Copyright � 2026 by Shane
Tourtellotte
The previous chapter dealt with acquiring the most money in the past for the least expenditure of present resources. But time-travelers usually intend to return eventually to their present. The appeal of bringing something back that will repay all their outlays, and more, is naturally strong, and not limited to those on a tight budget.
Our question is now reversed: what can a time-traveler buy in the past that will be worth the most in the present? And what other methods of enrichment might the enterprising time-traveler be able to conduct? Again, we will begin with Augustan Rome, but speculations will go much further afield in short order.
Mediums of Exchange
The easiest principle to offer is the reverse of the one you used going back. Given the choice between silver and gold, you want gold. On value of metal alone, it will net you roughly seven times as much as silver back in the present. It will probably be a while before copycat time-travelers glut the modern gold market and depress the price, so get that gold.
This will mean dealing with the higher end of Roman society, as gold is not something the great mass of Romans will have in abundance. If you’ve brought back valuable enough trade goods, this shouldn’t be hard to arrange. It’s possible those nobles or well-off merchants will want to pay you off in silver, keeping the gold for themselves1. Press them on this. Even accept a premium on being paid in gold. It’s more than worth it.
Also, if you can manage it, try to arrange to be paid in gold fresh from the mint. This may require some finagling, but again, it will be worth the travails. You aren’t just after bulk metal value with the gold coins you’re receiving. You’re looking at them as collector’s items.
A Roman aureus from the first century of the Empire will have around a quarter-ounce of gold in it, which at current prices is somewhat above one thousand dollars. If the gold coins you’re paid aren’t severely battered and worn or clipped2, they will be worth much more than that to coin collectors. In the absolute best of conditions, aurei will be worth around thirty times their weight in gold; and even the regular range of specimens should fetch ten or more times their melt value. You’ll have to take a discount from retailers’ prices when selling yours, or go through the grind of selling them off yourself, but it still leaves you with a handsome profit above the value of the gold.
It also means you’ll have to devote a bit of time to examining and cataloguing the coins you’ve brought back. This isn’t work: this is part of the fun. You’ll find coin enthusiasts today who lovingly comb through their pocket change, looking for an ordinary coin old enough or unusual enough to be worth something beyond its face value. You’ll be doing the same thing, only with far better odds of striking it rich -- or richer. It is gold, after all: you’re pretty well off in the worst case.
This principle obviously can be extended, not only to the Tudor and Sengoku periods, but to most past eras you visit. The closer you are to the present, however, the less of a gain this offers. For gold coinage of the late 19th to early 20th centuries, it may require outstanding condition for a coin to be worth much more than melt value. Also, the gold/silver ratio had by then risen from its ancient and medieval values, making the gold less advantageous compared to silver3.
Paper currency is still chancier, as it doesn’t have the intrinsic value of the metals as a floor to its worth. One rip, and you’re down to face value, meaning pennies on the dollar in present value when you account for inflation. Judging by American issues of the early 20th century, gold certificates4 won’t fare as well as the gold itself, unless the quality of the note is pristine. Silver certificates fare better, roughly matching the appreciation of gold if the notes are of high collectible quality. The snag there is that denominations will be much lower, meaning a stack of bills to look after rather than a few coins or one ingot.
It's not only currency, of course, that has value as collectible items, or as museum pieces. Fairly ordinary items to a Roman will fetch good prices today as ancient artifacts, though perhaps this can be exaggerated. The cost of manufacturing, say, a pottery jar or an oil lamp would have been fairly high in Rome, since it was done by human hands and not mechanical labor. The gain realized from its age and rarity may not be that great compared to how much it costs to buy. Excellence of condition can augment that, but produces complications I will address shortly. Also, the items will probably have a lot more volume and mass than their equivalent value in gold, so difficulty of transportation arises again.
For Roman crafts, my buying suggestions include glassware, which will get fine prices for relatively small items. Small statuary, mainly from the Roman pantheon but also of some imported deities like Isis, should also do well. Jewelry bears the problem of gemstones being expensive in the Roman era without the greater quality of today’s stones, so appreciation is limited. Try going with simpler adornments, perhaps of silver and gold, where the materials will hold their value better while gaining from their antiquity and rarity.
For a more mundane, not to say plebeian, artifact, you might try dice. Romans loved their gambling, and though betting on dice games was mostly illegal, the laws were mostly ignored. You could pick up a few dice made of bone pretty cheaply and expect good returns. Plus, they’re small, so carrying them back to your time will be scant inconvenience.
If you’re looking at larger artworks for making your killing, the inconvenience will rise in proportion. Whether it's a marble or bronze sculpture, a mosaic, or a mural painting (Romans did most of their paintings on walls), the artwork in question will be heavy, bulky, and very difficult to transport. One exception is Roman painting done on wood: we know it was done, but no examples have survived two millennia5. Any example of that would be unique, and valued as such, and could reasonably be carried by an enterprising time-traveler.
Other arts than painting, sculpture, and craftwork offer a truly remarkable opportunity: to wit, literature. I must defer that discussion, though, to address another practical problem with the physical artifacts. With time travel and attendant time trade still an underground activity, you’re going to have trouble convincing most buyers that you aren’t trying to defraud them.
X Marks the Spot
Bulk isn’t your only worry about goods you bring back from the past. Arts and crafts you hope to sell as valuable antiques could be rejected as fakes, simply because they look too good to be as old as you claim.
In a sense, they’ll be right. The objects will be from that time, but won’t have aged through the intervening years. If there’s any organic component to them, like the wood of one of those Roman paintings, carbon-dating would show it to be contemporary rather than ancient. This method works on the clay in ceramics also, though less accurately, but other methods exist to pin their ages down6. Inorganic objects will have their own tell-tales, but simply looking like they were produced two years ago rather than two thousand will be the main red flag.
You may choose to brazen this out, pointing experts to the genuine craftsmanship without a hint of modern methods used in production. This may well work, more likely with the inorganic things, but if nothing else it will put your goods in a lingering limbo before you can get them sold.
Another method exists. You can bypass the problems with age verification by having the items age naturally. This means hiding them somewhere in the past where you can retrieve them in the present, and in practical terms this means burying them.
This is scarcely a risk-free option. One strong hazard is that someone will chance upon your buried treasure and take it for themselves. Another is that your picked burial spot will get developed in the intervening centuries, built over or paved over, making it far more difficult and risky to retrieve your loot.
The second hazard can be mitigated by scouting a suitable burial area in the present before making your trip. The first will require more direct work to avoid. Keep your burial spot out of trafficked areas7; don’t stint on the depth of burial; don’t leave the ground looking like it’s been freshly dug. Also, accept that these precautions lessen risk, not eliminate it. You may still get looted. As with everything else in time travel, you’re still taking chances, even if they’re the best chances you can make them.
The location of your concealment is vital for reasons other than the aforementioned. One is bioturbation, the fifty-dollar word8 for ground being disturbed by living organisms. Burrowing animals could dig down and destroy your treasures. Tree roots could grow down and do the same, over a longer period that from the perspective of your original-day self might as well have been instantaneous. Areas that are, or will become, forested should therefore be low on your list.
Deformation of the soil itself can cause breakage of fragile items such as glass or ceramic. Dynamic forces like the tread of feet, human and animal, can propagate into subsoil and do damage at modest depths. Longer-term static forces increase with depth, balancing out the risks: avoiding one leaves you vulnerable to the other. Dry clay soils will resist deformation the best, while wet sandy soil is the worst option.
Other geological and climatological factors affect the degradation of the artifacts you’ll be burying, but the nature of what you’re hoping to preserve is also very important. Some substances can weather the centuries well, while others may be better off coming home with you, whatever pitfalls in authentication there might be.
Ceramic and glass, mentioned before, bear up well in most undisturbed soils. So does gold, so burying a golden goblet from the first century9 could work very well for you. A short hierarchy of deterioration resistance in metals would go: gold, lead, silver, copper, zinc, iron. Dry conditions will preserve them best.
Glass likewise does better in dry soil. Moisture will produce surface corrosion, leading to loss of transparency and formation of a silica-rich crust which will weaken the glass. Any surface coatings or decorations on the glassware will degrade within a century, making it hopeless to preserve such from Roman times. Rome does provide the advantage that its glassmaking methods used soda ash, which resists chemical attack better than medieval glasses that used potassium-rich wood ash.
Ceramics endure burial very well, depending on the materials and the method of manufacture. High firing temperatures produce more resistant ceramics. It won’t be easy to confirm local manufacturing standards casually enough not to draw suspicion, but keep it in mind.
For most things you’ll be trying to preserve, dry soils tending toward the acidic are ideal, while high alkalinity is the most destructive. For organic materials, this is reversed: waterlogged soils with high alkalinity will be anaerobic, and thus forestall corrosion. This may sound like a good idea if you have one of those Roman paintings on wood -- except that while the wood may be preserved, the paint will not. Best to stick with dry soils.
The location of Rome works against you here. Europe is generally one of the lousiest places for preserving buried artifacts. Italy is better than the European average, but that makes it merely fair rather than good. Some very dry areas of eastern Spain could work well, but you’re probably better off looking to arid stretches of Africa and Asia. Sprawling as the Roman Empire was, this is a practical option.
The trove you leave behind must strike a balance between preserving your goods and avoiding anachronism. Any storage material that doesn’t fit with the era is a serious timeline risk, should someone else stumble upon your valuables despite your precautions. This danger actually increases the closer to the present the cache is discovered. A weird and inexplicable storage box unearthed in the distant past has a much greater chance of vanishing into the mists of history than something dug up a hundred years ago, holding antique items within a container a little beyond anything they have at that time. Those questions are going to spread with the power and swiftness of 20th-century communication, and the resolution of the paradox will not be to your benefit.
Should everything go right, the crafts and artworks you buried in the past will be in place and intact when you unearth them in the present. Even at this stage, you need to be careful. The worst damage could come once you’ve opened your personal time capsule.
During its centuries underground, your parcel of goods has come into a chemical equilibrium with the soil containing it. Recovering it puts it into a new environment, and brings a shift to a new equilibrium. If not handled properly this can bring sudden deterioration, especially by physically weakening the object, more than it may appear. Similar effects occurred when you buried the items, so really you will be dealing with two sets of traumatic changes at once.
This holds true even if your treasure is kept in a relatively airtight container. The chemical equilibrium will be with the air rather than the soil, but once you’ve opened the container, a new kind of air will be hitting the contents.
Going into detail with preservation techniques for all the kinds of material you could be reclaiming would devour pages on a subject already far afield from the general concept of time travel. You know now that you need to take care with your recovered artifacts: you can take the final step of doing research for the specific items you’ve cached.
Having the Last Word
Some artifacts are valuable for what they are; some are valuable for what they contain. A scroll two thousand years old may not be worth much of itself, but the words on it could transcend price. There is lost literature from ancient Rome, and beyond, that would make scholars by the hundreds ache with yearning.
Even the best-known Roman authors have gaping holes in their bibliographies, torn open by time. Cicero is missing works on rhetoric and philosophy, which since he was his age’s leading orator and a synthesizer of the Greek philosophical tradition are losses sharply felt. His Hortensius was massively influential, even on St. Augustine four centuries later, but is gone now. Consolation, written to weather the grief of his daughter’s death, likewise has perished. Even with these and other lost works, Cicero is maybe the most complete major Roman writer. Others have fared far worse.
Julius Caesar’s On the Gallic War is an enduring classic, but his other writing is mostly or entirely gone. His Letters to Cicero exist only in fragments; his Anti-Cato, written as a rebuttal to Cicero’s encomium on one of Caesar’s most determined enemies, likewise is down to scraps. A vastly better understanding of the history of Caesar and his times is, currently, beyond us.
Poetry and plays are also affected. The comic playwright Plautus, a clear influence on Shakespeare, has twenty-one plays that have survived -- and more than a hundred that have not. Ovid, famed for his Metamorphoses, wrote a tragedy on Medea that exists only in a couple of fragments.
All these items would draw intense scholarly interest and some nice bids, though maybe not on the scale of optioning The Godfather or Jaws. Where the booksellers of ancient Rome might be even more valuable, though, would be as a conduit to the writers of ancient Greece. If you prefer one-stop shopping over making a side trip to Athens10, you can take this opportunity to refill a library even more ravaged by the centuries than that of Rome.
The three titans of Greek tragedy, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, between them wrote roughly three hundred plays. Thirty-three survive complete, though one is suspected to be by Aeschylus’ son, and half of them do not endure even in fragments. The comic playwright Aristophanes wrote forty works: nine survive whole, two exist in revised versions, and eleven are fragmentary. Of the Big Four, he was the lucky one.
Lost Greek literature goes far beyond that. The half of Aristotle’s Poetics dealing with drama has survived the ages11, but the half dealing with comedy did not. Of his other works, only about a third are thought to have endured. The poetess Sappho is known only by a few scattered pieces. Works by Eratosthenes on geography and the size of the Earth, and by Aristarchus on his novel theory of the Earth revolving around the Sun, vanished, setting human knowledge in those areas as far back as two thousand years. Multiply this by a hundred other names both recognized and obscure, and the scope of what has been lost grows dizzying.
Narrowing our focus back to the great playwrights, rescuing about three hundred works by first-rank playwrights from obscurity or oblivion would be a revolution in literature. How remunerative this would be is admittedly debatable. University Classics departments and repertory theaters do not have the deep pockets of Hollywood. There is also the matter of quality. Are you offering a stack of plays people were content to let perish fifteen hundred or two thousand years ago? Not even Shakespeare was a hit every time: who’s to say that thing by Sophocles didn’t deserve its fate?
One cautionary example is another Greek playwright, Menander. He wrote over a hundred comedies, some adapted into Latin by their own leading playwrights. None of the originals survived, though, to the lamentation of the intelligent and refined for this incalculable loss12. Then in the 20th century, seven of Menander’s plays were recovered, and the reaction was … lukewarm. The intelligent and refined were disappointed.
Part of this is likely modern preference. Menander was a leader in what was called New Comedy, as distinct from the Old Comedy of Aristophanes. New Comedy is akin to what we call situation comedy, while Old Comedy was more free-wheeling and anarchic. Think The Brady Bunch versus Monty Python. Menander’s rediscovered plays reached a scholarly audience attuned to silly walks and catapulted cows. Seen this way, the critical reaction isn’t so surprising.
This also means that what survived from antiquity and what vanished depended much on the tastes of those controlling the bottleneck. The most important filter of what survived from Greek antiquity was the Byzantine Empire. If the Byzantines liked works, they copied and preserved them. If they didn’t, those works probably perished. Among other things, the Byzantines were partial to Old Comedy, so Aristophanes’ works got some care, and Menander’s got neglected.
What does this mean for you practically? It means you’re probably better off not trying to out-guess the market. Your ability to comb the bonanzas from the modest curiosities will be limited mostly to going for the names that have survived to the present day.
There is a category of writing I have not yet mentioned, because the ways you can benefit from it are twofold. I’m speaking of history, where especially in Roman times there are shocking gaps that cry out to be filled. You can do that, but not only for the benefit of posterity.
There are many well-known Roman historians, but fame did not preserve their labors. Polybius wrote a forty-volume history of Rome from 220 to 146 BC. The first five survived whole; the rest exist only in excerpts. Livy’s magisterial history of Rome, written in the Age of Augustus, ran 142 volumes. A quarter survive. Our old friend Pliny the Elder wrote both History of His Times and History of the German Wars, but we have only quotations remaining from both. Suetonius is famed for The Twelve Caesars, but we’ve lost his Royal Biographies and his commentary On Cicero’s Republic, among much else13.
Even more tantalizing are memoirs of and about famous people that no modern eye has ever scanned14. The Emperor Augustus penned a History of his Own Life, while Agrippina, Nero’s mother, wrote Misfortunes of Her Family15. Pyrrhus, he who won the Pyrrhic victory, wrote memoirs and tomes on how to wage war said to have influenced Hannibal. Speaking of whom, one Sosilus wrote Deeds of Hannibal about his time as a companion to that scourge of Rome, a book Polybius publicly scorned yet seems to have plundered as source material. This scratches the surface of what was lost, and could be found again.
The attraction these would have for modern scholars is great, and the broader audience is nothing to sniff at either. Caesar and Cicero are still read widely, as is Meditations by Emperor Marcus Aurelius. A pair of novels pretending to be the secret memoirs of Emperor Claudius are classics of 20th-century literature, and they made a great miniseries too. There’s money to be had … but the better investment might mean sitting on some of that material.
The histories I’ve described are not just literature, they’re knowledge. They will reveal things long forgotten, some of which we don’t even suspect exist. They will open up opportunities to visit events we never knew happened, or pinpoint dates and places for events that time has obscured. This expansion of history will broaden your horizons for experiences and adventures, and reveal chances to gain further knowledge that will feed the cycle, one advance building on another.
It will also give you a chance to get even richer, one best taken if you start off keeping what you’ve found to yourself.
One of the surest paths to profit is an imbalance of knowledge. If you know how to raise silkworms, and your customers don’t, they’ll have to pay your price for silk or go without -- or at least find another seller. That is one of the more ethical examples. One less salubrious would be where you sell high-priced food in a famine-stricken region when you know, but the locals don’t, that a big grain shipment is coming soon.
I don’t suggest you do the latter. I’m not urging you to fleece people of the past. It’s other time-travelers I’m suggesting you beat to the punch.
Historical records that you discover will lay opportunities before whoever reads them. As long as you’re the only one from the future reading them, you’re the only one who can exploit the imbalance of knowledge they provide. You will be the one finding new markets, introducing or gathering new goods, taking advantage of shortages or gluts, high or low prices, that exist for a time. The hints that you gain from those documents, and from the experiences they lead you to, will provide chances to find other lost documents (or oral knowledge), so you can reap what harvests they hold, and so on.
When you’re done, when you’ve chased down all the leads, then your present-day publisher or Classics department or museum can have those documents. Other time-travelers can then try to take the same opportunities you did -- but you got there first, at least from their frame of reference. If they try to undercut you, undo the deals you made for their own profit, they’ll be the ones risking the creation of paradoxes, and the cycles of recurrence to resolve them. It’s hard enough avoiding paradox with just the natural inhabitants of the past. A cross-temporal visitor like yourself makes it geometrically harder for them.
The reverse of this is that it may be you beaten to the punch, you trying to make a score in a time and place some other time-traveler has already exploited. I’ll speak more to this in a later chapter, but my main advice is not to force the issue and risk hurling yourself into the paradox trap. Withdraw; regroup; re-think.
Moving beyond history and literature, other works of Roman artistry do exist, but their suitability as sources of profit will be narrow. Recordings of Roman music, stagecraft, and oratory won’t have open markets, and things so easily reproduced as those recordings won’t command top dollar from most underground collectors. Examples of culinary arts, including winemaking, won’t get too far even if they turn out not to be inferior by modern tastes16. The wine might be worth a flutter, on the principle that rarity and novelty may serve in an area where prices can get ridiculously high. It’s still a bulky commodity to bring back, so you would need a very high value density for this to make practical sense. You’ll have to sample the vintage first to make an informed decision. Don’t drink too much of your own profits, especially since there might not be any.
Tilting the Odds
There are other ways to exploit your information advantage. One of them is arguably the epitome of predatory behavior: gambling.
This breaks into two categories. One is where your superior modern education lets you determine the odds of a game better than your past-born opponents, giving you the edge. (This assumes you got a superior modern education. I’m willing to assume that. You were smart enough to buy this book, right?) This isn’t as useful as you might think. Romans weren’t dummies about mathematics -- you couldn’t be such good engineers if you were -- and the ill-educated lower classes who may have had that knowledge deficit aren’t going to have much money for you to fleece. Experience in other eras may vary, but don’t expect too much out of this.
The second category is where probability doesn’t matter, because you already know the result. This will be tough to arrange in Rome. If much of Cicero’s writings turned to dust, how many reports on results of chariot races or gladiatorial combats could possibly have endured?
The specific events weren’t much chronicled, although this is one of those cases where finding contemporary records could lead on to fortune. Even from what we have today, though, there are mentions of specific gladiators or chariot drivers who had notable success, or even failure. Betting on the basis of their lifetime records could provide an advantage, if not a sure thing.
Still, there are a couple of sure things we can identify from our distance in time. At the opening of the Colosseum in A.D. 80, one of the main events was a naval battle held on the flooded floor of the new arena. If you’re in the area, bet on the Athenians to beat the Syracusans. There are a few similar high-profile events that provide sure things, but don’t count on getting too rich. With enough time-travelers visiting them, the odds will likely get skewed and diminish your returns.
This gambling tactic obviously works better closer to the present, although with the attendant rising risks of making changes to the timeline that cannot be smoothed out. Betting on Apollo to win the 1882 Kentucky Derby at 10-1 is much safer than backing Rich Strike in 2022, even if his 80-1 odds do turn your head17.
Another method of leveraging information advantage needs to be relatively recent. Anything before the latter 19th century won’t work, but from there to a point within living memory, it can reap big rewards. You’ve surely heard laments along the lines of “If grand-dad had bought into Coca-Cola/AT&T/IBM early, our family would be rich.” Now it’s better than a complaint: it’s a strategy.
A variant of this has been a science fiction trope for a long time. Make a small deposit in the bank, travel ahead to the far future, and by the power of compound interest you’ll be fabulously wealthy. There are three ways this can fall apart. First, untended accounts have a strong likelihood of being deactivated, so unless you’re tediously dropping in every several years to keep the plate spinning, it may fall down and become worthless. Second, banks are not eternal institutions. You would need to be careful selecting one that exists both today and in the timeframe you’re visiting. Third, interest rates do not always, or even often, keep pace with inflation. Your deposit could lose real value, or gain much less than cashing out in gold might.
The right stock purchase, on the other hand, will outpace inflation. It’s not that stock investments are inherently better, but that the best stock investments are better than the best savings accounts. You, of course, will have the knowledge to make the best decisions. That beautiful stock certificate you’re handed in an 1890 brokerage house will turn to even more beautiful profits when you come home and sell.
Before you ask, no, almost nobody sells stock on actual paper certificates any longer, but no, that doesn’t mean the old paper is invalid. You’ll have to find the company’s current transfer agent and go through some tedious red tape, but they will accept old certificates.
There are caveats to observe. One is paradox-related: try to confirm that there are enough “missing” shares from a company’s early days before you buy into that company. Otherwise you could be fiddling fatally with corporate, and possibly broader economic, history. Another is more of an investment tip: try to pick a stock that won’t pay dividends. You want the value to remain in the shares themselves, not to be disbursed in payouts that will be at best complicated and at worst impossible for you to recapture.
And that is as much like an accountant as I need to sound for today, so I will change the subject.
Forward Thinking
So far I’ve spoken about using knowledge from your present to gain advantages in the past. This can work another way: using knowledge gained from the future for advantage in the present. I’ve shown caution before about traveling to the future, and while I maintain that caution, this is where visiting the future can reap huge gains.
The gambling scenario is familiar enough from that famous trilogy-length DeLorean commercial: get results of sporting events from the future; return to the present to wager on the sure things; profit obscenely! Reality is, by now predictably, more complicated.
Your big score risks creating a paradox, but in a new configuration. Your present won’t be undone by actions that changed the past. It’s your actions in the present which could give new shape to the future you visited, possibly bending it enough that it’s no longer that same future. The same timeline conservation principles will apply: events will try to shift in order to produce the same result. If they don’t, it will be a different future you visited, with the same chance of multiple iterations and the same risk that something nasty will happen to you so the timeline can finally straighten itself out.
My advice for avoiding this is to spread out your plays, betting with multiple books rather than one or two. Bankrupting someone who originally was going to stay in business is an obvious timeline failure mode, one you should work to avoid. Also, throw in a few losing bets here and there, so it doesn’t become clear what you’re doing. Following statistical trends is literally what keeps bookmakers solvent. Don’t take them for fools, because they’re not -- and they have ways of dealing with people who take them for fools.
The investment scenario is not as risky, as long as you aren’t looking for instant gratification. Make your well-informed investment today, and you’ll have handsome rewards waiting for you years or decades down the line. (On the reverse of the coin, you can note which components of your present-day portfolio you ought to sell, and when.) Again, one big score is more of a threat to timeline integrity than several scattered investments, but finding multiple companies destined for greatness is a tougher matter than finding multiple places to do your sports betting.
If you want those future gains now, though, you lose that simplicity. Yes, you can return to the future to cash out your investments, which probably gives you a lot of numbers in a computer that you can’t take back with you. You’ll need to convert your gains to something physical. The bank can pay you in bills, but bills with series dates a few decades in the future are going to get you in big trouble back home very quickly18.
What commodities will you be converting to and bringing back? This time, you’ll definitely know better than me, from on-site study. You’ll know whether gold or silver rose in price more slowly and thus will have greater conversion value in the present, or whether some other investment metal like platinum or palladium works better. You’ll know if any gemstones got cheap in the intervening years, the way pearls did a century-plus back. In fact, you’ll be looking out for any product that got much easier to produce or refine, to exploit their bargain prices against our full-freight pricing19.
There’s an underlying historical trend at work. As civilization advances20, the cost of commodities falls. The energy and resources available to produce them rise, as does the efficiency of the production process, mainly through machine work replacing human labor21. One thus may expect future commodities to be cheaper, relative to inflation and similar considerations, than today -- assuming a continued advance of civilization. If you find prices in the future you visit to be higher relative to the wealth of the society, you can reach a conclusion about the state of that civilization, though you will likely only be confirming what you can see in other ways.
Are there things other than fungible commodities you can bring back from the future for profit? Technology is an obvious no, a sure way to upset the timeline -- at least if it gets into circulation. If you can find an eccentric, well-heeled collector who will buy it just for the personal pleasure of possessing it, that is a different matter.
This scheme extends into other areas: arts, literature, being the first owner of a Mars rock decades before the first mission brings any back. It is strongly limited, though, by how few collectors that rich and that discreet exist, and the difficulties of getting in contact with them and convincing them your wares are genuine. It’s a chancy play, at least if you’re guessing at what they would like. Soliciting orders from them that you can fulfill would be harder to arrange, but would offer surer profits for what you bring back.
This works similarly for medicines and therapies, the equivalent of the erectile drugs you took back to Rome. Buyers will exist for treatments that dissolve tumors, fortify fragile blood vessels, or reverse dementia, but keeping those results secret in our increasingly intrusive data-driven society will pose steep challenges. You might be better off reserving those treatments for yourself … and family members … and a few close friends … and you see how quickly things that need to stay hidden could be exposed.
England, By the Book
Returning profit items from Tudor England is probably a more limited opportunity than for Augustan Rome. Artworks, crafts, and coins won’t have as much accumulation of age to raise their values as collector’s items, though there would be less need to bury them so they age properly. You might get some interest in genuine period clothing, but the gains won’t be that great, and the items are bulky. Your best prospects for profit likely center upon one man -- and I don’t mean Henry VIII.
A recording of a Shakespeare play performed at the Globe Theater would be a treasure, but making money from it runs hard into the underground nature of time travel. You’re back to a handful of rich, obsessed, and hopefully discreet collectors as your market. It won’t even be much good as a historical resource for scholars. You might be better off keeping it to enjoy yourself.
A more tantalizing opportunity would be discovering one of Shakespeare’s lost plays. Will doesn’t have remotely the problems that Sophocles or Aeschylus does, but a couple of his works did vanish from the record, and several others have been at least apocryphally attributed to him. You’ll be in a position to check the latter for genuineness, but beware of alternative titles. You might come back trumpeting the discovery of What You Will and All Is True, only to find we already know them as Twelfth Night and Henry VIII.
One lost play that could also fit that category is Love’s Labour’s Won. The title is found in two documents of the era, one indicating that the play was already available in book form in 1603. If you visit the right period bookseller and find the volume, or happen upon a stage production, you could discover a true lost play, or that Love’s Labour’s Won was an alternative title or subtitle to a known work22. You might instead not find what is actually a mere phantom, a misapprehension or mistake put down in writing.
Your remaining prospect for hidden Shakespearean gold, one we are sure did exist, is Cardenio. This play, one of his late-life collaborations with John Fletcher, appears to be drawn from an episode in Don Quixote, which had only recently reached England’s shores23. No copy of the play has reached us: an obscure 18th-century play reportedly based on Cardenio is as close as we have. If you can find a contemporary copy, or if you can record the play being performed, you’ll have hit a jackpot that probably exceeds anything Aristophanes could provide you. Be sure to extend your search several decades ahead of the estimated 1613 production date, to raise your chances of finding a printed copy24.
You’ll want to do likewise for another Shakespearean reason, maybe the best profit opportunity he provides. Arrive in London seven years after his death, and you’ll be able to purchase a copy of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, known to us today as the First Folio. Best estimates say about 750 were published, with a third of them still known to exist. This collection of plays will cost you one pound in 1623: today, copies of the book sell for millions of dollars. It might need some arranged aging to pass authentication, but for that return on investment, it’s worth the effort.
A few other volumes might be worth similar exertions. The original printing of the King James Version of the Bible was issued in 1611, and a copy in fine condition will fetch fine sums. Earlier translations extant in Elizabethan England, like the Bishops’ Bible and the Geneva Bible, will find some appreciation, but it will be limited. Between a version that circulated for a couple decades, and the one that held sway for three or four centuries, the choice is rather clear.
War Profits
I’ll be brief: a genuine period samurai outfit would be an awesome sale item. The only thing bigger than your profit would be the difficulty of getting it away from the samurai25.
There is a related item that should be much more acquirable. Swords were an important export item for Sengoku Japan. They’ll have the willingness and the inventory to sell some to you. Quality might be a sticking point: mass-exported swords are likely to be functional tools first, and exquisite craftwork far down the list, if not off it entirely. You may need to negotiate for the top-flight weapons, or perhaps just commission one or more to be made for you. That would be an investment of time, but the profit from a modern collector should repay it.
Other Japanese crafts and arts have strong potential as instant antiques. Decorated silk screens and lacquerware were notable exports in earlier centuries, and they have likely retained a qualitative edge the way their weapons have. Pottery won’t be a good choice. Its quality in Japan only rose around the end of the 16th century, when the Japanese brought over some artisans from Korea -- as slaves captured during an otherwise failed invasion.
If you want more practical goods, there are always precious metals. Japanese mining had developed enough by this period that gold, silver, and copper were important exports. They can spare some for you, and by now you know to prefer the gold over silver.
Footnotes:
It’s just as conveniently compact for them as for you, and just as pretty.
This nefarious practice was shaving off the edges of coins, to get scrap gold or silver while leaving you able to pass the coin at face value to some unsuspecting victim. This is why many later coins have milled, reeded, or otherwise decorated edges: so you can tell if it’s been given a trim.
For the best metal conversion rates, try to get your trip in before the late 1870’s. The early to mid-1860’s are especially favorable: the American Civil War really distorted the markets.
Once upon a time, gold (and silver) certificates were conveniently portable notes that represented money. You could take one to a bank to redeem it for real money, meaning gold (and silver) coinage. We have moved far beyond that, past bills as money to numbers in a computer as money.
Wood painting wasn't merely a Roman method: Leonardo da Vinci painted Mona Lisa on wood, not canvas.
One method involves how ceramics absorb water over time. Weigh the item, heat out the combined water, re-weigh it, then measure its reabsorption rate for several days, and you can calculate how long it’s existed since originally fired.
Avoiding witnesses also strongly implies that you’ll want to do your burying at night. Arrange for a moonlit night if possible, so you won’t need to use artificial lighting that could give you away. If you’re using a modern lighting source for your digging, you face a compounded hazard.
Blame inflation.
Either one.
Or if your Attic Greek is nothing to speak of.
Which, among much else, is why we recognize the word “catharsis.”
Scattered surviving excerpts were a tantalizing hint at his ability, and at how well his work had survived into Rome’s Golden Age. “Iacta alea est,” Julius Caesar’s famed declaration that “the die is cast” as he crossed the Rubicon, was a quotation from Menander.
These further losses include Greek Terms of Abuse and Lives of Famous Whores. Suetonius seems a lot less dry now, doesn’t he?
Unless that modern eye hopped into a time machine and read them first. You’ll see soon why I recommend you don’t let them do that.
I venture that Nero figured prominently in the text.
They probably will be inferior. Chefs and vintners have to have learned a few new tricks in two thousand years.
Besides, any significant bet you made would lower those odds.
This assumes there aren’t more blatant changes to the paper currency. Harriet Tubman on the $20, or Franklin Roosevelt on the $1000, won’t pass even the most inattentive contemporary glance.
One of the great historic examples is aluminum, once almost impossible to produce in pure form. In the mid-19th century it was ludicrously expensive, but improved chemical and electrolytic processes would eventually turn it tremendously cheap. To an 1860 person, wrapping leftovers in aluminum foil would be akin to using gold leaf as scrap paper, a sign of an immensely and ostentatiously rich society.
Really as technology advances, but the two are closely bound.
You do then need to factor in the cost of building and maintaining those machines, but it still works out in favor of cheaper goods.
Scholars posit The Taming of the Shrew and All’s Well That Ends Well as possibilities for the alternative identity.
Historical irony: Shakespeare and Cervantes, arguably the two greatest writers of their era, had the same death date, April 23, 1616. However, England was still using the Julian calendar, so Cervantes actually died ten days before the Bard. That chapter on measuring time wasn’t such a waste, now was it?
Your best shot may be 1664, as a collection of his plays published that year included Cardenio.
I cannot top that line, and I’m tempted not even to try, but you deserve more for your money than witty zingers.
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