Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

320 12. land, labour and settlement
ii. population; the spread of settlement; demographic
decline?
It would greatly help our understanding of the economy, and indeed of the
whole society of the late Roman world, if we could come up with even
rough estimates of total population. These would give us figures to
compare with later and better-documented periods, and thereby allow us
to form a more accurate impression of the scale of operations within the
Roman period. They would also help us to put into context some of the
late Roman institutions to which it has been possible to attach rough estimates
of numbers of people. For instance, estimates for the size of the
Roman army at the end of the fourth century can rise as high as 600,000
men. 8 This is indubitably a very large figure, and certainly points to the existence
of a heavy state structure. But exactly how large and how heavy
depends very much on what one thinks the total Roman population was –
if it was 20 million, then perhaps more than one in forty of the total population
(around one in ten of adult males) was maintained under arms by
the state; but, if the population was 200 million, the proportions drop to a
less impressive one in 400 of the total population and one in a hundred of
adult males. Similarly, a very rough estimate for the size of the population
of Constantinople in around a.d. 450 is 300,000–400,000 souls 9 – a very
large number of people, involving a massive system of supply. But quite
how heavily this weighed on the eastern empire depends very much on how
large one thinks its total population was at this time.
However, in the absence of census or tax returns, we unfortunately have
no overall recorded figure for the total population of the empire in any
period. Few have yet ventured even regional estimates on the basis of the
ever-increasing archaeological evidence. The main imponderables are
whether all sites (even if identified with confidence and shown to be
roughly contemporary on pottery dating) were in reality all occupied at
exactly the same time, and, more seriously, how to estimate from surface
finds the numbers of households present on a site, and how then to decide
the correct multiplier to use for individuals per household.
In the one province, Britain, where a number of archaeologists have
recently been bold enough (or foolhardy enough) to attempt independent
estimates, the suggested figures for Roman population are high, and have
tended to rise over the last decades, as more archaeological data emerge.
The estimates range between two and six million people, which are very
different figures, but are none the less roughly within the same order of
magnitude as estimates for the population of England in the period around
and after the Domesday survey of 1086. 10 It seems possible that the land
8 Treadgold (1995) 43–59. 9 Mango, Développement 51. 10 Millett (1990) 181–6.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008