Urbanism in the Preindustrial World: Cross-Cultural Approaches

4. Seasonal Mortality in Imperial Rome and the Mediterranean: Three Problem Cases

Seasonal ®uctuations of death are a demographic fact of some considerable historical signi¤cance. Recurrent variations in the annual cycles of mortality formed by these seasonal clusters of deaths help the historian to de¤ne human populations in relation to their environments. These annual patterns of death suggest the fundamental underlying causes, including atmospheric conditions, temperature regimes, disease vectors, material sustenance, health resources, urban and rural discontinuities, and other such factors that produce the long periodic waves of mortality that are characteristic of any given population. Because of the lack of appropriate data, however, it is simply not possible to reconstitute these patterns with a great degree of con¤dence for most human populations of the Roman world. By means of the careful collation and analysis of large bodies of epigraphical data, however—principally tombstone epitaphs from the city of Rome and from other mixed urban and rural populations in Roman Italy—it has been possible to delineate the long annual rhythms of death that characterized the urban populations of the metropolis of Rome and the other centers of population in large parts of the Italian peninsula in late antiquity (Shaw 1996). The conclusions that I reached concerning the annual oscillations of seasonal mortality that characterized the city of Rome have been con¤rmed by the parallel results obtained by Walter Scheidel (1994, 1996). Both sets of studies have revealed the recursive patterns of seasonal mortality that typi¤ed the populations of the city of Rome and of the outlying regions of Roman Italy in late antiquity. The temporal rhythms of mortality in the urban core of Rome and in town centers of central Italy rose and fell in an annual cycle with the incidence of deaths, reaching a peak in the period between August and October and then declining to lows in the months of December to March (Figure 4-1 top). This pattern was modi¤ed for both urban and rural populations living in regions farther to the north of the peninsula where high levels of mortality occurred in the midwinter months as well as those of late summer, thereby producing a typical bimodal summer-winter distribution of seasonal mortality (Figure 4-1 bottom). The prin4 Seasonal Mortality in Imperial Rome and the Mediterranean Three Problem Cases Brent D. Shaw cipal physical factor in the environment that seems most closely correlated with these changing patterns is that of temperature. But temperature regimes themselves must only be supporting or repressing various kinds of disease vectors that are most evident in the population sample for the city of Rome. These surely varied from region to region. For the region of Latium, in which Rome was the large metropolitan center, it has been argued that malarial infection was the prinFigure 4-1. Seasonal mortality: (top) city of Rome (fourth to ¤fth centuries AD) Source: Shaw (1996:115, Figure 5); (bottom) northern Italy (fourth to ¤fth centuries AD) Source: Shaw (1996:127, Figure 18). rome and the mediterranean 87 cipal disease responsible for the high mortality levels as well as for their seasonality (Sallares 2002). The evidence that I used to compute these seasonal patterns was furnished primarily by data provided by Christian burials from the city of Rome and from other selected regions of Italy representing mixed rural-urban populations. In general, the pre-Christian inhabitants of peninsular Italy and the city of Rome did not record the times of their deaths in their funerary epitaphs, but instead emphasized different quantitative aspects of their lives in the inscriptions on their memorials, such as the length of their life or, if adults, the duration of their marriage . For peculiar religious and cultural reasons, Christians began to record the actual day and month of their death and burial. It is therefore the Christian funerary epitaphs that are of particular use to the historical demographer. The data collection that enables the computation of seasonal cycles is a dif¤cult and painstaking process that requires the systematic collection of a suf¤ciently large number of funerary inscriptions from a speci¤c representative cultural set of all funerary inscriptions to provide a sample for a given regional population. Any burials from Mediterranean antiquity that might offer the possibility of extending or increasing the numbers of this type of data are therefore a matter of some interest to the historian of ancient populations. In the process of collecting the evidence that produced the original database...