(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

today, on absolutely meaningless comparisons:

Gaius Appuleius Diocles was a Roman charioteer, born in what is now Portugal. He was apparently very good at charioteering, and sometimes people call him "the highest-paid athlete of all time".

Now, modern day athletes can make a lot of money. If you look at that Wikipedia article, it mentions various comparisons for how much his winnings in 2nd century Roman sestertii would be in modern US dollars, including "roughly equivalent to US$7.3 million in 2019" (based on the price of wheat) and "worth between approximately $60 million and $160 million in equivalent basic goods purchasing power". If you click through to the highest-paid athletes article, you'll notice 160 million, while a lot, is not enough to compete with people like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, who've made over a billion dollars throughout their careers. No, Diocles' claim at being the best paid of all time is because of yet another comparison, landing at an astounding 15 billion equivalent USD.

How did they come up with that number? Well,

His total take home amounted to five times the earnings of the highest paid provincial governors over a similar period—enough to provide grain for the entire city of Rome for one year, or to pay all the ordinary soldiers of the Roman Army at the height of its imperial reach for a fifth of a year. By today’s standards that last figure, assuming the apt comparison is what it takes to pay the wages of the American armed forces for the same period, would cash out to about $15 billion.

source

Impeccable logic, I think we can all agree. It seems an incredible oversight that the standard basket of goods doesn't include "a month's worth of wages for the largest military force in the world".