Inspired by my Easter tradition of watching the movie.
Here Are Some Incredible Things You Could Buy With 1,000 Talents
How would you like to be rich? I'm sure we all ask ourselves this question. Wouldn't it be amazing? But rich is just one thing. Rich, dare I say it, is a common thing. A modest estate worth just a single talent will put you in the bracket of "the rich" in Athens, and if you have the staff to work that land you'll never have to work another day in your life. It makes being rich sound almost pedestrian.
So let's ask the real question: how would you like to be ridiculously, out-of-this-world rich?
It's no fun to imagine what you might buy with a couple hundred drachmai, or even a talent (6,000 drachmai). Let's up the ante. Let's talk the kind of money that really makes the world go round. What could you buy with, say, a thousand talents?
1. The entire dockyards of Athens
Classical Athens was built on its navy. By the late 5th century, there were enough slipways and drydocks around the Peiraieus to house and maintain well over 300 triremes - and then the Spartan-backed oligarchs known as the Thirty sold it all for scrap. According to the orator Isokrates, the whole dockyard system had cost over a thousand talents to build, and the oligarchs sold it for three.
2. About 5,000 horses
Horses are the sports cars of the ancient world: the ultimate status symbol and plaything of the rich. A pile of lead tablets found in a pit on the Athenian agora has informed us about the price of a horse in the 4th century BC. These tablets were records issued at the annual review of the cavalry, in which each man's horse was assessed so that the city's loan on the purchase of the cavalry mount could be properly reimbursed. As it turns out, the highest price range of a cavalry horse - presumably representing the finest mounts in the prime of their life - was about 1,200 drachmai. That's 5 horses per talent, or 5,000 horses for the sum we're playing with here. Now you'll just need 5,000 trained men to ride them!
3. The walls of a large city
We rarely hear just how much it cost to build fortifications, but when we do get accounts, we learn that it was expensive. From inscriptions listing the amount of money raised for the construction of single towers, we can conclude that a tower might cost as much as a talent. From contributions to general fortification efforts, it has been estimated that the rebuilding of the walls of larger towns like Rhodos might have cost as much as 500 talents. With double the money, you might be able to provide even a major city like Athens or Syracuse with a comprehensive new system of defences.
4. A fleet of 110 brand-new triremes and their crew of 22,000 for an entire 8-month sailing season
How would you like to rule the seas? Your sum of 1,000 talents will get you most of the way there. At a Classical rate of about 1 talent per trireme, and a competitive wage of 1 drachma a day for its crew of 200 rowers, sailors and deck-fighters, some rough sums will show that you could afford to lay down fully 110 of these top-of-the-line warships and equip them with skilled crews for 8 whole months. Nobody wants to sail in winter, but it’s likely that your fleet will have gathered enough loot by that time to see you through to next year.
5. Salamis
It’s not exactly known how much land cost in Ancient Greece. There are some inscriptions that allow for estimates of about 800 to 1,200 drachmai per hectare. Taking this rate, a sum of a thousand talents would pay for a whopping 5,000 to 7,500 hectares of good arable land – an estate about the size of the entire usable land of an island like Salamis or Aegina. Set yourself up as a king of your own private island! Some Salaminians might not be too happy, but they can’t complain; their plots were merely a handout by the Athenian state, and your money will let them buy new plots wherever they want.
6. One tenth of the funeral pyre for Hephaistion
When we’re looking for big spenders in Antiquity, none can beat Alexander the Great. When his closest companion Hephaistion died at Babylon, Alexander allegedly built him a multi-tiered funeral pyre 80 meters in height, a gilded tower of Babel covered in gold statues and captured arms, laced with incense and fragrant oils. Large sections of the Babylonian city wall were torn down to provide the insane monument with a suitable foundation of smooth stone. The price tag: ten thousand talents. Alexander seems to have known no better way to honour his friend than to put this money to the torch.
So, Ben-Hur takes place in Judea. /u/Iphikrates gave an excellent answer about Greek coinage in general, but I'd like to add some region-specific terminology and information. Generally in Hebrew/Aramaic people would use older currency terms for their Greek equivalents, which were in common use. A talent was a kikkar, which was equal to 60 maneh. Both of these were older currency terms, which were used to refer to the standard Greek (and later Roman) coinage floating around. So even though they're in the bible, they were still used for later coinage. Of course some coinage terminology got dropped, and some got added in over time. The maneh was divided into 100 zuz, so a talent was equal to 6000 zuz. Hey, that's awfully coincidental, since /u/Iphikrates just said a talent was 6000 drachmae! A zuz was the equivalent of the drachma (and also the denarius, which is the same thing as a dinar but borrowed between languages). Four zuz made up a sela'.
Confusingly, because these were primarily units of weight, the same unit of weight could be used to refer to the value of that weight in different metals. Jewish texts from the period don't always specify what kind of money they're talking about, it's left to context, so you have to impute from different references of how much things cost that do specify to figure out what costs what. A silver dinar was worth about 1/24 or 1/25 of a gold dinar, depending on coinage debasement.
So, our protagonist here would have 6,000,000 zuz wagered, assuming he meant silver talents, which is likely because I think that's too much gold to even be comprehensible. To convert everything, that'd be something in the neighborhood of 240,000 gold dinars, or 1.5 million sela'im.
Possibly the best known reference to these ancient units of money is the Passover song (topical!) Chad Gadya, in which a goat is purchased for 2 zuz, so the wager could've bought a flock of three million goats. However, that song is much later than the period we're talking about, and zuz probably doesn't refer to the actual ancient coin, but is being used as a stand-in for a later currency. The second best known reference in Jewish texts to money is the value of the ketubah, which is the marriage contract in Jewish wedding ceremonies. In it, the bride is granted a lien on the husband's property that is payable in the event of divorce or his death. The traditional base value of that is 200 silver zuz (which people often convert into 100 goats when asked what 200 zuz is, but that's not accurate), though there are traditional add-ons, and in ancient times the value varied somewhat more, according to the couple's means. But it definitely was the sort of thing that could be the value of a ketubah. So, 1000 silver talents would be enough to pay a divorce settlement for 30,000 women. They probably should've negotiated for more. The other ritual context people might encounter ancient units of coinage in a Jewish context is the redemption of first-born sons, in which 5 sela'im is paid to a priest to redeem the son. 1000 talents could redeem 300,000 first-borns.
But those doesn't tell us much either, since absent context it's not clear how much those are supposed to be. Fortunately, other texts fill in more information. With all references in the Talmud, the exact date of the figure isn't really clear, but it at least gives some clue as to how much all this would be.
A gold dinar could buy a high-quality cloak. 1000 talents could buy 240k suits (which I will use as the modern analog, so I hope the winner of the bet has a big closet). A golden dinar could also be the price for a commercial rental, so 1000 talents would get you a lot of retail space. A pair of oxen to plow would be 1000 zuz, so 1000 talents would buy 12,000 oxen. Typical rent might be a sela' per month, so 1000 talents would get 1.5 million months' rent. If you wanted to buy a house, texts conflict somewhat, but you'd be looking in the few hundred to a thousand zuz range, so 1000 talents could buy a really unbelieveable amount of land.
Suffice it to say, it is an absurd amount of money. It's not really possible to convert things like this into a dollar figure, since the economy has changed so drastically. But suffice it to say this amount would probably be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.