Classical demography
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Classical demography refers to the study of human demography in the Classical period. More specifically, it focuses on the number of people who were alive in civilizations around the Mediterranean Sea between the Bronze Age and the Fall of the Roman Empire. The period was characterized by an explosion in population with the rise of the Greek and Roman civilizations followed by a steep decline caused by invasions, migrations, and a return to subsistence agriculture.
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[edit] Ancient Greece and Greek colonies
Beginning in the 8th century BC, Greek city-states began colonizing the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts. Whether this sudden phenomenon was due to overpopulation, severe droughts, or an escape for vanquished people (or a combination) is still in question.
[edit] Greece proper
The population of Greece itself is hard to estimate as the definition of what Greece was has fluctuated over time. While today Macedonia is considered a part of the Greek-world, in the Classical Period it was a kingdom with a strange dialect (before adopting the Attic dialect). Similarly, Ionia in modern day Turkey is no longer considered to be a part of the Hellenistic sphere of influence, although beginning in the 1st millennium BC it was densely populated by Greek-speaking peoples and an important influence on Greek culture.
Estimates as to what the population of the Greeks was in the coast and islands of the Aegean Sea during the 5th century BC vary from 800,000 [1] to over 3,000,000. [2] The city of Athens in the 4th century BC had a population of 60,000 non-foreign free males. If one were to factor in slaves, women, and foreign-born peoples the number of people residing in the city was probably in the range of 350,000 to 500,000 people, of with 160,000 lived inside the city proper.
Recently, the classical scholar Mogens Hansen calculated the population of the entire ancient civilization in the 4th century BC. He arrived at estimates that range from 8,000,000 to 10,000,000 people, these estimates are over ten times the size of the population of Greece 450 years before during the 8th century BC, estimated at 700,000 people. This was the total population of Greece proper plus the populations of Sicily, the coast of western Asia Minor and the Black Sea.
[edit] Magna Graecia
The population of Sicily is estimated to range from about 600,000 to 1 million in the 5th century BC. The island was urbanized, and its largest city alone, the city of Siracuse, having 125,000 inhabitants or about 12% to 20% of the total population living on the island. Other 5 cities probably had populations of over 20,000, the total urban population could have reached 50% of the total population.
[edit] Other colonization
The ancient Roman province of Cyrenaica in the region of present-day Eastern Libya was home to many hundreds of thousands of Greek, Latin, and Jewish communities. Originally settled by Greek colonists, five important settlements (Cyrene, Barca, Euesperides, Apollonia, and Tauchira) formed the pentapolis.[3] The fertility of the land, the exportation of Silphium, and its location between Carthage and Alexandria made it a magnet for settlement.
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[edit] Demography of the Hellenistic Kingdoms
[edit] Ptolemaic Egypt
Greek historian Diodorus Siculus estimated that 7,000,000 inhabitants resided in Egypt during his lifetime before its annexation by the Roman Empire. [4] Of this, he states that 300,000 citizens lived within the city of Alexandria. The total population of Alexandria ranged from 500,000 to 1,000,000.
[edit] Seleucid Empire
The population of the vast Seleucid Empire has estimates that range from 25 million to 35 million.
[edit] Demography of the Roman Empire
There are many estimates of the population for the Roman Empire, that range from 45 million to 120 million. Most modern estimates range from 55 to 65 million.
The estimated population of the empire during the reign of Augustus: [5]
| Region | Population (in millions) |
| Total Empire | 56.8 |
| European part | 31.6 |
| Asian part | 14.0 |
| North African part | 11.2 |
[edit] Roman Italy
The total population of Roman Italy was estimated to be around 4 million before the Second Punic War. After the war the population was reduced to only 3.5 million; about 750,000 people died in the war. It was the greatest death toll in roman military history.
During the first and second centuries BC, the population of Roman Italy doubled from 3.5 million to about 7 million during the first century. There was a great urban growth and the population of the cities in Italy increased greatly. The population of Rome itself increased from 150,000 in the 3rd century BC, to over 1 million by the time of Augustus when it stabilised. Most historians today consider 1.2 million the most probable number for the population of Rome in Augustan times, the total population probably peaked in the early 2nd century to a total number of 1.6 million, maybe the most populous city before the 19th century.
The total urban population of Roman Italy increased from about 450,000 (150,000 in Rome and 300,000 in other cities) in the 3rd century to 1.2 million in 80 BC (550,000 in Rome and 650,000 in other cities) and reaching 2.4 million (1.2 million in Rome and 1.2 million in other cities) in the first century. The estimated rate of urbanization was 11% in the 3rd century, 24% in the early first century BC and 35% in the first century AD.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~bjoseph/articles/gancient.htm Brian D Joseph - Ohio State University Department of Linguistics
- ^ Demographics of Greece
- ^ http://www.livius.org/ct-cz/cyrenaica/cyrenaica.html
- ^ Delia, Diana. "The Population of Roman Alexandria." Transactions of the American Philological Association 118 (1988): 275-92.
- ^ John D. Durand, Historical Estimates of World Population: An Evaluation, 1977, pp. 253-296.
