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Recent contributions by several ancient historians take it for granted that the population of republican and imperial Rome did not reproduce itself due to the “appalling” living conditions of the plebs urbana. Pleket (1993:17), for example, speaks of the iron law that the population of large preindustrial megalopolises was incapable of reproducing itself suf¤ciently. In this respect Rome fully obeys the demographic law according to which big cities largely depended on immigration for keeping the population up to the mark. Life in such cities was far from healthy and as a result mortality rates vastly exceeded birthrates. In the same vein Hopkins (1995–1996:60; see also Robinson 1992:1) holds that in Rome mortality must have been much higher than in small towns or the countryside and that therefore the city would have been “a huge death-trap.” Scheidel (1994; cf. 1996, 2003a; see also Sallares 1999, 2002), studying the seasonality of death at Rome on the basis of the evidence of Christian epitaphs with the date of death, accepts the gloomy presentation by Scobie (1986) of the dreadful sanitary conditions of the city and again takes for granted an imbalance between the birthrate and the death rate, compensated only by continuous immigration . Jongman (1990, 2003) and Morley (1996:46–54; but see Morley 2001, a partial retractatio [recantation] of his most extreme conclusions) consider the substantial growth of the population of Rome in the late republic as responsible for the alleged demographic stagnation of the whole Italian peninsula in the same period, whereas Purcell (1999) builds his picture of the “populace” of late ancient Rome on this assumption. And a strong imbalance between birthrate and death rate is also the implicit conclusion of Paine and Storey’s (1999; see also Storey and Paine 2002) characterization of the pattern of mortality in Rome as “catastrophic .” 2 Did the Population of Imperial Rome Reproduce Itself? Elio Lo Cascio This chapter aims at checking these assumptions by testing the relevance of the comparative evidence put forward by these scholars, by challenging the picture given by Scobie, and by pointing out the effects that certain speci¤c features of imperial Rome as a preindustrial city could have had on the mortality pro¤le (a generous water supply, the grain distributions, and generally the careful organization of the supply of foodstuffs by the administration of the annona [grain supply]). The chapter then tries to draw some conclusions from what the literary and juridical sources say on the conditions of a speci¤c sector of the urban population and in particular on the mechanisms at work in the distribution of the corn dole in order to see whether they imply that this sector, the so-called plebs frumentaria (people eligible for grain support)—a “closed” population—was in fact stationary or not. In assuming that the level of population in Rome was always maintained only through a substantial and continuous in®ux of migrants, which would have lasted for many centuries, the ancient historians base themselves on comparative evidence , chie®y on the trend of population in London between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries as it was outlined in a famous and very in®uential article by Wrigley (1967) more than thirty years ago (see also Finlay 1981a, 1981b; Landers 1987, 1993; also de Vries 1974:109, 115–118, 1984:179–198). The foundation of the “iron law” is of course the imbalance between burials and baptisms as revealed by such documents as the bills of mortality or the parish registers. More recently, however, both the traditional explanation of the surplus of deaths and the legitimacy of the generalization of this phenomenon have come under ¤re. The model of the “urban graveyard effect” or “urban natural decrease” has been severely criticized by Sharlin (1978:127), who proposes to replace this interpretation of the imbalance between births and deaths with a different interpretation , what he calls the model of “urban migration.” Sharlin does not question that urban mortality must have been higher than rural mortality, but he thinks that the model of the urban natural decrease reverses the causal relationship between surplus of deaths and immigration. According to Sharlin, immigration is fed by people who not only live in more precarious conditions than stable residents but also marry and have children less easily. The inability to reproduce themselves would refer just to the “migrants,” not to the stable residents. The features that distinguish stable residents from migrants are precisely the following: (1...

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