarius that was carried around by Julius Caesar on campaign in Gaul.

The coin itself wouldn’t be different physically but with that knowledge of ownership I wonder if it would be worth more.

This is called provenance or pedigree and is valuable even when a prior owner is less famous than one of those.

element159

I would not consider $8/hr to be 'average wage', I'd maybe triple that and so estimate the purchasing power at around $750.

But I'm sure it is not so easy to compare, times have changed since then. Very cool coin!

MKUltra24

@element159 said:
I would not consider $8/hr to be 'average wage', I'd maybe triple that and so estimate the purchasing power at around $750.

But I'm sure it is not so easy to compare, times have changed since then. Very cool coin!

I just went with $8/hour because it's about the minimum wage in some states with lower minimum wages.

The reason I did that is because I read an "unskilled laborer" earned 1 drachma per day and I figured an "unskilled" laborer would be similar to a minimum wage worker.

It may not be totally accurate but it's the best I could do with limited information while keeping the math simple.

Sapyx

Don't forget, most of what we now consider to be "minimum wage labour" would have been done back then for free*, by slaves. (* - of course, you'd need to feed, clothe and house your slaves, so not completely free, but still, it would have cost much less than paying a labourer).

Our civilizations are too far apart, culturally and technologically, to be able to come up with a simple conversion rate between a tetradrachm and a US dollar. Bread, for example, is horrifyingly cheap today compared to ancient times, because we've vastly upscaled and mechanized wheat farming, milling and breadmaking. So today, the cost of bread is almost as cheap as an equivalent weight of raw wheat. In ancient times, on the other hand, your tetradrachm might have bought a enough raw wheat to make hundreds of loaves of bread, but only a few dozen actual loaves of bread from a baker.

Recall also our world is highly interconnected, making regional price differences much smaller than they ought to be. In the ancient world, bread and wheat in Rome cost eight times more than it cost in the wheat-belt province of Egypt - and that's including heavy government subsidies.

We have some prices to make some comparisons from the few slices of domestic everyday life that have been preserved. In Egypt, they have found in Oxyrhynchus (a former regional capital) a "dump" of thousands of papyrus scraps that were used by everyday people in Greco-Egyptian and Romano-Egyptian society from around 200 BC, everything from religious texts to administrative paperwork to shopping lists. One lengthy list of interest is apparently a monthly list of expenditure for a medium-sized family, dating from somewhere around 1 AD:
http://www.attalus.org/docs/select1/p186.html
It includes numerous items, and how much was paid, including:

• "Wax and stylus for the children": 1 obol (1 obol equals 1/6th of a drachm)
• pomegranates (unrecorded number): 1 obol
• "pure bread" (that is, top quality bread from a baker, rather than the regular home-made stuff): 1/2 an obol
• "1 chous of oil" (about 3 litres of olive oil): 4 drachms 2 obols
• perfume for the mummification of a deceased young lady: 1 drachm
• A brand new "Coraxian cloak": 10 drachms
• mending an old Coraxian cloak: 1 1/2 obols.

So, your tetradrachm would have, in 1st century BC ancient Egypt, bought you enough wax tablets for a whole school classroom, 48 loaves of fine bread, over half a gallon of olive oil, or less than half of one nice fashionable cloak.

ELuis

was curios too, and found this:

It represents 12 days of welfare payment for a poor Athenian man unable to work or 24 days of pay for a citizen serving on a jury or for an unskilled labourer. This coin might have bought something like 54 litres of wheat (around 54 days’ rations for a soldier) or 12 litres of olive oil or 37 litres of local wine...

http://teachinghistory100.org/objects/about_the_object/a_silver_coin_from_athens#:~:text=The coin is a tetradrachm,working on a public building.

MKUltra24

@Sapyx said:
Don't forget, most of what we now consider to be "minimum wage labour" would have been done back then for free*, by slaves. (* - of course, you'd need to feed, clothe and house your slaves, so not completely free, but still, it would have cost much less than paying a labourer).

Our civilizations are too far apart, culturally and technologically, to be able to come up with a simple conversion rate between a tetradrachm and a US dollar. Bread, for example, is horrifyingly cheap today compared to ancient times, because we've vastly upscaled and mechanized wheat farming, milling and breadmaking. So today, the cost of bread is almost as cheap as an equivalent weight of raw wheat. In ancient times, on the other hand, your tetradrachm might have bought a enough raw wheat to make hundreds of loaves of bread, but only a few dozen actual loaves of bread from a baker.

Recall also our world is highly interconnected, making regional price differences much smaller than they ought to be. In the ancient world, bread and wheat in Rome cost eight times more than it cost in the wheat-belt province of Egypt - and that's including heavy government subsidies.

We have some prices to make some comparisons from the few slices of domestic everyday life that have been preserved. In Egypt, they have found in Oxyrhynchus (a former regional capital) a "dump" of thousands of papyrus scraps that were used by everyday people in Greco-Egyptian and Romano-Egyptian society from around 200 BC, everything from religious texts to administrative paperwork to shopping lists. One lengthy list of interest is apparently a monthly list of expenditure for a medium-sized family, dating from somewhere around 1 AD:
http://www.attalus.org/docs/select1/p186.html
It includes numerous items, and how much was paid, including:

• "Wax and stylus for the children": 1 obol (1 obol equals 1/6th of a drachm)
• pomegranates (unrecorded number): 1 obol
• "pure bread" (that is, top quality bread from a baker, rather than the regular home-made stuff): 1/2 an obol
• "1 chous of oil" (about 3 litres of olive oil): 4 drachms 2 obols
• perfume for the mummification of a deceased young lady: 1 drachm
• A brand new "Coraxian cloak": 10 drachms
• mending an old Coraxian cloak: 1 1/2 obols.

So, your tetradrachm would have, in 1st century BC ancient Egypt, bought you enough wax tablets for a whole school classroom, 48 loaves of fine bread, over half a gallon of olive oil, or less than half of one nice fashionable cloak.

Oh wow!! O_O

So it sounds like a tetradrachm was actually a significant amount of money.

Like if someone found one on the ground I imagine they’d be thrilled xD.

Unlike someone who finds a $1 bill on the ground today. Kinda cool but not a big deal.

Sapyx

@MKUltra24 said:
Oh wow!! O_O

So it sounds like a tetradrachm was actually a significant amount of money.

Like if someone found one on the ground I imagine they’d be thrilled xD.

Unlike someone who finds a $1 bill on the ground today. Kinda cool but not a big deal.

Well, yes, but a tetradrachm is a fairly large coin, big and chunky, and makes a good solid "thud" on the ground if you drop it, so people were unlikely to simply "lose one". This is borne out by archaeological and metal detecting finds to date: rarely are they ever found just one lost coin all by themselves; the vast majority of tetradrachm finds are of hoards of coins, which were deliberately buried rather than accidentally lost.

The smaller coins, on the other hand, were much more easily lost, and much more commonly found as solo finds, especially the tiny silver coins of Athens and Athenian-standard cities. Athenian coins go right down to the hemitetartemorion, or 1/8th obol - or 1/48th of a drachm, or 1/192nd of the weight of your tetradrachm.

There is an interesting line in the play "The Birds", a comedy written by Athenian poet Aristophanes for the Athenian state poetry competition in 414 BC: two human characters are trying to convince some birds how much they adore birds: one of them states that one day, they were sent to do some shopping but stopped and stared up awestruck at a small bird-of-prey in flight for so long, that they swallowed an obol and were forced to go back home empty-handed.

The line has no other context or explanation - obviously Aristophanes' original listeners would have known exactly what he meant, and must have found it funny - leaving us with the logical conclusion that it must have been common practice in the ancient world for slaves and servants to carry around small coins in their mouths when they went shopping, rather than in a bag or purse.

SaorAlba

@Sapyx said:

There is an interesting line in the play "The Birds", a comedy written by Athenian poet Aristophanes for the Athenian state poetry competition in 414 BC: two human characters are trying to convince some birds how much they adore birds: one of them states that one day, they were sent to do some shopping but stopped and stared up awestruck at a small bird-of-prey in flight for so long, that they swallowed an obol and were forced to go back home empty-handed.

The line has no other context or explanation - obviously Aristophanes' original listeners would have known exactly what he meant, and must have found it funny - leaving us with the logical conclusion that it must have been common practice in the ancient world for slaves and servants to carry around small coins in their mouths when they went shopping, rather than in a bag or purse.

Which makes you wonder, how many unlucky "swallowers" had to resort to digging through their excrement for the lost obol etc?

MKUltra24

@Sapyx said:

@MKUltra24 said:
Oh wow!! O_O

So it sounds like a tetradrachm was actually a significant amount of money.

Like if someone found one on the ground I imagine they’d be thrilled xD.

Unlike someone who finds a $1 bill on the ground today. Kinda cool but not a big deal.

Well, yes, but a tetradrachm is a fairly large coin, big and chunky, and makes a good solid "thud" on the ground if you drop it, so people were unlikely to simply "lose one". This is borne out by archaeological and metal detecting finds to date: rarely are they ever found just one lost coin all by themselves; the vast majority of tetradrachm finds are of hoards of coins, which were deliberately buried rather than accidentally lost.

The smaller coins, on the other hand, were much more easily lost, and much more commonly found as solo finds, especially the tiny silver coins of Athens and Athenian-standard cities. Athenian coins go right down to the hemitetartemorion, or 1/8th obol - or 1/48th of a drachm, or 1/192nd of the weight of your tetradrachm.

There is an interesting line in the play "The Birds", a comedy written by Athenian poet Aristophanes for the Athenian state poetry competition in 414 BC: two human characters are trying to convince some birds how much they adore birds: one of them states that one day, they were sent to do some shopping but stopped and stared up awestruck at a small bird-of-prey in flight for so long, that they swallowed an obol and were forced to go back home empty-handed.

The line has no other context or explanation - obviously Aristophanes' original listeners would have known exactly what he meant, and must have found it funny - leaving us with the logical conclusion that it must have been common practice in the ancient world for slaves and servants to carry around small coins in their mouths when they went shopping, rather than in a bag or purse.

Lol well I didn't mean to imply that they were frequently lost.

I just meant that based on what people said a tetradrachm was a good chunk of change back then that could've really helped a poor family through tough times.

SYRACUSIAN

@sapyx
That’s a brilliant post. And since you’ve mentioned the hemitetartimorion: hemi means half, as in half dimes, and tetartimorion means a quarter of a morion, in this case, a numismatic unit, because the same term is also used in mathematics totally unrelated to numismatics. It’s value is virtually 0.5% of the tetradrachm’s value.

Regarding the habit of placing coins in one’s mouth, that’s a global habit that lasted for (at least) a couple of thousand years, such as with the Indian gold fanams ~2000 years later. The clothes did not have any pockets to begin with and I cannot give a specific answer on how they were carrying bigger and heavier coins, but if I had to guess, I’d say that they had some sort of «bag» in which they were probably placing other necessary and valuable items that they needed to carry. Again, a brilliant post @sapyx !

MKUltra24

@SYRACUSIAN said:
@sapyx
That’s a brilliant post. And since you’ve mentioned the hemitetartimorion: hemi means half, as in half dimes, and tetartimorion means a quarter of a morion, in this case, a numismatic unit, because the same term is also used in mathematics totally unrelated to numismatics. It’s value is virtually 0.5% of the tetradrachm’s value.

Regarding the habit of placing coins in one’s mouth, that’s a global habit that lasted for (at least) a couple of thousand years, such as with the Indian gold fanams ~2000 years later. The clothes did not have any pockets to begin with and I cannot give a specific answer on how they were carrying bigger and heavier coins, but if I had to guess, I’d say that they had some sort of «bag» in which they were probably placing other necessary and valuable items that they needed to carry. Again, a brilliant post @sapyx !

There was a tradition of placing coins in a deceased person's mouth in Greece.

It was called "Charon's Obol" and it was intended to pay for the deceased to pay Charon to take them across the river separating the living from the dead.

They believed if someone was too poor or had noone to place a coin in their mouth that they would have to wander on the riverbanks for 100 years before being allowed to cross.