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Health and Wealth in the Roman Empire

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Health and Wealth in the Roman Empire G Model EHB 762 No. of Pages 13 Economics and Human Biology xxx (2018) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Economics and Human Biology journa l homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ehb Health and wealth in the Roman Empire Willem M. Jongman*, Jan P.A.M. Jacobs, Geertje M. Klein Goldewijk University of Groningen, the Netherlands A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T Article history: Ancient Rome was the largest and most populous empire of its time, and the largest pre-industrial state in Received 30 August 2018 European history. Recent though not universally accepted research suggests that at least for the most Received in revised form 14 January 2019 populous central periods of its history standard of living was also rather higher than before or after. To Accepted 15 January 2019 trace whether this is also reflected in Roman biological standard of living, we present the first large and Available online xxx more or less comprehensive dataset, based on skeletal data for some 10,000 individuals, covering all periods of Roman history, and all regions (even if inevitably unequally). We discuss both the JEL classification: methodologies that we developed and the historical results. Instead of reconstructing heights from the C55 fi C82 long bones assuming xed body proportions or from one individual long bone, we apply exploratory N01 factor analysis and calculate factor scores for 50-year periods. Our measure of the biological standard of N33 living declined during the last two centuries B.C. and started to improve again, slowly at first, from the O01 second century A.D. It correlated negatively with population, but also with other aspects of standard of O52 living such as wages or diets. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Biological standard of living Roman Empire skeleton remains 1. Introduction (collections of hundreds of thousands of surface finds from a small region), and they show a pretty consistent pattern of substantial Ancient Rome was one of the largest and longest lasting world increases in rural site numbers and site sizes. This went hand in empires of preindustrial history, stretching from the North of hand with a substantial urban growth from existing and new England and the Danube to western Morocco, and the Syrian towns. In Italy this rural and urban growth mostly occurred from Desert. At the peak of its political power in the first and early the late fourth or early third century B.C., and in the provinces often second century A.D. it had a population that has been variously following Roman conquest (see Deru, 2017 for some good estimated between 60 and 90 million inhabitants. That population provincial examples). Numbers mostly peak in the first and early was so large because of the geographical extent of the Empire, but second century A.D., followed by often quite dramatic decline, also because of relatively high population densities. mostly from the late second century A.D., after the so-called Unfortunately there is virtually no documentary evidence on Antonine Plague, an epidemic of probably smallpox that began to Roman population numbers. There is a little bit from Roman Egypt, ravage the Empire from AD 165. The effect is quite visible in the but that is it. This is not because the Roman state did not collect field survey data, even if smoothed by the low chronological such data (it did), but because outside Egypt none of these resolution of the African red slip pottery that covers precisely the administrative documents survived. For Roman Italy we also have date range of A.D. 100 to 250. some census numbers for the second and first century B.C. One limitation of such data was that the original data are site reported in literary sources, but already for a century scholars have numbers, so to arrive at population numbers we have to assign disagreed about who were included in the census, and if this estimates for numbers of inhabitants to the different site size changed over time. And that is effectively all we have for written categories. Fig. 1 shows precisely such recent population recon- data. Fortunately archaeological research of the last few decades structions for two parts of Roman Italy, and the similarities are has given us far better data from archaeological field surveys obvious. Admittedly this graph reports only two small regions, but a current Dutch, Italian and British project aims to homogenize and then integrate a large number of such surveys into one dataset for future aggregate analysis, beginning with three well know surveys * Corresponding author at: Department of History, University of Groningen, P.O. around the city of Rome (the Dutch Pontine Region Project, the Box 716, 9700 AS Groningen, the Netherlands. E-mail address: [email protected] (W.M. Jongman). Italian Suburbium Project and the British Tiber valley Project). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2019.01.005 1570-677X/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Please cite this article in press as: W.M. Jongman, et al., Health and wealth in the Roman Empire, Econ. Hum. Biol. (2019), https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.ehb.2019.01.005 G Model EHB 762 No. of Pages 13 2 W.M. Jongman et al. / Economics and Human Biology xxx (2018) xxx–xxx Albegna Neuno 30000 2000 25000 1500 20000 15000 1000 10000 500 5000 0 0 0 50 -50 450 700 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 500 550 600 650 -300 -250 -200 -150 -100 -350 Fig. 1. From sites to population: Albegna (left axis) and Nettuno (right axis). Based on Fentress, 2009 and De Haas et al., 2011. The historical question is about the consequences of this quite Our project set out to collect the largest possible dataset of massive growth and subsequent decline in population: did skeletal data on body length for the entire territory of the Roman standard of living respond in Malthusian fashion or, alternatively, Empire, and for the entire period of more than 1000 years: we was the population boom the response to increased prosperity, and collected published and unpublished osteological reports on human the subsequent decline the response to increased poverty? skeletal remains found in the Roman Empire,anddated between500 In this paper we exploit the link between stature, the biological B.C. and A.D. 750. This Roman stature database contains over 10,000 standard of living and economic development (Komlos, 1994). adult men and women born between 500 B.C. and A.D. 750 and However in contrast to studies covering more recent periods in buried in the territory of the Roman Empire at its largest extent. It which heights come from conscripts archives (see e.g. Coppola, 2013) or convicts records (see e.g. Morin et al., 2017), our biological Table 1 standard of living measure is based on ‘bones’. We report on thus Number of individuals in the Roman stature database. far the largest dataset on biological standard of living in the Roman men women Empire, covering its entire geographical extent for a period of more a number of individuals minimum 5745 4261 than one thousand years, and collected by Klein Goldewijk. We are maximum 7879 5926 preparing a monograph to document our data and methodologies b leg bones femur measure nr. 1 4198 3164 in greater detail (Klein Goldewijk et al., in preparation). We measure nr. 2 1789 1306 compare our results with related studies based on skeleton tibia measure nr. 1 3522 2537 measure nr. 1a 219 74 remains (Koepke and Baten, 2005; Koepke, 2016 and Galofré-Vilà measure nr. 1b 738 585 et al., 2018), and other data on different aspects of standard of fibula measure nr. 1 746 546 living. arm bones humerus measure nr. 1 3564 2554 We find that Roman biological standard of living was lowest measure nr. 2 715 485 radius measure nr. 1 2922 2121 precisely in the period with highest population densities and levels measure nr. 1b 228 159 of urbanization in the last one or two centuries B.C. and the first measure nr. 2 337 227 one or two centuries A.D. However, we also observe that indicators ulna measure nr. 1 1928 1316 of material standard of living such as diet followed an inverted measure nr. 2 304 225 pattern from that of the biological standard of living. Popular sum of bone measures 21283 15339 prosperity was highest in the peak period of Roman power and a We do not know how many individuals the database contains exactly, as some population density, when biological standard of living was lowest. publications only mention the average long bone length of a group of skeletons. b Bone measure numbers refer to Martin (1928). 2. Data and methods Table 2 Factor loadings. We are interested in the biological standard of living, which is often approximated by the stature of the men and women (Steckel, All Males Females 2009). For earlier periods of history where documentary data are Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 1 Factor 2 few or non-existent this has to be done from skeletal data. Previous femur 0.973 À0.134 0.954 À0.158 0.946 À0.252 projects on Roman biological standard of living had been based on tibia 0.967 À0.202 0.950 À0.247 0.945 À0.202 datasets that only used a part of the existing skeletal material. Such fibula – – – – – – smallish datasets can potentially be misleading, as we also humerus 0.970 0.165 0.945 0.252 0.943 0.150 radius 0.968 0.171 0.948 0.156 0.929 0.310 discovered ourselves, with an early pilot study with a far smaller ulna – – – – – – dataset: those results have now been refuted by the much larger eigenvalues 3.759 0.115 3.603 0.174 3.541 0.223 current dataset (Jongman, 2007b).
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