Summary and Conclusion

c h ap t er 9
Summary and conclusion
9.1 the population of italy: an unhappy few or

a happy lot?
Seen through the lens of traditional scholarship, Roman citizens born in
Italy during the last two centuries of the Roman Republic were an ‘unhappy
few’. Plagued by warfare, faced with economic headwinds and weakened
by impoverishment, they were unable to bear and raise children, so that
the free population dwindled in numbers. This bleak scenario has been
turned upside down by revisionist scholarship: instead of experiencing
decline, on this view the number of free citizens was rapidly increasing,
and people were in a relatively good economic and physical shape. They
were a happy lot. In this book, I hope to have shown that the truth lies
somewhere between these extremes, also known as the ‘low count’ and
the ‘high count’ scenarios of Roman demography. Over the course of
the preceding chapters, I have constructed a model of late Republican
development suggesting that both the economy and the demography of
the Italian heartland were characterized by slow, limited growth. The main
arguments underpinning this conclusion, and its implications for historical
accounts of late Republican Italy, are summarized below.
9.1.1 Economy and climate

That the aggregate economy of Roman Italy grew during the last two cen-
turies of the Republic can be inferred with reasonable certainty. Standard
metric methods of economic research cannot be applied to the ancient
world, because we lack sufficient data to fill out the parameters and vari-
ables in the equations. Yet the limited empirical evidence in the ancient
source material confirms that economic growth took place in the Ital-
ian heartland. As was noted in Chapter , proxies used to gauge eco-
nomic development point towards economic expansion during the late
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Summary and conclusion 
Republic. Lead pollution in the atmosphere and the number of shipwrecks,
of animal bone deposits and of dated wood remains (as a proxy for build-
ing activity) all increase during this period. Theoretical economic models
as well predict that the conditions in Italy at the time would have been
conducive to growth. Roman Italy found itself in an ever more privileged
political position over the last two centuries of the Republic. Increasingly
skewed power relations were economically beneficial. The ability of the
Romans to impose taxes on the inhabitants of regions incorporated into
their expanding empire is only the most obvious example.
In addition, a fully independent factor worked indiscriminately to the
advantage of late Republicans: the climate (Chapter ). Climatic conditions
are especially important in the agricultural sector. Whereas this is widely
recognized today in general terms, the work of palaeo-climatologists and
the importance of climatic change (in contrast to episodic extreme weather)
has largely escaped the attention of ancient historians. Climatic conditions
are the result of complex interactions, which can work out differently
both between regions and over short distances. Both characteristics entail
the risk of generalizing by non-specialists. Even so, there is little doubt
that, at a macro-level, the late Republican period witnessed an improve-
ment in climatic conditions. Temperatures rose compared to the preceding
period, but not so much as to become problematic. While a gradual drying
occurred, conditions during the Roman Republic overall seem to have been
wetter than they are today, and the negative impacts of the development
of a drier climatic regime seem to have post-dated our period of interest.
As a result, the predominantly agricultural economy was bound to profit
from higher yields. In this case, no human effort was required to trans-
form favourable preconditions into real economic growth. Warming also
allowed for geographical expansion of agricultural activity. Other economic
branches profited as well, mainly as a consequence of improved travel con-
ditions and via indirect feedback mechanisms in the demand sector of the
economy.
9.1.2 Macro-demography and population trends

Coinciding with these favourable economic developments, the population
of the Italian heartland seems to have experienced natural growth, although
that growth was slow. The meagre quantitative evidence at our disposal is
open to many interpretations, and any interpretative model must rely in
part on assumptions. This is one reason why the widely divergent macro-
demographic scenarios proposed by the ‘low count’ and the ‘high count’
 Population size
can coexist and continue to evoke debate. Yet, in my view, the hypothesis
that, exclusive of migration and enfranchisement, the number of Roman
citizens grew slowly should be preferred for several reasons.
I begin with the most general arguments in favour of a ‘middle count’:
that it is a misconception to argue that pre-industrial populations need to
maximize fertility to ensure population reproduction, and that substantial
growth is by definition impossible in a high mortality regime. But through-
out history, features of demographic systems that effectively limited fertility
contributed significantly to the fact that, in reality, rapid population growth
normally did not occur over more than a few decades. High ages at first
marriage, low marriage rates, infanticide, abandonment and abortion were
all causative factors that curbed demographic increase across generations.
For this reason, they should not be conceived of as external factors that
disturbed demographic balances. Rather, one or more of these factors could
be part of an integrated system of variables that formed the demographic
system of a specific time and place. The relevance of this observation to
late Republican history is that references to fertility-limiting measures for
this period are perfectly compatible with a hypothesis of demographic
growth. This is all the more so, given that the age at first marriage of
Roman women seems to have been exceptionally low: in most historical
societies with which Roman Italy is compared, ages at first marriage were
much higher. The onset of reproduction in Roman Italy, in other words,
created room for measures that limited the number of surviving offspring,
and perhaps even demanded such measures. In sum, there is no reason to
believe that the practice of phenomena such as infanticide and abortion
led to the demographic demise of the Roman Republic so long as there is
no evidence for sudden and dramatic increases in their use.
The case Brunt attempted to make in favour of a dramatic shift in
fertility behaviour among the Roman citizen masses following the Second
Punic War is unconvincing. As I have shown in Chapter , many arguments
can be adduced to counter his hypothesis. These range from the value of
children and the praise of motherhood, to the availability of solutions to
reduce the (economic) stress of raising children. Family arrangements and
lenient birth intervals played major roles in this. Arguably, the (increasing)
availability of future employment opportunities outside the agricultural
realm in cities and in the army also helped sustain high fertility, as did the
lack of alternatives to childbearing to secure a reasonable living standard
in the event of disease and disability and during old age. Cultural, social
and economic reasons thus joined forces to favour childbearing in Roman
Italy.
Summary and conclusion 
But these objections to the ‘low count’ scenario of natural population
decline do not support the revisionist scenario of the ‘high count’. Rapid
urbanization facilitated by various forms of rural–urban migration (see
Chapter ) and excess mortality brought about by Roman conquest and
political instability curtailed population growth (Chapter ). The involve-
ment of Roman men in warfare meant that they faced a doubled or tripled
risk at death (depending on the model life table used) as compared to non-
soldiers on that count alone. Higher population density in military camps
probably added to this risk. Similarly, in urban centres, the risk of dying was
elevated through the concentration of people in a small area. Population
growth was curtailed by these mortality conditions. Previous scholarship,
however, has overestimated the ‘urban graveyard effect’ by failing to take
account of the flexible nature of migration, and by drawing inferences from
later historical London that do not do justice to the divergences between
the two societies.
Finally, the arguments arising from the application of demographic the-
ory to late Republican Italian history are compatible with the reading of
the census figures proposed in Chapter . Historians of the Roman Repub-
lic have previously engaged in a bipolar debate on the interpretation of
the census figures. The only possible readings of the evidence seemed to
require a choice between a scenario of stagnation/decline, and a very large
population in Augustan times with strong growth during the preceding
era. A new scenario of population development emerges from the case I
have made for the interpretation of the census figures. If the Republican
figures represent adult men sui iuris, and the Augustan ones include women
and children sui iuris in addition to adult men sui iuris, this allows for a
‘middle count’ scenario. It creates much more flexibility in linking the
historical evidence to population development scenarios, because the ‘mul-
tiplier’ from census to population is determined not only by demographic
conditions (e.g. the ratio of men : total population), but also by legal, social
and economic conditions that impact on the share of citizens who were
legally independent. Inductive reasoning does not permit us to quantify
precisely the implications of this interpretation. What we can say is that the
free population of Italy must have been considerably less than  million
in Augustan times, could perhaps have been around . million including
slaves under Augustus, and was most likely closer to the current low count
than to the current high count. By implication, the free population of Italy
grew at a moderate rate over the final two centuries of the Republic. This
revisionist scenario has in common with its predecessors that it cannot
resolve all the enigmas surrounding the Roman census and the surviving
 Population size
census data. But it does at least provide, I suggest, a plausible alternative
to current hypotheses.
Demographic theories, comparative evidence and the Roman census
data are all compatible with slow population growth during the last two
centuries bce. Survey archaeology, which yields time-trend data on material
deposits in the Italian countryside, has recently been put forward as offering
independent datasets to test demographic scenarios against. In Chapter ,
the survey evidence was given central place. I argued that biases affecting
developmental trends in deposited farm remains tend to overinflate the
results. Moreover, behavioural factors such as co-residence habits also have
a bearing on trends in the number of farm sites. Translating trends in
material remains to potential population trends, in other words, is not
a straightforward process; there need be no direct relation between the
two. But by correcting for the impact of biases in the material evidence
(e.g. changes in connectivity, diagnosticity rates) and for the potential role
of changed residential preferences, crucial issues that hinder the use of
settlement trends as a proxy for population trends can be resolved. What
remains is an expanding material record suggestive of population increase.
Unlike what has previously been argued, however, this record cannot be
used to corroborate externally the notion of population growth during late
Republican times. The material yields evidence of moderate growth during
the early Empire, but cannot inform us about dynamics within the late
Republic itself. At best, the fact that growth was only moderate during the
early Empire, when the death tolls of Rome’s continuing conquests were
mostly not paid by Roman citizens from the Italian heartland, suggests
that rapid population growth during the late Republic is least likely.
9.2 the implications of a ‘middle count’ scenario

The revisionist account of population trends developed in this book has
significant implications for our perception of the period between  bce
and  ce. In what follows, I highlight some of the most interesting of
these implications.
9.2.1 Living standards

The concept of living standards has both an economic and a demographic
dimension. The traditional explanatory model of late Republican histor-
ical development emphasizes that societal change consisting in stratifica-
tion came at an economic cost for the individual. The economic living
Summary and conclusion 
standards of most individuals were undermined, and this had a quantita-
tive demographic cost to society: an unwanted decline in population size.
This explanatory framework sees the wealth accumulation of Roman elites
spurred by conquest as directly undermining the economic living standards
of ordinary citizens. Against this, we may observe that although the influx
of new wealth was disproportionately concentrated in elite hands, ordi-
nary Romans also profited to some extent. Increasing inequality, in other
words, implied increasing relative deprivation but not necessarily increas-
ing absolute deprivation. That is not to say that living standards were
high; the scarce material traces small farms have left in the Italian country-
side are telling in this respect. The demographic growth suggested by my
proposed model, then, occurred in a society in which average living stan-
dards were low and the productive economy was largely oriented towards
agriculture.
In contrast to earlier accounts, this model suggests that decline in demo-
graphic living standards rather than decline in per capita incomes should
claim the centre of attention. With population growth, an increasing num-
ber of people would have suffered from lower life expectancies caused by
greater exposure to disease vectors. This was essentially a function of the
rising urbanization and population density that characterized Italy during
the last two centuries of the Roman Republic. As noted above, geography
and population density largely determined the configuration of disease
pools in an area or region. Exposure to a larger or more virulent disease
pool worsened survival chances for a Roman Italian significantly, since (as
in the case of any high mortality population) diseases spread by microbes,
pathogens and the like were far more important causes of death than geri-
atric diseases not caused by infection. Wrigley et al. aptly characterized this
process by stating that ‘in the pre-industrial world there was a price to be
paid for economic progress. Standards of living might rise but life itself be
abbreviated in the process’. Their definition of ‘standards of living’ obvi-
ously favours economic standards of living, not demographic standards of
living, as determinative. The point is that the negative correlation between
economic and demographic living standards makes it clear that declines
in demographic living standards are not by definition a sign that a popu-
lation outgrew its productive capacities. Demographic conditions for the
individual may have worsened independent of economic conditions, as a
result of changing societal and spatial organization – that is, due to rising
 Wrigley et al. () .
 Population size
connectivity and population concentrations rather than lack of land, food
or other necessities.
9.2.2 Demographic stratification

Another observation can be made in conjunction with this. Societal and
demographic change in the Republic not only affected the life expectancies
of an increasing number of people, but they did so in a way that distributed
the health burden of population growth and urbanization unevenly. It was
predominantly people already living under less than satisfactory conditions
who migrated to the cities. Although (as was argued in Chapter ) we should
be careful not to overstate urban–rural mortality differentials, they were
surely a relevant factor. In other words, Roman society witnessed increasing
demographic stratification biased towards certain population groups: the
poor. They would have been more prone to migrate to high population
density cities, and when they arrived there, they would also have been the
most likely to end up living in the unhealthiest areas of those cities. The
relative mortality pressure on the poor increased further with the official
opening up of army service to proletarians under Marius in the first century
bce. To a certain extent, proletarians had served in armies before, but from
that time on their investment share in the ‘conquest of empire’ increased
sharply. In this, we find another non-random process driving demographic
stratification. Even if poor men and their families gained economically
from joining the army, especially during the Civil War, when bonuses were
high, enrolment came at a demographic cost that was at times very high.
But the case for demographic stratification should not be overstated. The
burden of disease, on the other hand, was pronounced across the board. It
is borne out by low life expectancies at birth and the numerous marks of
ill health on skeletons. The contours of a demographic framework for the
Roman Republic are thus firmly set.
9.2.3 Families of smallholders

That moderate population growth could be sustained was largely an effect
of increasing economic opportunities, which consisted of growing options
for trade and other forms of non-agricultural labour in both the cities
 Wrigley et al. () , where, after pointing to urbanization, they note that ‘the list of factors
associated with economic development which may have a bearing on mortality might be extended
almost indefinitely’.
Summary and conclusion 
and the army. These allowed sons of farmers without access to sufficient
farmland to find other means of living. Some may have failed for vari-
ous reasons, which may explain the frequently debated land redistribution
measures undertaken by the Gracchi. There has been a tendency to link
this central episode in the history of the late Republic to Malthusian con-
cepts, which gives rise to the suggestion that people were fighting over the
last strips of land in the country. A closer look at the carrying capacity
parameters for late Republican Italy undermines this idea. In some regions
close to Rome, pressure on agricultural land may have caused difficulties
for smallholders trying to make a living by farming. But there was cer-
tainly more fertile land available for productive purposes in the Italian
Peninsula than was ever used. On a low or middle count scenario, Italy
would not even have faced the productive limits of an agricultural system
with no intensification and/or diversification. The problem was neither a
lack of land nor a lack of public land; both were available. Furthermore,
as the heartland of an empire, Italy differed in many respects from the
classic Malthusian ‘ideal-type’ society, in which agricultural resources, land
and population form a closed system. Consequently, a different explana-
tory framework is required. The problem should be defined instead as
intra-familial competition for ‘free’, inheritable assets that grew scarcer
as population increased. Life under these macro-demographic conditions
required behavioural adaptation. This could be of various sorts, involving
willingness to migrate over shorter or longer distances, mental preparedness
to shift to a different profession, or the adoption of processes of family for-
mation and household patterns that more easily accommodated changing
conditions.
That the ancient (and modern) literature on the late Republic, espe-
cially that related to the Gracchan land reforms, leaves the impression
that problems were concentrated in the agricultural sector is perhaps not
surprising. If no initial capital is present, earning a living by farming is
difficult. Ancient historians have stressed the seasonal nature of all forms
of hired labour, which in agricultural contexts is characterized by labour
peaks of only a few weeks a year. Unless it was possible to rent fully or
partially equipped farms, starting up one’s own farm would have required
relatively abundant assets. This may explain why young men tended to join
the army or to try to find a job in a city; it does not necessarily imply that
their economic standard of living was worse than that of their parents, or
that despair drove them there. Neither does it suggest that agriculture as a
whole was plunged into a crisis phase. If anything, in fact, smallholders may
have enjoyed the benefits of quantitatively and qualitatively better yields,
 Population size
and, to some extent, better opportunities to sell their surpluses from time
to time when it suited them. Favourable climatic conditions and economic
expansion and integration resulting from imperialism paved the way. The
last two centuries of the Roman Republic, in sum, are more aptly character-
ized as a period of rising societal complexity and increasing opportunities
than as one of widespread impoverishment and demographic decline.

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c h ap t er 9

Summary and conclusion

9.1 the population of italy: an unhappy few or

9.1.1 Economy and climate

9.1.2 Macro-demography and population trends

9.2 the implications of a ‘middle count’ scenario

9.2.1 Living standards

 Wrigley et al. () .

9.2.2 Demographic stratification

9.2.3 Families of smallholders

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