The Value of a Ransom
It's been awhile, but I'm still slogging through rewrites. I'm making my final pass through part 1 and cleaning up all the fun worldbuilding details I've left for myself.
Yesterday, I came across a comment I wrote years ago that threw me into the world of currencies. I had to figure out how much bread costs versus a bracelet, and how much a legionary makes a year and the value of a nomadic horselord being offered for ransom.
When writing the first draft, I left these kinds of details until later and focused on the story. Now I have to make all of those amounts make sense together.
For example, in setting the ransom to be split among 80 soldiers, I threw in the amount of 100 talents. It seemed like a good round number. Since I'm basing the currency of my empire (very loosely) on Roman coinage, I looked up how much a legionary would make in single year. 1,200 sesterce or 400 denarii.
If you split 100 talents by 80, each soldier would receive 375,000 sesterce (or 93,750 denars*). That's the equivalent of 234 years of their base salary. If I gave them that much, there would be no one left in chapter two, because all the soldiers would desert to buy private islands.
After cutting and halving and rehalving the amount, the final value of the ransom is 2 talents. That still gives them the equivalent of over six years of wages in one payout, but at least it's not making them richer than highkings and emperors. As I'm writing this, maybe it should be 1 talent...
Somewhere, there's a bunch of soldiers screaming, "We can take more money!"
*Yes, I'm Anglicizing some Roman terms.
