Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great

A Note on Units of Measure

This book includes a mixture of ancient and modern units of measure. For the sake of convenience, modern units are used when they were more or less similar to their ancient counterparts (e.g., feet, hours, months). Verisimilitude has been served by including a number of antique units that are common in the relevant historical sources. Most prominent here are the stade, a Greek unit of distance approximately equivalent to 600 modern feet (and from which our word stadium is derived), and the parasang, a Persian unit equivalent to the distance a person could walk in an hour. On average the latter equaled 30 Greek stadia or three-and-a-quarter modern miles. An army of the time could cover about six parasangs in a day.

The common monetary unit is the Athenian drachma, which is equivalent in value to six obols. The superordinate units are the mina, worth 100 drachmas, and the talent, equaling 6000 drachmas. The daric is a common non-Greek unit of currency- a gold coin minted by the Persians worth about 26 drachmas.

We know that a decent house in a suburb of Athens in the fourth century BC would set the buyer back 500 to 1000 drachmas (or five to ten minas); a gallon of olive oil, more than three drachmas; a good pair of shoes, about ten drachmas; a healthy slave, 300 to 500. Still, for various reasons, expressing the value of a drachma in today’s currency is not as straightforward as finding modern equivalents for, say, distance. According to an oft-cited rule of thumb, the wage for the average laborer in classical Athens was one or two drachmas a day. A talent, therefore, works out to the equivalent of almost twenty years of work, or in modern terms something like a million dollars. The treasury of 120,000 talents Alexander is said to have plundered at Persepolis (cf. Curtius, 5.6.9) was therefore equivalent to some 720 million man-days of labor. This amounts to “real money” even in US government terms.

As for the calendar, the reader will notice there are no absolute dates given for the events depicted here. This is due to the simple fact that no universal calendar existed until recent times (and arguably, does not exist even today, given that the Chinese, Muslim, and Jewish calendars are still in use). Instead, years were designated either by counting the years since some important event, or on the basis of who held important magistracies at that time (in Athens, years were named for the so-called “eponymous” archons; Alexander, for instance, was born in the year of Elpines’ archonship, known otherwise as July 356-June 355 BCE). The court case described here takes place in the month of Pyanopsion (the Attic equivalent of October), in the year of Kephisodoros (323 BCE); the events recounted in the trial occur in the years immediately before and during the campaign of Alexander, spring 334 through spring 323.