Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great

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This book includes a mixture of ancient and modern units of measure. For the sake of convenience, modern units are used when they were more or less similar to their ancient counterparts (e.g., feet, hours, months). Verisimilitude has been served by including a number of antique units that are common in the relevant historical sources. Most prominent here are the stade, a Greek unit of distance approximately equivalent to 600 modern feet (and from which our word stadium is derived), and the parasang, a Persian unit equivalent to the distance a person could walk in an hour. On average the latter equaled 30 Greek stadia or three-and-a-quarter modern miles. An army of the time could cover about six parasangs in a day.

The common monetary unit is the Athenian drachma, which is equivalent in value to six obols. The superordinate units are the mina, worth 100 drachmas, and the talent, equaling 6000 drachmas. The daric is a common non-Greek unit of currency- a gold coin minted by the Persians worth about 26 drachmas.

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