Were Roman Soldiers Paid in Salt?

I am always amazed that the average American is seemingly incapable of comprehending the culinary complexities of the British staple food of beans on toast.

Beans on toast (and they are always 'on', never 'and') is the sort of thing that your Mum used to make for you when you got home from school to keep you going before 'tea' was ready at about 6. And yet the very notion of this simple snack, which consists of baked beans and ... well ... toast, can still render an American dumbfounded. It's as if they have been presented with lightly braised narwhal hooves served on a bed of whipped ectoplasm, topped with a honey and fairy-wing jus.

If you're an American and you are struggling to understand what beans on toast are, let me help you out. Baked beans are baked beans - the same baked beans that you can buy from the baked bean section of your local supermarket, normally sold in cans marked 'baked beans'. Toast is toast, made from bread that has been toasted. Perhaps in a toaster oven.

I dunno what else to tell you. You can add cheese if you like. You can add whatever you want, to be honest. You're eating it.

If you are still struggling with the mind-scrambling combination of beans and bread (and perhaps cheese), imagine a burrito, which is a food that contains beans and bread (and cheese). Beans on toast is like a burrito but slightly less 'pretend Mexican.'

This brings us to another meme that Americans have about British food: spices. It is a strange notion among Americans that the British don't eat spiced food. Well, as a Briton living in America, let me put you straight. British people eat almost nothing without spices. British people not only eat spicy food, but the world's most popular curry, the chicken tikka masala, and its second, the chicken balti, are both inventions of British cuisine by British chefs (of Asian origin), in Britain, for British tastes. Britons consume more spices per head (1.09kg) than Americans (1.06kg) (Source - Spice Consumption Per Capita | Helgi Library)

There are many reasons why Americans find it such a sport to poke fun at British food, many of which I suspect are related to America's constant struggle to find a distinct cultural identity from the rest of the world. This is a long and complicated subject for another day, but suffice it to say that if you shout long and hard enough about how awful someone else is, nobody notices how awful you are, and when it comes to food, America is a ghastly place.

Again, Americans will jump up at this point and cry out "But you haven't tried....!"

I have tried it. I live in Texas. I'm sorry, but your food is awful. The principal difference between American food and, say, European food is that European food is a vehicle for a sauce. American sauce is a vehicle for food. In France, chicken tastes like chicken. In Texas, chicken tastes like barbecue sauce. The overwhelming background taste of all American food is sugar and salt, and these are the reasons that, when they visit Europe, they have to bring along little jars of "'Ole Bob's Seasoning Mix", because their tastebuds have been scoured flat by a lifetime of eating chicken that has been served to them containing enough salt to stun a bull elephant.

Somebody once described America as: "They sell you a dream, but everyone's desperate and the food tastes of sugar." I have been hard-pressed to sum up what is, otherwise, a perfectly adequate country more succinctly.

Which brings us to the question of salt and its place in Roman history. Everyone knows, or thinks they know, that Roman soldiers were paid part of their annual wage in salt and this is where we get the word 'salary' from.

Is this true, however? Does the word 'salary' come from the Latin for 'salt'?

Yes. It does.

Were Roman soldiers paid part of their salary in salt?

No. They weren't. Let's take a deeper look.

Visit Wikipedia's page on the History of Salt (History of salt - Wikipedia_ and it contains the line "The word "salary" comes from the Latin word for salt because the Roman Legions were sometimes paid in salt. They say the soldiers who did their job well were "worth their salt." This comes with some handy citations that you can click on, but we have to bear in mind that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and thereby, all it does is collect together things other people say. It offers no discussion of the accuracy of the claims made elsewhere and simply repeats them.

There is not one single piece of evidence anywhere in ancient history that Roman soldiers were ever paid in salt.

The entirety of this myth seems to come purely from the link between the English word 'salary' and the Latin word 'salarium', meaning 'an allowance'. The problem here is that there is no satisfactory explanation of why the word 'salarium', which is derived from the adjective salarius ‘pertaining to salt’, came to be used to describe an allowance, and so, people being what they are, they just filled in the blanks.

If we go back to our old friend Wikipedia, their page on the word 'Salary' (Salary - Wikipedia), although it has been updated somewhat to point out the reality over the myth, still contains the line "This link goes back to the Roman historian Pliny the Elder, who stated as an aside in his Natural History's discussion of sea water, that "[I]n Rome. . .the soldier's pay was originally salt and the word salary derives from it..."

The problem is that Pliny says nothing of the sort, and the link provided on the Wiki page (which, unhelpfully, is in Latin) will take you to Book 31.89 of Natural History, where Pliny says:

"honoribus etiam militiaeque interponitur salariis inde dictis ..."

or

"[salt] is also related to magistracies and duty abroad, and that's where we get the word 'salaries' ..."

He's talking about a tax on the sale of salt, not a wage.

Elsewhere, we can also see evidence of the interaction between salt and money, but only in the form of taxation. Here, Livy tells us about introducing a salt tax around 204 BC.

"vectigal etiam novum ex salaria annona statuerunt. sextante sal et Romae et per totam Italiam erat; Romae pretio eodem, pluris in foris et conciliabulis et alio alibi pretio praebendum locaverunt. id vectigal commentum alterum ex censoribus satis credebant ... inde Salinatori Livio inditum cognomen."

"... also imposed a new tax on the annual salt production. Salt cost a sixth of an as in Rome and throughout Italy; they set it to be offered at the same price in Rome, but more in town squares and marketplaces and at other rates in other places. It was widely believed that just one of the two censors devised this tax ... As a result [the censor] Marcus Livius was given the nickname ‘salt-dealer'.

(29.37.3)

Although Wikipedia does try to clarify the mistranslation somewhat, it doesn't remove it or flag it clearly as being wrong. If you were looking for a source that mentions salt as a salary, all you have to do is read as far as the fake Pliny quote and then stop right there.

And that, broadly, is where the trail runs cold. There is no other evidence anywhere that soldiers were ever given a portion of their wages in salt. They were certainly given a ration of salt, but all soldiers were expected to pay for their own upkeep, and salt would have been charged for just like everything else they ate.

That's not to say that salt wasn't then and hasn't been since a valuable commodity and one that could be used for trading, but that doesn't make it a salary in any particular understanding of that term. Could soldiers have swapped some of the salt they bought for other things? For sure. But, again, that doesn't make it a part of their salary.

There are even other cultures that supposedly paid their soldiers in some form of salt. American soldiers in the War of 1812 were supposedly paid some of their salary in brine, again a claim repeated on the History of Salt Wiki page, this time with no citation at all and one that doesn't appear to have even a shred of evidence.

There is a secondary arm of the myth relating to 'salt money' or money that was paid to soldiers deliberately so they could purchase salt, which not only has no sensible evidence to back it up but defies common sense. Why would you give a soldier a specific section of his pay to buy a named item? Why not just order them to purchase the item from their primary salary?

The term for this money, 'salarium argentum', appears nowhere in any original source until Victorian dictionary writers simply plucked it out of thin air in an attempt to justify the whole 'salary' myth. The phrase is inferred purely because there are other known terms in Latin, such as "vestiarium" for "clothing money."

As we touched upon earlier, the problem is that the word "salarium" is related to salt and does, broadly, mean "salt money", at least in the context used here. Whilst it is clearly referring to money raised on the taxation of salt, how did it come to be used to define wages? There is no satisfactory explanation, but perhaps the most obvious is that it's a slang term.

When I was a younger chap, and my entire world revolved around the weekend, whatever I used to earn fell into two categories - money that had to be used to pay for the things I couldn't avoid, like rent, transport, food and heating and the rest fell under the general term of "beer money" or money that I could use to go out and have a good time with, once I had fulfilled all my other financial responsibilities. No such thing as saving when you're nineteen, right? Salt is an important part of the diet, but unless you are American, huge quantities of it are something of a luxury, and thus, maybe, a Roman soldier's "salt money" was not the portion of his pay that was delivered to him in salt, but the portion of his wages that were left over for other, more frivolous things - the finer things in life beyond oats and olive oil.

References and Further Reading:

Pliny, Natural History

Livy, Histories