The word for today is…
salary (noun):
: fixed compensation paid regularly for services
Source : Merriam -Webster
Etymology : Middle English salarie, salaire “compensation, payment,” borrowed from Anglo-French (also continental Old French), borrowed from Latin salarium “official pay given to the holder of a civil or military post,” noun derivative from neuter of salarius “of or relating to salt,” from sal-, sal “salt”. The notion that Latin salarium originally referred to money given to Roman soldiers to buy salt is a popular one, but it has no basis in ancient sources. It rests on the inference that salarium was originally short for an unattested phrase salarium argentum “salt money,” which would have been parallel to the contextually better attested words calcearium “money for shoes” (from calceus “shoe”) or vestiarium “allowance in money or kind to provide for clothing” (from vestis “clothes”). The inference can be found in Charlton Lewis and Charles Short’s A Latin Dictionary (1879), many times reprinted, though it was copied from earlier dictionaries, as the Latin-German dictionaries of Wilhelm Freund (1840) and I. J. G. Scheller (1783) (Scheller, however, takes donum “gift, prize” to have been the understood word). Pliny the Elder has been cited as support for the soldier’s pay explanation, though the text of his Historia naturalis refers only to some undefined role salt played in relation to honors in war, “from which the word salarium is derived” (“[sal] honoribus etiam militiaeque interponitur salariis inde dictis”; 31.89). As Pliny is extolling the virtues of salt in this chapter, it seems likely that if he knew of a better explanation for the word, he would have mentioned it. Clearly salt was somehow involved in the notion of official compensation in early imperial Rome, but to speculate further on its function is no more than guessing.
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