How much was a denarius worth?

A day’s wage

The clearest price tag in the Gospels comes from a vineyard. Early in the morning the owner goes to the marketplace to hire workers.

When he had agreed with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard.

He hires more at nine, at noon and at three, and some at the eleventh hour, about five in the afternoon. At sunset everyone gets the same coin, and the dawn crew complains. The story works only because a denarius was what a day of hard labor normally earned.

Roman soldiers made less. Julius Caesar doubled the legions’ pay (Suetonius, Julius 26), to about 225 denarii a year, and in AD 14 mutinous legionaries in Pannonia complained, Tacitus says, that their bodies and souls were valued at ten asses a day (Annals 1.17), not even a full denarius.

The coin in Jesus’s hand

In his last week in Jerusalem, Jesus is asked whether it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar. He asks for the coin.

“Bring me a denarius, that I may see it.” They brought it. He said to them, “Whose is this image and inscription?” They said to him, “Caesar’s.”

The emperor in AD 30 was Tiberius, and his common silver denarius fits the scene. Around his laureate head runs the legend TI CAESAR DIVI AVG F AVGVSTVS, “Tiberius Caesar Augustus, son of the divine Augustus.” On the back sits a woman, usually identified as his mother, Livia. A portrait and a title calling the emperor the son of a god: the coin itself sharpened the question. Collectors call it the tribute penny, because the King James Version (1611) translates denarius as penny, and its vineyard workers earn “a penny a day.”

What a denarius bought

• Two denarii. What the good Samaritan leaves with the innkeeper for the wounded man’s keep (Luke 10:35).
• A hundred denarii. The debt the forgiven servant chokes out of a fellow servant, about four months’ pay (Matthew 18:28).
• Two hundred denarii. Bread for the crowd of five thousand, by the disciples’ reckoning, and still not enough (Mark 6:37; John 6:7).
• Three hundred denarii. The price of Mary’s jar of nard, a year’s wages poured out in one evening (John 12:5).
• A denarius for a choenix of wheat. The famine price cried out at the black horse (Revelation 6:6): a whole day’s work for roughly one adult’s daily grain. More in the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Small change and big sums

Mark explains the widow’s two tiny coins for Roman readers: two small brass coins “equal a quadrans coin” (Mark 12:42), and a quadrans was a sixty-fourth of a denarius. Up the scale, an as was a sixteenth and a sestertius a quarter. Greek coins circulated alongside: a drachma was worth about a denarius, so the two-drachma Temple tax cost two days’ pay (Matthew 17:24), and the stater found in the fish’s mouth paid it for two men (Matthew 17:27). At the top stood the talent, about 6,000 denarii. The servant in Matthew 18 owed ten thousand of them, sixty million denarii. For an older price in silver, see how much Joseph was sold for.

From denarius to dinero

Rome first struck the denarius around 211 BC, during the war with Hannibal. The name means “containing ten,” because it was first worth ten asses; later it was retariffed at sixteen. It stayed the workhorse of Roman silver for more than four centuries, slowly losing silver as emperors debased it. Its name outlived the empire. The Arab dinar, Spanish dinero, Italian denaro and Portuguese dinheiro all come from it, and until 1971 the British wrote pennies with a d, for denarius.