Caesar's will stipulated that 300 sesterces (= 75 denarii) were to be given to every member of the Roman plebs. This was not every single Roman citizen, but the freeborn citizens resident in Rome - i.e., something like 250,000 people. So the sum we're talking about here is on the order of 75,000,000 sesterces.

Our sources do not talk about how the money was distributed, though we do know that young Octavian had to scramble to raise it, mostly - it seems - by selling the estates he had inherited from Caesar.^(1) He probably shook down Caesar's wealthier freedmen as well. He seems to have raised the money fairly quickly, which is hardly surprising, since handing the money out as speedily as possible was critical for his political fortunes.

So how much money, relatively speaking, was 75 million sesterces?

At the risk of blowing your minds, a lot. To judge from stray notices in Pompeii and elsewhere, Roman laborers were paid between 1 and 4 sesterces (plus lunch!) for a day's work. Most Roman craftsmen - to give a wildly generalized estimate - probably made between 500 and 1000 each year. The Roman elite, of course, had much grander incomes. Cicero, with properties worth about 13,000,000 sesterces, was probably in the middle range of senatorial wealth. The famously wealthy Crassus was worth 200,000,000.^(2)

The great generals of the Late Republic were even richer; after one of his triumphs, Pompey distributed 384,000,000 sesterces among his soldiers and officers, and then gave an additional 200,000,000 to the state.^(3) Caesar piled up equally gargantuan sums after his conquest of Gaul. We have no precise numbers, but he reportedly spent no less than 100,000,000 sesterces just buying the land for his extension of the Roman Forum.^(4)

Caesar, in short, was obscenely wealthy, though we don't know how much he worth when he died. As in the case of most wealthy Romans, his wealth was invested largely in land (Octavian, recall, had to sell Caesar's estates to raise funds). At least some of it may have been in cash - Antony, we are told, kept a large sum for himself^(5) - and if this was so, the money was likely stored in some combination of silver denarii and gold bars.^(6)

As far as we can tell, the sudden infusion of 75 million sesterces did not cause significant inflation. Nor did any of Augustus' other massive donations. This was only the first of several payments to the Roman plebs. As Augustus himself notes in his Res Gestae:

"To the Roman plebs I paid out 300 sesterces per man in accordance with the will of my father, and in my own name in my fifth consulship I gave 400 sesterces apiece from the spoils of war; a second time, moreover, in my tenth consulship I paid out of my own patrimony 400 per man by way of bounty...and in the twelfth year of my tribunician power I gave for the third time 400 sesterces to each man. These donations of mine reached a number of persons never less than two hundred and fifty thousand."^(7)

Over the course of his long reign, in fact, Augustus distributed or paid indirectly (via shows, building programs, etc.) no less than 2,400,000,000 sesterces (or so he says in the Res Gestae). None of this, as far as we can tell, seriously unsettled the currency. The donations were, after all, something like a very large stimulus check, and were limited to a relatively small and privileged population.

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On the life of Caesar, I like Matthias Gelzer's old but still very readable biography Caesar: Politician and Statesman. On wealth in the classical world, check out Sitta Von Reden's Money in Classical Antiquity.

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(1) Appian, Civil Wars 3.21. (2) Crassus: Pliny, Natural History 33.134-5. (3) Pliny, Natural History 37.16. (4) Suetonius, Caesar 26. (5) Plutarch, Cicero 43.8. (6) Gold bars: e.g. Cicero, For Cluentius 179. (7) RG 15.

Here is an answer to Caesars wealth in general by u/legalaction that discusses his leaving of money to citizens. It doesn't touch on inflation, but covers your general idea.

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This is a thread dealing with how his wealth was stored and kept with answers by u/tiako and u/nhnhnh (although their answer is not specifically about Caesar and Rome)

Hello and thank you very much for the great question and great answer.

Would there be any info as to what this wealth would look like if we took inflation into account in let’s say, around the 20th century?