previous next
[4] To one of his friends he ordered that two hundred and fifty thousand drachmas should be given (a sum which the Romans call ‘ decies1). His steward was amazed, and in order to show Antony the magnitude of the sum, deposited the money in full view. Antony, passing by, asked what that was; and when his steward told him it was the gift which he had ordered, he divined the man's malice and said: ‘I thought the decies was more; this is a trifle; therefore add as much more to it.’

1 That is ten times 100,000 sesterces, or 250,000 denarii. For the Roman denarius Plutarch regularly uses the nearly equivalent Greek drachma (which had about the value of the French franc).

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (Bernadotte Perrin, 1920)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: