Charioteer was in the chips

Among the ranks of highly paid athletes, there's Roger Federer atop the tennis world at $43 million, including endorsements, according to Forbes.com. Golf's Tiger Woods snagged $90 million last year despite the early revelations of his extracurricular issues, says SI.com.

But historically, they're far from the lead, maintains Peter Struck, an associate professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

The all-time top earner in sports? Struck makes a case for Gaius Appuleius Diocles, a charioteer in ancient Rome.

The fabulous earnings of Diocles and other top charioteers are no secret among classical scholars. Last month, Struck sought to put these exploits in context for a wider audience, on the website of Lapham's Quarterly, a history magazine.

An inscription from A.D. 146 indicates that Diocles earned 35,863,120 sesterces in prize money over 24 years. The ancient Roman economy was far different, so Struck tried a relative comparison:

This amount would have been enough to buy a year's worth of grain for the entire city of Rome, which had an estimated one million residents. Put another way, the winnings were equal to the total salaries for the Roman army for one-fifth of a year, Struck calculates.

Struck argues that Diocles made the modern-day equivalent of about $15 billion, basing that on the earnings for the U.S. armed forces for one-fifth of a year. Woods' career earnings, meanwhile, barely top $1 billion, Forbes found last year.

By another measure, however, Diocles and Woods weren't so different. A Roman soldier earned 1,200 sesterces a year, Struck says. Diocles earned about 1,250 times that much per year, on average. If Woods earned $90 million last year, that's 1,250 times an annual salary of $72,000.

"I don't propose that I've come to some hard and fast solution," Struck says. "What I do think that I've done is make accessible a sense of the utter magnitude of this guy's wealth. It's extraordinary."

And he didn't even have his own model of sneakers. Or would that be sandals?

- Tom Avril