Population and Demographic Studies

One of the most significant developments that the social and economic history of the ancient world has undergone in the last 20 years is the great relevance being ascribed to investigating size, structure and dynamics of ancient populations. Since the late 1960s and 1970s, pioneering studies by Hopkins and other scholars such as Frier stressed the potential of a clever combination of various types of ancient evidence - both textual and material - with comparative data and demographic models built in order to produce estimates of the vital statistics of contemporary populations. The population of Roman Italy might have increased over the years of the long Augustan Principate. The chapter discusses the issue of how to view the demographic evolution of Roman Italy in comparison to the trend of the Italian population in the following two millennia, and the issue of how to frame the achievements of the Roman economy. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.