Roman silver coin

Usage examples of sesterce.

That Oppianicus had ended in being convicted was due to the avarice of his appointed briber, the same Gaius Aelius Staienus who had proven so useful to Pompey a few years earlier-and kept ninety thousand sesterces for himself when Gaius Antonius Hybrida had hired him to bribe nine tribunes of the plebs.

Though the denarius was a more common coin in circulation than the sestertius, Roman accounting procedures were always expressed in sesterces.

The one-in-eight plated silver denarius issue of Marcus Livius Drusus had given everyone an extreme mistrust of coined money, and too many sesterces were minted in an attempt to get around this difficulty.

Here of course there was no need to collect the money, a sesterce or two, in advance, but one of the toadfeced bodyguards should have hulked at the entrance to prevent jostling and to jerk out of the crib any soldier who made excessive demands on the whore or her time.

Silius told us his compensation as the accuser was assessed at a million and a quarter sesterces.

A family could buy a whole modius of wheat, enough for a week of meals, for just three denarii, and a whole congius of fairly palatable wine for a single sesterce.

Speciality of the day was intended to be granting M Didius Falco the gold ring: four hundred thousand sesterces and promotion to the middle rank.

His last conscious act had been to break a fluorspar wine-dipper, worth three hundred thousand sesterces, which the emperor had been expecting to inherit.

His last conscious act had been to break a fluorspar wine-dipper, worth three hundred thousand sesterces, which the Emperor had been expecting to inherit.

That Oppianicus had ended in being convicted was due to the avarice of his appointed briber, the same Gaius Aelius Staienus who had proven so useful to Pompey a few years earlier-and kept ninety thousand sesterces for himself when Gaius Antonius Hybrida had hired him to bribe nine tribunes of the plebs.

With a scrubwoman, a cook and two manservants thrown in, the price is five hundred sesterces a month.

His purpose was to collect some forty million sesterces Auletes owed a consortium of Roman bankers, chief of whom was Rabirius.

Leaving out the extra money their centurions would cost, that was three hundred million sesterces.

For a few sesterces a day they guarantee to turn the sons of impecunious but social-climbing Third or Fourth Classers into lawyers, who then solicit business tirelessly up and down the Forum, preying upon our gullible but litigious-minded populace.

Clodius was not about to forgive Lucullus for those months of footslogging and living hard, even when his own share of the booty came in at a hundred thousand sesterces.