Roman population size: the logic of the debate
Our ignorance of ancient population numbers is one of the biggest obstacles to our understanding of Roman history. After generations of prolific scholarship, we still do not know how many people inhabited Roman Italy and the Mediterranean at any given point in time.
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.
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.