Classical demography

• 1. Introduction

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  Classical demography rests on one contested number: a Roman census that returned 4,937,000 people in 14 AD. Historians still argue about what that count actually measured. Did the census log only adult male citizens, every adult citizen regardless of sex, or something else again? That unresolved question runs through the whole field.

  The Classical period itself saw a population boom as Greek and Roman civilizations rose, followed by a steep decline. Economic collapse, mass migration, and a retreat into subsistence farming drove that decline. Every number that follows, whether it describes a Greek colony or a Roman province, carries the same buried question. What was actually being counted, and how much of it is an educated guess?

• 2. Chasing Greek Expansion

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  Around 800 BC, Greek city-states began founding colonies along the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts. Historians point to overpopulation, severe droughts, or the flight of defeated peoples as possible drivers, sometimes all three at once. By the 4th century BC, the zone of Greek settlement stretched from the western Mediterranean to Asia Minor and the Black Sea. Its population has been estimated at up to 10 million.

  In Cyrenaica, in the eastern part of present-day Libya, Greek colonists built a cluster of five cities known as the pentapolis. Those cities were Cyrene, Barca, Euesperides, Apollonia, and Tauchira. Fertile land, the export of silphium, and a location between Carthage and Alexandria drew settlers there in the hundreds of thousands. A native population lived alongside them.

  Massalia, the city now called Marseille, was founded in 600 BCE by Ionian Greeks from Phokaia in Anatolia. Further colonies followed along the southern coast of Gaul, reaching west toward the Iberian Peninsula to sites called Emporion and Hemeroscopium. Those far-flung settlements extended Greek trade networks deep into Iberian waters, far from the Aegean world that had spawned them.

• 3. Greece's Blurred Edges

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  Today every atlas places the ancient kingdom of Macedonia inside the Greek world, but in the Classical period it counted as a distinct entity. Macedonian speech belonged to the same Greek dialect continuum, yet some Athenian writers refused to count Macedonia as part of Greece.

  Almost every resident of historical Ionia, now part of Turkey, speaks Turkish today. Yet from the 1st millennium BC, Ionia was densely populated by Greek speakers and stood as a central piece of Greek culture.

  Estimates for the Greek-speaking population along the coasts and islands of the Aegean Sea in the 5th century BC vary widely. The low figure sits at 800,000, and the high figure passes 3,000,000.

  Athens and Attica, in the 5th century BC, held as many as 150,000 people of citizen status. Alongside them lived around 30,000 resident foreigners and 100,000 slaves, most of whom stayed outside the city and its port. Precise counts remain unknown, and estimates for the period still vary widely.

  The same Mediterranean coastline these Greek estimates cover was also being colonized by a rival seafaring people, the Phoenicians.

• 4. Phoenician Reach

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  Carthage, founded in 814 BCE, became the most famous of many colonies planted by Phoenicia, a name the Greeks gave to these seafaring traders. Phoenician explorers such as Hanno the Navigator and Hamilco pushed their voyages far beyond the home ports of Canaan. Their alphabet became the root of the Greek and Latin scripts, and eventually of English lettering, traveling with every voyage they made.

  In Canaan, in what is now Lebanon, the Phoenicians built a set of independent city-states. Among them were Gubla, later renamed Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, Berytus, now Beirut, and Arwad, near modern Tartus in Syria.

  From these cities, Phoenician traders reached from Egypt and Persia to Rome, and from Canaan all the way to Gades. They carried tin from Britannia, wine from across the region, Tyrian purple dye, lapis lazuli from the Hindu Kush, glass, and amphorae. Both the Greeks and the Romans absorbed the influence of this trading network.

  Beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the strait now called Gibraltar, Phoenician settlement reached into the ocean known today as the Atlantic. Across North Africa, that network included Hippo Regius, Icosium, Hadrumetum, Utica, Lixus, and Tingis. It also reached Oea, now Tripoli, Gades, now Cadiz, Leptis Magna, Sabratha, and Pharos Island near Alexandria. On the Mediterranean islands, Phoenician settlements included Sis, now Palermo, along with Motya and Soluntum on Sicily. Further settlements reached Kitiya on Crete, the Balearic Islands, and Karaly, now Cagliari, on Sardinia. Trading posts, if not full colonies, extended even to Porto on the Douro River and Lisbon on the Tagus River. One more reached Arambys, on Mogador Island near Essaouira in Morocco.

  Few Punic writings, the Roman term for the Phoenician language, survive today, and the Punic Wars are one major reason why. Archaeologists continue to uncover more about this culture, but most of what is known was first written down by Greek, Roman, and other early scholars. Those same trade lanes would later serve the kingdoms that emerged from Alexander's empire after his death.

• 5. Kingdoms After Alexander

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  Pella became the largest city in the Macedonian kingdom once urbanization took hold there. After the Wars of the Diadochi, the fighting among Alexander's generals that carved up his empire, the Kingdom of Macedonia held some 4 million people.

  The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus put Egypt's population at 7,000,000 during his own lifetime, before Rome annexed the country. Of that total, he counted 300,000 citizens living within the city of Alexandria alone. Later historians have questioned whether Egypt's economy could really have supported so many people.

  The Seleucid Empire, spanning a vast stretch of territory, has been estimated at more than 30 million people. Other historians put the number as low as 20 million across the whole of Alexander's earlier empire. That larger empire had included the Seleucid realm as one part.

  These Hellenistic kingdoms sat inside a wider Roman world whose own headcount would prove even harder to pin down.

• 6. Counting An Empire

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  Estimates for the Roman Empire's total population range from 45 million to 120 million people. Most historians now favor a narrower band of 59-76 million. The population is thought to have peaked just before the Antonine Plague struck.

  In 1886, the historian Beloch estimated the empire's population during the reign of Augustus at 54 million in total. He split that figure into 23 million in the European part, 19.5 million in the Asian part, and 11.5 million in the North African part.

  In 1958, the historian Russell offered a different estimate for the year 1 AD, putting the total at 46.9 million. Russell divided that number into 25 million in Europe, 13.2 million in Asia, and 8.7 million in North Africa. A further 7.9 million, in his accounting, lived in European areas outside the empire's borders.

  For the year 350 AD, Russell estimated the total had fallen to 39.3 million. Of that, 18.3 million lived in the European part, 16 million in the Asian part, and 5 million in the North African part. A further 8.3 million lived in European areas beyond the frontier.

  Those imperial totals still say nothing about Italy itself, where the evidence gets even more contested.

• 7. Rome's Contested Census

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  Polybius, in a passage numbered 2.23, describes Rome's regular practice of counting citizens eligible for military service. For the rest of Italy, though, historians must rely on a single surviving report on the military strength of Rome's allies, dated to 227 BC. They can only guess at the numbers of those who opposed Rome at that time.

  Through the 2nd century BC, the citizen count hovered between 250,000 and 325,000, presumably counting only males over the age of 13. A census taken in 70 or 69 BC recorded 910,000 citizens. That jump likely reflects the extension of citizenship to Rome's allies after the Social War of 91-88 BC. Even counting only males, this figure still looks like an undercount to many historians.

  For the 1st and 2nd centuries BC, two rival interpretations divide historians, both built from a base figure of roughly 4.063 million citizens. By the reign of Claudius, a later census recorded almost 6 million citizens. Many of those counted lived in Spain, Gaul, and other provinces, not in Italy itself. One reading of the earlier figures treats them as adult male citizens only, putting Rome's total citizen population near 13 million. The other reading counts all adults, male and female, over the age of 13, which yields a much lower 6.5 million. Under the male-only reading, Italy's population, excluding slaves and foreigners, would have reached around 10 million. That would mark a striking increase despite two centuries of near constant war.

  Roman losses were not heavy throughout that period, and an economic boom began around 175 BC. The Po Valley region, meanwhile, escaped both the Social War and the civil wars fought on the rest of the peninsula. That region may have supplied half the total increase in Romans, Latins, and Allies. That figure rose from 3.2 million in 225 BC to 4.8 million. Of that later total, 2.3 million lived inside the Po Valley itself. Census counts, on top of everything else, undercounted the population by at least 10%.

  Other historians find the higher figure of 13 million entirely implausible. They argue the census must have counted all citizens, male and female, over the age of 13, meaning Italy's population actually declined slightly. War casualties and a crisis among the Italian peasantry would explain that decline. Most historians favor this second interpretation as more demographically plausible, though the debate remains unsettled.

  Even the lower count is contested, since it includes people from Cisalpine Gaul except for a few tribes not yet granted citizenship. The true population of the Po Valley itself is not known. If the Romans, Latins, and Allies numbered 3.2 million, with a further 1 million Cisalpine inhabitants in 225 BC, the combined total barely moved. Over two centuries, that would mean an increase of only 300,000 people, a rate most historians consider implausible.

  Modern historians have since tried to settle these numbers with fresh estimates for Italy, and for Rome itself.

• 8. Sizing Up The City

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  Beloch, writing in 1886, put the population of mainland Italy, including Gallia Cisalpina, at 6,000,000 people at the start of the 1st century AD. Russell's 1958 estimate raised that to 6,830,000. Hin, writing in 2007, argued for a figure below 10,000,000, while Lo Cascio, in 2009, proposed as many as 14,000,000.

  Evidence for the population of Rome itself is just as scarce as it is for the rest of Italy. Historians have tried three approaches: counting houses listed in 4th-century AD guidebooks, measuring the built-up area, and calculating the volume of the water supply. Each method runs into problems. The best guess rests on the 200,000 people recorded as recipients of the grain dole under Augustus. That figure implies a total population of 800,000-1,200,000.

  Pliny the Elder listed more than 400 urban centres across Italy, though most held only a few thousand people each. By one measure, as much as 40% of the population lived in towns, a figure that drops to 25% if Rome itself is excluded. That would be an astonishingly high level of urbanization for a society without industry. Later scholars, though, would not count the smallest of these centres as truly urban. Counting only cities of 10,000 people or more, Italy's urbanization rate looks more modest, at 25%. Excluding Rome from that count drops the figure to 11%, still a notable share for its era.

  Most of the four hundred towns Pliny counted left far less evidence than Rome itself, and their populations remain the field's least answered question.