Income and Expenses in Rome c. 301 AD

March 12, 2022 12:45 PM

What things cost in Ancient Rome

Previously: Health in Ancient Rome. Romans on the road. Is ancient Rome relevant? We could do better.

posted by gregoreo (28 comments total)

Why was chicken so much more expensive than beef? It seems like they'd be far less expensive to raise.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 1:21 PM on March 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

Have you seen a chicken try to cross a Roman road?
posted by rebent at 1:30 PM on March 12, 2022 [12 favorites]

I don't have a good concise cite for this, but chickens were considered by certain cults to be sacred, and raised for religious purposes (sacrifice, feasts). I think in context, they were just considered super fuckin' fancy. It's possible that there were rules in place (like in feudal Europe with the ownership of dovecotes and raising doves being highly regulated) that only certain people were legally allowed to raise them.
posted by furnace.heart at 1:41 PM on March 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

There's a 'Told in Stone' yt channel that I could watch for days.

Roman imperial history 100 - 500AD gets a bit repetitive if not stagnant but how the late Republic became dysfunctional is immensely interesting.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 1:41 PM on March 12, 2022 [7 favorites]

This thrills the D&D player in me to the tips of my boots (high, soft).
posted by The otter lady at 1:57 PM on March 12, 2022 [12 favorites]

I don’t get it either, but chicken stays comparatively expensive through the nineteenth century. There are recipes using veal as a cheap substitute for chicken.
posted by LizardBreath at 2:01 PM on March 12, 2022 [14 favorites]

On chicken- a friend of mine was telling me about her husband, growing up in Bolivia. He remembers when chicken was very expensive. And then industrialised chicken growing arrived in the country, and suddenly chicken was cheap.
posted by freethefeet at 2:04 PM on March 12, 2022 [5 favorites]

If you look for other cites on this info, this is the price of a whole chicken, vs the price of a pound of beef. If you figure the chicken is six pounds it's still a little pricier per-pound but it's closer. Perhaps the chicken is sold live and so the cost includes the assumption you'll get eggs from it for a while before finally killing it. (There is plenty of stuff about how the romans liked to eat chicken and had big chicken farms, so I don't think it is a sacred rich-people-only animal or anything like that.)
posted by inkyz at 2:05 PM on March 12, 2022 [7 favorites]

My assumption is that list is actually showing the price for one chicken rather than for a specific amount of chicken. You'll notice an unfattened goose is 100 and a fattened goose is 200, which must also be the price for the whole bird. That makes the price for poultry meat roughly in line with the other meats.
posted by ssg at 2:07 PM on March 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Interesting, but while soldiers' salaries are presented annually, it doesn't explain what the unit of time is for the other categories of worker... which makes those salary numbers hard to make sense of. A couple of them say "working a full day", so I guess all of them are daily wages? Also, what does "with maintenance" mean?
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:09 PM on March 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

In much later circumstances maintenance is bed and board (food and lodging).
posted by clew at 2:18 PM on March 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

I’d guess an ancient chicken would rarely be as much as four pounds, based on (a) I usually can’t buy a chicken as small as the largest one imagined in the original _Mastering the Art of French Cooking_ and (b) agronomists boasting about higher meat-to-grain ratios in modern chicken production.

It is really odd that a bug-eating hen would be more expensive meat than a slice of a grass-eating cow, but it does line up with historical recipes.
posted by clew at 2:24 PM on March 12, 2022 [7 favorites]

To determine the buying power of the currencies above for a given time period, compare the exchange rate of the actual currency to the prices or wages listed on the preceding pages in denarii communes using the formula below:

(Price from list in d.c.) X (Number of coins exchanged per d.c. from chart above) = Cost or Wage in actual currency

I think this whole thing is very interesting but I don't know what the above actually means, could anybody put this into different words?
posted by bleep at 2:36 PM on March 12, 2022

inkyz: It is important to remember that our terms of reference are chickens we have today. Since 1957 chickens have (excluding growth hormones) grown in size by about four times. See here. NatGeo has some fascinating stuff re chickens here (including the fact that roosters have no penises!)... Overall, the spiritual significance of the chicken, its portability (try traveling with a cow as your food source) and general space/feed usage convenience, its versatility in cooking etc all make it a valuable commodity. See here. Just think of all of the ways you can cook/eat chicken. It is darn tasty. Iowa rears the highest number in the US but on the east coast in PA there are more chickens than people... here. Significantly more...
posted by IndelibleUnderpants at 2:43 PM on March 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

more chickens than people in DC, too
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:57 PM on March 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

In terms of bang for your proverbial buck, chickens are a terrible thing to raise. Pre-CAFO, you're limited by how large your coop can be before becoming unwieldy (birds won't voluntarily pack themselves in as densely as factory-farming operations pack them), and you have to move the flock around pretty regularly or else they'll deplete the local food supply. That means fixed enclosures either have to be enormous (to give you space to rotate their pecking grounds), or you have to shepherd them about open grassland. Anyone who's ever dealt with chickens can attest to their unbelievable stupidity, so the attrition from self-inflicted injuries and predation is further motivation to keep the flock size small. So for your hypothetical chicken-farmer, at the end of a year of husbandry, you likely have a 2-digit number of birds, each weighing a pound or two. Contrast that with raising hooved animals, which require about the same amount of effort to raise, but at the end of the year you have a dozen or more 1200+ pound cows to butcher and sell.

Raising a few chickens of one's own is totally reasonable in a Roman setting, but being able to do it at scale is mostly a result of twentieth-century advances.
posted by Mayor West at 4:13 PM on March 12, 2022 [18 favorites]

Chicken was about the same price as beef and pork as recently as a 80 years ago (there's a good graph here if you scroll down). It's only very recently in historical terms that chicken has become much cheaper than other meats and only because of industrial farming.

Since 1957 chickens have (excluding growth hormones) grown in size by about four times. See here.

Maybe getting to be a derail here, but this isn't true. Chickens are definitely bigger now than in the past, but what that study showed was that the newer breed was four times larger at the age they are now slaughtered, while the older breed had not yet reached market weight at the same age. In earlier years, chickens took longer to grow to market weight. Here's data from the National Chicken Council showing chickens are roughly twice as heavy as they were in 1957.
posted by ssg at 4:28 PM on March 12, 2022 [5 favorites]

I don’t get it either, but chicken stays comparatively expensive through the nineteenth century. There are recipes using veal as a cheap substitute for chicken.

A data point, in the middle 1960’s in Wisconsin we used have “mock chicken legs” which were a flat, breaded piece of veal stuck on a wooden skewer. These were sold at the supermarket in the meat department. We were a lower middle class family so they must have been relatively cheap. I’ve never bought veal to cook at home since I became an adult. Too spendy.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 5:19 PM on March 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

"It is really odd that a bug-eating hen would be more expensive meat than a slice of a grass-eating cow, but it does line up with historical recipes."

While I also had some trouble making sense of these charts, I did want to add -- In addition to the above comments about how chickens are fairly difficult to raise pre-industrially (and cows relatively easy), I wanted to add that cows and sheep and goats are valuable precisely because they make use of land that humans can't. Humans can't turn grass into calories. Cows, sheep, and goats CAN. You can put them on difficult-to-farm slopes, or in weird pastures you can't plow, and they walk around feeding themselves on fodder that is useless for humans, while producing fertilizer!

A lot of Roman plowing was still done with an ard-style plow (A SHARP STICK). The earliest mould-board plows are known from about 1000 BCE (but don't turn up in Britain until 600 CE), but people don't start using iron plowshares until relatively late. Using a mould-board plow is incredibly skilled work with animals pulling it; it's wildly difficult to get the pressure/weight/dig correct, and it's backbreaking labor even with an animal pulling. Historical movies about medieval or Roman times are almost always showing plowing as it's done with a STEEL plow, which was invented by John Deere (yes, that Deere, hello Ukrainian farmers!) and put into commercial production in 1837. Those things plow like mofos; they "broke the back of the prairie" and made it possible to run farms in the US midwest that raised crops for SALE, not just for survival. (Because plowing prairie sod rife with big bluestem roots is FUCKING EXHAUSTING, they're plants whose whole purpose is to put roots down 8 feet or more and hold the soil EXACTLY STILL. And I have used a modern gas-powered (hand) tiller to turn over prairie sod and that was still the hardest physical labor I have ever done.) But people's mental image of "old-time plowing" is "animal-pulled steel plow" so that's what movies usually show. But that's not a thing until 1837, and if you go watch a living history special that shows medieval plowing, gooooooood God it's slow and exhausting even with the latest advancements.

Which is to say, you (Roman landowner) might own a lot of land, but only a relatively small portion of it would be under cultivation for grain crops (or "row crops"), simply because plowing is insanely difficult and time-consuming, even with slaves. You'd have a lot of pasture, where you could turn out ruminants and let them convert grass and weeds into calories while pooping out tons of great fertilizer for you to use on your vegetables and row crops. Almost everything else is easier than grain crops -- orchards, for example, grow themselves and stay there for decades.

We tend to think of cropland as "easy to row crop" and "kind-of a waste to put animals on" -- especially as modern grain yields are so insanely high that it's cheaper to grow the grain and then feed THAT to cows (although that's bad for the cows). Maize corn got you around 20 bushels/acre in 1850 in Illinois (so WITH the good steel plow). Starting in 1937 with the introduction of hybrid corns, yields starting rising; beginning in 1955, mechanization and chemicals made yields grow even faster. An acre of Illinois farmland that produced 20 bushels an acre in 1922 should be producing around 180 bushels an acre in 2022. But for ancient Romans (or medieval French lords, or whomever prior to 1837), you're looking at grain crops that are incredibly laborious to sow and harvest, and are producing 1/20th of what their modern counterpart crops might produce (if that). So turning ruminants out on pasture was an incredibly valuable and efficient use of land, especially land that might be awkward to plow (like goats and sheep up on mountainside pastures).

Relatedly, pigs are so offensive to Ancient Near Eastern peoples (Jews, Muslims) because pigs eat people food, not grass. Cows and sheep and goats go eat useless grasses that can't be made into human calories unless you're willing to put that field under cultivation, which is hard and exhausting. Pigs compete with humans for grain. It's a real rich-person colonizer asshole move to come into a delicate desert ecosystem with limited grain-growing opportunities and feed the fucking grain to your fucking pig. People are STARVING, and you're like, "Oh, yay, I'll bring my pig here and feed it food that should be going to my servants (/slaves), so I can have pork and bacon!" You could have brought a cow or a goat, asshole, and we wouldn't be having a problem.

(This is also why Northern European cultures tend not to be fussed about pigs, because they tend to have a lot of forest land that is well-suited to pigs foraging among trees grown for wood, without getting into grain crops.)

Anyway, chickens require a lot more "herding" than ruminants, are a lot easier for pests and varmits to kill, and have to be housed in coops. If you want to fatten them up, they need grain (people grain). So counterintuitively, they're a lot more work in a lot of ways than ruminants turned out on pasture would have been, and it's far less clear that they're eating a non-competitive food source. Ruminant food and human food are basically mutually exclusive; chicken and pigs want your sweet sweet human-food grain if they can get it. But in the modern era, with row cropping so easy, cows are in direct competition with people for grain and cropland. That was never the case until very, very recently. Cows are the new pigs.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:39 PM on March 12, 2022 [62 favorites]

Like today, we like to say, "It takes 4 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef, but only two pounds of grain to make one pound of chicken, so chicken is the cheaper and more efficient animal meat." (I can't remember the actual numbers, but something like that.) But every part of this sentence is literally insane prior to 1950.

For a Roman farmer (and basically all the farmers until the 20th century!), it would have been, like, "I grow grain for human consumption over here, and over there I have a bunch of useless grasses that cows magically turn into meat and milk and fertilizer and leather and more cows with basically zero work from me, cows are magic!"

Like, don't feed cows grain diets, it's really bad for their guts, and before antibiotics it could kill them. Don't give people food to meat animals, that's crazy, do you know how much work it is to grow grain? Are you not aware cows will just eat grass if you leave them to it? Why do you think cows and people (and chickens) are competing for grain, are you some kind of dangerous lunatic who can magically grow infinite quantities of grain BUT for some reason want to give it to cows and chickens? What is wrong with you?
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:51 PM on March 12, 2022 [18 favorites]

Another factor affecting the relative prices of chicken and beef would be whether they were being raised primarily for meat in the first place. Nowadays, in the UK at least, where cattle are kept for dairy, male calves are either killed off young for veal or fattened for meat, but the Romans used oxen as draft animals, so the males would have been castrated instead, and a plough ox would be worth more for its work than for the meat it might produce. I'm not sure of the actual numbers, but from the point of protein production a laying hen would produce far more in eggs over its lifetime than if it was just killed for meat. Raising cattle or chickens for meat would probably have been a minor, luxury trade. Most beef or chicken on the general market would have been from older animals, hens past egg-laying or elderly oxen, so the meat would have been very different from what we get today - tasty but tough.
posted by Fuchsoid at 1:35 AM on March 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

A data point, in the middle 1960’s in Wisconsin we used have “mock chicken legs” which were a flat, breaded piece of veal stuck on a wooden skewer.

In addition to general trends towards chicken getting much cheaper, the amount of dairy produced in Wisconsin probably increases veal production because that’s what happens to the male calves.
posted by snofoam at 6:55 AM on March 13, 2022

Gaius Appuleius Diocles [b 104 CE] the highest paid charioteer earned 35,863,120 sesterces in his 24 year career. It's hard to translate that into real money but it's about what it cost to feed Rome for a year.
posted by BobTheScientist at 6:58 AM on March 13, 2022 [5 favorites]

A current oligarch like Bezos 'earns' enough to feed Rome for a year in about thirty seconds.
posted by pompomtom at 7:22 AM on March 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

Latin 'pecunia', meaning 'money' or 'wealth', comes from 'pecus' for a head of livestock, typically cattle. (Compare modern English 'impecunious' for 'broke'.) The underlying Indo-European root goes back as far as you'd care to trace it.
posted by gimonca at 7:58 AM on March 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

There's ancient Rome and ancient Rome, snapshot vs motion picture. The silver content of the denarius famously plummeted from the end of the republic (27 BC Battle of Actium) to the fall of the west (475 AD Romulus Augustulus). (Cf, just for fun, purchasing power US dollar over time.) By 301 AD, the date of the post, Rome was well down the tubes, value of money-wise.

For details, this is as good as anything.

what it cost to feed Rome for a year.

Hm. Rome in Diocles's day ca 130 AD was about a million mouths. That's thirty five sesterces a head, which equals a hundred and forty asses per annum. A loaf of bread alone in Pompeii (79 AD) cost two asses; wine, one.
posted by BWA at 9:09 AM on March 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

One problem with raising chickens for meat is getting the chicks. Egypt had egg ovens from around 400 BC but I don't believe the Romans had incubators. Not being able to incubate eggs severely limits meat bird production.
posted by Mitheral at 9:32 AM on March 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

What could Judas have bought with 30 pieces of silver?
posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:40 PM on March 13, 2022 [3 favorites]