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Buying Power of Ancient Greek coins

STONESTONE Posts: 15,275 ✭
in World & Ancient Coins Forum
I'm looking for information which might indicate what items cost during Ancient Greek history. I understand that inflation will not give me a linear answer to this question and that prices for items fluctuated over time.

It would be great if I could get specific information on "how many coins of a certain denomination it took to buy a loaf of bread, a pound of bread, or another amount of bread."

My goal is to try to compare the buying power between Ancient Roman and Greek coins.

I would be REALLY thankful to any help you might be able to provide. Thanks image

Comments

  • SapyxSapyx Posts: 2,364 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Part of the problem is that, apart from Egypt, we have very little surviving pricing data at all for the ancient Greek or Hellenistic world. In most cases, we don't even know what the coin denominations were actually called, which is why the catalogues give them size labels like "AE20", so it's almost impossible to point to a Greek coin and say "this would have bought you x loaves of bread". We simply don't know.

    Egypt is different, because of the fortuitous combination of Egypt's dry climate and the Egyptian habit of writing things down on papyrus. For example, the papyrus known as Oxyrhynchus 736, dating from sometime in the first century AD, is a record of expenditure for one week for a medium-sized, moderately wealthy household residing in what was then a large and prosperous city. The Egyptian monetary system at the time was derived from the Macedonian-Greek system introduced by Alexander but had become pegged to the Roman monetary system after becoming Roman property: there were 6 obols to a drachm, 4 drachms to a tetradrachm and at that time the tetradrachm was pegged to the denarius at 1:1. Some prices from this papyrus include:

    olive oil: 4 drachms 4 obols
    pure bread: 1/2 obol (this was purchased twice during the week)
    a cake for the children: 1/2 obol
    pomegranates: 1 obol
    milk: 1/2 obol
    barley water: 1/2 obol
    toys: 1/2 obol
    beer: 3 obols
    sauce: 1 obol

    Sadly, this papyrus lacks many specific details about exact amounts (how big were the loaves, how many pomegranates, etc) but we can see at once one flaw in comparing this list with a Roman one from the same time period: Egypt, being the "breadbasket of the ancient world", had much cheaper bread, if a "pure" loaf cost only 1/2 an obol; such a loaf would have cost a dupondius in Rome, or half that in a rural village in Italy. Or in other words, a denarius (or it's equivalent) would have bought you 8 loaves of fine bread in Rome, 16 loaves in rural Europe and 48 loaves in the Egyptian wheat belt.

    Of course, buying the ingredients to make bread was much cheaper, and most families did so for their daily food: with that same denarius in Rome you could buy enough raw wheat to make 20 to 30 loaves of bread.
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    Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations"

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  • BjornBjorn Posts: 538 ✭✭✭
    Excellent post Sapyx!
  • BailathaclBailathacl Posts: 1,042 ✭✭✭
    I learn more from ten Sapyx posts than I did in four years of college. (I don't know if that reflects well on Sapyx or poorly on study skills. Either way, great stuff....)
    "The Internet? Is that thing still around??" - Homer Simpson
  • determineddetermined Posts: 771 ✭✭✭
    Yes, thanks Sapyx for the post and STONE for bringing up the subject. I've thought about this subject often. Actually, from ancient to 19th century coins, I like to try to know the wages and expenses of the people of the time. I like to know what coins the average person would have used on a daily basis.


    If you go to page 5 in Ancient Coin Collecting II you will see a chart showing wages and expenses.

    Then listed in the bibliography on page 6 is the article:

    Literary Sources Reveal Buying Power of the Drachm
    Gary Waddingham
    The Celator, Vol. 2, no. 5 (May 1988).

    It seems it was the source for the chart. I assume that the article uses ancient Greek plays, speeches, letters etc., to get the income and expenses. I don't know how accurate it is. But there it is.

    I do know that tetradrachms were too large a denomination to be used in everyday life.

    I emailed The Celator to see if I could get that back issue. But I haven't heard back from them yet.

    I collect history in the form of coins.
  • ColinCMRColinCMR Posts: 1,482 ✭✭✭
    Yo may be able to purchase a back order of the reference

    http://wgs.cc/cws/orders.html

  • determineddetermined Posts: 771 ✭✭✭


    << <i>Yo may be able to purchase a back order of the reference

    http://wgs.cc/cws/orders.html >>



    Yes, that's were I emailed them from. But thanks. image

    Still waiting to hear back from them.
    I collect history in the form of coins.
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