Classical demography
It often focuses on the absolute number of people who were alive in civilizations around the Mediterranean Sea between the Bronze Age and the fall of the Western Roman Empire, but in recent decades historians have been more interested in trying to analyse demographic processes such as the birth and death rates or the sex ratio of ancient populations.
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 economic and social disruption, migrations, and a return to primarily subsistence agriculture.
The population of the areas of Greek settlement from the western Mediterranean to Asia Minor and the Black Sea in the 4th century BC has been estimated at up to 10 million.
The ancient Roman province of Cyrenaica in the eastern region of present-day Libya was home to a Greek, Latin and native population in the hundreds of thousands.
Originally settled by Greek colonists, five important settlements (Cyrene, Barca, Euesperides, Apollonia, and Tauchira) formed a pentapolis.
The Phoenicians established colonies and trading posts across North Africa and through the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar) into the Sea of Atlas (the Atlantic Ocean)and include Hippo Regius, Icosium, Hadrumetum, Utica, Lixus, Tingis, Oea (Tripoli) Gades (Cadiz) Leptis Magna, Sabratha, Pharos Island (Alexandria) many of the Mediterranean Islands Sis (Palermo) Motya and Soluntum on Sicily; Kitiya (Kition) Crete, the Balearic Islands, Karaly (Cagliari) Sardinia and if not full colonies, trading posts in Porto (at the Douro River), Lisbon (at the Tagus River), Arambys (Mogador Island-Essaouira, Morrocco).
Archaeologists are shedding more light on this important ancient Mediterranean culture and much of what we do have of their history was primarily scribed by Grek, Roman and other early scholars.
Others find this entirely incredible, and argue that the census must now be counting all citizens, male and female over the age of 13 – in which case the population had declined slightly, something which can readily be attributed to war casualties and to the crisis of the Italian peasantry.
[14] Estimates for the population of mainland Italia, including Gallia Cisalpina, at the beginning of the 1st Century AD range from 6,000,000 according to Beloch in 1886, 6,830,000 according to Russell in 1958, less than 10,000,000 according to Hin in 2007,[15] and 14,000,000 according to Lo Cascio in 2009.
As much as 40% of the population might have lived in towns (25% if the city of Rome is excluded), on the face of it an astonishingly high level of urbanisation for a pre-industrial society.
