Epigraphy and demography: birth, marriage, family, and death
When it comes to ancient demography, documentary evidence takes center stage. Our present focus on epigraphy notwithstanding, it must be stressed that it is papyrology that has made the single most substantial contribution to our understanding of early populations.
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.
Rule and Revenue in Egypt and Rome: Political Stability and Fiscal Institutions
This paper has more modest goals. It takes as its starting point Levi’s hy- pothesis that the transition from the Roman Republic to the Principate in the late first century BC brought political stability, which led to rationally calcu- lated fiscal reforms. It examines the effects of this transition in Egypt where there is abundant evidence due to the survival of administrative and tax docu- ments on papyrus and potsherds.
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.
In search of Roman economic growth
The real question is not what the data reveal about change over time: it is what we would need to know in order to determine whether these data reflect extensive or intensive economic growth; why any such growth occurred, abated, and ceased; and how it related to the distribution of incomes.
Human capital and the growth of the Roman economy
This paper takes as a starting point Keith Hopkins’ basic article, “Rome, taxes, rents and trade.”1 Walter Scheidel’s introduction to the article described it as “…the only comprehensive attempt to explain the dynamics of the Roman imperial economy currently available….
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 comparative economics of slavery in the Greco-Roman world
This paper has two goals. The first one is to improve our understanding of the critical determinants of the large-scale use of slave labor in different sectors of historical economies…My second objective is to explain differences in the relative prevalence of chattel slavery in different periods and parts of the ancient Mediterranean world with the help of data on prices and wages…
The Athenian Empire (478-404 BC)
In this paper I raise 3 questions: (1) How, and how much, did the Athenian Empire change Greek society? (2) Why did the Athenian Empire (or a competitor state) not become a multiethnic empire like Persia or Rome? (3) In the long run, how much did the Athenian Empire’s failure matter?