Talent (weight)

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A talent is an ancient unit of mass. It corresponded generally to the mass of water in the volume of an amphora, i.e. a one foot cube. The word comes from the Ancient Greek for carrying, since it was roughly the amount of weight that a soldier could march with on his back. (Cf. Roman weights.)

The Babylonians and Sumerians had a system in which there were 60 shekels in a mina and 60 minas in a talent (in Ancient Greece one talent = 26 kg of silver). The Roman talent consisted of 100 libra (pounds) which were smaller in magnitude than the mina.

When used as a measure of money, it refers to a talent-weight of gold or of silver. The gold talent is reported as weighing roughly the same as a person, and so perhaps 50 kg (110 lb avoirdupois). Some authorities state, more precisely, that the talent typically weighed about 33 kg (75 lb) varying from 20 to 40 kg. As of 2005 the international price of gold is about US$465 per troy ounce, i.e. about $15 per gram. At this price, a talent (33 kg) would be worth about $500,000. Similarly, at the 2005 price of about $7.60/troy ounce or 25 cents/gram, a 26 kg silver talent would be worth about $6,500. Thus when we read that King Auletes of Egypt paid Gaius Julius Caesar the sum of 6,000 talents of gold to grant him the status of a "Friend and Ally of the Roman People," the amount paid, in modern equivalency, was about $3 billion USD. However, these estimates, based on modern values, are only rough values. Note that the value of silver in comparison to gold drastically changed with the output of the Spanish silvermines in the New World, while in ancient times the same amount of silver was often worth more than gold. The estimates do not account for the less technical mining ability of the time, nor that there were still native deposits available. Later in Roman history, during the medieval Byzantine period, the emperor Basil II was said to have stockpiled the legendary amount of 200,000 talents of gold, which in modern terms would be worth approximately $100 billion USD. At any rate, he did save enough money that the Byzantine government was able to remit all taxes paid during the final two years of his reign.^{[citation needed]}

During the Peloponnesian war in Ancient Greece, a talent was the amount of silver needed to pay the crew of a trireme for one month. Hellenistic mercenaries were commonly paid one drachma for every day of service, which was a good salary in the post-Alexander (III) days. 6,000 drachma made a talent.

The talent as a unit of coinage is mentioned in the New Testament in Jesus's parable of the talents, but it is not clear (or important) exactly what quantity of money is implied; the important point in the parable is that even one talent was a very large sum.