Somewhere tonight a quizmaster is confidently explaining that Roman soldiers were paid in salt, and that this is why we earn a "salary". Half of the claim is solid: salarium really does come from sal, the Latin for salt. The other half — the legionary trudging home under a sack of seasoning — appears in no ancient source at all. It is one of history's most successful back-formations: a story invented, long after the fact, to explain a word — and it has proved as durable as the empire itself.
Salt genuinely mattered that much. Before refrigeration it was the only practical way to preserve meat and fish, which made it a strategic commodity everywhere. Rome itself grew up beside the salt pans at the mouth of the Tiber near Ostia, and one of the city's oldest highways, the Via Salaria — the Salt Road — carried the trade inland across the Apennines towards the Adriatic, predating almost everything else Rome built. Control of salt was worth fighting over long before anyone minted a coin. Centuries later the Roman statesman Cassiodorus could still observe that men might do without gold, but nobody could do without salt — which is why governments, spotting a commodity everyone must buy, have taxed it in every age.
What Pliny actually said
The entire ancient basis for the pay story is a passing remark by Pliny the Elder, who noted in his Natural History that the word salarium derived from salt. That is an etymology, not a payslip. What the record actually shows is that Roman soldiers received a stipendium in coin — Livy dates its introduction to 406 BC, during the long war with Veii — and by imperial times a legionary's pay arrived in instalments through the year, with deductions itemised for food, boots and equipment. Surviving pay records from the provinces show money in and money out; none show salt. In imperial usage, salarium generally meant the allowance paid to officials and senior officers — again in cash. Nor would paying in salt have made sense: around Rome salt was cheap and heavy, and a wage you must cart to market before you can spend it is a bad wage. The most historians will allow is that salarium may have begun as an allowance for buying salt, or simply as a metaphor — the money that keeps a man in salt. Rome certainly taxed the stuff, though: tradition says Marcus Livius earned the mocking cognomen Salinator, "the salter", after an unpopular salt levy during his censorship in 204 BC. And "not worth his salt", so often dressed in a toga, is an English phrase first recorded only in the modern era.
Where salt really was money
The irony is that salt has served as genuine currency — just not in Rome. In Ethiopia, bars of rock salt called amole, cut in the Danakil Depression, circulated as money into the twentieth century. Saharan caravans hauled slabs of salt south to the markets of Timbuktu, where medieval chroniclers claimed it traded for gold — sometimes, they said, weight for weight, an exchange rate modern historians file under travellers' exaggeration. Venice built a good part of its medieval wealth on a state salt monopoly, and when Moscow's rulers hiked the salt duty, the city answered with the Salt Riot of 1648. Imperial China ran state salt monopolies for two millennia, and the court argument recorded in the Discourses on Salt and Iron in 81 BC remains a classic of economic debate; in some later dynasties salt duties supplied a hefty share of the imperial revenue. France's salt tax, the gabelle, was so unequal and so loathed that it fed the grievances of 1789 — smugglers of untaxed salt could be sent to the galleys — and it was not finally abolished until after the Second World War. Salt even shook an empire in living memory: in the spring of 1930 Gandhi walked roughly 240 miles in 24 days, from his ashram at Sabarmati to the beach at Dandi, to pick up a handful of untaxed salt in defiance of the British monopoly; tens of thousands of Indians, Gandhi included, were arrested in the campaign that followed. The word itself is everywhere once you look: salad, sauce, salsa, sausage and salami all descend from sal, Salzburg means "salt castle", and Hallstatt, an Austrian salt-mining village, gave its name to an entire Iron Age culture, while England's Nantwich, Northwich and Droitwich all take the old suffix for a salt-working town.
So the etymology is true and the anecdote is not. The legionary paid in salt never existed — but the wage he supposedly earned survives in every payslip on earth.
Quiz nuggets
- "Salary" derives from the Latin salarium, a word Pliny the Elder connected to sal, salt.
- Roman soldiers were actually paid a cash stipendium, which Livy dates to 406 BC.
- The Via Salaria, the "Salt Road", is one of the oldest Roman highways, named for the salt trade.
- Ethiopian amole salt bars circulated as currency into the twentieth century.
- Gandhi's 1930 Salt March covered roughly 240 miles from Sabarmati to Dandi in 24 days.