Jesus illustrated great truths with human interest stories. One of them involved a wealthy man who turned over his estate to three men, entrusting each with a certain amount of wealth. Today we use dollars, yen, pesos or euros (depending on who has issued the currency) to measure wealth, but in Jesus' day the unit of measurement was a talent. Our English word for talent is a transliteration of the Greek word, the one Jesus used, which was talanton. A single talent in Roman days represented the equivalent of a working man's salary for a period of fifteen years. Thus, a talent represented a lot of money in any currency.