Population and Economy in Classical Athens by Ben Akrigg (review)

Students of classical Athens have long needed a resource to which to turn for evidence concerning, and for the state of the scholarship on, Attic demography, including its relationship to debates on other aspects of social history. This scrupulous work, a revision of a 2006 Cambridge dissertation (supervised by R. Osborne), has provided just such a primer for students and recourse for consultation. The first substantive chapter, "Population Structures," explores how we conduct demographic studies on ancient societies (especially regarding model life tables). I would recommend this discussion to a beginning student unhesitatingly, although I did find it quite immersed in adjustments that seemed non-dispositive for the issues at play elsewhere here. Its adjunct, however, "The Sex Structure of the Citizen Population," needed reconsideration from a cross-cultural perspective on societies dominated by subsistence agriculture.

Although A. W. Gomme's monograph of 1933 ( The Population of Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C. [Oxford]) is often noted, the main interlocutor is M. H. Hansen (especially Demography and Democracy: The Number of Athenian Citizens in the Fourth Century B.C. [Herning 1985]), particularly as the author turns next to "Population Size 1: Citizens," thus starting inversely with the fourth century. Frankly, I would have proceeded chronologically (from Solon). Other authorities are addressed as relevant, including C. Patterson (on Pericles' citizenship law) and myself (on Attic colonization and the force enumeration in Thucydides 2.13). My critique of Hansen on Aiginetan population (in A. Powell and K. Meidani [eds.], "The Eyesore of Aigina": Anti-Athenian Attitudes in Greek, Hellenistic and Roman History[Swansea 2016], esp. 30-40) perhaps fell too late in Akrigg's revision. Akrigg's criticism of Hansen is quite thoughtful, but Hansen as focalizing device sometimes locks the analysis into mere responsion, when replacing his paradigm for population dynamics was needed. Determining fifth-century Athenian numbers depends on one's theory of the status both of Attic colonists (in their varieties) and of groups derived from archaic Attica (about which I differ from Akrigg). Yet that opens the query whether this requires trying to imagine Athenian demographic policy, i.e., demographic/productive calculus (which is not an anabasisfor a dissertation). The closing section, "Archaeology and the Historical Demography of Classical Athens," merely serves to broach some of the issues. In "Population Size 2: Non-citizens," not only is the evidentiary basis necessarily slighter, but the investigation also greatly depends on views of chattel servitude (often contradictory) of earlier scholars. The synthesis here is solid, as the author moves through the topics of numbers, warfare, and agriculture, which diverges into labor inputs, slave prices, and labor costs. However, there needed to be a greater emphasis on slave population as a flow of individuals rather than a reservoir of producers and consumers. The second section of the chapter examines metics, where there is more evidence. Here this exploration has demanded reconstruction of the practices of the Athenian navy (which I am unsure I find persuasive). Akrigg's willingness to understand the metic population to a notable extent as body of freed-persons is salutary.

"Population Changes" is a long chapter. The basic contours are growth during the Pentekontaeteia, grievous losses in the Peloponnesian War, and demographic stabilization in the fourth century, which are placed against the backdrop of feasible rates of natural increase (where the work of W. Scheidel is notable). In addition to Patterson and Hansen, the exegesis is in dialogue with the scholarship of B. Strauss, R. Sallares, and I. Morris. I would see in the ascent phase of the population and economy a larger role for archaic immigration, greater emergency manumission and enfranchisement (510-479), and a noteworthy non-natural rate growth down to 451 and the citizenship law.

The final chapters broaden onto wider socioeconomic ramifications of Attic demography, of which the first discusses war and food. Throughout, relevant investigations have been ferreted out and presented well in their implications...