[red_hare]

Something cool about Silver and Gold is that we have such a long history of how they translate to labor.

https://people.duke.edu/~charvey/Media/2013/Hurriyet_May_2_2...

> In the era of Emperor Augustus (27 B.C. to 14 A.D.), a Roman centurion was paid 15,000 sestertii. Given that one gold aureus equaled 1,000 sestertii and given there was eight grams of gold in an aureus, the pay comes to 38.58 ounces of gold

Today, 38.58oz of gold would be a salary of $156K/yr.

If we do the same for silver, it comes out to about 470oz of silver. So $23,500/yr.

If we compare that to a US Army E-8 (say 80k/yr), we can argue that gold has doubled its value relative to labor and silver has dropped to almost a quarter.

[throwaway_5753]

How do we get to 38oz of gold? 15k sestertii at 8g per 1k would be 120g of gold (aka 4.25oz), right? Also, where do the silver numbers come from?

Interesting approach!

[panarky]

In the Augustean system, 1 aureus = 25 denarii = 100 sestertii (not 1000 sestertii as stated above).

But at 8 grams of gold per aureus, the ~40 troy ounces of gold annual salary is about right.

[foxyv]

Also, this may have been the brass sestertii at 25 grams.

> In or about 23 BC, with the coinage reform of Augustus, the sestertius was reintroduced as a large brass denomination,

That's 375kg of brass which would fetch about $1700 in today's dollars at scrap prices.

[ponector]

Knowing $125 price per gram of gold it's funny they need to convert to non-metric system to calculate price.

One aureus is approximately $1000 of gold value. And as a collectible item it is worth $3k-10k.