This post criticizes the idea that Roman soldiers were paid in salt or received an allowance for buying salt and that’s where “salary” comes from.
Haven’t scrutinized it super closely but this part criticizing Wikipedia jumped out at me:
The trouble with citing Pliny as a source for the myth is of course that Pliny doesn’t say anything of the kind. The problem is exacerbated by Wikipedia, which bald-facedly re-writes Pliny, and has been quoted very widely:
the Roman historian Pliny the Elder, who stated as an aside in his Natural History’s discussion of sea water, that ‘[I]n Rome…the soldier’s pay was originally salt and the word salary derives from it…’.
– Wikipedia, ‘Salary’ (the addition of this line dates to 2004)
This is a mistranslation, just to be clear. And this wording doesn’t even appear in the linked source. And Pliny isn’t writing about sea water, but about salt itself. None of that has stopped this fake quotation being repeated in countless books and websites.
Note, 18 Jan.: this error, and the other Wikipedia excerpt quoted above, have since been corrected. However, some other parts of the articles are still inaccurate: see below.