Communal Agriculture in the Ptolemaic and Roman Fayyum
My approach to land rights is social and economic rather than juristic. In other words, I am not interested in the interpretation of ancient legal terms according to Roman or civil law categories, which risks imposing rigid categories on social relations that have little explanatory power…In this paper, I use the economic concepts of communal and private land rights to illuminate these relations.
Counting Romans
I shall examine the assumptions underlying current interpretations of the Polybian army figures and the Republican census tallies in order to answer two important questions: can we consider the former as independent evidence corroborating the ‘low count’ interpretation of the census figures?…Second, in sections 6-10, I explore the possibility of an alternative reading that allows one to adopt an intermediate position between the current scenarios of small and large populations.
The size of the economy and the distribution of income in the Roman Empire
Different ways of estimating the Gross Domestic Product of the Roman Empire in the second century CE produce convergent results that point to total output and consumption equivalent to 50 million tons of wheat or close to 20 billion sesterces per year. It is estimated that elites (around 1.5 per cent of the imperial population) controlled approximately one-fifth of total income while middling households (perhaps 10 percent of the population) consumed another fifth. These findings shed new light on the scale of economic inequality and the distribution of demand in the Roman world.
Disease and death in the ancient city of Rome
This paper surveys textual and physical evidence of disease and mortality in the city of Rome in the late republican and imperial periods. It emphasizes the significance of seasonal mortality data and the weaknesses of age at death records and paleodemographic analysis, considers the complex role of environmental features and public infrastructure, and highlights the very considerable promise of scientific study of skeletal evidence of stress and disease.
The growth of Greek cities in the first millennium BC
In this paper I trace the growth of the largest Greek cities from perhaps 1,000- 2,000 people at the beginning of the first millennium BC to 400,000-500,000 at the millennium’s end.
Going with the Grain: Athenian State Formation and the Question of Subsistence in the 5th and 4th Centuries BCE
The questions I intend to ask in this paper focus on this very issue. My case study is 5th century BCE Athens. During this period, the so-called “Athenian Empire”, Athens experienced military growth, geographic expansion of its hegemony, and further population increase.
Migration and Greek Civilization
Greek civilization is one of the components of our Western culture partly because from the middle of the 8th century BC Greek populations accepted to leave their homeland