Salt is taken, in the world's thought, as an equivalent of wit, or lively wisdom, in speech. Thus Paul counsels the Colossian Christians: "Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer each one."[109] Because the Athenians were noted for their life and wit in speech, "Attic salt" was a synonym of truest life in conversation. Cicero says of Scipio: "_Scipio omnes sale superbat_" ("Scipio surpassed all in salt," or "wit").
Pliny after describing the properties and uses of salt, says: "We may conclude then, by Hercules! that the higher enjoyments of life could not exist without the use of salt: indeed, so highly necessary is this substance to mankind, that the pleasures of the mind, even, can be expressed by no better term than the word 'salt,' such being the name given to all effusions of wit. All the amenities, in fact, of life, supreme liberty, and relaxation from toil [in a word, 'life,'] can find no word in our language to characterize them better than this."[110]
Pliny also calls attention to the fact that "salarium," from which we derive our word "salary," was the "salt money," bestowed as a reward or honorarium on successful generals and military tribunes.[111] The idea of a "living," or a support of life, is in the word "salary." And so when we say that a man is "not worth his salt," we mean that he is not worth his living.
Salt has been employed as money at various times and in various lands, and thus has been the means of supporting life. It has been so in Tibet and in India, and in the heart of Africa along from the sixth to the nineteenth centuries of our era. Thus even in lands where gold is abundant but less valued than salt.[112]
[112] Marco Polo's _Travels_, Col. Yule's translation, II., 29, 35, 36, 37, and notes to Chap. 47.
It is said of the people of a province in Tibet, that, while they reckon the value of gold by weight, the nearest approach to coined money which they have is in molded and stamped cakes of salt. "On this money ... the Prince's mark is printed; and no one is allowed to make it except the royal officers.... Merchants take this currency and go to those tribes that dwell among the mountains; ... and there they get a _saggio_ of gold for sixty, or fifty, or forty pieces of this salt money; ... for in such positions they cannot dispose at pleasure of their gold and other things, such as musk and the like; ... and so they give them cheap." "This exchange of salt-cakes for gold, forms a curious parallel to the like exchange in the heart of Africa, narrated by Cosmas in the sixth century, and by Aloisio Cadamosto in the fifteenth."[113]