Is an ancient charioteer the best paid sportsperson of all time?

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. So, we can now listen to your podcast. wages, sponsorship and shoe deals. Even lowly cricketers are starting to drive flashy cars. But is there a chance that the sports superstars of today could be overshadowed by one who's been dead for nearly 2,000 years? Loyal listener Jane Bellingham got in touch to ask this very question after she heard journalist Charlotte Higgins and ancient history professor Mary Beard discussing Roman chariot racing on their podcast, Instant Classics. He's a guy who's from the Spanish peninsula and his name is Gaius Apuleius Diocles. His total prize money was 35,000 and something sestases. And people claim that this guy, Diocles, throughout the history of the planet, is the sports person who has won the most prize money ever. So it is Dream on Ronaldo. Wow. But wait a second. I'm pretty sure Cristiano Ronaldo isn't paid incestacies. So how was anyone able to make the comparison in the first place? Well in 2010 an academic in America made a calculation and decided that Diocles career winnings amounted to a cool billion And that a figure that stuck But is it a figure we should have confidence in? Chariot racing was hugely dangerous. You had to race up and down a track in Rome that was over half a kilometre long with terribly tight corners. and charioteers and their chariots and horses came to grieve very often on those corners. That is, of course, Professor Mary Beard. We went to her to find out a bit more about money in the ancient world, but also chariot racing. It is absolutely clear that this was the mass sport. You might have been able, on a generous estimate, you might have been able to fit a quarter of a million people into the Circus Maximus, we get some idea of what big prize money is. You know, you could get 60,000 sestases for a big race. You could get less if you came second or third. You could get less if it was a smaller race. But it's clear that there were, and Diocles is only one, there were superstar charioteers who were both fantastic celebs, you know, have poems written about them, and also became very wealthy. Now Professor Beard told listeners of Instant Classics that Diocles had earned a total of 35,000 sestases in prize money over the course of his career. Given I know almost no Latin, I'm slightly nervous to correct her, so I'll let her do it herself. Yeah, I am going to fess up here. I did fess up on the show notes of the podcast. The real answer is that it was over 35 million sestases. What I managed to say on the pod was that it was 35,000 sestases, which is kind of different. OK, so the academic Peter Strzok back in 2010 took that number of 35 million sestases and he converted it into a modern equivalent of $15 billion. Now, he did it in quite an interesting way. He said that that £35 million is enough to pay all of the ordinary soldiers of the Roman army at the height of its imperial reach for a fifth of a year. Then, to get the modern equivalent, he's substituted in the American army, taking the amount of costs to pay the wages of all the American armed forces for the same period. And that got him to $15 billion. Some people have pointed out some problems So yeah I mean the United States Army is you know in 2010 was one and a half million people Do we know the size of the Roman Army We have a reasonable idea that there were something like 140,000 legionaries. And when we think about the Roman Army, what we think of is legionary soldiers. You probably have to double that in the end if you want to include all the troops of the Roman army. Now, because they're also not just legionary soldiers, there are auxiliary soldiers too. So problem one. The US army is much bigger than the Roman army. Even if you say the Roman army was touching 300,000, that's still dwarfed by the US armed forces 1.5 million. The cost of paying these two armies for the same period of time are clearly not going to be analogous. But there's a more fundamental problem here. Even if the armies were exactly the same size, there's no guarantee that a soldier then would cost the same as a soldier now. The problem is that, and this is what you get whenever you talk quite reasonably, whenever you talk about someone like Diocles or whenever you talk about costs in Rome, And people say, well, what is that? What is that in modern money? Money buys different things. Different things are differentially expensive in the ancient and modern world. We're talking about an economy 2000 years ago. It looks very, very different. It is just very different. So the lovely back of the envelope kind of calculations saying, oh, well, that would be about this percentage of the US army and therefore divide it by whatever. and you get a figure, you know, I would feel hesitant to use the word meaningless, but I think it's pretty close to meaningless. What really complicates these kind of very long-run comparisons is economic growth. The overall size of the economy and income per head has advanced a lot quicker than prices over the centuries. This means you can only really understand someone's wealth within the context of the economy they're in. If you try and translate the wealth of a very rich person 2,000 years ago to today, you just can't get a sensible answer. Ultimately, the best thing to do is to put the wealth of individuals into the context of their own age. And when we do... 35 million sestases, let's say it's a vast sum of money. I mean I can give you some pretty fixed ideas of getting a bit of hang of that which is that if you were a senator in Rome and that is the super rich you had to have a total wealth of a million sestases to qualify. What you have with Diocles is someone who has won as prize money 35 million. So some senators would have had more wealth than that. But he's won over the complete fortune of more than 30 senators. Is he one of the mega rich of his day? He is one of the mega rich and there will be mega rich senators and maybe others in the Roman Empire who have more wealth. Don't know what their annual income is, more wealth than Diocles, but not all that many. I mean, I think we really are at the top of the upper rate tax band here. I'm sorry to spoil the fun but you can't really include Gaius Apollaeus Diocles on a list of the world's richest sports people and certainly not with a $15 billion number attached to him So those figures who often find themselves on the top of those sporting rich lists Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods Cristiano Ronaldo they can rest easy for the moment Our thanks to Professor Mary Beard from the University of Cambridge. If you have any questions or comments, please get into chat more or less at bbc.co.uk. We'll be back next time. And until then, goodbye. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. 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