THE DEMOGRAPHY OF
THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD
Walter Scheidel
(under contract with Cambridge University Press)
Purpose and structure
Demography is essential for our understanding of
ancient societies: patterns of mortality, the social organization of reproduction,
household formation and population density are among the crucial factors
governing life in every society, including ancient Greece and Rome. Following a
long period of neglect, scholarly interest in ancient population history has
grown quite considerably over the past thirty years. Even so, no comprehensive
introductory textbook on this subject currently exists. The overall structure
of this book is shaped by the central concerns of the historical demography of
the more recent past. It seeks to acquaint classicists with the perspectives of
professional demography to be readily accessible and relevant to historical
demographers and social historians of other periods. The core of the book
consists of a discussion of the three determinants of population structure,
namely mortality, fertility and migration. A separate chapter is devoted to
questions of family and household structure, a topic of great interest to
historical demography in general and of relevance to studies of the history of
the family, women, and childhood in classical antiquity. The issue of
population size, which has traditionally received most attention by ancient
historians, is assessed with particular emphasis on the concepts of carrying
capacity and population pressure. A final chapter focuses on the contribution
of demography to our understanding of the ancient world in general.
Contents
The introduction describes the scope and approach of
the book, which addresses two audiences, ancient historians and historical
demographers. It briefly surveys the development of scholarship in the field
and explains the relevance of demography for our understanding of the ancient
world, and the contribution of ancient history to historical population studies
more generally.
Chapter 1, on mortality, discusses the problems of
deriving mortality rates from age distributions attested in samples of ancient
evidence; their relationship to modern model life tables and comparative
evidence; their implications for life expectancy and fertility; documented
patterns of seasonal mortality and the light they shed on causes of death; the
ancient disease environment; and the nature and impact of mortality crises.
Chapter 2, on fertility, introduces the concept of
natural fertility; examines the principal determinants of fertility, such as
age of marriage, incidence of marriage and re-marriage, birth spacing, stopping
strategies; explores practices of contraception, abortion, and child
exposure/infanticide; and the effects of fertility control on sex ratios.
Chapter 3, on family and household structure, deals
with quantifiable evidence of the composition of families and households,
especially from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt; the information furnished by Roman
epitaphs; and literary and legal records.
Chapter 4, on the size and distribution of ancient
populations, addresses problems of determining population size; its change over
time, with particular reference to classical Athens, the city of Rome, and
Roman Italy; the notions of population pressure and depopulation; urbanization,
colonization, the slave trade, and other means of population transfer.
Chapter 5 illustrates how demographic information
affects our understanding of ancient history more broadly by exploring the
relationship between demographic conditions and economic development as well as
human capital formation, the demographic dimension of republican governance,
the demography of religious change, and other salient topics. It concludes with
a brief assessment of the prospects of the field.
© 2015 Walter Scheidel