Copyright � 2026 by Shane
Tourtellotte
Science fiction stories love to delve into the myriad paradoxes inherent in time travel, but they're much less interested in the mundane practical concerns involved -- like money. Seldom in SF do we see a time-traveler arrive in a past society with the financial resources needed to support himself for any length of time. Many stories ignore the matter altogether; others have the traveler fall in with some benefactor; in others the time travel was unplanned and precipitous. A protagonist who takes intelligent steps to fund his sojourn is uncommon.
You don't have the luxury of having an author fudge things on your behalf. You have real financial concerns, and cobbling together your time machine has probably stretched you to the limit1. My guess is, you have a relative pittance left to back your trip into the past. You need to maximize your limited budget to support your adventure, and I can help you do that.
Our illustrative period for this chapter will be Augustan Rome, but laying out first principles will extend well afield of that, and I will follow up with useful data and examples from our other two eras.
So, our first question arises: how to get the money you'll need in the past?
Heavy Metal
Ideally, you would have a stash of the currency used in the period you'll be visiting. Realistically, your coin collection probably isn't that extensive, and buying up genuine ancient coins would be overly expensive due to scarcity and other factors. You might contemplate counterfeiting period currency, but besides still being an expensive venture, it would be highly risky both in the present and the past2.
Go back more than a few centuries, though, and your options widen. People will accept more than standardized, state-produced currency. Precious metals, gold and silver, will pass well, as long as the recipient can be reasonably sure of weight and purity. Taking back bulk gold and silver will be much more efficient than buying period gold or silver coinage with the same money. If need be, you can purchase period currency with your metals in the past, at a much more lenient premium than at a coin dealer or an on-line auction today.
But of your two main options, gold and silver, which will get you further in the past?
The value ratio of gold to silver was remarkably steady for most of human history. From far antiquity to the start of the 16th century, an ounce of gold was roughly 12 times more valuable than an ounce of silver. There were local fluctuations, such as when Rome's access to silver was cut off during the Second Punic War, but global systemic movements were glacial.
The ratio shifted when Spain's silver mines in South America began producing, depressing prices for silver and moving the ratio to between 15 and 16 to 1. The greater dislocation came in the 19th century, when the Western nations, led by Great Britain, abandoned silver standards for their currencies in favor of gold. Deprived of this support for its value, silver fell, especially compared to gold, which gained that very support.
The gold-silver ratio has been increasingly volatile for the last century and a half. Through many economic upheavals, including the global abandonment of the gold standard, the ratio has soared past 110-1, and plummeted back to 14-1, almost as low as the ancient norm. Though the long-term trend has been upward, gold is in the middle of that range as I write, about 61 times as valuable as silver3. If you are going back to ancient Rome -- or to virtually any time before the American Civil War -- silver is more cost-efficient, getting you around five times the value for the present-day expenditure.
The downside is that silver is far less mass-efficient. Walk any distance with sixty pounds of silver on your back, and you may wish you had paid that 400% premium for a nice, portable five pounds of gold that will be worth just as much to the locals. As silver is also less volume-efficient, being less dense, that gold would take up four percent of the space of its equivalent value in silver. This won’t be a trip-killing burden if you’re traveling back in a machine rather than personally, but remember that you still have to get your goods from the time machine to market. The more trips you must make, not only the more wearying for you, but the likelier that someone will notice your movements and, hoping to raid your stash, find something bigger than he imagined.
Silver is at best a partial solution for the budget time-traveler. Some of your assets should go into that, for solid value and easy convertibility. The rest would be better used in something a little more speculative, but capable of producing far greater returns: trade goods.
The Wealth of Bygone Nations
If you're going to be a cross-time trader, you need to keep economic basics in mind. The most important in your situation is: know your market. This means knowing what the locals use as money, in all its denominations, knowing your customers' likes and habits, and knowing local price conditions. All of these require historical research. On the matter of local money, I’ve done some of that research on the three example eras for you in the previous chapter.
For the latter two, one soon comes to appreciate how patchy our knowledge of quotidian matters from the distant past really is, even in such a historic nation as ancient Rome. Famous writers whose works have reached us do often expound on cultural matters of what products are in vogue, but dry price listings are far less common. And who can blame them? If a Jane Austen novel digressed for five pages on the prices at a local market, you'd yawn and skip ahead to the next ball.
Some price listings do reach us from the Roman Empire. The Emperor Diocletian, reigning around A.D. 300, attempted to control rampant inflation with mandatory price controls, and the list of these maximum prices survives4. Cato the Elder covers prices related to farming in his De Agri Cultura, but these have a necessarily limited application to us. Our best and broadest source comes from the closest thing Rome produced to a modern scientist: Pliny the Elder.
Pliny's Naturalis Historia (Natural History), published soon before his death in A.D. 79, can plausibly be called the first encyclopedia. Among his exhaustive listings of natural facts are a number of prices for botanical, mineralogical, and other items useful to a time-trader. Pliny did make his share of errors in trying to encapsulate the known Roman world, but taken with care and some fact-checking, his Natural History is invaluable.
Your dealings will also have to follow the most famous economic maxim: buy low, sell high. One part of this will be where you do your buying and selling. Large cities will create pricing premiums, in the past as today: bread, for example, cost twice as much in Rome proper as in the countryside. The greater application is in finding goods that are cheap for you, but not only expensive for the buyers, but still things they will want to purchase at those prices. Your advantage as a time-traveler here, in the added knowledge you possess, is key. You will know which items, mundane and plentiful for you, are captivating and rare for your customers.
Rarity is a crucial point. The best guarantor of high prices is scarcity: even a mediocre commodity can fetch high prices if it is rare enough to gain cachet as a luxury item. And the best creator of scarcity, across most of human history, is great distance between a good's source and its market.
We easily forget this today, when it can be more economical to import even the cheapest items from ten thousand miles away than to manufacture them locally. But reduce today's web of global shipping to a few tenuous trade routes stretching across mountains, deserts, or oceans, and prices can spiral to dizzying heights. Historically, distance is a strong price multiplier, a fact we will have occasion to exploit.
Beyond this theoretical grounding, there are practical concerns. As mentioned with silver, high value is a mixed blessing if it comes with back-breaking weight. Ideally, you want a high ratio of value to mass and bulk. Also, you want something you can convert easily into money or property. A hundred-dollar bill is legal tender today, but you'll have trouble spending it at the local kids' lemonade stand. And no matter how valuable your "Sunflowers" by van Gogh is, the faster you need to sell it, the smaller the fraction of its worth you'll get.
Similar troubles will arise if you try to conduct business in the past with a ten-pound gold ingot or a five-carat emerald. Having your trading valuables in smaller amounts will help on that end, with a cost on the present end. The premiums you can expect to pay for precious metals will increase as the size diminishes: five one-ounce bars will cost more than one five-ounce bar. It’s the same principle at work in your local supermarket, where a ten-pound bag of rice will cost less than five two-pound bags5. You’re going to be inconvenienced somewhere: you get to choose where.
We now have a concise set of rules. We want compact trade goods, cheap today but dear in the past, with enough demand to support whatever we wish to sell. Our value baseline is silver, which was set by Caesar Augustus's monetary reforms as 84 denarii per libra6. Buying a denarius's weight of silver costs us roughly $9.44 today (by the price given in footnote 3). If your trade good doesn't fetch more money per unit of weight than this in the past, you're likely better off taking back silver instead.
So what goods are ideal for your visit to ancient Rome?
The Spice Must Flow
Spices and aromatics from the Orient were popular in Rome of the Augustan Age and later. Imported spices went into food, wine, and perfume in limitless combinations and voracious quantities. Pliny the Elder lamented that twenty-five million denarii a year went East to buy such goods from India at enormous mark-ups. Here is a tremendous, but elusive, opportunity.
Pepper is famed for its value to Romans. When Alaric the Visigoth besieged Rome in A.D. 408, part of the ransom he demanded to spare the city was three thousand pounds of pepper7. Its unit price, however, is disappointing. Pliny recorded that black pepper sold for a mere four denarii per libra, and long pepper, the most expensive variety, came in at fifteen d/lb. Buying pepper today to sell at those prices is a worse bargain than silver.
Frankincense and myrrh, aromatics famed from the New Testament, seem to hold promise, but again Pliny dashes that hope. Top quality frankincense brings only 6 d/lb, he says, and myrrh tops out at 16 d/lb.
Pliny never gives a price for saffron, but does say it is the commodity most often falsified, so there was plenty of perceived value in passing off fakes. However, the reason saffron is so obvious a luxury item to us is that it is so expensive today. The highest quality saffron goes for around ten dollars a gram -- and Romans paid attention to quality, so it's a poor idea to try scraping by with cheap stuff. Odds are low that saffron would be worth so much more to Romans to justify the expense, not to mention the risk that buyers will think this suspicious stranger is trying to pass off bogus saffron.
Pliny's information on cinnamon is interesting, partly because it covers several different plants. The foodstuff generally sold in America today as cinnamon is actually cassia. Pliny says the highest quality of cassia will sell for fifty denarii per libra, and the lowest at five: not up to our requirements. He gives a more promising price for daphnoides, or isocinnamon, at three hundred denarii a libra. The hitch is that we are not certain what plant Pliny meant here, a variety of cassia or another plant altogether.
We are more sure of the identity of Pliny's true cinnamon, as being Cinnamomum zeylanicum, the cinnamon tree native to Sri Lanka. The extant price he quotes for it is a disappointing ten d/lb, useless for our purposes. But then he adds this fascinating line: "The price of it was formerly as much as a thousand denarii per pound …"
What happened to bring the price of cinnamon down by ninety-nine percent, in a timeframe apparently within Pliny's living memory? The answer seems to have been a revolution in navigation, or at least the uncovering of a trade secret, by the Romans.
Originally, Roman ships sailing from Egypt to India would have had to hug the coastlines of Arabia and Persia, rather than risk a long open-water crossing of the Arabian Sea8. This meant a round-trip time of three years to deliver one shipment of goods from India. Few Romans cared to take the time and risks, and trade with the East was left in the hands of Arabian middle-men, who charged immense premiums. (Pliny mentions them scornfully in connection to the pepper trade, opining that they sell pepper to Romans for a hundred times what they paid for it in India. Again the 100-1 ratio: interesting.)
Some time roughly in the fifth decade A.D., a Greek sailor named Hippalus discovered the course and pattern of monsoon winds in the Arabian Sea9. Winds blew from the southwest from April to October, then from the northeast the rest of the year. Sailing from the Gulf of Aden to the Indian coast could now be accomplished in forty days, and the round-trip time from Egypt to India was slashed to one year. It still required daring to cross the Arabian Sea, trusting to the winds and primitive navigation, but Roman sailors now liked their odds much more, especially considering the very high reward. With the Arabian middle-men cut out, prices tumbled dramatically.
This was good news for the Romans of Pliny's era -- and even better for the time-traveler going back before that time. True cinnamon may sell today for roughly a hundred dollars a pound (in stick form, far preferred by Romans), but re-selling it for a thousand denarii per libra is an excellent profit.
And other spices now gain in retrospect. Pepper may have been worth far more in Augustus' time than in Pliny's, worth a calculated risk. Indeed, anything coming from India -- or farther east, like China -- is a plausible trading item in the time-traveler's cache, a fact we will return to later.
Pearls of Great Price
Precious stones are an obvious candidate for cross-time trading. They're very small and light, pack lots of value into their volumes, and Romans of this period were hungry for them. Finding an ideal trade item among them, however, is again tricky.
Diamond, Pliny said, "possesses the greatest value, not only among the precious stones, but of all human possessions." Romans prized it not merely for display, but for supposed medical benefits, to neutralize poison and cure mental disruptions. They knew only raw diamonds, as diamond cutting and polishing were developments far in their future. One can only speculate how much more they would pay for our modern multi-faceted marvels.
The practical trouble here is that we esteem diamonds, if anything, even more highly. They're a by-word for excellence and luxury, a near-mandatory component of our matrimonial customs (both before and after), and an effective monopoly keeps their prices even higher than what they would naturally fetch. At best, trading diamonds would be an expensive speculation, with serious risk of losing value in the bargain. Emeralds, also noted by Pliny as much beloved, carry the same drawback: we find them similarly valuable. Rubies, not quite as alluring to Romans, are roughly as costly per carat to us as diamonds.
Our best hope is in finding a stone that is commoner to us than it was to Romans. Opals show some promise here, as large finds in Australia have expanded that market10. But we can do better -- much better, in fact -- with the stone Pliny placed only behind diamond, and ahead of emerald, in the esteem of Romans: pearls.
Roman literature amply records the great worth they placed on pearls. Lollia Paulina, one of the wives of the Emperor Caligula, is reported to have worn ten million denarii of pearls and emeralds at a time. The historian Suetonius says that Julius Caesar paid 1.5 million denarii for a single pearl he gave to his mistress Servilia. And Cleopatra herself is fabled to have dissolved and drunk a pearl worth 2.5 million denarii to impress Mark Antony with her immense wealth (which she could put behind his military and political ambitions). Even if, as is quite possible, all three of these tales are exaggerated or wholly fictitious, they speak clearly to how highly Romans valued pearls.
Here we gain a clear advantage. Though Romans did raise oysters for eating, they never conceived of helping those oysters produce pearls11. Our pearl culturing industry gives us much cheaper pearls for the size and quality. To give an example, in 1917 the famed jeweler Pierre Cartier bought a Fifth Avenue mansion in Manhattan for a double-strand of matched pearls worth $1 million12. Forty years later, after pearl culture was well established, the same pearl necklace sold at auction for a mere $157,000. Due to intervening inflation, this drop is even more precipitous than the apparent 84%.
Do not try to pass off fake (as distinct from cultured or natural) pearls for a little extra profit. Romans were discriminating and attentive in their luxuries, and will spot a fake pearl easily, to your severe inconvenience. That said, cultured pearls promise high profits in a small package, even if the initial expenditure may be substantial.
Other Ways of Showing Off
Other luxury items offer excellent prospects, two of them coming again from the fabulous Orient that captivated the Roman imagination.
Silks first reached Roman attention in the first century B.C., with imports from China via the Parthians13. Silk's charm became so popular that the Senate passed several sumptuary restrictions or outright bans on silk clothing, both to stanch the flow of money east and to fight the decadence of such sheer and revealing material. These edicts had the effect you would expect -- silk became even more popular -- so you will be able to sell your silk with little problem, and at a good profit. Raw silk is recommended, though: Romans liked to blend their silk with linen for a while, before the decadence truly set in during the first century A.D. and pure silk garments came into vogue.
Another potential prize is porcelain. History tells of the Murrine cups imported at immense cost from the East, and scholars think this may have been porcelain. The Emperor Nero paid a quarter-million denarii for a single Murrine cup. You oughtn't count on doing that well yourself, and the scholars may be wrong, but taking back a good-quality porcelain cup in hopes of finding a rich buyer is a sound calculated risk.
Closer to home, dyes, and specifically the famed Tyrian purple, have potential. The Romans could only extract purple dye from certain eastern Mediterranean sea snails, in a process so inefficient that hundreds of thousands of these snails perished to produce one ounce of dye. The purple dye was worth its weight in silver in the fourth century B.C., and by the second century A.D., when Rome provided much heightened demand, Pliny the Younger reported it fetched a thousand d/lb, roughly worth its weight in gold.
Bringing back modern artificial dye, far less costly to you, is a good profit opportunity, though with caveats. Roman law tightly restricted who was allowed to wear purple-dyed clothing, so your market is limited. Also, we are not certain of the shade that was Tyrian purple, since ancient records conflict, though it's possible a range of colors would have passed as such. An artificial dye might also arouse suspicions with people used to handling the natural dye14. Purple dye is no sure thing, but it's another good risk.
All the Modern Conveniences
So far, all our proposed trade commodities have been things the Romans had for themselves. But what's the fun in time travel if you can't sell the proverbial Sherman tank to Julius Caesar? I won't speak to fun -- and I’ve done plenty of speaking about avoiding paradoxes -- but profit isn't as easy as you might think.
The problem with many modern devices is that they need the infrastructure of modern society in order to keep functioning. A revolver will need fresh supplies of bullets; a pocket computer will need recharging; a car needs refined fuel, and will soon fail if you try to skate by on something cruder. Without this support, you have short-lived curiosities, with a correspondingly small market. You can try passing them off as something more durable only if you plan on skipping town fast and never returning -- which admittedly is a practical option.
Modern materials like rubber or plastic could impress Roman customers, but they have long experience working with other materials, and may think the practical gains from yours merely incremental. Your best option could be to position them as novelties, to gain the luxury premium. This would offset the problem of plastic and rubber being bulky, which limits how much you can bring along.
As before, something light and valuable is your best bet. Medicines and antibiotics fit, and provide benefits the Romans could produce for themselves sporadically at best. Many medicines, though, will take days to show clear effects (in, say, fighting a wound infection or reversing a vitamin deficiency). You will want something immediate, if you want to prove its worth quickly for sale.
Aspirin and other analgesics are good -- pack some -- but there is something better still: erectile drugs. Roman literature, like many others, is full of men going to all manner of extremes in hopes of bestirring themselves. Find the right rich man, give him a single pill as proof of concept, and you can virtually name your price for the rest. Yes, it's exploitative, but you'll be giving actual value for money, which is more than most of the charlatans leeching off his troubles will manage.
Selling England by the Pound
The extensive examples I’ve given for trading in ancient Rome are meant to be illustrative of concepts that apply for much of the past. What I’ve told you about the Rome of Julius Caesar is applicable in large measure to the England of Elizabeth Tudor.
As far as modern technologies, England was scarcely any closer to them than Rome was. Plastics and rubber will still be unknown, and the infrastructure for maintaining today’s technological marvels will be scarcely more in evidence. There will be almost as much room for new medicines to do their magic, and goodness knows many men will still have that certain frustrating complaint.
The popularity, and expense, of gemstones will not be greatly changed either. Queen Elizabeth herself gloried so much in jewelry, with a particular interest in pearls, that you might be tempted to take your hoard directly to her to make a killing. This won’t work. Elizabeth came to expect her precious stones as gifts, not as purchases. She might want you to part with your treasure for nothing more than the high honor of having graced her with it. A better method would be to offer your wares for sale to well-off nobles who might have cause to make expensive and ingratiating gifts to their sovereign.
This will tempt you toward trade goods less likely to attract an avaricious eye and a grasping hand. It is an exciting time and place for that. Broad historical forces have produced a market in flux, with a number of rare and valuable commodities.
On one side, the flow of spices from the East was throttled last century when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, cutting off the usual trade routes. There has been some rerouting of the trade lanes, notably going all the way around Africa, but prices are still inflated. The result is the promise of opportunities similar to pre-Hippalus Rome.
On the other side, a different attempt to bypass Ottoman control of the trade routes was to sail the other way around the world to reach the Far East without Muslim interference. It turned out there was an inconvenient continent or two in the way. Though this frustrated attempts to reach one market, it opened the door to a whole new variety of trade goods, which are still rare enough in England to command premium prices akin to those for the spices of the Orient.
Will any of these goods beat silver as a compact store of value? Back in 1559, a groat (four pence, you will recall) was supposed to contain 32 grains, or about 2.1 grams, of silver15. I will elide the calculations, and state that five shillings would come out to just over one troy ounce of silver, and roughly 72 shillings would constitute one avoirdupois pound16. Beat that rate, and you’re ahead in the value density game.
Unfortunately, those spices won’t be a winning play. They topped out at ten shillings or a little more per pound. The old standby pepper was just four shillings per pound. Given the inflation of the period, those numbers could be lower if you’re visiting early in Elizabeth’s reign, much less any of the other Tudors. The workaround of overseas trade routes, or accommodations with the Ottomans, have lowered prices too much for this to work in your favor. Having those spices may be a good status signifier if you’re running in higher circles, but they don’t serve the current purpose.
Goods from the New World are a mixed bag at best. Potatoes are passing through the phase of a prized luxury on their way to becoming a common staple, but the value density of a big lump of starch will not be worth your while. Tobacco shows a touch more promise, but not enough, and there is a further complication. Tobacco of that era was much stronger in its effects than what we know today, the modern crop being bred for mass consumption rather than a knockout narcotic impact. Coffee and vanilla were still effectively unknown to England17.
Your best hope from the West may be chocolate, but not the chocolate we know. The English drank it as the Aztecs did, as a thin and bitter brew, often flavored with chili peppers. It was considered medicinal, so your market will be limited, but the price for moderate amounts should be enough to make it an efficient store of wealth18.
One rare and luxurious trade item you might be tempted to try is books. Gutenberg has done his magic by now, so ownership of books is spreading, but they’re still pricey items. The main problem is that there are almost no books written in or before that time that are being reprinted today, especially as much of the reading was being done in Latin by intellectual folks. The print-on-demand option helps you little, as the flimsy paper covers of POD works won’t conform to the solid covers people of that era will expect.
One apparent exception is the Bible, but this also has pitfalls. A Bible as large and sturdy as people of this era would expect for the Good Book will be inconveniently large and heavy. Also, beware the boundaries of the time period: it will be mighty suspicious trying to sell people a King James Version Bible before King James. Books in general may have a narrow window of success -- bringing back some Cicero in the original Latin, for example -- but don’t expect too much from them.
When it comes to taking compact value to Elizabethan England, silver is once again the best foundation for your portfolio. Some pearls, a tin or two of 100% cocoa powder, and perhaps a quantity of raw silk are good diversifications19. Some things have changed from Roman times, like the throughput of trade routes, but many of the lessons still hold.
Land of the Rising Mon
While Elizabeth’s England was in a sense a descendant of Rome, Japan was well out of that family tree. Their culture, and thus the trade goods they valued, were their own in most cases -- though not all. They shared one valued import with those other two nations: silk.
Being so much closer to the source of sericulture, Japan would seemingly have a far easier time acquiring silk. This wasn’t always the case, notably so in the Sengoku period. A surge of Japanese piracy, beginning in the mid-15th century, caused China to close itself off from foreign trade, hoping to starve out the menace. This didn’t quite work, and trade remained closed off for a long time, until the arrival of European explorers and later merchants. The Portuguese could trade far more freely with China, and readily acted as go-betweens so Japanese could snap up their silk at healthy prices.
If you don’t mind the bulk, you can exploit this opportunity yourself. A slight undercutting of the Europeans’ prices should gain you fine profits, paid out in the silver and gold now emerging from Japan’s new mines. Don’t undersell them too much: those barbarians could react badly to getting beaten at their own game.
Indeed, most of the items the European merchants are trading to Japan should gain at least a passing thought from you as wares you can sell yourself. Aside from the standard spices, two worthwhile items to pursue would be ceramics and books, both obtained from China. You might find a market for present-day ceramics brought back with you, but for the books you would probably need to stay contemporary.
I do recommend strongly against one of those European-moved goods: firearms. You’re not going to be able to acquire period weapons today at prices that would make economic sense20. Selling them more recent weapons is a grotesquely bad idea, and not only for who could be directly killed by them. The Japanese were very able at reverse-engineering the guns they bought, and making copies. The timeline will not be able to adjust to this, so don’t try.
The Japanese of this era were trying to build up their own native silk industry, to provide what China gave grudgingly. Taking back some seeds of mulberry trees, to provide food for the silkworms, could offer value at very low weight and volume. Then again, it’s not as if the mulberry trees cannot provide seeds of their own, so don’t hang all of your hopes on this.
Tobacco started reaching Japan by the 1570’s, but the caveats mentioned for England hold just as well here. Modern tobacco will be a weak substitute for the potent leaf of this era, and you won’t get far selling it. Playing cards arrived in the islands around the same time, and became popular, but again modern versions won’t serve. The type the Europeans brought had twelve ranks instead of thirteen, and the suits were swords, sticks, cups, and coins. Beside all that, laws against gambling with cards appeared around 1600. These laws didn’t stop the practice, but they will raise both the price you could collect selling cards, and the risks attending such, ahem, shady dealing.
The domestic mining surge is bringing gold and silver coinage into circulation, and as in our other example eras the existing rate of exchange between the metals favors silver. Converting your silver ingots into local coins may prove more difficult than elsewhere. One of Japan’s primary warlords, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, controlled the mines, meaning he controlled what metals were minted. You may need to deal with his mints to get your bulk silver converted to coins, probably at a higher premium than you’d pay under Caesar or Elizabeth. Consider it a recasting of the Golden Rule: he who mines the gold makes the rules.
Footnotes:
Granted, it's possible that you're filthy rich, and have millions left over for your travels. Feel free to overwhelm the problem with brute monetary force. But odds are you didn't build your fortune by passing up opportunities to save money, so keep reading.
Counterfeiting carries heavy enough prison terms today, but in many nations of the past, counterfeiting was a capital crime -- even in the early United States! There are enough perils in time travel without adding this one to the list.
Based on London spot values at 8:45 pm GMT on May 2, 2026: gold at $4,614.55/oz and silver at $75.34/oz, giving a ratio of 61.25.
For the historical record, Diocletian's price controls were ineffective against inflation.
You can look at this the optimistic way -- you get discounts for buying in bulk -- but as you’re paying above spot market price for whatever precious metals you purchase, the pessimistic way is unfortunately the more proper perspective.
The previous chapter covered the denarius. The libra was the Roman pound, roughly equal to three-quarters of an avoirdupois pound, or one-third of a kilogram.
The Senate gave Alaric the pepper, along with the gold, silver, silk, and dyed hides he demanded. Then Alaric returned the next year for another siege, and sacked Rome in 410. Moral: giving away your pepper doesn't solve anything.
The Romans, never the greatest of navigators, did the same coastline hugging when sailing the Mediterranean. This is where we derive the term "coasting" to mean slow, unforced movement.
There is great uncertainty in the historical record regarding Hippalus. Postulated dates for his discovery stretch as far back as the second century B.C., and some claim he only discovered routes to specific trade ports, the monsoon pattern being known long before -- and known for centuries as the Hypalus! I hold with the oftener-cited later dates because the cause and effect of lower prices following the discovery of an easier trade route is natural and logical. As to Hippalus/Hypalus, I suspect the Hypalus winds gave their name as an honorific (cf. Scipio Africanus) to the man who harnessed their use.
One hazelnut-sized opal set in a ring was worth half a million denarii. When its owner wouldn't sell it to Mark Antony for a twentieth of that price, he was condemned to death and had to flee for the outer provinces.
Pearl culture was only invented at the end of the 19th century, and first applied on a commercial scale in 1916.
Plus $100 in cash.
Silk became so intertwined with China in the Roman mind that our word for the raising of silkworms, sericulture, derives from the early Roman name for China, Seres.
For one matter, the Murex snails created an awful stink when processed: the dye may have carried some of this tell-tale smell.
They didn’t, after recent cycles of debasement, and even after Gresham’s welcome reforms coins tended to end up a trifle short of statutory weight. Expect to work with that prescribed rate, though, when changing your bulk silver for coinage.
I will use shillings as the denomination in this section, first because they were the primary unit of money at the time, and second because saying “pounds per pound” would get baffling quickly. When I say “pounds” for the rest of the chapter, I mean avoirdupois pounds.
Neither did they have tea yet. Inconceivable as an Englishman without his cuppa may be, you must be flexible enough in mind to absorb this fact.
Taking back a bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips for trade is a terrible, timeline-busting idea. You’ll have to use them yourself in your own time period. I’m sure you’ll find a way.
Bringing back silk clothes is being too clever by half. You could get great prices for, e.g., white silk hose back then (which was exclusively for men). The silk hose we make today, however, is generally biased toward sheerness, which would not satisfy your Elizabethan customers. Silk stockings for women could work, except the market was extremely exclusive at the time, and if you thought trying to sell pearls to Queen Elizabeth was tough …
You could buy them in 16th-century Europe, and use your transportation advantage to beat them on shipping costs. This hinges on how expensive it is to operate your machine. The romance and adventure of time travel, now with extra accounting.
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