[Alex Murphy]

Written in Greek on a piece of pottery, the receipt states that a person (the name is unreadable) and his friends paid a land-transfer tax that came to 75 "talents" (a unit of currency), with a 15-talent charge added on....90 talents totaled 540,000 drachma, researchers say. For comparison, an unskilled worker at that time would have made only about 18,000 drachmaa / year

The tax on the purchase - not even the purchase price itself - equaled thirty times the annual wage of a commoner. Soak the rich!

[SunkenCiv]

The biggest ‘talent’ was how there was a 15-talent surcharge added to the actual tax. Reminds me of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary entry: “Excise: a hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged not by the common judges of property but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid”