Is it one tutor or three? She’s sending mixed signals.
The slave is on sale for only 3 Sestertiis
Then it’s already gone. 3 Sesterii is like, two loafs of bread.
You wouldn’t expect a barbarian slave to be the same price as a delicious loaf of bread, I hope? One should be respected for being the very foundation of society, while the other one is a barbarian.
Grain seems to have run anywhere from 2-3HS per modius (a Roman dry measure, about 6.75kg) outside of really big cities with higher prices. A modius of grain is close to a week’s worth of food (around 22,500 calories) for an adult human[.]
https://acoup.blog/2025/01/03/collections-coinage-and-the-tyranny-of-fantasy-gold/
(But I agree that a slave for the price of a week’s food would be gone in a blink)
I’m happy I was only about a single order of magnitude off by memory
Well, considering that a slave could run upwards of 2,000HS, that difference is negligible. I wouldn’t have known it by memory at all.
ACOUP is so fantastic.
EDIT: But I might add that it’s likely that the grain prices are for unthreshed grain, which would have a significantly lower calorie count for the weight.
The amount of times I’ve gone “Oh wait, wasn’t there an ACOUP post touching on that?” and found it is insane. It’s a great exemplar of public science and I wish it – and projects like it for other disciplines – were more popular.
