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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.1 (2000) 83-84



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Book Review

Measuring Sex, Age and Death in the Roman Empire:
Explorations in Ancient Demography


Measuring Sex, Age and Death in the Roman Empire: Explorations in Ancient Demography. By Walter Scheidel (Ann Arbor, Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1996) 184 pp. $59.50

This book is a major contribution to ancient demography. Scheidel's focus is resolutely interdisciplinary; his bibliography contains almost as many entries on mammalian reproduction as on Roman history. His natural-science orientation (for example, his definition of demography as "a branch of the study of the replication and recombination of genes in individual genotypes in one particular species of mammalian vertebrates" [7]) may deter some historians, but if so, they will be missing one of the most methodologically sophisticated analyses of ancient population. Scheidel displays not only strong statistical skills and broad-ranging knowledge of studies of human and animal reproduction, but also sound knowledge of the ancient sources and sensitivity to their shortcomings.

During the last fifteen years, ancient demography has been revolutionized by the careful use of model life tables and the statistical analysis [End Page 83] of census and tax data from Egypt. Bagnall and Frier have shown that these sources avoid many of the weaknesses of premodern demographic data, and in Chapter 2, Scheidel shows statistically that even the common problem of age rounding is not serious. 1 Rural women's ages are rounded more than those of urban men, but by comparing the censuses with other Egyptian records, in which rounding is more prevalent, Scheidel shows that the data "do not necessarily imply that the individuals concerned would have been incapable of providing their precise age . . . if expected to do so" (88). Like Bagnall and Frier, he concludes that the census records are "consistently highly accurate by any reasonable standards" (87).

The general consensus is that the Roman empire had a predemographic-transition structure, but Scheidel reveals significant diversity within this broad category. In Chapter 1, he draws out the genetic implications of full brother-sister marriages in Roman Egypt. Using the latest genetic research, he shows that the repercussions were massive and obvious. Yet, Egyptians persisted with this institution across many centuries.

In Chapter 3, Scheidel focuses on the army, cutting through confusion about the evidence from tombstones for the typical age at enlistment with an elegant statistical analysis, and calculating more precisely than before the likely number of veterans who survived the twenty-five-year period of service and qualified for their discharge bonuses.

Chapter 4 turns to death, using early Christian epitaphs to document seasonal mortality in different parts of the empire. Rome and Egypt both saw peaks in late summer and early autumn, though slightly later in Egypt than in Rome. The area around Carthage has no such peaks. The only convincing explanation is the existence of distinct mortality patterns in different parts of the Mediterranean.

Scheidel concludes that "as far as quantitative analysis is concerned, the end of ancient demography is already in sight" (165). There will be no new source of the quality of the census records. Scheidel predicts two trends in the field: (1) cultural interpretation of demography, and (2) human demography placed in a larger ecological context. Insofar as he is correct about quantitative ancient demography reaching its limits, this book is playing a large part in taking it there.

Ian Morris
Stanford University

Note

1. Roger Bagnall and Bruce Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (Cambridge, 1994).

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