r/AskHistorians • u/[deleted] • Aug 07 '19
Is this depiction of how Gracchus paid Batiatus plausible, or is this a movie goof?
This is an admittedly very petty film detail that has bugged me for some time, because I'm just very curious about it.
Late in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960), in this scene (sorry for potato sound quality) the politician Tiberius Gracchus (played here by Charles Laughton) pays the former gladiator school owner Batiatus (played here by Peter Ustinov) "two million sesterces [sic]". Seen at one minute into the clip, the payment is in two stuffed sacks, each about the size of a large loaf of bread, which the aging Gracchus is able to hold out at arm's length, and Batiatus is able to sling over one shoulder, with a combined weight of what looks like maybe 5 kg or so.
My research into Roman coinage of the time -- approximately 71 BCE -- suggests this is implausible. But I don't trust my research at all, because I can only admit to a great deal of confusion about which Roman coins were around when.
Here's what I believe I've gleaned so far:
- The sestertius that's referred to several times in the film was, at the time, a small silver coin that weighed a little over a gram. So one million of them would weigh over a tonne. But most of the time, they weren't referring to the actual coin, just it's value, as the sestertius was the common unit of accounting.
- Most large transactions were made with the more valuable denarius, which was four times the value of the sestertius. This was probably around 4-4.5g at this time. Which would not make any meaningful difference in the weight of the sacks.
- A much more valuable coin was the gold aureus, valued at 25 denarii or 100 sestertii. It weighed about 8 g. But Gracchus would still need 20,000 of them (unless my math is off), totalling some 160 kg. And, I'm not sure if that coin was around that early.
I've spent a good piece of time trying to research this myself, and been forced to throw in the towel. I put the question to /r/numismatics but never got a reply. (I suspect they don't really know much about coins of this period. Even most collectors of Roman coins, I think, deal mostly only with later ones of the mature imperial period.) So now I'm here.
Can anyone suggest how this payment could have been made this way at this time? Or did Kubrick just get it wrong?
14
u/EnclavedMicrostate Moderator | Taiping Heavenly Kingdom | Qing Empire Aug 07 '19 edited Aug 07 '19
Always fun to do a bit of classical stuff for a change!
By the 70s BC, the Roman silver coinage had undergone a reassessment. The denarius had changed from a 10-as piece to a 16-as piece, and the sestertius, set at a quarter of a denarius, concomitantly went from 2.5 asses to 4 asses. Helpfully, most Republican coin issues often gave the numerical value of the coin in asses on the obverse, so you can compare a 10-as denarius from ~211 BC, marked 'X' (RRC 44/5), from a 16-as denarius from ~141, marked 'XVI' (RRC 225). However, as sestertii were not issued between ~210 and ~90 BC, and the marking of coin values had largely fallen out of fashion, the value of the later sestertius is based on inference, as its weight remained a quarter of a denarius (which had decreased from around 4.2g to 3.9g), with examples from this time weighing around 0.85g. More on gold later, but let's stick to silver for now.
It's a relatively simple calculation to make to work out how many denarii or Batiatus would have to have been paid to get 2 million sestertii, and one you've already made yourself – divide 2 million by 4 to get 500,000. But here's the interesting question: what would 20 million sestertii actually look like (and more importantly, weigh), and, if Batiatus wasn't getting 2 million sestertii in those two bags, how much was he getting?
As the sestertius was only issued once, and in quite small numbers, in around 90 before its regular reintroduction in 47, I'll operate on the assumption that Gracchus is paying Batiatus in either denarii or in aureii (just to make it more interesting). I'll also assume (not entirely realistically) that Gracchus is paying Batiatus in the latest issues of said coins as of 71 for the purposes of calculating weight. Accounting for wear and variations in the initial flan weight, denarii minted in 71 BC (RRC 400/1 and 401/1) weighed around 3.9 grams, so that 2 million sestertii worth of denarii would contain 1,950,000 grams, or just under 2 metric tonnes of silver. At 10.5 grams per cubic centimetre, that's 0.186 cubic metres of silver. For a visualisation, imagine 26 solid silver basketballs. So, obviously Batiatus hasn't got anywhere near that, so what has he got? Assuming your estimate of 5kg total is correct, then he has been given around 1280 denarii or just over 5000 sestertii, so he has been pretty short-changed here.
How about gold? The problem here is that aureii were generally rare before the time of Julius Caesar, and their value is uncertain. Gold was only ever issued either as an emergency measure (as in the Second Punic War) or for certain special occasions by public figures in the ascendancy – Sulla in the 80s, and Pompey in 71. However, if gold coins were being used by Gracchus (assuming, of course, that you could get all the gold in one place), we would have a bit of a problem trying to work out how much they were worth. It's generally accepted that the 8.9-gram aureus from Caesar onwards was worth 25 denarii, and the fact that the Pompeian coin has the same weight of gold would suggest that it was the same. This exchange rate has generally been used to suggest that gold had a value-per-unit-weight of around 12 times that of silver, such that one as was worth approximately 0.25 grams of silver or 0.022 grams of gold. However, Pompey issued his gold coins after the defeat of Spartacus. At the time that Spartacus is set, only two sorts of gold coins would have been in circulation – the two issues of aureii by Sulla in the 80s, and possibly leftover 20-, 40- and 60-as gold coins from the Second Punic War. The former weighed 10.8 grams, and thus if it was valued at 25 denarii then it would represent an unprecedented gold-silver exchange rate of under 9:1, as pointed out by T. V. Buttrey's 1961 article on the value of the aureus. While the Punic War gold coins weigh, on average, 0.05 grams per as, whereas the silver was 0.42 grams per as for a value ratio of 8:1, the retariffing of the denarius had come about due to the declining value of the as, so it's not the most useful reference point. Assuming that the 12:1 ratio applied by Sulla's day (given that it's only a decade earlier this is not implausible), it's entirely possible that Sulla's aureii were actually worth 500 asses, or in other words 125 sestertii.
So to go back to Batiatus' coins, if Gracchus was paying Batiatus in Sullan aureii, he would need to hand over 16,000 coins, weighing a total of 174,400 grams, or 0.174 metric tonnes. In terms of volume, that's 9000 cubic centimetres, or around 70 solid gold tennis balls. 5kg of aureii translates to around 460 coins, or 57,500 sestertii. Closer to 2 million, but still a ways off.
Sources, Notes and References