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> No one needs 4 liters of salt per week

Back in the day people used a lot more salt than we do.[0]

Before refrigeration, salting (brining) was the primary method of preserving meat and fish in damp climates. Salt was used to treat olives for consumption. Butter and cheese were stored in barrels surrounded by layers of salt to prevent spoilage. Soft cheeses like feta were often brined as well. Salt was used to cure hides for leathermaking. Salt was used in cloth dyeing. There are probably other uses that haven't sprung to mind immediately.

Note that these things are home production if the soldier has a farm, and a soldier's family would have been six people or so.

Maybe they could make do with less than 200 liters a year. If they were economical with it.

> where would all that salt come from?

Salt mines. The Austrian city Salzburg is called that because of the salt mines there. Hallstatt had salt mines from prehistoric times, and in the modern day several dead prehistoric miners have been recovered from the mines. they were preserved by the salt.

The phrase "back to the salt mines", meaning returning to an arduous job, exists because salt mining was hard and dangerous. It was usually done by slaves or condemned criminals. If there were an easier way to get the salt that was needed, people would have used it.

0. Actually this probably isn't true. It's just that all the salt used in making the the products and services we consume is hidden from us in far-away factories. Ed Conway's book Material World has a couple of chapters on salt.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt

> Back in the day people used a lot more salt than we do.[0]

Nobody needed 4-10kg salt per day (what a semi-skilled labourer and above could supposedly afford by ~300AD). The cost of salt by volume was about the same as wheat. So it was very cheap. Due to the bulkininess it was one of the worst medium of exchange someone could imagine. Just try to imagine having to transport to all the places where the army was stationed in. Absurd..

> Before refrigeration, salting (brining) was the primary method of preserving meat and fish in damp climates. Salt was used to treat olives for consumption

Yes. Not something legionaries probably engaged that much themselves in. Also their diet (just like everyone else's) was mainly grain based.

> Maybe they could make do with less than 200 liters a year. If they were economical with it.

I don't think this claim can be substantiated at all.

It was 4 litres per week, not per day, and payments could have been made to the home/family of the soldier rather shipped out to them personally.

> It was 4 litres per week

I couldn't find soldier salaries for ~300 AD but for semi-skilled labourers by it might have been up to 7 liters per day. The 4 per week figures seems to be based by using salaries from the early to mid 200 and price from 300 AD which is probably inaccurate considering there was significant inflation in that period.

In any case as far as we can tell the price of salt by volume was equivalent to that of wheat. Soldiers couldn't have been paid the equivalent (in coins not salt) of 4 liters of wheat per week.

> have been made to the home/family of the soldier rather shipped out to them personally.

I doubt soldiers generally had families in living far away from where they were station and nobody paid them in salt anyway.

When is "back in the day?" It was my understanding that techniques like brining date to the early medieval days, and inventions like brining haring were what gave the Dutch a leg up in their expansion, long after Rome had fallen.

I'm not disagreeing with you entirely, I do agree that salt was an important preservate in Rome and before that, but maybe not to the extent that 4 litres per week would be practical for most people.

I don't know anything about Roman food preservation, nor about exact quantities.

I was making the points that before refrigeration, a lot more salt was used for food storage, and that salt has other major uses besides flavoring food or providing necessary physiological electrolyte. As Ed Conway writes, the production of some important industrial chemicals starts with salt.

I'm also not claiming that legionaries were literally paid in salt. I don't believe that would have been true after the very early Republic at the latest. Probably not after the first kings. The Roman genius for bureaucracy and record-keeping would have sorted out a more efficient payment system quite soon, I believe.

Crazy idea but maybe they got paid in coins (money), since money was widely used in Ancient Rome already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_(Roman_army)

A lot more practical than kilos of salt.

The centurions were only paid double what soldiers were during the Republic era. Interesting their pay jumped to up to 30x during the empire.

Becoming emperor and outliving the job are mostly dependent on the support of the army at that point, right? If so, it is not so surprising that the wages went way up…

Mainly for the officers though. Of course kind of makes sense considering conscription became a lot more common in the later periods.

Yeah that's what I figured. Julius Caesar marched on Rome with a hired army, then after his death Marc Antony and Octavian kept having to bribe their soldiers to fight and not switch side. Sounds like the army and leaders established an unhealthy precedent.

> in 235AD, a legionary was paid about 1350 denarii per year. > 301AD, price of salt was capped to 100 denarii for about 17 liters of

There was massive inflation (by premodern standards) during those 70 years. The price edicts also caps the wages of semi skilled labourers at 50 denarii per DAY. So an ordinary person could supposedly buy 10kg of salt every day (of course in reality it must have been more expensive but the income-cost ratio in the edict might still be semi accurate).

> If the numbers are correct, this is indeed completely unrealistic. No one needs 4 liters of salt per week [...]

Isn't the same true for pay in denarii? Based on what Wikipedia says about denarii those 1350 denarii per year would be just over 118 g of silver per week. No one needs 118 g of silver per week.

Which one is easier to carry and make use of?

118g of silver which can easily be traded with just about anyone for anything.

Or 4800g of salt, which has a low liquidity and can be consumed (at ~20g max/day) or used to preserve foods.

> Which one is easier to carry and make use of?

Silver, of course. The comment I was responding to made that point and other great points against salt as pay all of which I agree with.

But it also asserted that salt would not be good pay because the amount of salt in a week's pay would be more salt than you need. My point is that one specific point of their argument is wrong. That's why in my reply I quoted that specific part of their argument and nothing else.

You need a variety of things to get by: food, water, shelter, clothes, and fuel for a few examples.

Unless you have a job where your pay consists of the employer actually giving you all those things you are going to want to trade your pay with others for those things. If the physical form your weekly pay takes is something that you actually use then it needs to be more than you use in a week so you will have some left over to trade for those other things.

Hence their argument that 4 liters of salt a week is more than you could personally use fails as an argument against salt as pay.

You're talking about 5kg/wk or 20kg/mo of an unwieldy, difficult to manage and carry, and hard to trade bulk item (which also has to be carried by the army logisticians to hand out) vs a compact and easily tradable item that can easily be converted into the former, if need be.

While you're correct that it's not impossible, it's logically backwards enough for us to say it probably didn't happen. And, to corroborate that, there are no historical accounts of the former beyond some colloquial offhanded remarks. I've seen family mention they're bringing home the bread before, are they being paid in bread?