TIL the highest paid athlete of all time was Roman charioteer Gaius Appuleius Diocles, earning total ~$15 billion over his career
TIL the highest paid athlete of all time was Roman charioteer Gaius Appuleius Diocles, earning total ~$15 billion over his career
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Where did that 15 billion number come from?
Diocles' lifetime winnings, as recorded in Roman inscription CIL 6.10048, totalled 35,863,120 sesterces (HS) over a working life of 24 years. From this, he would have been paid an unknown sum by his management team, or his owners; his status as slave or free is not certain, nor is the likely amount of his total share.
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Plugging that into this website: https://testamentpress.com/ancient-money-calculator.html, gives ~ 390 million USD
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Reading this stack exchange post, gives ~ 60 million USD
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Reading the wiki page on Sesterius "A loaf of bread cost roughly half a sestertius", where bread now costs about 3 USD, so that's ~ 215 million USD
Still a lot obviously, but where did that factor of 10-100 come from?
I initially saw that number on a Facebook post and when I checked the source [1] it also mentioned the 15 billion figure so I went with it. Looking at it closely, the author did some "creative" math to get that number
His total take home amounted to five times the earnings of the highest paid provincial governors over a similar period—enough to provide grain for the entire city of Rome for one year, or to pay all the ordinary soldiers of the Roman Army at the height of its imperial reach for a fifth of a year. By today’s standards that last figure, assuming the apt comparison is what it takes to pay the wages of the American armed forces for the same period, would cash out to about $15 billion
Good catch, I should read the sources better and don't trust the Facebook (especially the Facebook)
You have to do some extraordinary mental gymnastics to expect paying for all soldiers in the roman empire is comparable to paying for all soldiers in the US.
Yeah that is an absolutely ridiculous bridge of assumptions and comparisons to walk across
You probably shouldn't compare the price of bread then vs the price of bread now. It's $3 in the store, but that's after decades of developing efficient methods to produce bread in gigantic quantities, which brings the consumer price down.
An artisan loaf of bread made fresh by a baker near to me costs closer to $9, for example. This would be closer to the way they made bread at the time, but even now we have modern efficiencies and easier access to ingredients.
I'd also be interested how this salary compares to salaries of other jobs. It doesn't really matter if that number is correct if also a janitor earned close to that.
From the wiki link above:
... soldiers of the Rhine army who rose against Tiberius.... demanded to be paid a denarius a day, and they got it.[3]
One Sistertius is worth 1/4 of a Denarius, and 1/2 a Sisterius can buy a loaf of bread.
So 1 Denarius a day = 4 Sisterius = 8 loaves of bread a day
If we assume 3 USD is the price of a loaf of bread now, then these soldiers were being paid 24 dollars a day. Seems pretty low, but I guess bread was maybe more expensive back then?
Soldiers now make around 60 USD a day (random googling), so we're dealing with a factor of 3 error which doesn't seem so bad
AFAIK bread was quite a bit more expensive in the past, since baking involved getting up hours in advance to start a fire inside the massive earthen oven, not to mention that all the other parts of making flour were also way more difficult than they are now..
I think it might be comparable to meat these days? Something that everyone eats, but at the same time most people on some level realize that it's actually pretty fucking expensive and they should eat less of it, but it's just so normalized and tastes good so they just keep eating it every day.
(And for reference meat in the past would have been much more of a luxury, not in that people were vegetarians or anything but they'd just have less meat in every meal and they wouldn't turn their nose at organs and "low quality" stuff like we do.)
Even calculating based on the silver content when sestertius is 2.5g silver gives 90M grams of 90 metric tons. Each gram is valued around $1 so that's a 90M USD there.
Sesterius "A loaf of bread cost roughly half a sestertius", where bread now costs about 3 USD, so that's ~ 24 million USD
Could you explain this math? If 0.5 Sestertius = 3 USD, we have a factor of 6. So then 35,863,120 Serterces should be 215,178,720 USD? What am I missing?
35,863,120 sesterces = (times by 2) 71,726,240 loafs of bread = (divide by 3) 23,908,746 USD
Isn't that right?
no, you are dividing loaves of bread by 3 to get USD, that would only be right if a loaf cost 1/3 of a dollar.
The sequence should be money in Sestertius / (Sestertius per loaf) = loaves
loaves * (USD per loaf) = money in USDoh, doy! blinded by the numbers, fixed now
Let me know if you spot any more goofs
Ah, I see you already got it. 😄👍
Why are you dividing by 3?
Do these figures include earnings from garum endorsements?
They probably converted it using the BigMac index
Not sure but everywhere I look they say $15 billion
https://greekreporter.com/2025/05/16/diocles-15-billion-athlete-ancient-world/
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