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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;rrdenarius, post: 3197068, member: 75525&quot;][USER=93416]@EWC3[/USER] 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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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):</p><ul> <li>soldier 2 obols/day</li> <li>centruion 4 obols/day</li> <li>cavelryman 1 drachma/day</li> </ul><p>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):</p><ul> <li>Class 1 = 100,000 asses - Knights and foot soldiers</li> <li>Class 2 - 4 = 25,000 - 75,000 - less armed foot soldiers</li> <li>Class 5 = 10,000 - armed with slings</li> </ul><p>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.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p><p>[ATTACH=full]826588[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>You can see my slide presentation to the Bellaire, TX coin club on the subject here.</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.academia.edu/36955285/Roman_AE_Money_from_before_founding_in_753_BC_to_the_2_rd_Punic_War" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.academia.edu/36955285/Roman_AE_Money_from_before_founding_in_753_BC_to_the_2_rd_Punic_War" rel="nofollow">https://www.academia.edu/36955285/Roman_AE_Money_from_before_founding_in_753_BC_to_the_2_rd_Punic_War</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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