Have you ever wanted two auction lots, offered only days apart? A tiny Roman steelyard scale

Recently I was interested in two lots offered only a couple of days apart. The one I wanted most was a Roman steelyard scale, see it below. I also wanted a scale wight that had VNCIA marked on the top. I wanted the VNCIA weight because those marks indicate a relatively old weight => more likely to be Roman Republic. I held my money for the scale. Second guessing says I probably could have purchased both in my budget, but I wanted the near complete scale more.
We have talked a lot about bidding philosophy here. In this case I am glad to have the scale even if it means I passed on a piece I might have won in my budget.



I bought an interesting, and small, Roman Steelyard scale in a recent auction. The length of the beam is 150 mm (6"). This scale has two fulcrum points, or weight ranges (low and high). Weight range is switched by rotating the load hook 180 degrees and using the other fulcrum point.

The scale is good but not the best design available in ancient Rome. Scale accuracy is a function of repeatable distances between the fulcrum hanger, load hanger and weight hanger. The most accurate design had load and fulcrum points in the center of the scale arm and used football shaped dowels, see pics below of my small steelyard scale and two different 19th century scales.

The weight range of this scale is indicated by stamped dots or lines on two sides of the scale arm. I could not make a regular pattern on either side. The low weight range scale arm had 14 dots and two lines. The high weight scale arm had only two dots (that I could see for sure) and about 8 lines (again hard to see). In a flat part of the scale arm were several counter stamps. I assume the stamps were some approval of the scale’s calibration. They are hard to see in hand or in pictures, but I guess there are a dozen or more. The counter stamps are not all the same. One looks a bit like PacMan with a wide open mouth.

19th century scale, note the arm holes are centered and hangers are oval shaped


you can see circular counter marks to confirm calibration (I think that is what they are)

You can read a bit more in my blog -
http://rrdenarius.blogspot.com/

 

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Great post. I learned a lot from it.

 

Most interesting. I took a look at your blog - loved the Cupid weight.

 

In the blog you say:

RRDen > The display shows one week's pay in the large pan of the steelyard scale = 21 Asses = 6900 grams = 15 US pounds.

Great that you are getting into this stuff - but this conclusion does not seem plausible to me. Are you taking Polybius as a starter - thus 3 asses per soldier per day? If so I thought this was only true after 200 BC or so. Where 3 asses a day was about 2 and a bit Denarii a week. So less than 10 grams of silver - with silver in roughly the region of 100:1 against copper by weight - comes out at about a kilo of copper a week, so approx 1000g

Personally I kind of suspect once you get into the nitty gritty of deductions it may well have been substantially less than even that - but would be keen to hear from anybody with any different informed view.

Rob T

PS 1000g is approx 2.2 US (= Phoenician) pounds

 

@EWC3 thanks for your thoughts. Your number and mine differ by less than an order of magnitude. For a time when no written records exist, I think we are pretty close.

The starting point of my path on Roman money before coins is a book by T J Cornell - The Beginnings of Rome. He quoted Livy that soldiers were first paid in the 3rd battle with Veii in 405 - 396 BC (when senators drove wagon loads of bronze bars to Rome). I was fascinated that soldiers were paid a century before Rome minted coins. 400 BC was a time when Rome was transitioning to a monetized society. Before Veii, soldiers paid their own military expenses. (I think the cavalry received help for horse upkeep.) The idea behind paying soldiers was to improve the number and quality of volunteers and to help those who were fighting for an extended time to keep their farms.

A lot of people with lots of letters in front of and behind their names have written on the subject of what a Roman soldier was paid based on Polybus (200 - 118 BC):

• soldier 2 obols/day
• centruion 4 obols/day
• cavelryman 1 drachma/day

I picked 3 asses per day knowing that the soldier pay in 400 BC is not well known today. Pay was in bronze for the 1st and most of the 2nd Punic wars. A Roman one As scale weight is about 327 grams. The money As and scale weight As were originally the same. I assumed soldier pay in 400 BC would be like Roman citizen classification by wealth (S Tullius 540 BC):

• Class 1 = 100,000 asses - Knights and foot soldiers
• Class 2 - 4 = 25,000 - 75,000 - less armed foot soldiers
• Class 5 = 10,000 - armed with slings

Pay was switched to silver somewhere between 210 and 140 BC. I was trying to show how much bronze was needed for an army of several thousand of soldiers for 50 weeks.


You can see my slide presentation to the Bellaire, TX coin club on the subject here.

https://www.academia.edu/36955285/R...fore_founding_in_753_BC_to_the_2_rd_Punic_War

 

Since hardly anyone on the planet seems to be looking into our mutual interest here, I sure do not want to fall out with you over this!

Still, for now, I am sticking to my guess that realistic payments would probably be less than 1 KG per week per guy in copper (Polybius). That seem to be what they got paid in value around 200 BC, so is my best guess for 400 BC too. S Tullius 540 BC seems to me, well, not as mythological as Britain's King Brut - but all the same, not fully historical either - kind of like Solon in Greece in that - and in other ways too.

If you can dig out further sources on this matter I would be pleased to get them

Yes - I agree that is really interesting. Made me think. I have always been strongly opposed to the idea that "coins were first struck to pay soldiers" - that seems to me to be just too simplistic.

However - if you soften it a bit - something like - the plebs refused to fight unless they got paid - we can start to see how that might be one of the important element in the factors that combined to bring on the coin using society.

There is a bunch more things to say about Roman weight standards - I hope we can discuss it again down the line?

Rob T