Quantifying the
Roman Economy
Methods and Problems
Edited by
A L A N BOWMAN
and
ANDREW WILSON
0xIO';RD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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How Prosperous were the Romans?
329
The reason that these comparisons are possible is because many
researchers are studying real wages around the world in a systematic
way.&One of the grand questions in modern economic history is why
Europe pulled ahead of the rest of the world, and that question
cannot be answered until we know when the "reat divergence'
happened.? Real wages are one indicator of that separation. By
using standard methodologies developed to chart the great divergence, Roman historians can avail themselves of the emerging picture
of post-mdiwal living standards and use it to judge Roman performance. At the same time, the Roman empire will be integrated
into this broader world-view. This chapter is a first stab at that
problem.
To measure the purchasing power of wages, we need information
about wages and the prices of consumer goods. The data used in this
chapter are all derived from Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices
issued in AD 301.8 There are questions about how long the edict was
enforced and how the maximum prices it specified relate to actual
wages and prices in different parts of the empire;9indeed, one way to
improve on the results here is to rework the calculations with wages
and prim specific to a variety of times and places. However, since the
Price Edict is such a well-known source and includes most of the
necessary information it is worth seeing what it has to say.
The approach I. use i s straightforward. First, I calculate from daily
wages what a labourer would earn in a year if he worked full time.
Second, I calculate the cost of supporting a family. ?'his involves
specifying the items-and the quantities-they would have consumed in a year, This list is called their 'consumption basket'.
Multiplying the quantities by their prices defines the cost ofliving,
Third, I compare income to living costs. Could the labourer purchase
the specified basket? Doing the same calculations for the Roman
6 van Zanden 1 9 9 ; Alien 2001; dzrnucur and R m u k 2002;Bassino and Ma 2005;
Allen et nl, 2007.
? Pnmeranz 2000.
"or the prices in the Mict F have used the edition of buffer (1971), The most
important modern publications are Reynolds 1971. Erim et al. 1970 and 1973,
Giaccheto 1974. See also Errnatinger 1990. 'The fullest English translation of the
text, as it was then known,is that of Grascr (1940).
9
Sec Ermatinger 1990.
How Prosperous were the Romans?
33 1
20
Fig. 16.1. Silver wages
Sorrrre: Allm et nl. (2007) and tm.
exchange, currencies are usually converted according to their silver
equivalents. How much silver was in a denarius at the time of the
Price Edict? I take it to have been 0.032 grams of pure silver.ll In that
case, the daily wage of a lahurer was 1.16 grams of silver.
H According to King (1993: 11), the nrgmtetts, which was the coin worth one
hundred dennrii, had a theoreticalweight of 3.38 grams of silver. In practice, however,
the actual weight was a bit lower. It should be noted that the welfare ratios computed
in this chapter are independent of the silver content asst~mcdfor the dman'tis. The
reason is thst the welfare ratios are ratios. The silver exchange raw appears in the
numerator where it converts the wage from dcnarii to grams of silver and in
the denominator where it does the same for the prim. Thus, the silver exchange
rate cancels out.
How Prosperm were the Romans?
333
Table 16.1. Northern European respectability basket
Nutrientslday
Quantity per
Price g. silver Spmding Nutrientsiday grams of
share (%) cslor~cs
protein
person per year pcr unit
Bread
182 kg
Beanslpess 52 1
Meat
28 kg
Buttrr
5.2 kg
Cheese
5.2 kg
EMS
52 each
Rcer
182 1
Snap
2.6 kg
Linen
Candles
Lamp oil
Furl
Total
3m
2.6 kg
2.61
5.0 M BTU
0.693
0.477
2.2 13
3.470
2.843
0.0 10
0.470
2.880
4.369
30.4
6.0
13.9
4.3
3.6
t .3
20.6
7.545
4.164
1.8
5.3
3.1
4.7
5.0
414.899
100.0
4.980
1,223
160
178
104
50
53
11
212
3
1
2
1,941
80
l0
14
0
budgets and suggests the spending pattern of 'respectable' workers.
The budget is medieval, however, in that it does not indude foods
like sugar and potatoes that only entered mass consumption after the
European discovery of America.
The budget shown in Table 16.1 represents the spending of an adult
male. It should be noted that wheat brad was consumed in some
re@ons,while rye bread was consumed in others. In some places, veal
was eaten, in others, it was beef or park. I have followed the maxim
'when in Rome, do as the Romans' and b e calculated the cost of the
basket using the price of the most widely consumed type of bread or
meat. The budget's daily calorie intake ( E ,940) would put the person in
the third decile from the bottom of the English distribution in the bte
eighteenth century and in the fourth decile of the French.l Protein
availability was high. This was 'respectability' rather than destitution.
Frequently mentioned non-food commodities like cloth, candles,
and fuel are also included. Textiles presented a problem. The only
type of doth shown is linen, although much wool was also worn. The
available price data for wool are hard to interpret, however. One
needs the price of the same quality of woollen cloth in the pIam
compared, but wool varied enormously in terms of quaIity, and
14
Fogel I991: 45.
Robert C.AlIen
quality differences seem to have driven the differencesin the prices
we have. Wool cloth is, therefore, not useful for the present exercise.
Linen does not appear to suffer from the same problem. I have
included enough linen in the budget, so that the share of linen in
spending is what one would expect for all textiles.
Table 16.1 lists average prices in grams of silver for 1745-54
prevading in Strasbourg. When the cost of the basket is caiculated
with these prices, it amounts to 414.899 grams of silver per year.
Prices were different in other cities and in other times, but this gives
an indication of the price level in eighteenth-century Europe.
Table 16.1 also omits the cost of housing. Budget studies suggest
it amounted to 5 1 0 % of spending. I have not been able to find the
rent of comparable housing in the cities studied, so I have dealt with
this problem by increasing the cost of everything except the housing
by 5%.
While Table 16.1 describes spending in northern Europe, it does
not apply to the Mediterranean. In southern Europe, wine was
consumed instead of beer, and olive oil was used instead of butter.
In reckoning the cost of living in Mediterranean cities, I substituted
olive oil for butter and wine for beer. In the Iatter case, the quantity
was reduced to maintain the same annual consumption of alcohol.
Table 16.2 shows the resulting Mediterranean budget. Its cost in
TabIe 16.2. Mediterranean respectability basket
Quantity per
person per year
Bread
Beanslpeas
Meat
Olive oil
Cheese
Eas
Wine
Soap
Linen
Candles
Lamp oil
Fuel
Total
Strasbourg price
g. silver per unit
Naples price
Diocletian price
g. silver per unit- g. silver per unit
l82kg
521
26 '%
5.2 1
5.2 kg
52 each
68.25 1
2-6kg
5m
2.6kg
2.6 1
5.0 M m
416.3583
355.9249
163.921
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A sa3rld 3mqsws
Wine: 8 denarii per pint as for ordinary wine (11, 10).
Cloth: cover to be used as a tent, 16 feet in length and breadth, dyed
(XIX,4). The cloth is 256 square Roman feet in area and priced at
2,500 denarii or 9.77 denarii per square Roman foot. A Roman
foot was 296.2 mm, so the doth cost 1 1 1.3089 denarii or 5.877
grams of silver per square metre. The early modern prices are for
pieces one metre long and typicaIly about one ell (27 inches or
0.6858 metres) wide. A piece this size would have cost 4.03 gxams
of silver in AD 301.
Fuel: 'wagon load of wood, 1200 pounds' worth 150 denarii (XW,
8)
or 0.125 denarii pm Roman pound (0.32745 kg) or 0.012216 grams
of silver per kilogram (0.032 x 0.12510.32745). 1 assume that one
kilogram of wood yields 7,701 BTTJs,l5 The price of energy in
grams of silver per million BTUs was, therefore, 1.586 = 1,000 X
0.01221617.701.
Bread: bread does not appear in theuia. It does give a maximum price
for wheat 100 denarii per casmsis modius of 12.936 litres: I, 1) and
the wage for a skilled worker, in particular a baker at 50 denatii per
day plus maintenance (VIt, 12). I estimated the price of bread from
these data using the 'bread equation' I estimated previousIy.1~This
is a statistical equation estimated from an early modern dataset of
bread prices, grain prices, and wage rates. The equation fits the data
well and provides a means of estimating the price of bread from the
cost of its two main inputs. The equation used here is:
price of bread = 0.063 4 1,226 X price of wheat + 0.014 X daily
wage of skifled labour
The prices and wages are all in grams of silver, the price of bread is
grams of silver per kilogram, and the price of wheat is grams of silver
per litre.
Table 16.2 shows the prices used in computing the cost of living in
Diocletian's day. When the prices are ntultiplied by the quantities
shown, the cost of the basket can be calculated. Et works out at
163.921 grams of silver per year, This w a s a much lower cost of living
than in Naples or Srrasbourg.
15 Alien (2003b) tabulates themergy content of many fucls measurcdby weight and
volumc. This paper is available on mv website at httal/www.nuff.o~acu~~~~iolow.
Fig. 16.2. Welfare ratios with European respectability basket
So~rrce:Allen er al. (2007) and
tm.
Workrs elsewhere in Europe and Asia experienced real wage
slides across the early modem period, There was a wage peak in the
fifteenth century following the population drop caused by the Black
Death in 134819 and subsequent outbreaks. As population grew from
the sixteenth century onward, real wages fell. By the eighteenth
century, most workers in Eurasia had earnings that only equalled
half of the cost of the basket. Workers in the Dutch Republic and
EngIand were the only ones to avoid this fate as the economies of
these countries grew rapidly due to their success in the global
economy.
How Prosperous wme the Romans?
BARE BONES SUBSISTENCE BASKETS
What happened to workers in southern Europe, east Asia, and the
Roman empire who were too poor to buy the baskets-meagre as
they are-shown in Tables 16.1 and 2? One strategy was to increase
the time workd. Men could work more days and longer hours. No
allowance has been made thus far for the earnings of women and
children. They could work many hours, although their wage rates
were usually so low that their employment could not decisively
change the situation. China was an exception to this generalization,
for women there contributed a significant proportion of family
income.18
Cutting expenditure was the other strategy. That was possible
because the food shown was highly processed either by animals
(meat) or by pmple (bread and beer). Indeed, the way to cut costs
was sharply to curtail most of the non-food items, eliminalte the
alcohol and most ofthe animal protein, and eat boiled grains rather
than bread. Scottish highlanders ate oatmeal, Italians shifted from
bread to palenta, and many Asians ate mostly rice. In the Yangzi
Delta, poor peasants even ate boiled wheat in the sumrner.19
Early modern travellers' accounts often depict many people subsisting on diets like this. 'It appears from contemporary accounts that
the articles in the diet of the common people in most parts of India
consisted chiefly of rice, millets and puIses.'20 Francisco Palsaert, a
Dutch East India Company captain who visited the subcontinent in
the early seventeenth century, called the Indian diet 'monotonous: In
the Delhi-Agra region, the people 'have nothing but a little kitchery
[kedgeree] made of green pulse mixed with rice. . eaten with butter
in the evening, in the day time they munch a little parched pulse or
other grain'. The workmen 'know little of the taste of meat'. Indeed,
pigs, cattle, chickens, and eggs were all taboo. Where available, fish
was the only source of animal protein. It was a similar story in
western India. Wheat was not eaten by the labouring population,
.
Li 1998: 150-5; Pomerenz 2000: 290,3191.20.
Li 1998: 207 n. 25,
Raychaudhuri and Habib L982. I: 164.
whose main source of carbohydrates was millet. This was ground
into a course flour and fried up as chapatis that were eaten with
pulses and vegetables. Charles Lackyer, who toured Asia in the early
eighreenth century on the English East India Company ship
Streatham, observed of the Arab sailors in the Indian Ocean: 'They
serve for small Wages, and are Victual'd at a much cheaper Rate than
out Ship's Companys: Salt-fish, Rice, Gee, and Doll, with a few Fowls,
being all the Provisions they care for. Doll is a small Grain, less than
Fetches, contains a Substance like our white Peas, and being boil'd
with Rice makes Kutcheree.'2'
I specified such quasi-vegetarian 'bare bones' spending patterns for
each of the places being compared. Oa,tmeal was the basis of the diet
in north-western Europe, poIenta in northern Italy, and millet in
western India. Table 16.3 shows the bare bones basket for northwestern Europe and for the Romans. The Roman diet was dominated
by wheat and beans, which supply most of the calories and protein.
The calorie level has been kept at 1940 calories per day, as before.
While animal protein has been greatly reduced, the wheat and beans
provide a diet that is comparably rich in protein,
The great thing about the bare bones diet is that it cost much less
than the respectability diet-in the case of Rome, 83.163 grams of
silver versus 163,921. Hence, the cost o f supporting a family was cut
to 261.963. This was something that the Roman labourer muld
afford. Indeed, the ratio of income to the conswn~ptionexpenditure
jumped to 1.10, so the laborrrer had a bit of income to spend on
'luxuries',
All workers see a rise in their welfare ratios, when bare bones
spending patterns are the basis for comparison, as F'ig. 16.3 shows.
The Figure shows the same relative values as Fig. 16.2, but the pout
workers of the eighteenth century all had welfare ratios of one or a bit
above. Labourers in London and Amsterdam earned three or four
times the cost of the bare bones diet. They did not multiply their
oatmeal consumption by four, however. Instead, they increased their
purchases of non-food items and bought the more expensive foods of
the respectability diet. The essence of the matter is captured by
I -m-
London
+Florence
+Amsterdam
Delhi
U
Vienna
-A-
Beijing
;P
/
I
T
LRoman emplm
AD 3
1
1
Fig. 16.3. Welfare ratios with bare bones baskets
Soum: Allcn cl #l. (2037) and tewr.
Doctor Johnson's definition of oats as 'a grain, which in EngIand is
given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people'.
The real wage evidence supports a guardedly optimistic view ol
Roman living standards. Certainly, the Roman worker in Diocletian's
time was doing about as well as most workers in eighteenth-century
Europe or Asia. One lesson that price history teaches, however, is that
real wages fluctuated in the past. Indeed, Roman performance Iooks
unimpressive in comparison with. fifteenth-centuryEurope, when real
wages were so high. In addition, generalizations are confounded by
HOWProsperous were the Romans?
343
variation across space with workers in booming parts of the continent earning much more than their counterparts in more placid
provinces. One suspects that the same was true of the Roman empire.
The next step in the research agenda shouId, therefore, be to use
actual wages and prices (rather than legal maxima) to measure real
wages in the Roman period and 20 do this for different regions of the
empire and different time periods. That investigation might reveal as
much variation as we observe in the early modern world and lead to a
more complex assessment of Roman living standards.
ACEMOCLU,D.,JOHNSON, S., and ROBINSON,1. (2505). 'The rise of Eumpe:
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