Worth her salt
My current theatrical involvement is "Sylvia" by AR Gurney, and there's a line in it where someone says "any wife worth her salt can deal with that" (referring to an affair). Her salt? I know what the...
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Yep, the word salary itself comes from French salaire, Latin salarium, originally, salt money, the money given to the Roman soldiers for salt, which was a part of their pay.
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Were the Roman soldiers given money for salt or actually paid with salt? Somewhere I heard the latter. Up to some point or other in history, salt was considered more valuable than gold, on a weight...
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The guy on this board seems to know whereof he speaks, dh. (Much more there on Roman pay for the legionaries.)In the imperial army various kinds of people classed as salararii or salarati who recieved...
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The guy who wrote that (Sander Van Dorst) is highly respected, and meticulous in his research. The form and basis for salaria/-um is comparable to various terms relating to donatives, doles and...
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Whether or not salt may have been more valuable, per weight, than gold skirts a larger problem - salt does not do well when exposed to water. The logistics of actually distributing salt as pay would...
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You can get about 3 ounces of salt simply by evaporating a gallon of seawater. While it's possible that in some rare times and places (especially far inland) salt may have been more precious than...
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Perhaps that cite refers to exchange communities -- or times of dearth and drought -- in which gold had no practical use and thus negligible value as a commodity? Salt would of course have been...
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I try to envision a paymaster set up in an open field trying to hand out doses of salt to 10,000 grizzled soldiers as their pay and I find it absurd. Whether ancient Roman technology could deal with...
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What you describe and rightly demolish is the (mistaken) folk etymology. The troops always preferred coin, when coin was available, and were likely to mutiny if they didn't get it. Occasional payments...
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Perqs and bennies there were not.Yeah, but they did get to wear cool hats...
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This is from the online 1911 Britannica. "As covenants were ordinarily made over a sacrificial mehil, in which salt was a necessary element, the expression a covenant of salt (Numb. xviii. 19) is...
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