What Was The Purchasing Power Of A Constantine The Great Bronze?

I just received my fist ancients and am very excited. One of the coins is a Constantine the Great bronze.

What would have been the purchasing power of such a bronze coin back then? A loaf of bread? An egg?

 

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An imac

 

Funny, funny as always. This site would be boring without mrbrklyn around.

Thank you for the history lesson.

 

I was trying to make a point though. The economies and society were so different, that such a translation, such as it is, would be meaningless.

 

No doubt huge differences exist, but I am under the impression common people would have used bronzes like the one at issue. I would think a basic item such as food would be something they would buy. I am wondering if a coin like this might have been like $1 or $5 is to us?

As usual, I am slow and did not catch your wit.

 

Maybe. I'm sure it had more value than a widows mite. maybe like a Zuz. 200 zuzim was thought to be a mans salary for a year. That being said, a free man probably had his own eggs and didn't depend on cash that much.

 

Perhaps my question should be: what kind of things would the subject coin be used to purchase?

 

The edict of Diocletian predated Constantine by a few years, but this might be helpful:

http://www.constantinethegreatcoins.com/edict/

Exchange rates are at the end of the post.

guy

 

Value of goods also has to be taken into account. Rare spices in one part of the world would cost a fortune but where it's in abundance it would be relatively affordable.

Say the cost of X spice is the equivalent of a day's labor in one part of the Empire but in another part of the Empire it's the equivalent of a month's labor, how would you determine the actual "purchasing power" of the money?

 

The standard text on this for Roman is usually Coinage in the Roman Economy, 300 B.C. to A.D. 700 by Kenneth Harl. It covers the wide range a bit unevenly because there are periods for which we lack evidence on the most simple questions. Regarding the Money of Account matter mentioned by Doug: There was an issue by Licinius I where he placed the value of the coin in denarii of account on the reverse of the coin. The occasion was a revaluation of coinage making the previous 25 denarii coins now worth 12 1/2 so the new coins were marked XIIs (where the s is a squiggle some people see as a gamma but it was the symbol for semisis or half). I'm away from home and my copy so I can't quote what Harl had to say about purchasing power under Constantine but I can tell you that the time between 307 and 337 AD saw many changes in the matter so your question would be hard to answer. Consider also that the Empire had the same situation we have today where I can buy gasoline for $3.59 and a nice house for $250,000 but someone reading this has trouble finding gas for under $5 or a house for under a million. In my lifetime (roughly the span of Diocletian to Julian II) I have seen gas under 20 cents and houses for $5k so we should not be too exacting on the question of what could you buy with this AE3 unless we realize there will be footnotes longer than the answer.

 

Luckily, I have a copy of Harl handy. This refers to the prices of grain in Egypt, based on the unit of a modius (around 2 gallons) of wheat. "Nummus" just means coin, but is used to reference the standard billon coin that your type would fall under:

Harl goes on to say that it's really hard to determine the prices of things in terms of billon denominations in the 4th century (though one could try to work back by converting the wholesale prices, which were usually in terms of gold, but that's not really going to tell you what your average guy on the street would pay for anything), so that's probably as clear an answer as your going to get without diving into some rather obscure sources.

 

I had seen the Diocletian reforms site before, as well as printed versions. I also know there is on the internet some pages of prices in Pompeii of goods and services. The eruption and subsequent covering of the city left prices on chalkboards and the like intact, so we have that resource.

The warning I would give about Diocletians edict prices would be we know they didn't work, that real prices climbed, much like the US trying to dictate prices in the 70's. However, we do not know how much each good was really selling for versus edict prices, so use that chart as a baseline, knowing it was not true in practice, but theoretical. The problem with using Pompeii prices is that Pompeii was a resort town, and prices there were higher than in most of the Roman world. It would be like going to Key Largo and using their prices as representative of the rest of the US.

 

WOW! Thank tou for all the input so far. It may not be exact, but some kind of an idea is better than none as I hold this coin in my hand.

 

Isn't it cool to hold in your hands an authentic piece of history, bearing the likeness of a man who single handedly change the course of history for the western and Christian worlds?

To me, no amount of MS blah blah blah can compete with that.

 

It is true. My spouse has a hard time imagining walking down the streets of Rome with a bronze in hand wondering whether to possibly purchase some grapes, a peach, or 1/2 loaf of bread. I do not. I find it extremely fascinating.

 

Ancient Doug wrote a very readable description of the purchasing power:

http://dougsmith.ancients.info/worth.html

Here is Harl's more technical summary from 1998:

http://www.tulane.edu/~august/H303/currency/Diocletian.htm


guy