hey everyone welcome to my channel and welcome back to my subscribers this is bald guy money and in this video i am going to show you how much silver was worth in ancient rome before the invention of paper silver and metals manipulation to determine whether silver was worth more in ancient rome than it is today and also to determine what the price of silver should be based on the romans physical silver system and i will also show you some of my roman coins in the process just before we get started please don't
forget to leave a like because this is a message that people are not receiving in schools or as the romans used to call it scolap and your likes help get this educational material to people who need it thank you now let's get into this because people often tell me this the payment of a day's work in ancient rome was one silver coin so if a day's work is worth about 150 dollars today then silver should be worth 150 dollars per ounce and for all of you history buffs out there you may be nodding your heads in
agreement right now with this statement but you'll also know that this payment benchmark applied basically to soldiers and that it changed over time as roman currency was debased during the decline of the empire specifically driven by this coin i will hold it up here which is called an antoninanos which was slowly mixed with more and more bronze by incompetent rulers from its induction by emperor karakala in the year 215. but this is not a history lesson per se and to establish what silver was worth
in roman times we need to establish a benchmark between their measuring system and ours because today we measure silver in troy ounces and the standard unit for a silver coin in roman times was a denarius which weighed 70.5 grains which is about 4.6 grams today and that's why right from the start i am going to say that for the sake of our calculations we are going to assume that due to advances in geological surveying and mining technology that one roman denarius is equal to one troy ounce silver coin today
and that is just to keep things simple and because slave labor was so popular in ancient rome i am going to benchmark the value of silver then not to labor but to the cost of goods which means that you all have to understand exactly what one silver denarius could buy you in ancient roman times and we will use the example of eating out at a restaurant as a way to determine that because it's something we can easily understand in today's terms now i am not going to give a total breakdown of how the roman currency
system worked and if you want to see something like that on this channel please let me know in the comments but what is important to say is that the silver denarius although a very important unit of currency in ancient rome it was not the most widely used by the regular population on a day-to-day basis in fact most payments at a restaurant would have been made with a coin just like this you can see and this in ancient rome was called an ass and this one is from my collection featuring marcus agrippa who was the
right hand of the first emperor augustus i'll put that back there and what you really need to understand about that coin the ass is that one silver denarius was equal to 16 asses and if we combine that information with ancient records that we have from rome like these we can ascertain or figure out for certain that with one denarius you could purchase a very nice dinner for two which included the following a glass of good quality wine a plate of pulmentarium which was a basic kind of food item that ancient romans would eat
on a day-to-day basis when they went to a local tavern or restaurant a high quality piece of bread as well as a large portion of sausages and all of that would have cost you eight us meaning that the cost for two people to have this exact meal would be 16 asses which are equivalent to one denarius so now to be able to accurately establish what that means in modern day prices i searched around on google maps and chose to benchmark a similar meal in this modern roman restaurant it's called la taverna de forie
imperiali which translates to imperial forums tavern and i chose it based on good ratings and price relativity to my ancient roman example that being a restaurant somewhere between common and fancy let's call it for all intents and purposes a nice restaurant and in this restaurant a good glass of wine costs 8 us dollars as you can see here we will replace our pumentarium with a nice eggplant appetizer for a main we will take something similar to our sausages and take a pork filet and instead of eating bread with dinner
we will swap it out for a nice ricotta cheesecake to give this meal a truly contemporary look and feel now for all of that you can see on the right that it will cost you 38 us dollars per person and for two people that brings the total to 76 u.s dollars so coming back to the purpose of our exercise if we use one roman denarius to benchmark to our modern silver one ounce coins we may be able to say that the real value of a one ounce silver coin based on non-manipulated ancient roman standards could be around 76 u.s
dollars so we fall way short of the 150 dollar amount that many people claim silver should be worth based on this roman example but if this exercise illustrates anything to us it's this from a speculative point of view the real value of silver is likely much higher than what the spot price reflects if you're a regular viewer of my channel you'll know i think the real value of silver today right now is slightly higher than 30 dollars an ounce and let's call that the fair value of silver
and i also think that we'll see that level once manufacturing begins to return to a normal level and once we see manufacturing start to grow as well as the u.s dollar come down in value relative to other foreign currencies and if you're new to the channel i also want to let you know that my 2026 price target for silver is 60 per troy ounce so still a little bit short of the example that we've uh or that i should say the result of the exercise we've done here based on the value of silver in rome but
what i want to say is whether you think that price is accurate or too conservative we can all agree that the price of silver is cheap right now and that's why i am personally using this opportunity to grow my stack just like it was common for ancient romans to hoard silver coins in times of currency debasement it was a very common practice because history may not repeat but it sure does rhyme thanks everyone for watching be sure to leave a like if you enjoyed that and subscribe to my channel for more content
i leave you in this video with a look at some of my roman coins let me know in the comments if you want to see more on that topic right here at bald guy money and until next time to say goodbye in the roman way valley [Music] you
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